Page 123 of The Fall
Blair pulls himself back together. His spine straightens, then his shoulders square, and finally his face smooths into neutral. The transformation takes maybe three seconds, but I track every micro-movement like I’m memorizing a play.
His fingers uncurl from the table’s edge one by one. The blood returns to his knuckles in slow patches of pink. “So, visualization. I think it’ll help us prepare for being on a line together tonight.”
He hops up on the table facing mine, his palms between his knees, his forearms tense. “We should get used to thinking together.” His eyes lift. “You and me. Let’s walk it through.”
I breathe in through my nose. I give him a nod, smaller than before.
“Close your eyes.”
I do; I’d follow him into a volcano if he whispered to me like that.
“Breathe in.”
I draw air.
“Now, picture the game…”
The room dissolves, and the blackness behind my eyelids becomes the rink, the ice.
Home game. Cold leaking in through fiberglass and steel. Blair flanking on my left, Hollow flying to my right, Hayes tailing behind. We’re in motion.
Blair calls it, his voice feather-soft. The ice to him is different, cleaner, a grid invisible to most, and I rearrange my instincts to match his. “Face-off,” he says. “Neutral zone. You win it clean and drop to me. I cycle back?—”
“And I stretch wide,” I say. “Right-wing breakout. I call for it.”
A hitch in his breath, a tiny puff that is almost a smile. “You cut hard past the defenseman,” he says, “but he plays high, so I switch lanes and shoulder past.”
“You draw the D. I crash the back post.”
“Your stick’s down.” He inhales. “I feed it through to you?—”
“Score.”
The imaginary goal feels real. I can see the red light flashing, Blair’s arms raised, hear the roar building. When I open my eyes, he’s watching me. We sit in the after of it together.
“Cody fucking hated this crap.” He digs his thumb into the center of his palm, bruising half-circles that rotate over and over and over again. “He thought visualization was bullshit. Said real players didn’t need to pretend.”
The past tense hangs between us. Was. Thought. Said.
Blair’s gaze drifts to the wall behind me, to some middle distance where memories live.
“He was such a little shit,” he says. “I got in more fights that year than any other season, before or since.” He drags in a rough breath, fills his lungs like he’s stealing the oxygen from the room. “I wouldn’t trade it, though. I got that year with him, even if it was in Calgary.”
Calgary. “Wait,” I say.
His eyes rise to meet mine.
“Calgary?”
“Yeah. We played together for a year on the Wranglers. I stayed down an extra year so we could be on the same team.”
The words hit me wrong, sideways and sharp. Calgary. The Wranglers. My stomach drops through the floor.
“You okay?” Blair’s studying me now, his head cocked slightly. “You look?—”
“Yeah.” The word comes out strangled. I clear my throat, try again. “Yeah, I’m good.” Yes. No. Fuck.
But I’m not. I’m thinking about his voice in my ear, the ghost of his touch on my skin, an approach over a city through cloudy skies.
