Page 106 of The Fall

His hands blaze a trail down my sides, calluses catching on every ridge of muscle.

His mouth follows, kissing down my chest, his tongue swirling over a nipple until my back bows off the bed.

The wet heat of his mouth pulls, teeth grazing just enough to shoot sparks straight to my cock.

He doesn’t stop, licking the taut lines of my abs, teasing into the dip of my navel.

He maps the inside of my thigh with open-mouthed kisses, his stubble scraping my skin.

I’m hard and aching, my cock leaking steadily against my stomach.

He breaks me down in careful pieces, leaves me trembling with my thighs falling open wider as he settles between them.

Then his mouth is on me, wet heat enveloping my cock in one smooth slide. His hands pin my hips to the mattress, fingers digging bruises into the hollows, holding me still as he takes me deeper. His throat contracts around me, swallowing, and stars burst behind my eyelids.

“Fuck—Blair?—”

He pulls off with an obscene pop, lips swollen and spit-slick, only to lick a broad stripe from base to tip before sucking the head between his lips. His tongue works the slit, lapping up precome while his hand wraps around the base, stroking what his mouth doesn’t take.

He throws one of my thighs over his shoulder and palms both sides of my ass. A groan scrapes out of me as I drive up into the heat of his mouth and he takes it, throat opening, his spit stringing when he pops off for air.

A frantic thought seizes me: remember this, remember all of it . The sight of his lips stretched around me, the way his eyes water when he takes me to the root, the obscene sounds filling the room. I’m flying apart here on these sheets.

A faint click sounds from the nightstand, the snap of a cap. Then his hand returns to me, fingers dripping with lube. He strokes my cock, coating me before slipping lower. His knuckles brush my balls, rolling them gently before his thumb finds my hole and circles the rim.

“Please,” breaks from me.

His thumb pushes past the ring of muscle, testing, before he replaces it with one finger sliding in to the knuckle. A second finger follows immediately, spreading me open. I keen into his mouth, thighs trembling around his waist.

He slides up my body, never breaking the kiss or removing his fingers, and grinds down into me. He rolls his cock against mine, both of us leaking, both of us sliding through the mess on our stomachs. Our hot, slick skin moves together while he finger-fucks me, driving into my prostate.

“There,” I gasp against his lips. “Right there, don’t stop?—”

He doesn’t. His fingers curl with every thrust, nailing my prostate while his cock grinds against mine in the mess of precome and sweat between us. The obscene squelch of lube fills the room as he adds a third finger.

“More,” I beg, lost in the wet glide of his touch and the rough rub of our cocks as they slide together.

He grinds deep into me with his hips and I cling to his shoulders. He twists inside me, and the moan he pulls from me could wake the entire floor. Heat pools low in my belly, spreading through my veins like wildfire as he drops his forehead to mine.

He drags my lower lip between his teeth and bites, then sucks the sting away. My cock jerks, leaking steadily, the slide between us even slicker. I hook a leg over his hip, ankle digging into his ass, pulling him impossibly closer.

“Yes,” I breathe, barely a sound. “Yes.” My hole clenches around him, trying to keep them exactly where he is. The pressure is perfect, too much and not enough. “Feels?—”

I arch into him, pleading for more. More, God, more.

More of this ache that feels like the only cure for itself.

My fingernails rake down his back as our mouths crash together, messy and desperate, tongue and teeth.

His touch angles just right, a fourth finger teasing at my rim while three work inside, and I’m right there, right on the edge, muscles coiling tight?—

His teeth skim my throat. “Say my name when you come.”

The world shatters. Release surges through me.

I keen into his mouth, screaming, “Blair,” and he captures my shout with his kiss, swallowing the sound to keep it for himself.

I’m clinging to him, he’s claiming me, my hands are tangled in his hair, refusing to let go as he tumbles over the edge with me.

His heat spills across my skin, and I catch his moan this time as he shudders apart.

We collapse into each other, limbs entwined. A quivering exhale sounds, his or mine, I can’t tell. “Blair,” I whisper. “Fuck, Blair.” Our heartbeats fall into rhythm, slowing together as sweat cools over our skin. Every breath Blair draws pulls me with it.

I could stay inside this hush forever, every inch of me mapped by his touch. His hand drifts lazily across my back, his touch skating the ridges of my spine. Don’t let go . Not now. Not ever.

“I love you,” he breathes. “So much it terrifies me sometimes.”

The pad of my thumb finds the sharp edge of his jaw, follows its curve to where it softens beneath his ear.

Why does love always feel like holding your breath underwater, waiting for either salvation or the sea to claim you?

I’ve carried him in dreams and daylight, our past and present blurring until our love has become its own haunting.

I’m envious of him. He hasn’t woken up in a different life with the ghost of another still burning in his chest, or watched himself fail what he needed most.

If fate rips him away again, if there’s a universe where I wake up alone—again—I won’t survive.

His gaze meets mine as the quiet between us stretches wide and golden.

“Me, too,” I say.

“I love you,” he breathes as he kisses me, over and over and over again. “I love you, I love you.”

I lie on my side, propped on an elbow, my body angled toward Blair’s.

Moonbeams lay stripes of borrowed light over the slope of his shoulder as he sleeps with one arm thrown over his head.

A dark strand of hair has fallen across his forehead.

I brush it away. The clock on the nightstand glows: 2:37 a.m.

“Blair,” I whisper. He turns, his face burrowing against my neck, his arm wrapping around my waist.

This bed held me once before, when I thought I’d finally learned how to stand. Peace had settled into me—or what I mistook for peace. I wondered then how it was possible to feel so complete with my past in fragments. Feeling that was the beginning of the end.

His breath warms my collarbone, steady as tides. I thread my hand into the soft hair at his nape. He lets out a low sound in his sleep, pulling me closer. How many times has he reached for me in the dark, in how many lives?

The moonlight shifts, painting new shadows across his back. Time keeps its steady march while I lie here, again. Again implies I’ve done this before, implies I’ll do it once more, implies an ending I can’t see.

We’re moving forward on a track laid out clean and straight, and I can’t see a single switch to change our direction.

Those broken images that surface in my nightmares—Blair’s blood on my hands, water rushing through shattered glass, the fall—are getting more insistent, like fingers tapping at my consciousness, demanding to be let in.

I want to rage against whatever decided I should remember enough to fear but not enough to prevent.

And I want to stay this man—the one who has his trust, the one he reaches for in sleep.

I want to be the first face he sees in the morning.

I want to be his constant shore in the darkness.

There was a time I was none of those things, and going back to that, to a life without him, would be the end of me.

I wish, fuck, I wish I knew where this ended, where we fell. And I wish?—

Blair, if wishes live anywhere, let them find you.

There’s no map for this, no compass pointing toward safety or tomorrow, only the hush of his breathing and my stubborn hope that maybe this time, just this once, love is enough.

Those nightmare fragments keep circling, vultures patient for their meal. Water. Glass. Falling. Free fall?—

“Blair,” I whisper. “I don’t know how to save us.”

Dawn seeps through the windows. The sheets twist around our legs, holding us captive in their warmth. Blair’s breath ghosts across my scalp, each exhale gentle. He shifts, his chin grazing my forehead.

This is how all mornings should be, the two of us together, his body heat still a second skin against mine. His arm tightens reflexively around my waist, holding me closer even in sleep.

I trace a fingertip along his ribs, counting each one like a rosary. I should slip away before the world catches us tangled together, but I stall. I want to leave another lazy kiss along his jaw, pull the sheets over our head, and love him for hours and hours and hours.

But I ease myself out from under his arm. His hand reaches across the mattress for me as he rolls and snorts.

My clothes lie crumpled where we shed them last night, my jeans inside-out, my shirt twisted into a knot. My hair is a wreck, an unfixable map of where his hands were. The proof of what we’ve been up to is written all over me. Nobody can mistake me for a guy who slept alone.

I slip out and close the door behind me.

The hallway is washed pale by dawn, empty except for my heartbeat.

Every step away from Blair feels like a dare.

How long can I carry the taste of his skin, the imprint of his arms?

My hands drift over rumpled seams as I right my shirt.

There’s something— Something I should remember?—

Hawks rounds the corner, his sweat-darkened tank clinging to his shoulders, a water bottle swinging in his hand. He clocks me, and his gaze rakes me from head-to-toe, flickers to the number on Blair’s door, then returns to my face.

Fuck. That’s what it was.

“Early film study, Kicks?”

I force my face into something that doesn’t scream I just spent the night with Blair. “Always room for improvement.”

“That’s my man. Always grinding. That’s why you’ve got the golden hands.” His fist comes up for a bump, and I knock mine to his. He winks. “Catch you at breakfast, bro.”

Two minutes left. The score is a knot, tied and waiting for a blade to cut it. Blair is a solid line to my right; Hollow guards my left. Pittsburgh is a shifting wall of black and gold.

My teammates move around me, resetting, and we gather behind the dot. “Switch,” Blair says. “Mikko, pinch in.”

The puck drops, and I drive my edges into the ice. Mikko surges forward, his stick a blur, fighting for possession.

A Pittsburgh player slips free, cutting a clear path to Axel’s net. The arena surges, bellowing for blood, and for one suspended moment, I am back on the ice in Vancouver as my own failure unfolds.

I catch the player as his stick flexes to take the shot, but it’s not enough. Axel throws himself across the crease, though, and his blocker connects, punching the puck high.

Hayes collects it. I shout his name, slap my stick on the ice. He passes to me as two Pittsburgh players cream him into the boards.

The rink opens up for me, and I read through all the layers of movement: defenders spreading wide to cut off passing lanes, Blair ghosting into position on my wing. The clock is bleeding seconds. There’s under a minute left now.

I feint, drawing the defense with me, then slide the puck to Hollow.

He takes it cleanly, weaving through a check, while Blair opens an impossible lane and accelerates toward the net.

I skate into the slot as Hollow holds the puck, drawing their defenseman and closing angles.

He drops a pass to Hayes at the point; Hayes shoots it to Blair.

The goalie slides, anticipating Blair’s shot, and Blair begins his windup.

The goalie commits, a gambler going all in.

And Blair, my Blair, passes; he lasers the puck across the crease to me. It meets my stick with a hard, clean shock that travels up my arms.

My blades bite. My wrists twist, and the puck soars?—

And the goal horn wails.

I thrust both arms skyward. Euphoria explodes through me as the red light bathes the ice while that beautiful horn keeps screaming.

Blair crashes into me, wrapping me up before we are lost in the mess of the noise of the crowd and the post-game music. “Fuck, I love you,” Blair shouts.

Hollow and Hayes arrive, and we are buried in a pileup against the boards. “Only one more left, baby!” Hayes cries. “One fucking more!”

Blair’s gloved hand lands on the back of my neck. He pulls me forward until our helmets touch. A photographer’s lens flashes behind us, capturing a moment I know I will die to protect.

“Only with you,” Blair says, his voice for me alone. “Only with you.”

And I think, whatever comes, it begins and ends with you.