Page 55 of The Fall
That anticipation was too much for Hayes, who dragged me to the rink this afternoon in a hurricane of kinetic energy, a restlessness I helped him bleed off. Blair had kissed me on my way out, grumbling about a leaky faucet he could no longer ignore.
“Blair?” My duffel bag hits the floor by the kitchen island, and his keys clatter onto the granite. The usual sounds of him—and the low curse of a war fought against plumbing or the spray of a broken faucet—are absent. There’s no cursing from undera sink, no sounds of a struggle, no water running. The house is still, the lights turned low.
The sliding glass door to the lanai is open a crack, spilling a wavering light into the dim kitchen. Florida sunsets are never a single event; they are a slow bleed of color across the horizon, and tonight the sky is bruised with purple and a last, burning slash of orange.
I step out to the patio and my breath stops.
The world outside has been transformed. Dozens of candles flicker from every surface, their flames dancing in hurricane glasses against the deepening twilight. Above, strings of tiny lights drift in loose patterns. The notes of a lone trumpet tumble through the first bars of something warm and timeless.
The patio table is set for two. Cloth napkins are folded into birds-of-paradise. The crystal is out, catching the candlelight and scattering prisms of color across him.
Blair.
He stands beside the table, a still point in the heart of all this light. The candlelight carves him from the twilight, softens the hard lines of his shoulders in his fitted T-shirt, pools in the hollow of his throat. It turns the planes of his cheekbones to gold and gathers in the blue pools of his ocean eyes. He takes a step toward me.
“Surprise.”
My gaze drifts from the candles to the table, to the sky, and always, always back to Blair. My voice sounds foreign when I finally find it. “The leaky faucet was a bigger project than I thought.”
“I needed a few hours. Hayes provided the distraction.”
He offers me his hand, palm up. The rest of the world falls away: the looming playoffs, the single win we need, the lingering questions about my lost year of memories. It’s him. It’s always him.
He guides me through the flickering gold landscape he’s made and pulls out a chair for me, then settles in the seat at the corner of the table, close enough that his knee brushes mine and he hooks his foot around my ankle.
A silver bucket sweats on the table, a bottle peeking out. I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in two weeks. Why?
Blair lifts a bottle of Gatorade from the ice and—sommelier-serious—unscrews the cap. “May I interest you in our house specialty? A 2025 Glacier Cherry, an excellent vintage, heavy on the electrolytes.”
I play along, holding out my wineglass. “I’m detecting a subtle bouquet of … artificial flavoring?”
“Your palate is impeccable, sir.”
I laugh. He pours his own glass and sets the bottle back into the ice. The shine in his eyes holds me captive.
The last of the sun has sunk. In the gloaming, his eyes have deepened to the color of a midnight sea, holding reflections of candlelight and a promise I am beginning to understand. The fractured parts of my life are finding their center, and that center is him.
The night breeze stirs the palm fronds, their rustle a dry whisper against the soft lapping of the canal. Blair tells stories, and I lean in, caught not in the narrative but in him.
“... so I’m totally turned around in Prague, lost on the metro, and this ancient babushka is yelling at me in what I think is Russian?—”
“Please tell me you didn’t try to flirt your way out of it,” I interrupt, and the faint flush on his cheeks is my answer.
We finish the last of the sushi, then scoot our chairs closer as the first stars begin to prick the black velvet of the sky.
“What was it like when Lily was born?” I ask, my voice softer now.
“Chaos,” he says with a soft laugh. “Hayes looked like he’d been run over by a Zamboni for three straight weeks. Utterly terrified and completely in love.”
“I bet. He’s a great father.”
“He is, but it was a steep learning curve for him.”
I smile. “Must’ve been amazing to be there for it.”
His grip tightens on my hand. “Now they get to do it all over again.”
The candles flicker, casting dancing shadows across his face as he leans closer. Under the table, Blair’s ankle is still hooked around mine.
