Page 246 of The Fall

Last time, this moment hollowed me out with everything I didn’t know, but now it breaks me differently, knowing too much.

Grief rewrites at the cellular level. It changes how love moves through your body. Blair’s grief moves like a fatal riptide, invisible from shore, but powerful enough to drag you under. I recognize the careful way he tells his stories, how he parses out memory in small doses. In his stories, Cody lives again, brilliant, reckless, beloved Cody, who Blair couldn’t save.

His eyes are deep water when they lock onto me. I squeeze his hand. “He knew you’d always be there to back him up.”

A long, slow breath leaves him; it’s the slow receding of a wave.

He brings our joined hands up to rest on the bar, fingers threaded together. The move is a full sentence, a conversation without words. My thumb runs over the back of his hand, sayingI’m hereandyou’re not aloneandCody would be proud of who you’ve become.

The bartender sets our drinks down—extra cherries, double umbrellas.

Blair pays, and then we head back into the crowd. He walks close enough that I exist in his shadow.

The table explodes with laughter when we return. Divot’s deep into a story about fighting a raccoon, but all I can focuson is Blair and how his fingers brush mine when he reaches for his drink, how the light catches in his hair as if it’s been gold all along.

“What am I missing down there?” Blair leans in, voice low enough to raise goosebumps.

Everything, I want to say. You’re missing how I dream about you in places we’ve never been, how sometimes I wake up and am afraid you’ll be gone like you vanished once before, like you were never real at all. Loving you feels like remembering something I’m not supposed to.

“Yo, Cap.” Simmer calls 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?”

The debate is passionate and ridiculous. Blair argues for buffalo chicken sandwiches with the same intensity he brings to power play strategies. His hand settles on my thigh again. This time I cover it with mine, lace our fingers together where no one can see.

The night unspools lazy as honey. Blair touches me constantly: a hand on my leg, an arm around my chair, fingers tracing patterns on my knee that probably spell out confessions to the whole world. I burn and burn and burn, and he keeps pouring fuel on the fire with every casual touch.

He knows what he’s doing. The small smile playing at his lips tells me he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Eventually, the night winds toward curfew. Credit cards appear. Chairs scrape. Phones come out to call rides.

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

“Not it!” Novak shouts.

“Bus leaves at eight,” Blair’s captain voice cuts through the noise. “Don’t be late.”

Hockey players don’t leave anywhere quickly. The guys scatter, distracted by fire pits and city views, and Blair takesmy hand, bold as anything, to pull me inside. We turn down a hallway lit soft as candlelight, where shadow and glow take turns with his face.

The noise fades behind us. Blair stops walking, turns, and pulls me against him until there’s nothing between us. Our hearts beat a matched rhythm. His breath stirs my hair, and in the dim light, his eyes hold galaxies. I trace the edge of his jaw with my fingertips, marveling at how perfectly we fit in this space, this moment, as if the universe engineered every molecule to align us here.

His fingers are impossibly gentle against my cheek. Our foreheads touch. His lips brush mine, a question, a hesitation that lasts a single, infinite second before he closes the distance.

The kiss is soft and tastes of pineapple and coconut, of salt from the ocean air, of summer nights and future mornings, ofhim. I hold him close while he kisses me as if we have forever and we’re not stealing moments in dark hallways. We kiss like we’re trying to crawl inside each other, like we could fuse at the molecular level if we press close enough.

The world makes sense only when he is this near.

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

Our kiss breaks, but he stays close. His eyes are brilliant, holding me, and something in them dares me to meet him in his forever, where no one else has ever been.

He’s given me everything: all of his strength, all of his loyalty, every battered hope he’s patched together after the years of his storms. His trust, his grief, his brother’s memory, his whole heart laid bare. Everything he is—history, hope, loyalty that tastes like salt and sunrise—sits between us.

I’d stand between him and any storm. If life tries to pull him under, I’ll be his mooring. For every scar he hides, I’ll press a promise against it: you’re not alone. I want to be the undoingthat doesn’t wreck him, the safe place after where he can shelter his soul. Already, my heart carries him everywhere, the way the tide always carries the shore.

I won’t lose him to clocks unwinding or days repeating. The world can try to erase what we’ve built, but my memory of him is set deeper than time can touch. I’ll find him in every version of reality, every timeline where he exists.

Whatever cosmic force thinks it can separate us doesn’t understand. We have chosen each other across impossibilities, always and forever. We belong in the same story, on the same pages. Our love defies the physics of space and time.

Nothing will stop me from loving Blair.