Page 114 of The Fall
I shift my stance, testing its give against the grooved-up ice. “Didn’t know you were watching.”
“I’m always watching.” His eyes are on mine when he says it, and they linger a second too long before he skates away.
“Keep your head up, Kendrick. You’re looking at the puck too much.”
I go for another lap around the ice, and the sting in my thighs deepens, my tendons dragging like frayed cables.
“Your pivot’s shit.” His voice cuts clean across the rink, slicing through the slap of pucks and sticks. “You’re stuck in your knees.”
The ice rattles under Hollow’s slap-shot behind me. Blair’s ahead of me, waiting at the blue line. “Your edge work’s lazy,” he says as I near. “You’re playing soft.”
Soft. I bite the metal inside my cheek, fingers flexing on my stick. He’s not wrong.
“Go again.”
The boards blur on my next lap. I pump through the turn, forcing more into my edges. Weight through the heels, deeper bend at the knees. I drop harder, drive through. Hips low, core locked. My stride is cleaner, and my balance holds when I lean into the turn. He’s there when I straighten at the far hash marks, finishing my lap.
“Again,” he says. “This time, keep your stick on the ice through the whole turn.”
I push off before he finishes. My quads scream on the crossover, but I keep my stick blade flat to the ice, feeling the drag of it, the way it wants to lift when I hit the curve. Every partof my body wants to pull up, to cheat the angle for speed. But I hold it, grinding through the arc.
When I come around again, he’s still tracking my approach.
His stare pins me as I glide in front of him. I tighten my grip on the stick and skate closer.
Blair holds my gaze. “You ready?”
I nod.
“Prove it.”
I get an apartment.
It’s nothing flashy, a one-bedroom north of Punta Gorda. My things still live in duffel bags and I eat cereal and oranges standing in my shoebox-kitchen. It’s empty, it’s quiet, and it’s lonely.
I don’t sleep much. I lie in the dark, my mind doing laps it never gets to finish.
I still sketch him during game tape and replays. Line after line, his shoulders emerge, the way he stands with his body shifted to one side, that slight tilt of his head when he’s analyzing a play. I don’t mean to fill so many pages, but my hand keeps moving as my eyes track his power plays and penalty kills on my screen.
Later, when the room is dark and the game has long since ended, I open my sketchbook again, checking if I got his jawline right, if I captured his eyes a little bit truer today than I did yesterday.
The graphite smudges under my thumb. I trace the shadow beneath his cheekbone, the curve where his neck meets his shoulder. Every version is wrong—too soft or too sharp, missing the exact way light catches in his eyes when he turns. I flip backthrough weeks of attempts. Blair in profile. Blair mid-stride. Blair’s hands wrapped around his stick.
I close my sketchbook and set it on the floor beside my bed.
My ceiling fan wobbles, throwing uneven shadows across the walls. I count the rotations—one, two, three—until my eyes burn. Tomorrow Blair will correct my form again. Tomorrow I’ll pretend his voice doesn’t follow me home. Tomorrow I’ll add another page to the collection I’ll never show anyone.
The sheets twist around my legs. I kick them off and stare at the red numbers on my alarm clock. 2:47 a.m.. In four hours, I’ll be back on the ice. In four hours, he’ll be there, too, watching my edges, cataloging my mistakes.
I reach for the sketchbook again.
“You’ve got the wrong angle, Kendrick,” Blair calls. “That’s why you’re losing all your draws.”
I stay crouched at the dot, one hand choking my stick as he skates into my peripheral vision.
“Left foot.”
He drops into the circle, his body tilting into the same stance I’m supposed to have: hips low, posture pitched-forward, knees flexed, spine braced. “Lower,” he says.
