Page 29 of The Fall

Fifteen

Darkness.

It swallows sound, smothers light, and crushes hope.

My eyelids flutter. Every breath is an effort. Torn, ragged gasps rip through my throat.

Is anybody there?

Sound hovers on the edge of this darkness, persistent, insistent. It permeates the blackness, slowly widening the cracks, letting reality in through slivers. Beep. Beep. Beep. It catches deep inside me, pulling me up from the abyss, and with it comes pain. Deep, unrelenting, agonizing pain.

The world filters back in pieces: scratchy sheets beneath my fingertips, light searing my eyes when I force them open.

I blink. Once, twice. A white ceiling swims into focus. Fluorescent lights. Machines crowd around me, along with monitors and IV poles. The beeping sharpens, defining itself. A monitor, keeping time with my heartbeat.

I’m in a hospital.

A single thought sears through my oblivion: Blair .

Everything—everyone—feels far away. But the memories—no, the nightmare—of blinding lights and the violent screech of metal shredding metal flood back and pulverize me. Laughter, the guys, the locker room. Gatorade showers.

The limo. Champagne popping.

Tires screaming. Shattering glass.

Blair’s face, so close to mine. His eyes, his beautiful eyes, dimming.

So much blood.

No, no, no, no?—

I’m in a hospital, but where the fuck is Blair? Did they pull him out? Did anyone else?—

My head feels like it’s being ripped in two. My heart monitor spikes, faster and faster, a staccato of terror, until it whines, high and steady and unending. A nurse, a young guy with long hair pulled back in a ponytail, strides into my room. “Calm down, Torey.”

Calm. How the fuck am I supposed to stay calm? Blair was right there, right next to me, and then?—

—his hand reaching for me, the blood, so much blood?—

“Blair,” I rasp. “Where’s Blair?”

“Deep breaths now.” The nurse’s voice is firm. “Dr. Granholm is on his way. Breathe for me right now, all right?”

I suck in air, shallow and stuttering. Where am I? I try to speak?—

“Torey, how are we doing?” An older man walks in—Dr. Granholm, I presume—wearing blue scrubs and a white coat. “You’re awake. That’s wonderful. Feeling a little anxious right now?” His face is kind as he stands next to my bed.

The nurse turns to fiddle with the monitor, silencing it. He checks my IV bags, then punches at the keyboard on the terminal next to my bed.

“Where’s Blair?” My voice is breaking apart. “Where is he? What happened?”

Dr. Granholm’s brow furrows. “Blair?”

“Blair,” I gasp, grabbing him. I’m desperate, so desperate.

“He was right beside me, we were—we were—” The rest of the sentence dissolves.

“Please, I have to know—” His coat is trembling in my grasp.

“Did they pull him out? Did they? Is he—” Tears stream from the corners of my eyes. “Please, tell me?—”

If he doesn’t know where Blair is, then—then?—

No. I refuse to think it—but it’s already there.

The light fading out of those brilliant blues. Our foreheads together in that final, agonizing moment, his lips moving against mine, whispering his last words to me.

“Where is he?” I’m pleading now, my voice small and broken and lost. “Please. Please, I need him. Where is he?”

Dr. Granholm glances at the nurse. He turns to me, his expression carefully neutral.

That look does it. Then I know.

His voice is low and soft and soothing, and he lays his hand on top of mine. “Let’s focus on you for a moment, Torey.”

He’s too calm. Calm like everything’s under control, like nothing’s wrong, and that scares the fuck out of me, because everything is wrong.

“No, no, please. Please, I have to know. Where is Blair?” My voice is a broken whisper. “Is he— Is he—” I can’t say it. A sob wrenches from me.

“If you’re asking about Blair Callahan, the player from Tampa?—”

“Yes!” I want to shout, but all I can manage is a croak. “Please,” I beg. “Tell me if he’s alive.” I’m hyperventilating, choking on every shallow gasp.

“The Mutineers are back in Tampa. I’m sure he’s with his team.” He pauses, studying me. “I believe they flew back right after the game.”

“What? That’s impossible—he was with me—I—” My words stumble. “We were— We?—”

“Do you know him?”

Know him? He’s my everything. My partner, my love, my goddamn world. How can I even begin to explain what we are to each other? “He’s— We’re?—”

My thoughts crash into the next. I can’t breathe, can’t think. The beeping of my heart monitor ratchets again. “Where is he?” I choke out.

Dr. Granholm’s hand tightens around mine. “We’ve contacted your father,” he says instead of answering me. “We’re keeping him updated while he’s in Shanghai. And we’ve spoken with Dr. Jackson?—”

“Dr. Jackson? No, no, you should be talking to my team doctor. You should be talking to… talking to…”

Tampa’s team doctor. I see her face. I hear her voice. Her name, what’s her name?

Dr. Granholm’s expression is placid. He studies me closely. “Dr. Jackson is your team physician. He’s being kept apprised of your situation.”

Dr. Jackson was my team physician when I played for the Orcas. But I’m not in Vancouver and I’m not with the Orcas anymore. I’m in Tampa, with the Mutineers. With Blair.

The Orcas, and Dr. Jackson, that was?—

Before.

“My phone. I need my phone.” Shit, is my phone at the bottom of the bay?

Did they get it out when they pulled me from the water?

From the limo? The limo. The crash. Blair.

Fuck. Where is he? Did anyone else survive?

I can’t think, can’t think. “Did they get my phone out of the limo? When they pulled us from the water? Did anyone else—” I choke on my words.

I need my phone. I need to see Blair’s face, hear his voice, read his texts.

The nurse pulls out a bag of my belongings, filled with my undershirt, leggings, socks, wallet, and—my phone. But it’s my old phone, from a lifetime ago. From before . Before Blair. Before us.

This can’t be right. It’s a relic from another time, another life. My fingers, slippery with sweat, fumble to unlock it. Please, God, please let me turn this on and see Blair’s smile.

“Password.”

For a second, my mind blanks. The four digits of my PIN come slowly, like dredging them from a nightmare. I stab them into the screen, and when the phone lights up, the ground cracks beneath me.

No. The background is wrong. There’s no picture of Blair and me smiling at the camera, our foreheads touching.

My thumbs fumble for the photo folder. My chest heaves; I can’t pull in enough oxygen. The photos blink open?—

There’s nothing. No Blair. No Hayes. No Mutineers. No celebration. No goofy selfies with the team, no pictures of Hayes and Erin’s backyard, no beaming smiles under the Florida sun. I swipe hard, clumsy, and my vision blurs, rivers of tears distorting everything.

Nothing makes sense. My thoughts are unraveling into threads, useless, meaningless.

I frantically search for any sign of the life I remember, any trace of Blair, of Hayes, of my team, my family. I don’t understand ?—

Because there’s nothing. No photos, no texts, no evidence at all. All I find are old shots from Vancouver. Slate-colored beaches, a bottle of lonely beer on the rickety patio table on the balcony of my old apartment. These are the deadened remnants of a life I left behind, a life I hated.

“What’s happening?” I rasp. “What the fuck is going on? Where is he?”

Dr. Granholm’s lips are moving but I can’t hear over the rush in my ears. Someplace inside me is broken and bleeding. My tear-swollen eyes home in on the date on my phone. What the fuck ?—

It’s March 22, the same day I woke up in Blair’s bed, tangled in Blair’s sheets with his scent on my skin, with a year’s worth of missing memories. It was March 22 two weeks ago?—

And it was March 22 one year exactly from today when I woke up in Blair’s bed, one year from the date I’m seeing on my phone. But?—

The date leers at me. Understanding seeps in, slow and merciless. I woke up in Blair’s bed with a year ripped from my memory, but that was a year that, apparently, never happened.

“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no.”

Everything I knew, everything I felt—it’s evaporating, and I’m on the edge of something too perilous, too broken, to confront. This can’t be happening. It can’t. All of it, gone. A year. A whole year, gone, erased. Again . My life, gone.

It was real, I know it was real, I felt it, I lived it, I loved it?—

A scream tears from me. I can’t stop it, can’t contain the wreckage inside me. “ No! Where is he?”

“Torey—”

I’m nothing but agony, ripping through every nerve, shredding every thought. “Tell me where the fuck he is!” Without Blair… God, without Blair, what am I? Who am I? Every inch of me is washed in terror. I can’t go back to the Torey I was before him.

Dr. Granholm’s face swims in front of me. Sounds splinter; nothing connects. It’s all fragments, shards of reality that won’t fit together. The phone slips out of my hands. I’m falling, plunging into an abyss with no bottom.

Blair. The memories of his smile, his touch; they splinter and dissolve, scattering.

His touch slips away. I cling to wispy fragments—Blair’s scent, coconut and lime, the rumble of his laughter, the taste of his lips, salt-sweet, the heat of his breath ghosting over my neck as we moved together, one soul in two bodies—but the memories are slipping away, as if it was all a dream.

Darkness bleeds into the edges of my vision.

This can’t be. This can’t ?—

The anguish is so deep, so unbearable, it shreds my veins, floods my heart, drowns my mind. I’m breaking, shattering into jagged edges. Where is he? Where ? Where did he go?

My lungs are collapsing, folding in on themselves. My scream tears free, surging up from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere that can never mend.

Blair’s eyes were so beautifully blue.

He can’t be gone.

Dr. Granholm is trying to reach me. “Torey. Torey, can you hear me? Torey…”

“Where is he ?”