Page 60 of The Fall
Except the season they’re talking about lives in a blind spot in my memory. The games, the wins, the journey that brought us here—it’s shadow and smoke, and the harder I chase it, the faster it runs. I wish I’d seen it, lived every beat of it, every perfect play.Show me, brain. Show me anything real.
I wish I could fuckingremember.
Across the room, Blair watches me. Everything else blurs. I blink and his face sharpens; the noise narrows to a hum. My thoughts simplify. He’s all I need to see.
My mind blanks with the ridiculousness of it: that this, the blood-and-bone grind of hockey, is nothing without this one person.
Hawks slams his helmet on and releases a sound that’s half-war-cry, half-primal-scream. He’s our hype man, the one whoignites the fire. The boys rally, slam their sticks, laugh big and loud so nobody believes there’s fear anywhere near us.
“Tonight is the night.” Blair’s voice cuts through the noise. “We were born to do this, boys, and to do it together. Let’s leave it all on the ice. Let’s go, let’s go!”
The roar that follows shakes the room to the studs. Hayes slings an arm around my neck, pulling me into a bone-crushing hug. “Let’s fucking go, Kicks!”
The tunnel swallows us whole, concrete walls amplifying every sound until our footsteps become thunder. The crowd’s voice funnels in from the other end, unseen hands tugging us forward. My teeth chatter. My heartbeat starts boomeranging off the walls. I want this moment to matter. I want to matter.
Blair’s stride never falters. He carries the entire season, an entire city’s hopes, and he makes it look effortless. TheCon his chest might as well be forged in iron for how steady he is for us.
“Hey.” Blair nudges me.
I meet his eyes, so blue they seem to reflect the horizon even in darkness.
“We got this,” he says, his voice rough around the edges. He squeezes my hand over my stick. Then he’s moving again, striding out into the light, and I follow. We scissor out as a unit, Blair leading, me keeping pace.
The crowd is a sea of blue jerseys, a roiling, churning roar, and the lights on the rink gouge color from the world. The brilliance shorts out something in my brain. For a second, I’m staring into a memory I can’t quite catch, trying to remember the contour of something that keeps slipping away. It feels like I’m staring into a sunspot, trying to draw the shape of a shadow. I blink, trying to clear the smudged edges of the world.
A dull ache builds behind my eyes, spreading down into my jaw. The air shudders; the arena’s hunger threads through me.
Everything coming together, so they say.
Focus. Breathe.
My entire body is a finely-tuned instrument of wrongness.
We line up for the anthem. The music tries to drown out the chaos in my head—and fails. My rhythm’s gone, lost somewhere between the locker room and here. I should feel adrenaline crackling in my veins, but instead, all I feel is that shadowy wrongness seeping through everything.
The anthem ends. The crowd swells and yells together. The noise hits me, rocks me. I want to go, go, go. We skate to the bench, and beside me, Hayes locks his chinstrap. There isn’t a trace left of the playful big brother he usually is. He is part trickster, part gunner, and part broad-shouldered watchdog prowling the blue line. Beneath his helmet, he looks all-business—sniper, heartbreaker, everyman and iron man rolled tight.
Blair’s eyes are locked onto mine, and alifetime folds down into this one sliver between us. He is the calm at the center of my storm.
“You and me, Kicks.” He is a fixed point, the one coordinate I can navigate by. “You and me, forever.”
He doesn’t need to say anything more. He believes in this team, in this moment, but more than that, he believes inme.
For the next sixty minutes, nothing else matters. Not the past, not the future.
Only the game.
Only the ice.
Only him.
Time bleeds away in gasping seconds. The scoreboard is a knot of light, a tied game burning into the final minutes of the third.
This is where our season dies or finds its second life.
My lungs burn; every breath scours me clean. The compressed roars of twenty thousand people thicken the stretched-thin air.
A whistle shrieks; the sound hangs in the air a second too long. I waver, wobble as I glide after the play.No, stay here. Stay in the game.It’s the lights, maybe. They are too bright, leaching the color from the boards. It’s the noise. It’s the arena.
