Page 141 of The Fall
His voice spikes. “And who on this team has made it his personal fucking mission to proveeverybodywrong?” He pauses. “Torey fucking Kendrick.”
I freeze.
“You want to talk about perseverance? You want to ask me what guts looks like? Or what relentless means?”
Every face turns toward me, but I can’t pull my attention from Blair.
“That grit deserves to be immortalized.” Blair strides to the bench, where an equipment bag has been tucked against the wall. He unzips it and reaches in?—
And pulls out my stick, the broken one, the one that shattered last night when I scored. I know that stick, every nick in the blade. The black composite fiber fractured when I put everything I had into that shot.
I stop breathing as he heads for the empty wall space between our stalls and the whiteboard, the wall where nothing has ever hung before, the wall everyone sees first when they enter the room.
And I have seen this before. Vertigo chases the base of my skull. This stick. That wall.
He prepped for this; there’s a hammer and nails on the whiteboard tray. He takes a nail and drives the first through the broken shaft. The hammer strikes again; each impact drives the nails deep, securing my broken stick to the wall where everyone will see it.
And then it’s done—the stick is mounted, forever fractured and forever visible. It leans slightly to the left, imperfect and permanent.
“This,” Blair says, his voice rough, “is every ‘no’ turned into fuel and focus and fire. This is what we do,” Blair continues, his voice gaining strength. “We take what tries to break us and we make it ours. We take their doubts and we forge them into something harder than they’ll ever be.”
Hollow pounds his stick against the floor. Hayes joins him. Then Hawks, Simmer, Divot, Nolan, Novak. The sound builds until the whole room thunders with it, twenty sticks beating in unison.
Blair points to my stick. “That’s staying right there,” he says. “As a reminder of what happens when you never, ever quit.”
The thunder of sticks against floor reaches fever pitch. Blair’s voice cuts through it like a blade. “And if you want something breathtaking, you’d better be willing to burn for it.”
Thirty-One
Days blur into weeks,ice time and road trips melding into one endless stretch of hockey.
Blair’s voice echoes inside me: if you want something breathtaking, you better be willing to burn for it.
I want to blaze.
We don’t lose for ten games.
The press call us a surge. Tampa was supposed to be go-nowhere team doing nothing this season, but we’re rewriting the standings. We’re a seventh-place stepchild turned into the unstoppable juggernaut no one wants to face. We’ve got the rhythm of the season rolling now, and we’re dismantling teams.
We steamroll through Ottawa on a Tuesday. Montreal never sees us coming. We take out Toronto by two, then overwhelm Winnipeg with four goals in the second.
We win, we recover, we condition, we repeat.
We beat Carolina in OT. We torch Chicago 5-0. We break Nashville’s dump-and-chase and walk all over them. I score in Detroit from my knees.
My shots stay low and mean; Blair throws me pucks that I tip in tight. We lay hits without apology.
We come off ice together.
Colorado is a nail-biter, but we fight through it, with Axel swallowing thirty-eight shots. Simmer took a puck to the ribs and still made three clears in the final minute. Blair sits next to me in the room after, his chest heaving, neck flushed, Gatorade resting at his knee. A good win cracks him open, and I want to live in that warmth with him as the room goes soft around us.
He and I have become… something. We’re matching bruises, shared routines, patience and proximity. The echo of our goals rings in my head every time I close my eyes. He stays with me to do extra reps in the gym. I bear the heat of his closeness when we’re shoulder to shoulder and he doesn’t move away. He peels an orange after practice, the rind coming off in one long, perfect ribbon, and he offers me a slice first. I watch him rub his thumb over the ice-melt condensation on the side of his water glass at team meals. His skates cut a hard stop next to mine at the bench, a clean sound that meanswell done. His laugh is a low rumble I feel through the bench boards when our shoulders are pressed together.
After games, we sit next to each other on buses and planes, in lounges, and at team meals. A thousand tiny moments—shared looks, incidental contact, a private joke—stack up inside me. I’m braced for impact or for launch; I don’t know what I’m waiting for, only that I am.
Sometimes, it feels like Blair.
Hayes is blaring “All I Want for Christmas” from his Escalade even though it’s too early for holiday music. Today is American Thanksgiving, and there are rules about when Christmas music can play, but Christmas creep is real, and Hayes is its greatest victim.
