Page 280 of The Fall
“I love you, too.”
The automatic doors push open. The nurses allow us a final moment, and Blair’s free hand comes up to cradle my face. The fluorescent lights turn his tears to crystal before they fall.
The nurse touches the bed rail. “We need to go now.”
Blair nods against my forehead. He breathes me in, coconut and Key lime mixing with hospital antiseptic, with fear, with love so vast it reshapes the air between us. “I love you.”
The doors swing wide, and I’m wheeled through. My neck cranes back, desperate for one final glimpse.
Blair crumples. His knees hit the floor hard, and a sound tears from him. It’s animal grief, a guttural scream that shatters the air on its way out. He folds into himself in the hallway, shattering the way he must have shattered before, in some other corridor, when Cody disappeared behind doors that never opened again.
Dad drops beside him and wraps his arms around Blair, and Blair collapses into the shelter of my father’s arms. They rock together on that cold hospital floor, my dad’s hand cradling the back of Blair’s head while Blair’s shoulders heave with sobs that crash down the corridor.
The doors seal shut between us.
The ceiling tiles blur overhead. Each one identical, each one carrying me further from that sound, from Blair breaking apart in my father’s arms. The surgical wing swallows all outside noise. Only the squeak of wheels remains, the soft breathing of the nurses, and the hum of machines waiting to remake me.
How many times can one person watch love disappear through hospital doors before the watching itself becomes unbearable? Blair knows the answer. He’s living it right now, reliving it, the past and present colliding in that sterile hallway where my father rocks him.
The gurney turns a corner. The walls close in, funneling toward those final doors marked with red warnings.
The operating room is a shock of cold and bright-white light as voices drift around me. An anesthesiologist leans into my line of sight, her eyes kind above her mask. She explains the process, the medication that will pull me under, and the cool seep of anIV begins in my arm as a mask lowers over my face. “Breathe normally. You might taste something metallic...”
I have absolutely no idea how this ends. I’ve never been here before. This is uncharted territory, and there are no memories to guide me, no déjà vu, no future glimpses to lean on.
Her voice drifts above me, counting backward from ten.
The edges of everything soften. The surgical lights above fracture into stars, then halos, then nothing at all. A hand adjusts the pillow near my head. Metal instruments clink together, a distant music that belongs to another world entirely.
Seven... six...
Blair. Dad. Their faces blur together, love and fear and faith all tangled too large for my fading mind to hold. Each breath pulls me further from the surface of myself.
Three...
The bright lights above stretch into ribbons, white bleeding into white bleeding into?—
My last conscious thought is of ocean-blue eyes and a hand over mine.
Darkness swallows me whole.
Is anybody there?
Sound hovers on the edge of this darkness, persistent, insistent. It permeates the blackness, slowly widening the cracks, letting reality in through slivers.Beep. Beep. Beep.It catches deep inside me, pulling me up from the abyss.
The world filters back in pieces: scratchy sheets beneath my fingertips?—
A hand squeezes around mine. “We’re here, Torey. You’re okay.”
Another hand settles on my forehead, and I hear my father next. “You did great, son.”
The words are buoys bobbing in a thick fog. I fight toward them, peeling my eyelids open a millimeter at a time. The world is a smear of pale light and a dark shape leaning close.
Blair.
He’s here. The certainty floods through me before my vision sharpens enough to make out his features. Coconut and Key lime cut through the antiseptic haze. Everything hurts, but the pain is muffled by whatever cocktail of medications flows through the IV in my arm.
His face swims into focus by degrees. Red rims his eyes. He looks wrecked. He looks beautiful. “There you are.”
