Page 37 of The Fall

I bite down on my mouthguard and turn with him, catching the churn from his skates.

He cuts across the slot, hips turned in, jaw tight, and rips another from the dot.

Axel punches it away with his blocker, the rebound dribbling to my side.

Hayes glides in, scoops the loose puck with smooth hands, and taps it out of danger.

“Reset,” Hayes growls softly.

This Blair doesn’t flow with the game; he attacks it.

I remember the Blair who’d catch my eye across the ice, who’d bump my shoulder during water breaks, his touch lingering through my gear. That Blair radiated heat, but this Blair burns cold and dark. He is the sun gone black and cold.

Even his skating has changed—where he used to glide, now he punches through the ice like he’s trying to break something, or like he’s trying to break himself. I know that feeling. I’m doing the same thing, only quieter. While he rages, I dissolve. While he hardens, I fracture.

I search his face for a sign, for an unguarded moment, for a flicker of the man who smelled like salt and summer, but there’s nothing.

He’s built a wall around himself so high I can’t see over the top, and I’m on the outside, freezing. We are two separate islands of misery on the same sheet of ice, with an entire ocean of unspoken things between us.

The whistle blows, ending the drill, and Blair and Hayes skate to center ice.

They fall deep in conversation, faces tight as they circle each other.

They’ve done this before—it’s in how Hayes angles his body, making a wall between Blair and the rest of the team, and in how he doesn’t interrupt when Blair’s mouth moves fast, words tumbling out in a flood he can’t stop.

Hayes takes it, absorbs it, the way you stand in a storm and wait for it to pass.

Blair’s with Hayes, but he’s utterly alone.

And I am alone watching him.

I should be the one standing there, soothing his rage and pain. I would stand in that hurricane for him and let it tear me apart if it meant he could find his center again. But I’m not; I’m out here, useless, my hands empty, my stick heavy.

The other players reset, their movements distant and hazy at the margins of my vision.

The scrape of their blades, the clatter of sticks, it’s all a dull roar, background noise to the silent, desperate scene unfolding between the two men I used to call my best friends and my lover.

My focus is so fixed on them I don’t hear my name the first time.

Not until the sound of it is a whip-crack across the ice.

“Again, Kendrick!” Coach shouts.

My head whips toward the bench. Coach’s face is granite, his arms crossed.

The rest of the world rushes back in—the sharp cold on my cheeks, the scrape of blades carving tight turns, the sudden focus of every player on me.

One more failure. One more reason for them to see I don’t belong here anymore.

All these eyes on me, waiting for the fall. Hot, useless shame burns up my neck.

No, I will not give them the satisfaction. There is only the ice now. Only the next stride, the next push, the next shot. Nothing else matters because nothing else is left. Don’t think. Don’t fuck up.

I drop into the rush, faster than I’ve managed all week, and this time—finally—I feel it. The puck’s on my tape as I glide, cut, and surge through the blue line, watching space open like a door I’ve been waiting for. I shoot, and?—

Score.

For one second, all the tension in my spine unwinds. It’s purely physical, a muscle memory of what success used to feel like. My first instinct is to find Blair. My head turns before the thought is even fully formed. My victory isn’t real until I see it reflected in his eyes.

But he’s not looking. He’s facing the boards, his shoulders a stiff, unmovable line.

The small, bright point of triumph inside me gutters out.

Coach’s whistle blares across the ice. “ Again! ”

Inconsistent becomes my new name. I miss another puck. Then I score a goal.

There are moments where the ice sings, the puck dances, and the play unfolds like it was drawn for me.

I deke the defense—even Hayes, who still won’t talk to me—and my give-and-goes with Hawks and Hollow are clean and sharp.

When it all clicks, it feels like I’ve reached through time and borrowed the Torey I was the last time I was on this ice, and the first thing I do, every time, is look for Blair.

But Blair is locked inside his own storm, and I’m neither the eye of it nor the reason it’ll ever calm.

His passes lack their snap, his shots spray wide, and even when he scores, there’s no triumph on his face.

This isn’t a slump—his body remembers how to play.

But that spark, that wild joy that used to radiate from him during every shift?

It’s gone. He’s missing some edge, some push.

Coach barks pairings for face-offs. I square up across from Hollow and we dig in. He cheats the draw; I counter, win it back to Hawks, then pivot out. My knee zings on the turn.

Again. Win, lose, win.

Between whistles, Blair skates extra laps.

Hayes hangs with him, matching his pace.

Hayes speaks low, his head tipped toward Blair.

Blair nods once, then flicks his gaze across the rink.

It skates right past me, neat as a chip off the glass.

Those blue eyes that used to hold oceans are now frozen over.

Is this more proof? Not that it was real, but rather, that it was not ? That I made up a man who doesn’t exist? He’s not the man I remember.

Memory tricks me into feeling Blair’s hands on my hips, strong and steady, with his voice rumbling instructions in my ear. I drag my stick across the ice, digging grooves that match the ones in my mind.

After practice, I’m slow with my gear, fingers stiff and clumsy on the laces. My knee throbs. Blair is gone before I’m done with my socks, and Hayes’s stall is empty too.

I palm my phone, thumb over the screen without unlocking it.

I pocket it, sling my bag, and step into the evening air outside the rink, sweat cooling under a sky the color of wet steel.

The breeze off the bay smells clean, and the bridge arches away from me, a curve I don’t look at for long.

My knee throbs with the stop-and-go, and by the time I get to my room, my legs are hollowed out and heavy.

The door clicks shut behind me and the hotel room swallows me into darkness. The bridge is out there beyond the drapes; I never open the curtains.

A fresh bruise blooms on my hip, a deep purple mixing with the faded yellow of an older one.

I trace its edge, the skin tender and angry.

I iced my knee earlier, but I need to do it again.

I’ve probably hit the limit on painkillers, too, or passed it.

I could take them all and still feel the ache in my wrists that tells me my body’s past its best-before date.

My whole body feels like a collection of aches and impacts, a roadmap of every mistake I’ve made on the ice since I got to Tampa.

Each failure is a new color on my skin. It’s a language I know: hit, hurt, heal.

But how do you heal from a wound that doesn’t have a scar?

I think of the vodka in my mini-fridge. It’s right there. Painkillers and vodka, shake, stir, and light a match. It’d be easy.

My phone buzzes, face-down on my bed. I know who it is, and when I flip it over, I’m right. It’s Dad.

I should answer. Swallow the inevitable conversation, choke down the disappointment. But he’ll ask about the trade, about Tampa. He’ll ask questions I don’t want to answer.

I let it go to voicemail.

Two protein shakes and no vodka later, I have ice packs wrapped around my knee and both wrists. The ice should numb me, but my brain keeps spinning through every missed pass, every fucked-up drill, every moment where I was supposed to grip this life harder and I didn’t.

I collapse to the mattress and pull Blair’s jersey to my face. I close my eyes, willing sleep to swallow me, but it won’t come.

That vodka’s still cold. Even through the door, it calls to me.

One drink wouldn’t be the end of the world. One drink to take the edge off, to blur the lines between pain and exhaustion. Clear liquid, clear thoughts. One drink to help me sleep, to quiet the voice in my head.

The choice shouldn’t be this hard, but it is. Everything is these days.

I push myself upright, the ice packs sliding off my wrists and hitting the floor with wet thuds.

My knee screams when I stand, but I limp to the mini-fridge anyway.

The handle is cold under my palm. Inside, the bottles catch the dim light—three neat rows of temporary amnesia.

My fingers close around one of the little bottles of vodka.

One twist of the cap. One tilt of the bottle. One swallow.

The cap twists off too easily.

I think about Blair on the ice today, all that controlled fury. Would he recognize me like this?

Would he care?

The rim of the bottle touches my bottom lip. I’m one tip away from making everything disappear for a while. My knee throbs. My wrists ache. My chest is a hole with raw and raggedy edges.

I rest the bottle against my forehead instead and close my eyes, then set it on the nightstand.

I grab Blair’s jersey from where it’s pooled on the sheets and pull it over my head. My knee hammers with each heartbeat. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and do this all over again—the ice, the drills, the way Blair looks through me.

Outside, the city hums with life I’m not part of. Inside, it’s me, the dark, and the ghost of what Blair and I used to be.

I trace Blair’s name on his jersey and let the night hold me, waiting for tomorrow to decide if I’m still worth saving.

“You’re on the verge of washing out, Kendrick.”

Coach has his arms crossed and his feet planted in front of my stall. It’s not meant to be hostile. Mountains aren’t hostile; they’re simply there.

The rest of the team is gone and the smell of today’s sweat hangs in the locker room air.

“You’re on the fourth line through preseason. Barely.”

Fourth line, and I’m still scraping the bottom. The smell of the rink seeps up through the floor, through my gear, through the fucking walls. I bite down on the inside of my cheek. “I can do more.”

“You haven’t shown more.” A muscle ticks in Coach’s cheek. “I’m giving you these games. You need to give me something steady.” He hesitates. “You’re running out of time. You get that, right?”

“I do.”

“Then show us we’re wrong about you.”