Page 113 of The Fall
The burn returns. I lean into it, let it fuel my glide, my turns. To my right, Blair appears, matching me stride for stride, our edges slicing the ice as one. We cut the turn at the same moment, pushing back to center like magnets clicking together; we move like we’re caught in the same wave.
Blair’s eyes meet mine as we round the next lap. The corner of his mouth lifts and he shakes his head, a bark of laughter escaping out of him before he can stop it. I laugh back, breathless, and we keep skating, stride for stride, side by side.
It’s late. Most of the guys are gone, but I’m in the gym because there’s always more I can work on. I can rebuild my life if I do the work the right way.
I’m not alone. Blair’s clean-jerking weight that most of us have no business looking at. His form is perfect—back straight, shoulders set, the bar rising in a smooth arc as he drops into a squat and then stands. Sweat darkens his shirt between his shoulder blades. I count every breath he takes, matching my inhales to his exhales.
I should leave. I know I should. But my feet stay rooted to the floor, and my eyes stay fixed on him. His shoulders are broad enough to carry a team. Once, they carried me?—
No, they didn’t. I need to keep my head on straight. I’m not here to get lost in the past or in what-ifs. I’m here to rebuild, to push myself back to where I need to be. I will not beg the past to spoon-feed me a future.
And the truth is, these memories I’m clinging to aren’t memories; they’re ghosts that haunt me. They are whispers of a life that never was.
I want to be better. I want to be worthy—of my dad’s expectations, of the league’s aspirations, of the fans’ excitement for me when I was drafted. I want to be better for me, for all of my dreams and hopes and lost wishes.
And… I want to be worthy of the love and pride that used to be in Blair’s eyes, even if that love was never real, and even if it only ever lived in the over-excited synapses of my concussed brain. Fantasy masquerades as memory. Memory masquerades as craving. Either way, I want him to know all of me: the parts I’ve buried, the pieces I’ve worked to forget, and the places I have yet to discover inside myself.
Blair’s eyes dart up. They are endless, saltwater-blue, the ocean on a windless day running off the edge of the world. A winter ocean; that’s what he is, roiling dark waters that would take you away if you stepped wrong. His glance used to find me, and there’d be warmth in it, a spark that said we were in this together. Now his gaze slides past me, set on some far point only he can see.
He’s carrying something heavy and he won’t set it down. The more he holds it, the more he hardens around it.
I want to be the place he exhales. I want to hand him a reason to lean without flinching at the word. I want to say, give me part of it, I can hold it and I won’t drop it. My brain writes sentences I never say, whole conversations where he lets me in. In those, his voice goes soft again, the way it does when he talks to me alone, and the cold in him warms enough to glow.
I want to be everything for him.
I haven’t made that easy. Vodka isn’t exactly a love letter. Inconsistency isn’t either. If I were him, I’d look at me and wonder whether I can be counted on.
His gaze holds mine for one heartbeat. Two. Three. He doesn’t speak, and neither do I, but we’re tangled now, my silence answering his.
Then his eyes drop, and the moment splinters.
I turn away, pretend to adjust the plates on my bar. My hands are steady but my insides quake. This is what we’ve become: a collection of near-moments, of glances that linger a second too long.
Blair goes back to his clean jerking. His body language is sharp and raw, his motions hard and brutal.
I have to believe that the dark he’s in isn’t permanent. It’s a season. And even in the stillness, and even when he gives me nothing, I am rewritten by him.
So I stay here. I stay with the man who used to be my world, even if I’ve been exiled, even if my memories are a mosaic of broken glass. I’m a man walking an unfamiliar shore. The place I left is behind me and what’s ahead of me isn’t mine. The sand shifts beneath my feet, unstable and treacherous, like everything else in my life right now.
I love him. It’s a love that wants to carry water for him, sharpen his blades, and stand in front of whatever wind is cutting his face.
I will swim in these dark waters forever as long as Blair is there with me.
Twenty-Seven
The season hiccups into rhythm.We grab a win in Detroit, a point in Chicago, and drop a shootout heartbreaker in Jersey.
My fourth-line minutes hold steady. Game by game, the ice starts to make sense again. I pick plays cleaner, recover my edges mid-shift, stop second-guessing the puck when it snaps to my blade. I rack points; small ones, secondary assists, and plus-minus ratings that climb in slow inches. It’s nothing flashy, but my stats are creeping up.
It’s still not enough. There’s still a gap between what I am and what I need to be.
I stickhandle up the boards during practice, one tap after another, pretending the puck is all that matters, but Blair is in my periphery, leaning against the glass. He doesn’t say more than ten words to me in a week, and I live off those ten words as if they’re calories.
“You’re off,” Blair finally says to me during morning skate, his voice hooking me mid-turn.
I stop too quickly. “How?”
“You’re not fast enough off your inside edge,” he says, chin jutting toward my left skate.
