Page 6 of The Fall
“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
I shake my head, and the world spins again.
When the acid stops scraping my throat, when I can think in blocks longer than two seconds, I straighten against the bowl, forearm braced on cold ceramic.
Blair pulls me back against his broad, furred chest. His arms wrap casually around my waist, hands stroking my forearms. “Easy, babe. Easy.”
I’m shivering, and I can’t make my mind work. My head is a disaster, and my stomach roils.
“You went through it,” he says. “That hit was rougher than we thought, yeah?”
The hit in Vancouver? All I can picture is a skate blade slashing across ice, the world stuttering as I crashed to the boards. Yesterday, I remember the black beach, then my tailspin during the game, the hit, everything going white then black?—
Yesterday was a long time ago for me.
Is this still today? Last I checked it was Vancouver, but now it’s this place, and he’s here.
Everything has moved out from under me. My bones are soaked through, the rest of me a limp mess shaking from fever or fear. I don’t say anything. I can’t. I’m not sure my throat works, or if I even have a tongue. My brain is too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on to be able to focus on anything else.
“We’ll go see Dr. Lin first thing in the morning.”
He says this as if I should know exactly who Dr. Lin is, where we are, and where we’ll see this doctor. But I don’t. I don’t know any of it. I understand nothing.
Blair turns me a little, his thumb brushing the nape of my neck. “Head still spinning?” he asks, half-hushed. I nod.
Blair settles me gently between the toilet and wall, propping me up like a rag doll. He pads away, and part of me wants to beg him not to leave me. My eyes close, and then he’s back, folding himself down on the floor beside me with a blanket and a bottle of water. He hands me the water and drapes the blanket over my shoulders, and I bury my face in the curve of the toilet seat.
Then it’s quiet. Blair sits back against the wall, looking like he’s there to stay. His big, broad hand strokes my shoulders, runs up and down my back, slowly, then slower, slower, until his head lolls to the side and he’s out, fast asleep on the bathroom floor beside me.
It’s too surreal to comprehend.
My stomach is grinding itself to dust and my head is screaming, but I gingerly push back from my huddle over the bowl and sit opposite Blair, facing him, slumped in the folds of the blanket he brought me. A Tampa Bay Mutineers blanket.
This must be a dream. Some concussion-induced delirium, my synapses firing wild while I’m blacked out on the ice. It must be.
Except it feelssoreal.
I’ve had my share of heavy hits and a handful of concussions through the years. I’ve ridden the waves of Toradol and OxyContin, laid back and watched epic narratives unfold on the stages of water stains on my ceiling. They’ve always been nonsense, elephant empires in space, coaches with insect heads, teammates with wings, hockey games played between butterflies. Nothing like this.
No concussion hallucination has ever felt this precise.
Heavy hits don’t conjure moonlit pools and rooms with duffels full of my own gear. This is structured, and the supporting details don’t wobble when I blink.
I still have that phone. I dropped it by the toilet when I was heaving, and it’s easy to fish it out from between the wall and the porcelain stand. The screen is over-bright and harsh in the dim bathroom. The time says it’s 2:37 a.m., and the date is wrong—it has to be—because it’s?—
March 22, one year ahead.
I throw up again, lurching violently toward the toilet. The phone clatters to the tile. Blair grunts and shifts. I freeze.
The phone is inches from my face, screen up, still on. I can still read the date, the time, the year, but they’re wrong, it’s all wrong. This has to be a prank, or this phone fucked up. Yeah, it’s fucked—the settings, they’re wrong. It’s not even my phone?—
“‘Face Unlock’” flashes on the screen with a chime. The bland screensaver, a boring geometric background, shifts into the home screen, and?—
That’s me and Blair.
That picture, the background. It’s me and it’s Blair, and we have our arms around each other. We’re both smiling—no, beaming—and we obviously know each other very well.
I’m fucking trembling as I scroll through the phone, madly swiping through apps and screens. The date and time keepyanking my gaze, dragging me back to those cramped little words again and again and again.
