Page 120 of The Fall
We fall into a rhythm. Drop, draw, reset, again. He reads every false twitch in my hips like a codebreaker. “You’re looking at the puck. Don’t. Eyes on his elbow. It tells you more than the blade.”
He stays crouched with me, close enough that I catch his scent again: Key lime, sharp and clean, the ghost of a Florida year stirred up through cold sweat. I drop and plant, my eyes on his elbow. This time, I don’t wait for the puck; I wait for his twitch.
The moment stretches: me watching his arm, him watching me watch. His elbow shifts a micro-movement right and I’m already moving left.
Blair’s exhale clouds the air. “Better.” He retrieves another puck and settles back into position. “Again.”
I reset my stance, thighs burning, sweat cold under my practice jersey. This close, I map the micro-expressions crossing his face, then force my attention back to his elbow.
The ice shavings beneath my blades grind as I shift. His elbow stays perfectly still, but I catch the slight flex in his forearm, the way his fingers adjust their grip on his stick.
“Good,” he says. “You’re reading the tells now.” He stays crouched across from me, patient as stone. The rink lights catch the sweat on his temple, trace the line of his jaw.
He drops the puck. This time I’m ready for it, and I sweep left as he goes right, my blade finding rubber before his does. The puck shoots away from us both, skittering toward the boards.
“There it is.” Blair straightens, and I follow, my knees protesting.
We’ve done this drill fifty times, and we’ll do it fifty more.
Two weeks. That’s all it takes to lose track of the line between routine and craving. I dream broken shards of a life I never lived every night. Candlelight. Salt-heavy air. Stars strung across a lanai, captured for the two of us.
I keep hoping for something to slip out. One gesture, one look, one particle of proof that everything inside me is not complete insanity. That the year we shared—a year from now—existed somehow, even if only the echo of a medical mishap.
But there’s no recognition in his eyes, and no hidden message in his instructions on the ice. There’s nothing in him that says he wants more from me than controlled face-offs and clean zone entries.
The locker room empties around me while I take too long with simple tasks. It’s always at the margins where I feel the agony the sharpest. The almost. The nearly. The fragments of who we were. The math shouldn’t hurt this much: one person plus one year minus one concussion equals zero-sum game. I know the equation. I live it every day.
I pull on my compression shirt and lace my skates. I repeat the drills he pulled me through, and during games, I win anotherpuck on the draw. I build, one battle, one shift, one small victory at a time. The next face-off dot waits. The next whistle comes.
And for the team, wins start sticking.
Three straight. Five out of six. The standings shift in our favor, and the energy in the room changes. Hollow starts making his ridiculous shots. Hayes finds his groove on the power play. Even Divot stops overthinking his blue line pinches.
Sometimes Blair meets my eyes across the rink when nobody else is looking. It’s quick—only a flicker—but it steadies me more than any pep talk ever could.
My own numbers climb quietly upward: face-off percentage inching higher, plus-minus smoothing out. The days blur together: ice, sweat, hotel rooms that all smell faintly of bleach and old carpet. But somewhere in that sameness is momentum, rolling forward whether I’m ready or not.
I start to believe.
And then, in Montreal, I miss every pass.
I try. God, I’m trying, but my timing’s off and the ice feels wrong beneath me. It doesn’t matter who I’m aiming for—Hayes streaking wide, Divot at the hashmarks—my stick isn’t steady, my reads are late, and every puck skids out of reach.
Shift after shift, nothing lands. Not the dump-ins, not the cycle, not even the simple outlet Simmer feeds me in the neutral zone, clean and gift-wrapped.
Coach’s voice bellows from the bench. “Kicks! What the hell was that?”
I have no answer. The puck won’t settle, not on my blade and not in my head. I’m fighting the game instead of flowing withinit. When the horn sounds ending the second period, we’re down 3–0.
The locker room reeks of frustration. I stare at the floor while Coach rips into us. The words wash over me in waves—intensity, compete level, execution, accountability.
Nothing gets better, and by the time the final horn sounds, I already know what the numbers will say before the sheet hits the room: zeroes across the stat line, two turnovers, three bad zone exits, a minus-3 for the night, and?—
And a look from Blair I can’t read at all.
I beat the sun to the rink the next morning.
The arena is ghost-quiet, and I lace up my skates in the silent locker room. I’ve got drills in mind, hours of them, enough to bring me all the way to the start of skate. I grab my stick and a bucket of pucks and head to the ice.
