Page 282 of The Fall
Blair’s eyes lock on mine, trust and love and every midnight we ever shared packed into two ocean irises. He’s a constellation against the dark of night, and he folds his hand through mine. He squeezes once, strong and certain. This is Blair, the man I crossed time to reach again.
“After I got hit last year...” My words come slowly. “I woke up somewhere else. Somewhenelse.” My voice cracks. “I woke up with you… in Tampa… in your bed.”
Confusion flickers through his eyes.
“It was a year later. This year. We were together;livingtogether. I didn’t remember how we got there, but Iknew...” I swallow. “I knew I loved you even though I’d never met you before. We never met when I played in Vancouver.”
My words tumble out faster now, each confession pulling the next from me. “I lived weeks there, here, with you. We were so in love, Blair, God, we were everything. The team was going to the playoffs. Hayes and Erin were having another baby. You made me dinner on the lanai and told me you were ready to come out. And then?—”
My voice breaks completely.
“Then we got in that limo after the game where we clinched playoffs and the driver— We crashed on the bridge. Exactly like… And you?—”
I can’t say it. I will never be able to explain that I held him while he died, that I know the exact temperature of his skin as life leaves it, and the shade his lips turn when his heart stops beating. My grip tightens, and each of my inhales draws in my courage to keep going. He deserves everything, every shattered piece and every impossible truth.
I force myself to meet his gaze again, letting him see it: the storm behind my eyes, the love threaded through every memory and every loss.
His voice is so gentle when it comes: “Torey?”
“Then I woke up in Vancouver back in my time, right after the hit. I was alone. You were gone.” Tears burn my eyes. “The doctor said it was post-traumatic amnesia. A really,reallyvivid dream. But it wasn’t, I know it wasn’t.”
Silence unfurls between us.
“So I thought I was crazy,” I whisper. “I thought the concussion scrambled everything up and made me imagine things, but it feltsoreal. You weresoreal.” I hold my breath. “And then it all happened again. Everything. Me going to Tampa, this year, us… everything led to the exact same place, the exact same?—”
Tears fall, one after the other, down my cheeks. “Maybe I am crazy,” I choke out. “Maybe the doctors are right. Maybe everything was a seizure and none of it was real.”
“Shhh.” Blair’s voice is a low rumble. His arms pull me in until my face is buried in his neck. His hand cups the back of my head. I want to fill the silence, to explain more, to ask a million questions, but I force myself to wait.
“When...” he starts, then stops. “When did you first see me?”
That isn’t what I expected. He’s not askingAre you sure?orDid you hit your head harder than we thought?or sayingLet’s call the surgeon.I shift back to look him in the eyes as I speak.
“At home. Our home. I woke up in bed with you, the night I was sick after the Zolotarev hit. The one in Tampa—and the one in Vancouver—” Fuck, I don’t know how to explain this. “You took care of me.”
“What else?” he asks.
“I lived these past two weeks. All of it, every moment, I swear I lived before. Except for the crash. We took the limo the first time, and— We died. You died in my arms.”
“That’s why you wanted to drive?”
“I had to save you.” My voice is barely audible. “I couldn’t let you die.”
His eyes search mine.
“I know how it sounds,” I whisper. “Crazy.Impossible. When I woke up in Vancouver, you didn’t know me. We’d never met. But I loved you then the same as I love you now. I havealwaysloved you, Blair. Always.”
He’s so quiet for so long. Every worst-case scenario I’ve ever imagined screams through my head. I have laid my heart, my sanity, my whole cracked-open soul at his feet, and he is unreadable.
“The way you looked at me that first day…” Blair’s breath is a kiss against my skin.
I squeeze my eyes shut as I speak. “Ilovedyou.” My sobs tear through me; I can’t control them, can’t stop the flood now that the dam has broken. My words come in fractured, hitching gasps. “Every time you were there, I—” I rememberedeverything. “...Without you, I was dying.”
Every time I looked at him, memory crashed over memory, love layered over love, until I couldn’t breathe beneath.
Blair’s fingers find the tears on my face, brushing them away. I shudder, and Blair pulls me closer. His heartbeat drums beneath my ear —alive, alive, alive.
“Am I broken?”
