Page 20 of The Fall

The ghost of it is there—stick in my hands, sweat in my eyes, the perfect weight of a puck on my blade. Was it Blair who fed me the pass? Hayes who sprang me?

“He scores with eleven seconds left!” Hayes slaps the table. “And then—” Hayes pauses for maximum drama. “In overtime, after all that heroics, all that blood and beauty… Who gets the game-winner?”

I have no fucking clue.

“Fucking Divot !”

The table erupts into chaos. Divot has a heart of gold, but he’s the definition of a plug. He’s got feet for hands and skates like a refrigerator, but he can hit like a train and pick, pick, pick at the other team. He’s known for his bulk, not his season point total.

Three stitches on my cheek. I touch my face.

All I want in this moment is to remember. To reach back into the murky depths of my memory and pull out a single, solid thought.

But there’s nothing there, only a gaping hole.

“You okay?” Blair asks.

“Yeah. Just remembering.” Liar.

Hayes leans back into his seat, extremely satisfied with his performance. “Point is, Boston brings out the best in us, especially you, Calle.”

Blair’s hand lands low on my back, his fingers splayed above the waistband of my jeans. The warmth of him seeps through my shirt and into my skin. My thoughts shiver, freeze, vanish with a pop.

“When you laugh like that…”

The heat of his hand has spread, blooming across my skin like watercolor on wet paper.

“It might be my favorite sound in the world.”

If he leaned in and brushed his mouth over mine right now, I wouldn’t stop him. Drowning feels inevitable now, and losing myself completely is all I want.

How does he do this? Create the feeling that we’re the only people in the universe with a touch, a look? As if we’re tangled in sheets and whispering secrets against each other’s skin? Does he see how unsteady I am now, how thoroughly undone?

“Let’s get refills,” he says.

He stands. I stare, absolutely unable to understand what he wants me to do. Kiss him, yes. Climb into his lap and rut against him, yes. Stand, move, talk, think? What?

I do, though, managing to push past the primal version of myself and become a human being again.

I follow Blair, weaving between tables all the way to the bar.

It’s a solid wall of bodies, the warm wood sticky with spilled beer and rum.

Ice clinks in glasses, and laughter swells and breaks against the walls.

We’re both used to this crush, and we spot a gap and angle in, catching the eye of the bartender.

Blair orders two more virgin pina coladas. The bartender raises his eyebrows slowly. Blair holds his gaze.

I slip my hand down his chest, rest my hand on his hip between his T-shirt and his jeans.

He turns back to me when the bartender moves away. “You know,” he says, his voice dropping low enough that only I can hear him, “I was thinking about my brother earlier.”

His eyes soften like ice melting into water. My breath stops.

“We were playing juniors, his rookie season,” Blair continues, fixing his eyes on some point beyond the wall of liquor bottles. His gaze is distant, unseeing. “He was always running his mouth, but this one game, he was on another level. Relentless.”

He’s smiling now, but there’s something inside it, under it. “He decided to make this one guy on the other team, a defenseman built like a brick shithouse, his personal project for the night.”

A muscle fires in Blair’s jaw, a rubber band popping. “Before a face-off, he skates right up to him. Says, ‘Hey, big guy. Your girl called. Said she left your balls on the nightstand.’”

I chuckle when Blair does, but it feels wrong. There’s an edge to Blair’s smile that doesn’t match his words.

“I spent the next two periods tangled up with him, trying to keep him from turning my little brother into a smear on the ice.”

My thoughts race through memories that aren’t there anymore and land on nothing but blankness.

I’m supposed to know all of this history already.

Clearly, we’ve talked about his brother.

I should know all of Blair, his inner worlds and the secrets he’s trusted me with, all the details, tiny and magnificent, that fill up his life.

I ache for him tonight more than ever before. I ache to be the man he needs, the real Torey he loves.

What happened during that missing year? What did we do together? How did we get here? And what if I never remember?

What if he can tell that so many crucial pieces of our past are missing for me? That half my soul is an amnesiac stranger to this love?

Here is where it matters most that I have lost my past year.

No, our past year, because I haven’t only lost my memories.

I’ve lost us, the history of what we’ve built, what we’ve shared, what we’ve confessed, what we’ve made.

There is no feeling my way through this, no muscle memory to follow.

This is a canyon I must cross to get back to him—to us—one way or another.

I slide my thumb over his skin, one slow arc, up and down and back again. Blair catches my gaze, holds it. He’s reaching for me through his own turbulent waters, wanting, no, needing?—

I squeeze his hand. “He knew you’d always be there to back him up.”

He lets out a long, slow breath. He brings our joined hands up to rest on the bar, fingers threaded together.

I swallow hard. That’s what he needed, and maybe I recognized his whirlpool because I’d been lost in mine for so long. Did Blair pull me out? Or did we rescue each other from our own storms?

The bartender sets our pina coladas in front of us—double umbrellas and a mountain of cherries—and Blair pays with a crisp bill before we head back to the group. He walks behind me, sheltering me inside his shadow, close enough that our arms brush together every step.

The table roars when we return. The guys are hyped, their voices overlapping.

Divot is telling a story about how he nearly got into a fight with a raccoon last summer at his cabin, and he’s reenacting it like it was the Cup finals.

Hayes is flapping his hand in front of his face, nonverbal.

Novak rolls his eyes and pushes his hand into the side of Hayes’s face.

I slide into my seat next to Blair. “What am I missing down there?” he asks. His fingers brush mine as he reaches for his drink.

God, his touch makes me want to drag him somewhere private and let him ruin me slowly. You could have all of me, forever. You do have all of me forever.

“Yo, Cap,” Simmer calls from down the table. “If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, but it had to be something from the arena, what would it be? And why is it nachos?”

Blair argues for buffalo chicken sandwiches like he’s coaching the power play. Beneath the table, he lays his palm on my thigh. This time, I cover his hand with mine.

The night unrolls around us. I am on fire, burning alive in front of everyone, under his touch. If he slid his hand higher right now, I’d let him do anything he wanted. I want his mouth on me again, slow and greedy, until I forget my own name.

Eventually, the night winds down toward curfew. The guys start getting noisy about calling for Ubers and settling tabs. Credit cards come out, chairs scrape against the floor. Cell phones and sunglasses are gathered.

“Who’s on coffee duty tomorrow?” Hayes asks.

“Not it!” Novak says immediately.

“Bus leaves at eight,” Blair says, his voice rising above the din of twenty hockey players. “Don’t be late.”

A pack of hockey players goes nowhere quickly.

Some of the guys wander to the railing. Some get distracted by the fire pit, others by the dartboard.

Blair tucks my hand into his and leads me inside the bar, turning us down a hallway that barely glows.

There’s only enough light to trace the lines of his face from the shadow, and the rest of him fades in and out.

He stops abruptly and turns me into his body. We press our foreheads together, and the world outside this tiny, enclosed pocket of air simply evaporates. He breathes out, I breathe in. We share this air, confined in our private universe that needs nothing beyond its borders to be complete.

He inches closer until our lips are a breath from touching.

He tastes of saltwater kisses and summer nights spent tangled up together on beaches where nobody else exists but us.

He eases deeper, his mouth opening, patience sliding into hunger.

The kiss deepens like waves building strength before they break against the shore.

I tangle my fingers in the thick hair at the nape of his neck, holding him closer, holding him here. We kiss, and time drops away, like we’re not standing in a darkened corner while twenty teammates could round the corner any second.

We move closer, and closer still, until our bodies are a single hard line. Everything that means anything narrows to the taste of his lips. If I could weld myself into this moment, I would.

“Yo!” Hayes’s voice bounces down the hallway. “If you’re down here, hurry your asses up. Ubers are pulling up!”

Our kiss breaks. His eyes are so bright, so intense; they burn into mine. I don’t look away.

I don’t want to look away. He’s everything: my anchor, my lifeline, my reason for being. The world blurs when he’s this close.

How do you describe something you’ve never experienced before? How do you put words around feelings you’ve never felt before? I want to burn this moment into my broken memory so deeply that it can never be stolen away again.

Nothing’s truly lost until you forget the taste of another man’s lips.

And I will never forget him.