Page 86 of The Fall
This Blair doesn’t flow with the game; he attacks it.
I remember the Blair who’d catch my eye across the ice, who’d bump my shoulder during water breaks, his touch lingering through my gear. That Blair radiated heat, but this Blair burns cold and dark. He is the sun gone black and cold.
Even his skating has changed—where he used to glide, now he punches through the ice like he’s trying to break something, or like he’s trying to break himself. I know that feeling. I’m doing the same thing, only quieter. While he rages, I dissolve. While he hardens, I fracture.
I search his face for a sign, for an unguarded moment, for a flicker of the man who smelled like salt and summer, but there’s nothing.
He’s built a wall around himself so high I can’t see over the top, and I’m on the outside, freezing. We are two separate islands of misery on the same sheet of ice, with an entire ocean of unspoken things between us.
The whistle blows, ending the drill, and Blair and Hayes skate to center ice. They fall deep in conversation, faces tight as they circle each other. They’ve done this before—it’s in how Hayes angles his body, making a wall between Blair and the rest of the team, and in how he doesn’t interrupt when Blair’s mouth moves fast, words tumbling out in a flood he can’t stop. Hayes takes it, absorbs it, the way you stand in a storm and wait for it to pass. Blair’s with Hayes, but he’s utterly alone.
And I am alone watching him.
I should be the one standing there, soothing his rage and pain. I would stand in that hurricane for him and let it tear me apart if it meant he could find his center again. But I’m not; I’m out here, useless, my hands empty, my stick heavy.
The other players reset, their movements distant and hazy at the margins of my vision. The scrape of their blades, the clatter of sticks, it’s all a dull roar, background noise to the silent, desperate scene unfolding between the two men I used to call my best friends and my lover. My focus is so fixed on them I don’t hear my name the first time. Not until the sound of it is a whip-crack across the ice.
“Again, Kendrick!” Coach shouts.
My head whips toward the bench. Coach’s face is granite, his arms crossed. The rest of the world rushes back in—the sharp cold on my cheeks, the scrape of blades carving tight turns, the sudden focus of every player on me. One more failure. One more reason for them to see I don’t belong here anymore.
All these eyes on me, waiting for the fall. Hot, useless shame burns up my neck.
No, I will not give them the satisfaction. There is only the ice now. Only the next stride, the next push, the next shot. Nothing else matters because nothing else is left. Don’t think. Don’t fuck up.
I drop into the rush, faster than I’ve managed all week, and this time—finally—I feel it. The puck’s on my tape as I glide, cut, and surge through the blue line, watching space open like a door I’ve been waiting for. I shoot, and?—
Score.
For one second, all the tension in my spine unwinds. It’s purely physical, a muscle memory of what success used to feel like. My first instinct is to find Blair. My head turns before the thought is even fully formed. My victory isn’t real until I see it reflected in his eyes.
But he’s not looking. He’s facing the boards, his shoulders a stiff, unmovable line.
The small, bright point of triumph inside me gutters out.
Coach’s whistle blares across the ice. “Again!”
Inconsistent becomes my new name. I miss another puck. Then I score a goal.
There are moments where the ice sings, the puck dances, and the play unfolds like it was drawn for me. I deke the defense—even Hayes, who still won’t talk to me—and my give-and-goes with Hawks and Hollow are clean and sharp. When it all clicks, it feels like I’ve reached through time and borrowed the Torey I was the last time I was on this ice, and the first thing I do, every time, is look for Blair.
But Blair is locked inside his own storm, and I’m neither the eye of it nor the reason it’ll ever calm. His passes lack their snap, his shots spray wide, and even when he scores, there’s no triumph on his face. This isn’t a slump—his body remembers how to play. But that spark, that wild joy that used to radiate from him during every shift? It’s gone. He’s missing some edge, some push.
Coach barks pairings for face-offs. I square up across from Hollow and we dig in. He cheats the draw; I counter, win it back to Hawks, then pivot out. My knee zings on the turn.
Again. Win, lose, win.
Between whistles, Blair skates extra laps. Hayes hangs with him, matching his pace. Hayes speaks low, his head tipped toward Blair. Blair nods once, then flicks his gaze across the rink. It skates right past me, neat as a chip off the glass. Those blue eyes that used to hold oceans are now frozen over.
Is this more proof? Not that it was real, but rather, that it wasnot? That I made up a man who doesn’t exist? He’s not the man I remember.
Memory tricks me into feeling Blair’s hands on my hips, strong and steady, with his voice rumbling instructions in my ear. I drag my stick across the ice, digging grooves that match the ones in my mind.
After practice, I’m slow with my gear, fingers stiff and clumsy on the laces. My knee throbs. Blair is gone before I’m done with my socks, and Hayes’s stall is empty too.
I palm my phone, thumb over the screen without unlocking it. I pocket it, sling my bag, and step into the evening air outside the rink, sweat cooling under a sky the color of wet steel. The breeze off the bay smells clean, and the bridge arches away from me, a curve I don’t look at for long. My knee throbs with the stop-and-go, and by the time I get to my room, my legs are hollowed out and heavy.
The door clicks shut behind me and the hotel room swallows me into darkness. The bridge is out there beyond the drapes; I never open the curtains.
