Page 186 of The Fall

“Some mornings,” he confesses, “I wake up and forget. I reach for my phone to text him about a game or a stupid meme, and it hits me all over again that he’s gone. And sometimes it feels like if I just sit long enough he’ll walk back through that door.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Outside, the canal waters rock lazily against the dock. Palm fronds shush and sigh. I know so, so deeply what it is to wish you could fix what you never broke and that hollow ache of responsibility that isn’t yours to carry, but you shoulder it anyway because the alternative is surrender. Thinking if you try harder, love better, find the right words, you could change the path. They’re different griefs, but same impossible wish: to turn back time, to find the perfect combination of words and actions that would have changed everything.

The fantasy haunts us both: that love, if applied correctly, could have been enough.

“You couldn’t have known,” I say, the words inadequate but necessary. “No matter how many times you replay it.”

A ripple passes through the water outside, the canal answering the night breeze with gentle lapping.

We breathe in time with our hauntings and each other. We’re sharing corners with ghosts and wishes tonight. The bedroom holds them all—his brother’s memory, my broken mind, paths not taken.

There’s safety in this quiet darkness.

He shifts, pulling back to see my face in the dim light. His eyes search mine. There’s a question forming in the air between us.

I stand slowly and tug at his hand. “Come to bed.”Come curl into me and don’t be alone.

He rises from the chair.

I walk backward, leading him, and he follows me out of Cody’s room, pausing to switch off the lamp. In the darkness, he presses a kiss to his fingertips and then touches them to the door frame. A goodbye, a goodnight.

We move through the dark of his house, moonlight pooling around our feet. When we get to his bedroom, we crawl beneath the sheets together and lay on our sides, facing each other and sharing a pillow.

His eyes are so wide, so open.

My knee slides between his; our feet bump and hook and settle. His inhale ghosts my lips. Gentle symmetry fills the gaps between us. I could lie here forever and still want one more second.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump this on you,” Blair whispers. “Not tonight, before our trip.”

“You didn’t dump anything on me.” I shift closer, erasing the distance between us. Our foreheads touch.

How do you ask someone who saved you how they were saved first? His chest rises and falls. He lost his brother, lost himself, fought his way back for a ghost and a game. Then I showed up, and he loved me enough to dig himself out of the darkness. How do you ask about that?

His voice is so quiet I nearly miss it. “Torey—” His hand ghosts over my cheek. “Thank you for finding me.”

I tighten my arms around him. “I’ll always find you.”

His thumb moves over my cheekbone. “Can I kiss you?”

The question hangs between us. His eyes hold mine.

“Yes,” I breathe, the word barely formed before it leaves my lips.

He doesn’t move right away. Instead, he studies my face like he’s memorizing it, like he wants to remember this exact moment. He moves so slowly, each millimeter of distance disappearing. His breath mingles with mine, warm and sweet, and craving builds in me until I can barely breathe.

I close the distance between us, sealing my lips to his. Blair’s lips are velvet against mine, a slow-drawn line of heat and salt. His exhale melts into my mouth, a silent surrender that turns my blood to honey. I sink into him, letting the warmth spread from my lips down my neck, through my chest, pooling low in my belly.

His hand cups my face, fingertips gliding into my hair as his mouth moves against mine. Every brush of his lips unravels another thread of tension I’ve been carrying. His tongue brushes my bottom lip, and I open to him, meeting him halfway. A small sound escapes him when our tongues touch, half sigh, half groan.

The sheets rustle as we shift closer, legs tangling further, my thigh between his. I break the kiss only to breathe, but stay close enough that our lips still brush when I whisper, “Blair.”

“Again,” he whispers. “Kiss me again.”

This time it’s deeper. Slower. His lips part under mine like he’s giving me permission to know him completely. I open to him, too, and let him steal the breath from my lungs and replace it with everything he is.

I give him everything he asks for, and then more.

His chest rises and falls faster under my touch, and I can’t get enough of the way his body responds, the way his breath stumbles every time I angle my head to deepen the kiss. I drag my lips from his to trail them along his jaw, tasting the faint roughness of stubble, the warmth of his skin under my mouth.His head tips back, giving me access, and the quiet gasp that slips from him when I nip at the edge of his jawline sears straight through me.