Page 15 of The Fall

Blair moves through the plane like he owns it. Sunlight pours through the open jet door, streaking over Blair’s sharp jawline and tousled hair. For a moment, he’s gilded as sunbeams run over him from head to toe. I want to follow those sunbeams with my fingers, my lips.

Our eyes meet.

He gets this look whenever he sees me. He keeps his gaze locked on mine longer than he should, like he can’t tear himself away. Heat washes over me in waves. I’m a neon sign, glowing for him.

And that smile. God, that smile. It hits me like a perfect tape-to-tape pass every time.

Blair reaches my row. He stows his bag, strips out of his suit jacket, rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirt. The muscles beneath the starched white fabric shift, rippling across his wide shoulders and down the thick cords of his forearms.

I want to trace the veins on those forearms with my tongue, taste his strength beneath.

I force myself to breathe.

He settles beside me, and the air compresses, charged with his closeness. It’s nothing. It’s everything. I want to lean into him, to close that millimeter of space between us. Having him this close is a gift and a curse.

His arm against mine is a solid line of heat. I don’t dare move. There is a whole world contained in that simple point of contact.

Hollow leans over the aisle seat, already shuffling a deck of cards. “Kicks, you in?”

“Maybe later.” My voice is steady, but my heart races.

He finds my hand with his between our seats, hidden from view. I turn my palm up to meet his, and we lock our hands together in the shadowed space between our seats.

“Sometimes I look at you,” he says, his voice low, “and I forget how quiet my life was before.”

I cannot form a response, cannot find the version of me who would know how to. He speaks of a shared history as if it’s solid ground while I am trying not to fall through the cracks in my memory. How do you become the reason a man like this feels settled?

What did I do to become the person who could fill a silence in Blair Callahan’s life?

I search his face for the man he thinks he’s seeing. His blue eyes hold a piece of the ocean.

“Me, too,” I whisper.

The engines whine. The plane trembles, and the long, slow pivot away from the gate begins, followed by the steady taxi. Then the runway opens up before us, and the plane surges forward.

For a second, the frantic acceleration is all wrong, metal screaming, glass shattering, the world tilting on an axis it was never meant to have. My nightmare surges.

Blair’s thumb moves over my knuckles.

This angle of ascent, this view of Tampa Bay falling away beneath us, Blair beside me: it’s all so achingly familiar. The ribbon of white sand against the endless blue is a sight I’ve seen before.

Up, up, up, we go, leaving the coastline and the solid ground behind.

The world below grows smaller and smaller, and the past and present collide. I’m caught in a maelstrom of broken memories, each one a fragment of a life I can’t remember. Snatches of conversation, whispers of laughter, the taste of Blair’s skin.

I slide my gaze to Blair again. What do I know of this man?

What secrets lie hidden beneath the surface of his skin?

All I understand right now is that I want to belong to him, to be the Torey he remembers, the one who loves him without fear or hesitation.

What will I know when I remember everything?

The plane levels off, and the cabin quiets, the noise fading to a steady hum. Blair’s hand is warm in mine, an anchor in the open sky.

Blair stands, and it’s like someone hits pause on the whole plane. He’s got that captain’s aura, that indefinable something that makes you want to follow him into battle. Or off a cliff.

Or head over heels in love.

“Listen up.”

All eyes turn to him, including mine, always mine. His voice isn’t loud, but it commands the space. He grips the seatback in front of him. The muscles in his throat work as he swallows.

“A lot of teams get here and start believing the universe owes them something. Like the finish line’s already waiting.”

It’s so silent, so suddenly. He tracks his gaze around the plane as if tethering himself to each of us. There’s something there, in his words, wrapping around everyone. What am I missing? Damn it?—

“We know better. The only thing we’re owed is the chance to prove ourselves tomorrow night.”

His eyes find mine. For a breath, the cabin and the team and the sky outside cease to exist.

“Every man here fought for every inch this season. There were days we could have quit, days when walking away would’ve made more sense than showing up.” His voice is strong enough to cut the cabin in two. “But not one of you took that door.”

“This is our time,” Blair says. “Every single one of us has bled for this, sweated for it, lost for it. Nobody hands you a playoff berth. You claw your way there, and we’ve spent all year doing exactly that—fighting through doubt, through…

” He hesitates, eyes skipping to me, then sweeping the team.

“Through losses that could’ve buried us. We didn’t let them. We kept fighting.”

My heart slams against my ribs like it wants to leap into Blair’s hands, where it belongs.

“I keep saying it because it’s true: you can quit any night you want.

You can pack it in, make it easy, tell yourself you’ve done enough.

Or you can lace up tomorrow and take what’s yours: victory, and the chance to keep going, all the way.

Nobody’s going to hand that over. No one offers you greatness.

You have to reach down and find it in yourself. ”

Lightning in his voice, thunder in the silence that follows. Hayes drops his chin to his chest and closes his eyes.

“And we did exactly fucking that. And that resilience?” Blair’s voice drops. “ That’s our edge. That’s what is going to separate us from the teams who watch the playoffs from their couches.”

Blair continues, his eyes laser-focused as he calls out each of us, highlighting the assists and goals that created this run, how Axel has kept his net sealed tight all season.

He talks about Hollow playing shutdown-defense and how Hawks is unstoppable on breakouts.

He ends with Hayes and Mikko diving in front of shots, sacrificing their bodies week after week.

Everyone cheers. His words are an avalanche, surging over me, sweeping me up into this brotherhood I can’t remember being blooded into.

“Last but not least?—”

I’m too aware of everything: Hayes looking sidelong at me, the hush that falls over the cabin, the crackle in my blood like bursting bubbles.

His voice softens. “Kicks.”

He talks about power plays and clutch goals, but his words are a river carrying a deeper meaning. The quiet mornings, the iced bruises, the whispered confessions in the dark are all there in his voice. He’s telling me I give him a reason to believe in tomorrow again.

I feel Blair’s words burrowing under my skin.

He calls me elite—says it twice. I haven’t been called elite since before the draft.

He’s throwing fuel on the fire inside me that I’d long-thought extinguished.

All my years playing, and I can’t remember the one year I did it all right, but here, apparently, I have.

We have. We’re here, at the edge of the playoffs, and I helped us get there.

With him.

I know, as deeply as any man can know a foundational truth: Blair and I are meant to be together. On the ice, off the ice. We are two halves of one singularity.

“That,” Blair says, and everything else falls away, “is the clutch performance we are going to deliver. Again. And again.”

The world condenses around his words—Blair’s voice and me, hanging by my fingertips. I’m not breathing anymore.

I so badly want to be the man Blair sees when he looks at me . I want to be that Torey so much it burns me alive. I want this life.

“I’m proud of all of you.”

I’ll follow him anywhere, into the unknown, into the depths of my own soul.

He looks away, and I can breathe again. Oxygen rushes back into my lungs.

“Let’s run the table.”

The cabin erupts, a single roar that fills me. The sound burns away the questions and the guilt, leaving only a clear and total purpose: I will not fail him.

How could I ever tell him? How could I ever confess that my memory is a ruin and I can’t be the man he needs right now, when the team is right here, at the edge of greatness and glory? I look at Hayes, at Hollow, at all of them; hope shines in everyone’s eyes.

I cannot be the one to extinguish it.