Page 249 of The Fall
Hayes claps a hand on my shoulder. “You good?”
No. No, I’m not good. I’m standing in a moment I’ve already lived, terrified of a future I can’t remember, in love with a man I’m destined to lose. Again. Time is folding back, forcing me through the same path toward the same ending: Blair’s blood on my hands, dark waters and shattered glass, a never-ending scream.
We head outside, where Boston’s morning air is sharp, tasting of diesel fumes and the coming game. Our bus waits. Blair stands by the door, his bag slung over his shoulder.
Morning skate. Pre-game meeting. Cool down. Stretches. Warm-up. Our path is laid out through the day. I need to move, grab my bag and board the bus like nothing’s wrong.
But everything’s wrong. I’m an actor who’s forgotten his lines but remembers the blocking, knows where to stand, when to turn, how to smile while the script dissolves.
If I’ve lived this before, why can’t I remember what matters? Why do I get Hayes’ stupid hypotheticals word-perfect but not the moment everything falls apart? My mind gives me breakfast conversations and practice drills while withholding the one piece of information that could save us.
That’s the cruelest part, this partial blindness. I know the taste of loss without remembering how it happens. I carry grief for a loss that hasn’t occurred yet, or has occurred and been erased, or keeps occurring in a loop I can’t break.
The duffel strap cuts into my shoulder. It’s real pain, present tense, but even pain feels suspect now. Have I felt this before?
I could be crazy. Brain-damaged and trapped in some trauma response that makes me feel like I’m reliving moments that are simply similar to others. Hockey players live in patterns—same hotels, same routines, same conversations cycling through a season. Maybe my mind is misfiring, creating false memories from these rhythms.
But I know better.
I thought I knew about how time moves. Forward only. No rewinds. No second chances.
Except I am getting one. Or I’m trapped in one. Or I’m losing my mind thinking I have one.
Blair meets me at the bus door, his hand settling on the small of my back as I climb the steps. “You’ve been quiet.”
I turn on the step, putting us eye to eye. The morning sun catches in his hair, turns his eyes that impossible shade of blue. I’ve seen this exact light on his face before. I know I have.
“Just thinking.”
“About?”
About how I have held you before. About blood and glass and dark water. About waking up screaming your name in Vancouver. About loving you so hard it shatters the rules of physics.
“The game,” I lie. Blair knows—of course he knows—that I’m lying, but he doesn’t push.
What else could I tell him? I want to grab him and hold him so tight that whatever is trying to tear us apart can’t take him, but that’s not how this works. You can’t outmuscle fate. You can’t check destiny into the boards.
I’m terrified that I’m the problem, that whatever destroys us starts with me, with some choice I take or don’t take, some word I say or swallow. I don’t know if loving him harder saves us or damns us. I don’t know if pulling away protects him or pushes him toward whatever darkness waits.
Everything is wrong when you don’t know what leads to ruin.
Blair shifts, his knee resting against mine. He knows I’m off-balance, even if he doesn’t know the impossible reason.
What I have isn’t foresight, or a superpower, or premonition; it’s a bad echo, so quiet I can’t parse it until I’ve already fallen into the same sequence, the same acts, the same damn loop. I never have more than a second’s warning. Each moment flows into the next without a ripple of warning. But there has to be something: a sign, a trigger, a crack where I can wedge my fingers and pry reality open. How can I change where we’re going if I can’tremember?
All I can feel is the dread of what’s coming, the momentum of our inevitability building and building.
The only thing I can control is whether I walk this with him or walk away.
I’ve already lived through the hell of being without him before. I won’t choose that. Ican’t.
I will become the shield. I will be the body that takes the hit. Let me be the one who breaks this time, as long as he gets to walk away whole.
That is the only choice I have.
Our charter jet cuts through the dark, a silver needle stitching one city to the next. Inside, the cabin is a pocket of quiet folded around the drone of the engines, and low light bleeds color from the world, leaving only shapes and shades of blue. Most of the team is out, lost in the dead-to-the-world exhaustion that follows a victory. Hayes is sprawled across the aisle, his socked foot a pale flag.
Our row is an island, and our privacy makes me greedy. I lean my cheek against Blair’s shoulder and the worn fabric of his hoodie.
