Page 119 of The Fall

Fifty-Nine

Night pools around us in the hospital room.

Dad left for his hotel hours ago, dropping a kiss to my forehead before he went, but Blair hasn’t shifted from where he’s folded himself into this narrow bed with me.

The Mutineers chase the puck across the muted television screen while Blair’s fingertips whisper up and down my arm. “You should watch.”

“No.”

Hayes wins a face-off on screen. The team looks solid, but they’re missing their captain, and that extra fire Blair brings.

He settles more fully against my side, his focus absolute. The game on the screen, the entire world outside this bed, doesn’t exist for him.

“I’m taking another leave from the team.”

Everything inside me stills.

“What?”

His eyes hold mine in the television’s blue flicker.

“I’m entering the Player Assistance Program.

I need help, Torey. Real help. I watched you die.

You went under and you didn’t come back up, and when I dragged you out you weren’t—” He swallows.

“Every time I close my eyes, you’re in my arms again, and you’re not breathing. And you never breathe again.”

I have no memory of the water filling my lungs or of the darkness taking over. He is the one who remembers, and he has been living inside that horror while I was fighting to come back to him.

“I know you survived,” he whispers. “But I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and you’ll be gone.

“Blair...”

“And it’s Cody, and my family, and hockey, and it’s all the shit I never dealt with. I can’t do it anymore. I won’t pretend I’m okay when I’m not.” On the television, Tampa scores and our bench erupts, but Blair doesn’t look.

The television light washes his face in shifting blues and whites. His breathing has gone shallow, waiting for my reaction, for permission he doesn’t need but desperately wants.

My own recovery feels small next to the mountain he’s choosing to climb. He’s choosing to shatter himself to become whole.

The terrifying courage of admitting you need someone else to help carry what you’ve been dragging alone—God. Blair has carried his grief like armor, worn it so close to his skin that removing it means exposing every tender place beneath. And he’s choosing to do it.

“I should have done this a long time ago,” he says. “But I thought if I kept moving, kept playing, kept being what everyone needed...” His eyes close. A tear escapes, tracking silver down his cheek. When he opens them again, the blue is darker, deeper, endless.

On screen, the camera pans across our bench, settling on the empty space where Blair should be.

“We heal together,” he says. “However long that takes, however messy it gets. And when we’re ready to go back—because we will be ready, Torey—we do it together.” His fingers thread through mine. “I’ve been on that ice without you, and I won’t do that again. I’m done pretending I can do this alone.”

He’s tethering his future to mine because that’s the only future he wants, and he’s offering me every broken part of himself and trusting me to hold it. How can I not offer him the same? The truth I’ve guarded, the secret that defines my entire existence, is a wall between us. It has to come down.

My heart thunders, drowning out even the crowd on TV as I search Blair’s face. I angle closer until our foreheads touch and I see the steadiness I fell in love with before I knew it by name.

“What I’m about to tell you is going to sound crazy,” I say. “But I need you to hear me out.” The words I’ve swallowed for months rise up. “The concussion.” My voice is quaking. “The one that started everything… when Zolotarev hit me in Vancouver…”

“Yeah?”

“I need to tell you what happened after. Something I’ve never told anyone.”

“Hey.” His hand cups my jaw. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Blair’s eyes lock on mine, trust and love and every midnight we ever shared packed into two ocean irises. He’s a constellation against the dark of night, and he folds his hand through mine. He squeezes once, strong and certain. This is Blair, the man I crossed time to reach again.

“After I got hit last year...” My words come slowly. “I woke up somewhere else. Some when else.” My voice cracks. “I woke up with you… in Tampa… in your bed.”

Confusion flickers through his eyes.

“It was a year later. This year. We were together; living together. I didn’t remember how we got there, but I knew ...” I swallow. “I knew I loved you even though I’d never met you before. We never met when I played in Vancouver.”

My words tumble out faster now, each confession pulling the next from me.

“I lived weeks there, here, with you. We were so in love, Blair, God, we were everything. The team was going to the playoffs. Hayes and Erin were having another baby. You made me dinner on the lanai and told me you were ready to come out. And then?—”

My voice breaks completely.

“Then we got in that limo after the game where we clinched playoffs and the driver— We crashed on the bridge. Exactly like… And you?—”

I can’t say it. I will never be able to explain that I held him while he died, that I know the exact temperature of his skin as life leaves it, and the shade his lips turn when his heart stops beating.

My grip tightens, and each of my inhales draws in my courage to keep going.

He deserves everything, every shattered piece and every impossible truth.

I force myself to meet his gaze again, letting him see it: the storm behind my eyes, the love threaded through every memory and every loss.

His voice is so gentle when it comes: “Torey?”

“Then I woke up in Vancouver back in my time, right after the hit. I was alone. You were gone.” Tears burn my eyes. “The doctor said it was post-traumatic amnesia. A really, really vivid dream. But it wasn’t, I know it wasn’t.”

Silence unfurls between us.

“So I thought I was crazy,” I whisper. “I thought the concussion scrambled everything up and made me imagine things, but it felt so real. You were so real.” I hold my breath.

“And then it all happened again. Everything. Me going to Tampa, this year, us… everything led to the exact same place, the exact same?—”

Tears fall, one after the other, down my cheeks. “Maybe I am crazy,” I choke out. “Maybe the doctors are right. Maybe everything was a seizure and none of it was real.”

“Shhh.” Blair’s voice is a low rumble. His arms pull me in until my face is buried in his neck. His hand cups the back of my head. I want to fill the silence, to explain more, to ask a million questions, but I force myself to wait.

“When...” he starts, then stops. “When did you first see me?”

That isn’t what I expected. He’s not asking Are you sure? or Did you hit your head harder than we thought? or saying Let’s call the surgeon. I shift back to look him in the eyes as I speak.

“At home. Our home. I woke up in bed with you, the night I was sick after the Zolotarev hit. The one in Tampa—and the one in Vancouver—” Fuck, I don’t know how to explain this. “You took care of me.”

“What else?” he asks.

“I lived these past two weeks. All of it, every moment, I swear I lived before. Except for the crash. We took the limo the first time, and— We died. You died in my arms.”

“That’s why you wanted to drive?”

“I had to save you.” My voice is barely audible. “I couldn’t let you die.”

His eyes search mine.

“I know how it sounds,” I whisper. “ Crazy . Impossible . When I woke up in Vancouver, you didn’t know me. We’d never met. But I loved you then the same as I love you now. I have always loved you, Blair. Always.”

He’s so quiet for so long. Every worst-case scenario I’ve ever imagined screams through my head. I have laid my heart, my sanity, my whole cracked-open soul at his feet, and he is unreadable.

“The way you looked at me that first day…” Blair’s breath is a kiss against my skin.

I squeeze my eyes shut as I speak. “I loved you.” My sobs tear through me; I can’t control them, can’t stop the flood now that the dam has broken. My words come in fractured, hitching gasps. “Every time you were there, I—” I remembered everything . “...Without you, I was dying.”

Every time I looked at him, memory crashed over memory, love layered over love, until I couldn’t breathe beneath.

Blair’s fingers find the tears on my face, brushing them away. I shudder, and Blair pulls me closer. His heartbeat drums beneath my ear —alive, alive, alive.

“Am I broken?”

His eyes close briefly. When they open again, they’re wet. “You’re not broken,” he finally says. “You’re the bravest person I know.”

Fresh tears blur my vision, but through them I see him clearly, this man who held me while I drowned, who shattered on a hospital floor when they wheeled me away, who’s choosing to rebuild himself so we can heal together.

“I’m here,” he whispers. “I’m right here.”

“I was afraid if I told you, you’d think?—”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think you’re crazy.” His breath ghosts across my lips. “I used to think fate was bullshit,” he says softly. “Something people said to make sense of chaos, but the world is stranger than we want to admit.”

His gaze is so intense; I can’t look away. “But how? And why? I don’t understand?—”

“Does it matter?” Blair asks. “The how or why?”

I look at him, studying the face I’ve loved across two lifetimes. Did I carry this love back with me or was it always there? Where is the beginning? I follow the lines around his eyes, the curve of his mouth, searching for a start to our story that makes sense. This is too much, too big?—

He tangles our hands together and draws them between us. “Every day before you, I felt unfinished and never knew why,” he murmurs. “When you walked into my life, it felt like the part I’d been missing finally showed up.”

Every thread of fear dissolves. The truth is between us now, and Blair believes me. All those months of carrying this alone and thinking madness lived behind my eyes, and now Blair knows.

“I’d do it again. A thousand times, or a million. I’d live through all of it to get here.”

He shifts closer and lets out a long exhale. “I’ve got you,” he whispers. “And I’m not letting go.”