Page 234 of The Fall
But we won’t get through this. Wedon’t. All our love can’t change the physics of falling.
This is what I have. This moment, and however many times it plays out.
His lips brush mine, and my lips part for him.
More.The single thought is a bonfire in my head. I need more of this, more of him, enough to last a lifetime I might not get. His tongue sweeps my lower lip before diving deeper, a slow, searching invasion of salt and heat and all I know asBlair. My hands fist in the front of his hoodie, twisting the fabric, trying to hold him here, in this exact second, forever.
His hand slides from my cheek to the back of my neck, sinking into my hair, tilting my head to give him a better angle.
I love you. I’m so scared. Don’t leave me.I pour my frantic thoughts into our kiss.I will not lose you, Blair.Not again.
Forty-Seven
I slip into the bathroom,and the door clicks shut behind me.
A hush, thin as tissue, settles over the tile, and I wait for a flicker, for a trapdoor to swing open and toss me into some other night. Time can’t be trusted anymore; anything could happen.
Nothing does.
My reflection stares back from the mirror, and the face looking back is the me I know. Months of clean-cooking, good sleep, great play, and love have filled out the hollow places. I’m wearing the face of a man who belongs in his life.
But my eyes can’t lie, even to me, and questions chase each other behind my pupils.
I run the tap and cup my hands under the flow, splash water onto my face. It’s cold enough to drag me halfway back from the brink I’m teetering over, and have been all night.
Everything is echoing: Erin’s smile at dinner, Blair’s hand catching mine under the table, Lily shrieking as Nerf foam pings off her forehead.
Earlier tonight, Erin laughed at one of Hayes’s jokes, throwing her head back the way healthy people do, careless and whole. The sound rang across their patio while Hayes watchedher like she might evaporate. She’s here because months ago, I planted a seed that I didn’t understand.
It was me who told Hayes to get Erin checked out in Pittsburgh, not because I knew, but because something inside me had whisperedget her checked, and those words became a life saved, a family preserved, cells caught before they stole a future. Now their lives are altered because of a reason I’ll never be able to name. Hayes is still a husband. Lily’s mother is still here.
How do I explain that? Who tells a stranger to look for tumors?
There’s no vocabulary for this, no framework that holds both the rational explanation and the certainty that won’t let go. The doctors would call it confabulation, my brain stitching fiction into the gaps where memory should be. But confabulation doesn’t save lives. Delusions don’t catch cancer before it spreads.
The water drips from my chin onto the counter, each drop a mark between who I was and who I am, between what’s possible and what shouldn’t be. When I opened my eyes in that Vancouver hospital, my heart beat for a man I’d only loved in… What? Whatwasthat other life? Where are these feelings and instincts and shards of memoriesfrom?
Dreams don’t leave scars this deep.
Whatever it was, that life left me with these shards, these instincts. When I woke up, I carried these convictions in my bloodstream: Blair is the rest of your life, clutch Hayes like a brother, your future has a name.
There’s no exit from this. Either I’m losing my mind in slow motion, or something happened to me that science can’t explain. Both options leave me standing here, water drying on my skin, trying to reconcile love that predates its own beginning.
Is that what insanity is?
Thisiswhat brain damage does, creates false patterns, phantom memories, the illusion of prophecy where there’s only broken neurons firing. What’s happening to me is fallout from Zolotarev’s hit last year and this year building on each other, rattling loose the part of my brain that sorts cause and effect, now and then. I’m hallucinating. Déjà vu is a documented phenomenon. Concussions can fuck you up sideways, and I am sideways fucked.
It’s safer to believe in brain injury than in loops or in fate. Safer to believe Zolotarev broke me. No concussion protocol allows for worrying about time loops; the medical forms don’t let you fill in “afraid I am repeating my own life.”
If reality has seams, they must be here, behind this face that looks like mine in the mirror and whatever lurks behind his eyes. If I could peel back one corner of this reflection and slip through, would whatever is keeping me here, whatever is doing this, let me out?
Christ, I need to breathe.
I drag a towel across my face and blink away the leftover drops of water. “This is insane,” I whisper. “People don’t move through their lives twice. That’s not how shit works.”
But neither does waking up with memories that never happened and a soul-deep love for a stranger.
I squeeze my eyes tight and try to will this constant ache behind my eyes back into hiding, but it’s no use. Pain beats with each heartbeat, a throb that spreads from temple to temple. Nothing helps. This headache is different from the others, more insistent, as if my brain is trying to convey a message I can’t understand.
