Page 25 of The Fall

Twelve

I cut the engine in Blair’s truck. For a long moment, I sit, and the quiet of the driveway settles around me.

Two weeks ago, this house was a beautiful, sun-drenched question I couldn’t answer, a fantastical space that didn’t feel like mine. Now, a deep and certain tide pulls at me, one I would follow into the deep without a second thought. Blair’s tide.

I open the truck door, and the Tampa evening wraps around me.

I’m home.

After our road trip ended, the team was given two days off before we play the final game of our season. One game left. One win between us and the playoffs.

That anticipation was too much for Hayes, who dragged me to the rink this afternoon in a hurricane of kinetic energy, a restlessness I helped him bleed off. Blair had kissed me on my way out, grumbling about a leaky faucet he could no longer ignore.

“Blair?” My duffel bag hits the floor by the kitchen island, and his keys clatter onto the granite.

The usual sounds of him—and the low curse of a war fought against plumbing or the spray of a broken faucet—are absent.

There’s no cursing from under a sink, no sounds of a struggle, no water running.

The house is still, the lights turned low.

The sliding glass door to the lanai is open a crack, spilling a wavering light into the dim kitchen. Florida sunsets are never a single event; they are a slow bleed of color across the horizon, and tonight the sky is bruised with purple and a last, burning slash of orange.

I step out to the patio and my breath stops.

The world outside has been transformed. Dozens of candles flicker from every surface, their flames dancing in hurricane glasses against the deepening twilight.

Above, strings of tiny lights drift in loose patterns.

The notes of a lone trumpet tumble through the first bars of something warm and timeless.

The patio table is set for two. Cloth napkins are folded into birds-of-paradise. The crystal is out, catching the candlelight and scattering prisms of color across him.

Blair.

He stands beside the table, a still point in the heart of all this light.

The candlelight carves him from the twilight, softens the hard lines of his shoulders in his fitted T-shirt, pools in the hollow of his throat.

It turns the planes of his cheekbones to gold and gathers in the blue pools of his ocean eyes. He takes a step toward me.

“Surprise.”

My gaze drifts from the candles to the table, to the sky, and always, always back to Blair. My voice sounds foreign when I finally find it. “The leaky faucet was a bigger project than I thought.”

“I needed a few hours. Hayes provided the distraction.”

He offers me his hand, palm up. The rest of the world falls away: the looming playoffs, the single win we need, the lingering questions about my lost year of memories. It’s him. It’s always him.

He guides me through the flickering gold landscape he’s made and pulls out a chair for me, then settles in the seat at the corner of the table, close enough that his knee brushes mine and he hooks his foot around my ankle.

A silver bucket sweats on the table, a bottle peeking out. I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in two weeks. Why?

Blair lifts a bottle of Gatorade from the ice and—sommelier-serious—unscrews the cap. “May I interest you in our house specialty? A 2025 Glacier Cherry, an excellent vintage, heavy on the electrolytes.”

I play along, holding out my wineglass. “I’m detecting a subtle bouquet of … artificial flavoring?”

“Your palate is impeccable, sir.”

I laugh. He pours his own glass and sets the bottle back into the ice. The shine in his eyes holds me captive.

The last of the sun has sunk. In the gloaming, his eyes have deepened to the color of a midnight sea, holding reflections of candlelight and a promise I am beginning to understand. The fractured parts of my life are finding their center, and that center is him.

The night breeze stirs the palm fronds, their rustle a dry whisper against the soft lapping of the canal. Blair tells stories, and I lean in, caught not in the narrative but in him.

“... so I’m totally turned around in Prague, lost on the metro, and this ancient babushka is yelling at me in what I think is Russian?—”

“Please tell me you didn’t try to flirt your way out of it,” I interrupt, and the faint flush on his cheeks is my answer.

We finish the last of the sushi, then scoot our chairs closer as the first stars begin to prick the black velvet of the sky.

“What was it like when Lily was born?” I ask, my voice softer now.

“Chaos,” he says with a soft laugh. “Hayes looked like he’d been run over by a Zamboni for three straight weeks. Utterly terrified and completely in love.”

“I bet. He’s a great father.”

“He is, but it was a steep learning curve for him.”

I smile. “Must’ve been amazing to be there for it.”

His grip tightens on my hand. “Now they get to do it all over again.”

The candles flicker, casting dancing shadows across his face as he leans closer. Under the table, Blair’s ankle is still hooked around mine.

“You know,” he says, his voice steady while the pulse in his wrist bounds against my fingers, “I’ve been thinking about what comes after hockey.”

“What do you see?”

“Coaching, maybe. A way to stay close to the game.” The words are casual, but his eyes are searching mine.

“You’d be incredible at that,” I say, and I mean it. “A perfect fit.”

“What about you?”

Hayes had asked me the same thing. Nobody else has ever asked, not really, what my future looks like.

I sense the horizon shifting, every possibility reshaped around the chance to build something with him.

I brush my thumb over his knuckles. How do I explain that my future is a person, not a picture?

“Honestly? I want to be wherever you are.”

A long, slow swallow moves in his throat. When he speaks, his voice is low and stripped bare. “I want it all, Torey. You. This. Us. For the rest of our lives.”

He lifts my hand to his mouth, his lips soft when they kiss my knuckles. “I’m ready,” he continues. “To tell the team, the league, whoever wants to know. I’m ready for all of it.”

A fragile, beautiful possibility hangs in the air between us. The fear of it breaking is a sharp ache in me.

“I am, too,” I breathe.

He holds out his hand, and I stand, letting him pull me from my chair.

He draws me into the circle of candlelight near the edge of the pool, wrapping his arms around me until my forehead rests against his collarbone.

We sway to the music, to the rhythm of the water.

His body is a solid, warm wall against mine.

One shared breath, then another. This night feels wild and beautiful.

“I can see us growing old together,” he says, his breath warm against my ear. “Still chirping each other when we’re grey and wrinkled.” His voice shifts as he tests out a chirp. “You know, for a guy who spends all his time on ice, you’re pretty hot.”

I groan into his shoulder. “That was atrocious. I might have to take it all back.”

His laughter is rich and full. He guides me in a slow spin before pulling me back, his palm cupping my cheek, his nose brushing mine. He holds my hand between our chests, his thumb stroking my palm before he traces the line of my ring finger with one fingertip.

“I’ve also been thinking,” he whispers. “About how this finger looks a little bare.”

Everything stops. The music, the breeze, the light—it all freezes. Is this real? Is this impossible night about to become something more?

“Are you … Is this you asking me to marry you?”

The shield he wears for the world is gone, leaving the deep blue of his eyes stripped bare, raw, intensely gentle. “Not yet,” he says, and the certainty in his voice is absolute. “When I do, you’ll know. Trust me.” A small smile touches his lips.

Then his voice drops, and it holds all the vulnerability in the world. “Torey ... Do you want to be asked?”

His eyes are burning with every shade of blue he carries.

Whatever he’s dropped for me, he leaves himself bare.

He is impossible to look away from. Here he is, offering himself: captain, builder, believer, lover.

The man who leads us, who absorbs every hit and asks for more, has stripped away all his armor and is simply standing here, waiting.

He is giving me his world without condition, asking only if I want to step inside, share his horizon.

The old ghosts of my failure and fears recede, leaving only this one brilliant reality: him, and the life he wants to build, and the startling calm of knowing I want to build it, too.

There is a deep and final shift in my soul when it recognizes its other half and knows it is finally home. My future has a name, and that name is Blair, and this night defines our forever.

All my fears about my career, my name, my life—they fracture and dissolve, replaced by the singular terror of a world without him in it. This is the life I almost lost, the one I never knew I was missing.

The air holds his hope and mine, no longer separate. I draw him to me, and I pour every answer I have into my kiss. His lips tremble against mine. I press closer and feel his breath catch. His hands tighten at my waist. My heart is untamed and wild; there’s nowhere to hide, and no need for it now.

I break the kiss, my forehead still pressed to his.

“Ask me,” I whisper.

He guides me from the hallway and into the bedroom, where the air has gone thick and gold. A dozen small flames flicker from the surfaces of the dresser and nightstands, their light catching on the walls in soft, shifting strokes. He must have lit them before dinner, for us.

He backs me against the wall as gentle as a turning tide, and the heat of him seeps into my skin and my soul as his breath whispers across my cheek. His hands lift and frame me, palms flat to the wall. A muscle twitches high in his cheek. He’s watching me breathe.