Page 256 of The Fall

Fifty-Three

I am home.

I cut the engine in Blair’s truck and sit in the driveway. Exhaustion seeps into me; my hands fall from the steering wheel to my lap. I am wearing down beneath the waiting, the hoping, and the fearing.

The team’s so close. We’re so close. One more win and we’re in the playoffs. The anticipation was too overwhelming for Hayes this afternoon. He’d dragged me to the rink, his nerves spilling over like a shaken bottle finally uncapped. I welcomed the distraction, the cone drills, pucks, and each other.

Blair had kissed me before we left, his mouth warm against mine, grumbling about the bathroom sink that wouldn’t stop dripping.

I grab my duffel from the passenger seat and climb out. The walk to the front door steadies me with each step, and by the time I reach for the handle, the day’s weight has lifted enough that I can breathe again.

“Blair?” My duffel thuds against the kitchen floor, and I set his keys on the counter. No quiet curses drift from down the hall, no tools clink against pipes, and there’s no gush of runningwater. The house breathes in silence, lights dimmed as though waiting.

A thin wedge of flickering light spills through the partially-open sliding door to the lanai. Outside, the Florida sky unfurls in sunset, a gradual surrender of blue to fire, then to deep-bruised purple along each cloud.

I push the door wider and step outside, and the world I know falls away. My hazy, indistinct memory of this night, a gossamer dream I’ve clung to for a year, solidifies even as the world fractures into a thousand points of impossible light.

Candles burn everywhere, dozens of them, their flames protected in hurricane glasses, tiny flames quivering in the falling twilight. The lights overhead are a private galaxy of captured stars. Music I hadn’t noticed drifts from the speakers, a trumpet playing rich and soulful notes.

It’s a moment I thought I’d made up. A memory I’d imagined. I remember Thanksgiving, and looking up at these lights on Blair’s patio, andaching?—

Every detail is here: the table is set with delicate sushi rolls on fine china, folded cloth napkins that stand like birds of paradise, crystal glasses throwing shattered rainbows?—

That dance right to Blair.

He’s standing at the table’s edge, backlit by sunset and candlelight. Caught in the candlelight, he gleams in ways only the sea gets right, tide-polished and dangerous. He’s dressed soft in a fitted T-shirt. Light and shadow trace the planes of his face. The whole of my world anchors in his gaze.

He, and this lanai, are absurdly, staggeringly beautiful.

“Surprise.”

My heart tries to outrun time. The pieces of my life, the real and the remembered, settle into a mosaic with Blair at the center.

“The leaky faucet was a bigger project than I thought.”

He holds out his hand. “I needed a few hours. Hayes provided the distraction.”

So this is it; this is what it is to love so completely that it terrifies you. Blair’s calloused palm closes around mine, and he guides me through the constellation of flames at our feet. He pulls out a chair. The world spins slowly, softly, around him.

His fingers brush my arm as he sits, our knees touching as his foot nudges mine under the table, his ankle hooking around mine.

Blair pulls out a bottle of Gatorade from a silver champagne bucket and unscrews the lid. “May I interest you in our house specialty? A 2025 Glacier Cherry, an excellent vintage with robust notes of electrolytes.”

I hold my glass out, and he pours with a sommelier’s grave focus. I swirl the ghost-colored liquid. “I’m detecting a subtle bouquet of… artificial flavoring?”

“Your palate is impeccable, sir.”

Laughter escapes me, real and full. “God, you’re ridiculous. I love it. And you.”

“Yeah?” He pours his own glass and sets the bottle back into the ice. His full attention returns to me. The shine in his eyes is a deep, consuming fire, and for a second I am staring into memory: what I lost, what I didn’t know how to want until it was ripped from me.

For tonight, for this, for him,please; let me keep this love.

The sushi is impossibly beautiful. We dip rolls into wasabi and tell each other stories about our childhood, about teammates, about disasters averted and embarrassments endured. I cannot escape his eyes; they deepen as the sun surrenders to the night. No one has ever looked at me the way he does, as if I am the only thing in the world worth seeing.

It feels obscene how beautiful one person can be. The sharp angle of his jaw, the gentle arc of his mouth when he smiles, theway he leans forward, his elbows on the table as he tells me all the secrets of the universe or of his laugh.

I am lost in the stories he’s telling. “...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?—”