Page 120 of The Fall

Sixty

The canal whispers against the seawall, a rhythm I’m learning to trust again. After six weeks, water no longer tastes like blood and drowning. Now it carries salt breezes across the lanai and has become the soundtrack to our careful reconstruction of ourselves.

I sit on the lanai, wrapped in one of Blair’s hoodies despite the warmth of the Tampa afternoon, watching shifts of light on the canal’s surface. I shift, testing the boundaries of what my body allows today.

Surgery was successful; they removed the lesion. My seizures should be completely eliminated in time. My medication has been dropped twice now, and I haven’t had any episodes. It’s a success by medical standards.

But the fatigue lingers. Headaches come without warning.

My short-term memory betrays me, the next word in a sentence evaporating, the reason I walked into a room vanishing, Blair’s question hanging unanswered while I struggle to recall what he asked moments ago.

I’m weaker, slower, and healing in unpredictable bursts and plateaus.

Blair never minds. He’s rewritten his existence around my recovery, and the magnitude of his sacrifice is a second heartbeat inside me.

The Mutineers were knocked out of the playoffs in the second round.

It was hard to watch, and harder still to be there when they came home from the road loss and cleaned out their lockers, but every one of our teammates had nothing but love to give to Blair and me.

They promised next year, and said we’d be back, and next time we’d do it together.

“Here,” Blair says, crossing the lanai and setting a glass of water on the table beside me.

“Thanks.”

He sits and takes my hand. “Hayes called,” he says. “Erin’s ultrasound went well. It’s definitely a boy.” His gaze is fixed on the water.

Blair looks whole from this angle, sun-bronzed and solid, but his thumb worries my knuckles and tension rides high in his shoulders. “Cody’s birthday is next week,” he finally says.

I squeeze his hand. Through our recoveries, we’ve built a language of touch.

“I dreamed about him last night.” He shifts toward me. “He was sitting where you are now. We were hanging out the way we used to. Laughing, talking…” Blair’s voice catches.

I reach up, thumb brushing his cheekbone.

Blair leans into my touch. “Dr. Mercer says those kinds of dreams are normal.”

“Do they help?”

“Yeah.” Blair exhales. “They do.” He kisses me, soft and lingering, before resting his forehead against mine. “PT in twenty,” he says, though neither of us moves.

“We could skip it,” I offer, knowing he won’t let me.

“Nice try.” But his smile softens his words, and when he stands, he holds out both hands to help me up.

Our home PT setup dominates the living room: resistance bands, balance board, a foam roller that is my nemesis. Blair’s already moving through his warm-up routine. He never lets me do this alone.

“Thirty seconds on the balance board,” he coaches. “You got this.”

My tremors start at sixteen seconds. Blair counts down the final moments, and when I step off, his “beautiful work” carries the same pride he used to use on the ice after a perfect play.

We move through the rest of my routine: stretches for my neck muscles and spine, cognitive exercises disguised as conversation, strength work that leaves me shaking.

Blair talks about playoff scenarios and debates line combinations with me, filling the air with hockey to remind us who we’re fighting to become again.

When my exhaustion finally wins, I drop onto the couch and melt into the cushion. “Small victories.”

He sits beside me and rubs my thigh. “There’s no such thing as small victories anymore. Only victories.”

We’ve both recalibrated what matters.

Blair assesses me. “Was it too much?”

We both know I’ll lie. “It was perfect.” And it was. Every ache proves I’m healing.

I lay my head against his shoulder, and he lays his head atop mine.

The next day, Blair returns from therapy frayed, and he folds into my side on the couch, his control crumbling.

His therapy sessions are three times weekly, an hour each with Dr. Mercer.

He comes home with exposed nerves and weeping wounds and clenched fists.

These sessions are excavating pain that never properly healed: Cody’s death, pulling me lifeless from the sinking Escalade, the compounded trauma of love and loss braided too tight to separate, growing up gay in a hypermasculine world, his family turning their backs on him, learning how to not be alone.

His therapist is teaching him to carry life and grief and love without drowning, but there are days when the water still rises too high.

“Bad one?” I ask as I hold him.

“Yeah,” he finally says.

My arm tightens around him.

We move outside and sit together on the lanai. The canal reflects the late afternoon light, and a boat motor purrs in the distance. It’s peaceful. Safe. The opposite of collapsing bridges and plunging into dark waters.

We take turns being each other’s solid ground.

My father arrives at four-thirty, right on the dot. He’s rented a place ten minutes away, close enough to visit every day but far enough to give us privacy.

The easy warmth between him and Blair still catches me off guard, like they’ve been family for years instead of weeks.

“Smells amazing,” I call from my perch at the kitchen island, watching them work in tandem. Dad’s teaching Blair to cook Singapore chili crab today.

“Your Blair has good hands,” Dad says, guiding Blair through the recipe.

“I know.”

Blair shoots me a look that promises retribution later, but he’s smiling.

He’s surprisingly old-fashioned about some things.

He wants to treat me like a prince in front of my father, and takes on the role of a gentleman whenever Dad is here.

I think he’d sleep on the couch if he thought there was a chance he could pretend that we haven’t already ravished each other completely, but my father is a realistic man.

Still, Blair likes to believe he’s a white knight.

He is.

I rest my chin on folded arms atop the island counter as the kitchen fills with steam and garlic and the sharp bite of chilies hitting oil.

They move around each other easily, Dad explaining while Blair absorbs every detail.

He is meticulous with the crab shells and red chili paste, listening intently while Dad explains how much ginger to add.

Dinner on the lanai becomes our tradition. We eat while boats drift past, conversation flowing between hockey and recovery, Singapore memories and future plans. Dad asks about my PT progress, and Blair jumps in with pride. “He’s ahead of schedule.”

Dad reaches over to squeeze my shoulder. “Of course he is.”

This is my life now, messy and filled with small victories and daily challenges, and rich with a love I never knew was possible.

Thursday is a bad day.

My fatigue is so terrible I can barely lift my head, and thick, agonizing fog replaces my thoughts. Dr. Lin warned about these setbacks, but knowing they’re lurking and waiting to pounce doesn’t make enduring them any easier.

“Hey.” Blair sits carefully beside me in bed. “Scale of one to ten?”

“Twelve.” The word takes effort. “Maybe thirteen.”

“Want me to read?”

We discovered early on that his voice helps when my head gets this bad. It’s a low, steady rumble that cuts through the static in my skull.

The smallest nod is all the answer he needs.

He pulls out the novel we’ve been working through. Blair’s not much of a reader, but he’s become excellent over these past few months. He settles close enough that his warmth seeps into me and begins where we left off.

I feel his voice more than hear it at first, his steady cadence pulling me through the worst of the pain. My thoughts drift in and out, tide pools filling and emptying as he reads. His voice becomes the thread I follow when everything else is chaos.

The pain recedes incrementally with each page turned. I focus on his thumb absently stroking my arm, the way he pauses occasionally to check that I’m still with him.

“Keep going,” I whisper when he stops to check on me.

My body unclenches, muscle by muscle. He reads through two chapters, and gradually the crushing pain eases enough to let me surface from the agony.

“Better?” he asks when my eyes focus properly again.

“Yeah.” I catch his hand, bring it to my lips. “Thank you.”

“Always.”

The nightmare comes for Blair at three a.m., leaving him screaming, then gasping. He’s thrashing against invisible water and screaming when he doesn’t reach me in time. I hear my name torn out of his throat. I hear him shout, hear him roar and sob and break.

“I’m here,” I reach for him. “Blair, I’m here.”

His eyes find consciousness like a drowning man finds air, desperate and disoriented, but seeing me snaps him free from his terror’s hold. He clings to me with shaking hands and drags himself close, wrapping around me. “You’re okay,” he whispers. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay. We’re both okay.” I wait, giving him time to return to the present.

“You were in my arms, and you weren’t breathing.”

“I’m here.” I guide his hand to my chest and let him feel my heartbeat.

Blair’s nightmares follow the same theme: me lost, dead, or dying, always beyond his reach.

Sometimes he never reaches the Escalade.

Sometimes he can never break the window to get me out.

Sometimes I never draw in that ragged, gasping breath I did on the bank, the one that brought me back to life while he roared my name, over and over and over.

One night, after a bad nightmare left him sobbing, I told him how I fought to stay conscious in that cold, dark water and how his name was the last thing on my lips before everything went black. I told him that I heard him calling my name, somehow. He kept me there. He kept me here.