Page 90 of The Fall
I wish I could take this heaviness from him, even for a minute, or let him know that he isn’t alone in whatever fight he’s losing. That someone notices; that someone cares enough to keep noticing even when he tries so hard to disappear.
He finally sets his fork down and stands. His gaze never lifts as he moves through the crowded room like a shadow barely brushing past anyone else.
I sit there for a long time after he’s gone, staring at the empty space where he sat. All this wanting digs against my ribs: wanting to fix what’s broken in him, wanting to fix what’s broken in me, wanting any version of us where we aren’t both so impossibly far away.
The hotel bar in Columbus swallows me.
The bottles of booze are stacked neatly behind the bartender in our hotel, poised for someone like me, someone looking for an easy way out. I think I’ve left half of myself in the bottom of bottles over the past few months.
I want one drink to settle the shaking under my skin and the racket in my skull, and all the things I don’t want to think about: fourth line and barely hanging on; Blair, heartbroken and untouchable. The game replays behind my eyelids. Another blown coverage. Another minus.
One drink, and I’ll fucking forget.
I slide onto a stool at the far end of the bar where shadows are deepest. The mirror behind the bottles shows me what everyone else sees—hollow eyes, three days of stubble, the slouch of a man who’s so close to giving up.
Behind me, laughter erupts from the corner booth. I know that laugh. The core guys are here, crammed into a booth on the far side of the room. Hawks and Hayes have claimed a corner table. Their bottles sweat onto cardboard coasters. Words roll between them in a low tide. Blair sits among them but apart, chair tipped back an inch, forearm hooked over the top rail. His hand worries the edge of a label. He’s been dragged out again; I smell Hayes all over this.
I hear the rhythm of their voices, feel the way they lean into each other’s space. I remember being there, too.
A tremor starts in my hand. I fist it on my thigh, hide it under the lip of the bar. I wanted space apart from myself, which means space apart from them and this damn team, but I guess I don’t get that tonight. There are no lines anymore; what’s happening now tangles with what I remember and what I don’t.
I want Blair to look at me. I want him to laugh like he used to. I want him to ask me if I remember Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh. Midnights and rooftops and sneaking into locker rooms before dawn.
I trace a ring of condensation left behind by someone else’s glass on the wood.
The bartender sizes me up, surely catching a whiff of my desperation. “What can I get you?”
“Vodka. Rocks.” I hate the way my words feel coming out.
Ice cracks into the glass like small bones breaking. My hands and wrists ache from this endless stretch of preseason, and I lay them flat on the bar; the surface is tacky from a thousand spills.
He sets the drink on the coaster in front of me. The vodka is a pool of perfect, liquid quiet. Clear and cold, innocent and patient.
It’s a simple thing, having a drink. Everyone does it. Hell, half the team’s doing it right now. I wrap my hand around my glass, condensation bleeding against my palm. My body wants this. A single swallow and it will all be over; I can go back to forgetting what I am and what I’ll never be again. It doesn’t matter what happens after that; anything is easier than this. I run a finger along the rim. Cold seeps between the whorls of my fingerprints.
What’s one more mistake? My stomach clenches around emptiness. Somewhere behind me, chair legs squeal and settle, and Blair rises from his table.
In the mirror, he moves through the scattered tables and bodies, a slow trajectory aimed at the empty space beside me. Dread and foolish hope twist together in me, and everything in the bar recedes except for him.
I track every step, every closing inch between us, and before I’m ready for it, he’s right beside me, close enough that his heat brushes my arm and the faint whiff of coconut rises off him. Of course he’d come now. Of course he’d?—
“Another Stella,” he says to the bartender. His voice is a low rumble beside me.
I tell myself I won’t look, won’t glance sideways, won’t let him pull me under?—
Of course, I do.
He’s braced against the bar, head dipped between his shoulders. The tendon in his temple flickers.
The bartender sets down a fresh beer for him. He doesn’t take it immediately, and we exist in this vacuum where everything I want to say calcifies on my tongue.
I played better in the second period.
I’m trying.
In another life, you loved me.
Blair’s hand closes around the neck of the bottle. He doesn’t move; he stays in the exact spot that guts me, close enough to break me, distant enough to kill me. It’s unbearable.
