Page 103 of The Fall

Fifty-One

The hotel ballroom yawns before me, empty except for the breakfast buffet steaming under heat lamps. Sausage links pop and hiss beside strips of bacon, and maple mingles with butter and salt. I load my plate: scrambled eggs, bacon, a muffin, a croissant.

Last night shimmers, the glow of a night spent tangled in Blair’s sheets. My muscles hold sweet afteraches, memories rising up in waves of fingertips on bare skin, his breath warm against my neck, all the soft words we whispered in darkness.

I take a table by the window. The city of Boston is waking up, and sunlight catches on the rim of my water glass.

My phone vibrates, and when I swipe, Blair’s photo fills my screen: rumpled and golden in morning light, sheets twisted around his hips, and that lazy grin, the one meant for me.

His hair sticks up where my fingers ran through it hours ago, and light catches the sheen of sweat I left him with. My fork hovers halfway to my mouth.

Miss you already.

God, I miss him even when he’s nearby. My thumb moves, about to type a response, but my eyes snag on the text sitting below his. It’s my father’s, unanswered from days ago.

Saw the hit. You okay?

His text came through during the Washington game, right after Zolotarev’s hit, but I never answered. In the chaos of my concussion check and the fugue in my own head, I forgot. I left him hanging. Shame licks through me.

This is the new shape of our relationship, questions separated by days of silence. It’s space I asked for, but now the quiet is a scar. He learned to stand back, and I still haven’t learned how to ask him to step closer again.

I draft responses in my head: I’m good, Dad or Yeah, I got checked out or Sorry for not answering sooner, but my fingers stay frozen.

The ballroom door swings open. Hayes shambles in, his hair pointing in four directions at once, and makes a direct line for the coffee.

“Morning, Kicks,” he mumbles around a yawn as he collapses into the chair beside me. “Save some for the rest of us, yeah?” He spears a sausage link from my plate and shoves it into his mouth.

I laugh. “Dude.”

He shrugs and smiles, chewing away.

Dominik, Mikko, and Simmer follow, then Reid, Hollow, and Hawks. They fill the seats around us, conversation flowing as coffee and carbs hit their systems. Hayes steals food from everyone before he gets heckled into getting his own plate. Hollow demands a replacement bear claw.

“So,” Hayes says, returning with a mountain of food and talking at the table. “What would you rather do: eat nothing but tacos or only drink kale smoothies for two weeks?”

Nolan grimaces. “Ugh. Tacos.”

“But—” Hayes bites into a muffin and talks with his mouth full. “What if you were guaranteed at least a goal and an assist every game if you drank the kale smoothies?”

The groans are universal and deeply felt, but the guys lean in like it’s a real philosophical crisis.

“Where’s Calle?” Hayes turns to me, hiding his words behind his coffee cup.

“Still upstairs, I guess.”

“You guess.” A smirk plays on his lips. “Did you leave him with any energy for the game, or did you?—”

He cuts off with a squawk as he wriggles, trying to fish something out of his shirt, until scrambled eggs emerge from the small of his back. The table erupts. Blair strolls past toward the buffet as if he is entirely uninvolved, and Axel holds up a fist for a bump.

When he returns, Blair sets his plate down in the empty seat across from me.

The clatter of forks, the hum of conversation, my father’s text—it all recedes, leaving only the calm geography of his face and the soft light in his eyes.

“Okay, okay! I got one.” Hayes breaks through the chatter. “What would you rather do? Fight one grizzly bear-sized hamster or fifty hamster-sized grizzly bears?”

Everything inside me goes cold, then colder.

Hayes’ laugh ringing across the table, Blair’s easy smile, Mikko shaking his head, Hawks rolling his eyes, Nolan snorting into his coffee, Viktor pretending he’s forgotten English while Dominik cracks up beside him?—

I have been here before.

This is not déjà vu. This is a film reel clicking through the same sprockets, frame by agonizing frame, and I am inside a moment I have already lived. I have been here, lived this, experienced this, before .

It’s too real to keep ignoring. Too exact, too, like an image burned too long into your retina after the flashbulb goes dead.

This is something impossible.

No! I want to slam a fist through this table. Brain damage, Kendrick, that’s what this is. Get hit by Zolotarev and loop slow-motion through your own life forever. Am I even here? Is this even real? Or am I hooked up to some hospital bed, living out a fantasy life over and over and over again?

This morning, I woke up certain of who I was and where I belonged, but now I’m not even sure if my thoughts are my own or they’re memories of thoughts I’ve already had. Am I living or replaying the past?

This cannot be real; this cannot be happening. The clock does not run backward.

But I am .

What if I did live those two weeks and now I am living them again?

What would it mean if déjà vu was a warning?

And if that’s true, if I slipped forward and then back, then… do I get to keep this version, this slow-built love with Blair, or does it all get ripped away again?

Have I been here a thousand times, every time thinking it’s new? Am I doomed to love him and then lose him, again and again and again, until my mind and my soul splinters and there is nothing left of me to break?

How much of me is memory? How much is reflex?

I knew something was lost to me after waking up in the hospital screaming for Blair, back in Vancouver.

I knew something had been burned away, and I feel the same now, like I’m clambering up a spiral staircase and convinced that if I run fast enough I can catch the ghost that I’m chasing. I can catch myself.

Blair’s foot finds mine under the table. I look up and meet his gaze.

I’d walk through fire for the way he looks at me. I have walked through fire, I have crawled on my belly, through the wreckage and the refuse and the ruin, slowly, terrifyingly, beautifully all the way back to him.

And I will do it again, as many times as this life demands. If the universe forced me into hundreds of looping lives, I’d use every one climbing back into his arms.

I focus on him, my point of stillness in a world that has come unhinged.

Hayes snaps his fingers near my face. “You with us, bud?”

I blink. “Yeah.” My fork is frozen in a pancake. “What are you talking about?”

Hayes grins. “Would you rather have fingers for toes or toes for fingers?”

“What?”

“Come on, you gotta choose,” Hollow insists.

“I guess… fingers for toes? At least I could still play hockey that way.”

The debate explodes; finger-toe skates, whether the game would become a kicking sport. I’m not listening.

I can’t lose Blair again.

I have to find the point where everything split apart. I have to keep us from falling into that darkness.

I’ll memorize every second between now and whatever catastrophe waits for us. I’ll catalog every word, every glance, every choice. And when I find the moment, the decision, the single wrong turn, I’ll throw myself between Blair and whatever tries to take him from me.

I know what it costs to wake up without him. I know how the world turns bleak, how food loses all taste, how breathing becomes a waste. I’ve lived through that emptiness once, and I will not survive it again.

This love I carry for him has been worn smooth by age, deepened by loss, sharpened by the terror of almost. It lives in me, older than this morning, older than this version of us.

Every cell in my body recognizes him as home, as necessary as oxygen, as the reason my heart keeps beating even when everything else collapses.

If time wants to play games, fine. If I have to live through every practice, every meal, every conversation twice or ten times or a hundred times, I will. I’ll become an expert in our destruction. I’ll map every path that leads us to ruin until I find the one road that doesn’t.

Breakfast ends. Chairs scrape back. I stare at my fork.

Hayes claps a hand on my shoulder. “You good?”

No. No, I’m not good. I’m standing in a moment I’ve already lived, terrified of a future I can’t remember, in love with a man I’m destined to lose.

Again. Time is folding back, forcing me through the same path toward the same ending: Blair’s blood on my hands, dark waters and shattered glass, a never-ending scream.

We head outside, where Boston’s morning air is sharp, tasting of diesel fumes and the coming game. Our bus waits. Blair stands by the door, his bag slung over his shoulder.

Morning skate. Pre-game meeting. Cool down. Stretches. Warm-up. Our path is laid out through the day. I need to move, grab my bag and board the bus like nothing’s wrong.

But everything’s wrong. I’m an actor who’s forgotten his lines but remembers the blocking, knows where to stand, when to turn, how to smile while the script dissolves.

If I’ve lived this before, why can’t I remember what matters? Why do I get Hayes’ stupid hypotheticals word-perfect but not the moment everything falls apart? My mind gives me breakfast conversations and practice drills while withholding the one piece of information that could save us.

That’s the cruelest part, this partial blindness. I know the taste of loss without remembering how it happens. I carry grief for a loss that hasn’t occurred yet, or has occurred and been erased, or keeps occurring in a loop I can’t break.

The duffel strap cuts into my shoulder. It’s real pain, present tense, but even pain feels suspect now. Have I felt this before?