Page 39 of The Fall

We’re still losing as the clock winds down. Ten minutes. Five. Three. We push and push, but Carolina holds. When the final horn sounds, Blair is first off the ice, disappearing down the tunnel before I can even reach the bench.

He’s an island in the locker room. Not even Hayes tries to talk to him. He moves like a man underwater, unreachable.

I sit at my stall, peeling off layers of gear and sweat, stealing glances at the ghost who haunts me.

His head bows as he unlatches his pads. His back muscles ripple.

I know that back too well—I shouldn’t know it at all.

My heart beats too loud for this room. He pulls on his shirt, eyes locked on nothing, then stands and walks out without a glance in my direction.

I draw Blair in the margins of my notebook.

Every time I think I’ve got the slope of his cheek or the hinge of his wrist, he shifts, and the image fractures into smaller panes that keep running away from me.

His jaw, the slope of his shoulder, how his thumb rubs against his knuckle when he thinks no one’s watching—I get him wrong every time.

But I watch, and at our team dinner, this is Blair:

He sits at a table meant for four, one fork moving through pasta he won’t eat.

Someone laughs at the next table over, and Blair doesn’t flinch.

His fingers curl into his palm, then release.

The tendons in his forearm shift, his skin stretched tight over muscles that used to hold me in the dark. Except they didn’t.

His jaw works like he’s grinding words to dust. A tremor catches the corner of his mouth—barely there, gone before anyone else would notice.

The overhead lights throw shadows over his skin that I want to trace.

His chest rises shallow, catches, continues.

He stares straight through his own hands where they rest on the table.

Whatever is killing him is buried so deep no one else can see it. He’s trying to bury it, but while he’s digging, he’s collapsing.

If I could reach across the gulf—table, team, everything unspoken—I would, but all I can do is watch.

I wish I could take this heaviness from him, even for a minute, or let him know that he isn’t alone in whatever fight he’s losing. That someone notices; that someone cares enough to keep noticing even when he tries so hard to disappear.

He finally sets his fork down and stands. His gaze never lifts as he moves through the crowded room like a shadow barely brushing past anyone else.

I sit there for a long time after he’s gone, staring at the empty space where he sat. All this wanting digs against my ribs: wanting to fix what’s broken in him, wanting to fix what’s broken in me, wanting any version of us where we aren’t both so impossibly far away.

The hotel bar in Columbus swallows me.

The bottles of booze are stacked neatly behind the bartender in our hotel, poised for someone like me, someone looking for an easy way out. I think I’ve left half of myself in the bottom of bottles over the past few months.

I want one drink to settle the shaking under my skin and the racket in my skull, and all the things I don’t want to think about: fourth line and barely hanging on; Blair, heartbroken and untouchable. The game replays behind my eyelids. Another blown coverage. Another minus.

One drink, and I’ll fucking forget.

I slide onto a stool at the far end of the bar where shadows are deepest. The mirror behind the bottles shows me what everyone else sees—hollow eyes, three days of stubble, the slouch of a man who’s so close to giving up.

Behind me, laughter erupts from the corner booth.

I know that laugh. The core guys are here, crammed into a booth on the far side of the room.

Hawks and Hayes have claimed a corner table.

Their bottles sweat onto cardboard coasters.

Words roll between them in a low tide. Blair sits among them but apart, chair tipped back an inch, forearm hooked over the top rail.

His hand worries the edge of a label. He’s been dragged out again; I smell Hayes all over this.

I hear the rhythm of their voices, feel the way they lean into each other’s space. I remember being there, too.

A tremor starts in my hand. I fist it on my thigh, hide it under the lip of the bar.

I wanted space apart from myself, which means space apart from them and this damn team, but I guess I don’t get that tonight.

There are no lines anymore; what’s happening now tangles with what I remember and what I don’t.

I want Blair to look at me. I want him to laugh like he used to. I want him to ask me if I remember Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh. Midnights and rooftops and sneaking into locker rooms before dawn.

I trace a ring of condensation left behind by someone else’s glass on the wood.

The bartender sizes me up, surely catching a whiff of my desperation. “What can I get you?”

“Vodka. Rocks.” I hate the way my words feel coming out.

Ice cracks into the glass like small bones breaking. My hands and wrists ache from this endless stretch of preseason, and I lay them flat on the bar; the surface is tacky from a thousand spills.

He sets the drink on the coaster in front of me. The vodka is a pool of perfect, liquid quiet. Clear and cold, innocent and patient.

It’s a simple thing, having a drink. Everyone does it.

Hell, half the team’s doing it right now.

I wrap my hand around my glass, condensation bleeding against my palm.

My body wants this. A single swallow and it will all be over; I can go back to forgetting what I am and what I’ll never be again.

It doesn’t matter what happens after that; anything is easier than this.

I run a finger along the rim. Cold seeps between the whorls of my fingerprints.

What’s one more mistake? My stomach clenches around emptiness. Somewhere behind me, chair legs squeal and settle, and Blair rises from his table.

In the mirror, he moves through the scattered tables and bodies, a slow trajectory aimed at the empty space beside me. Dread and foolish hope twist together in me, and everything in the bar recedes except for him.

I track every step, every closing inch between us, and before I’m ready for it, he’s right beside me, close enough that his heat brushes my arm and the faint whiff of coconut rises off him. Of course he’d come now. Of course he’d?—

“Another Stella,” he says to the bartender. His voice is a low rumble beside me.

I tell myself I won’t look, won’t glance sideways, won’t let him pull me under?—

Of course, I do.

He’s braced against the bar, head dipped between his shoulders. The tendon in his temple flickers.

The bartender sets down a fresh beer for him. He doesn’t take it immediately, and we exist in this vacuum where everything I want to say calcifies on my tongue.

I played better in the second period.

I’m trying.

In another life, you loved me.

Blair’s hand closes around the neck of the bottle. He doesn’t move; he stays in the exact spot that guts me, close enough to break me, distant enough to kill me. It’s unbearable.

I force my eyes sideways.

His face holds the flat, polished shine of disappointment. His gaze drifts to the glass by my hand, then to me, then back to the glass, where my vodka sweats on the bar.

Condemnation radiates off him in waves. There’s no light in his eyes; they’re cold and hard when they see me.

Everything inside me surges and sags, a tide turning in me. Shame crawls up my neck, burns the tips of my ears. I snap my gaze forward and stare into the clear poison waiting in my glass.

My glass sits there between us, untouched. The ice shifts, clinks against the sides. Such a small sound, but it fills the space between us like thunder.

He takes a swig of his beer and then walks away.

Cool air rushes into the space where his warmth had been, and I’m left staring at my reflection in the mirror. My hand hovers over the glass.

The bartender wipes down the far end, careful not to look my way.

I could drink it. Prove him right. Give him one more reason to write me off.

My hand closes around the glass.

Blair’s retreating shape blurs in the mirror, already leaving, already gone. He’s the man who loved me, who put sunlight in my life, who held me like a lighthouse cradles the night. But he’s not .

But this is me . This is every misstep, every stumble, every drop of shame that’s swallowed me. They’re mine, all these memories, all these failures, all these fuck-ups.

I stare at my drink like it’s already in me, numbing everything it touches. I want it. Fuck, I need it. I want the burn that blanks the edges and the dead space after. All I have to do is lean into the fall. God knows I’ve done it before. No one here will care. No one will stop me.

One swallow. That’s all it would take. One swallow to blunt the serrated edge of his judgment. Two and maybe I’d forget how I fumbled that pass in the first period and let their forward walk right past me for the go-ahead goal. Three and I’d stop seeing Blair’s face. Four and?—

Four, and I’d wake up tomorrow the same failure I am today.

A voice inside me whispers the usual lines. You deserve nothing tonight. You’ve already fallen as far as anyone expects.

It’s so easy to disappear.

My hand twitches toward the drink. It would take nothing.

It would take everything I still might be.

A thin ember within me refuses to go out. It’s the memory of a life I held for a handful of breaths—steam fogging a shower door and the sound of Blair’s laugh, Hayes chirping me, the clean crack of a puck riding my blade and leaping into the top corner of the net.

But it wasn’t real . None of it is, except for the way I love him, and that’s the part that breaks me. My love was—and is—the only real thing in this whole mess, and it’s lodged in me like shrapnel. I can’t drink it away, can’t run from it, can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

One sip and I’m gone. One sip and I’m free. One sip and I’m lost again. I could fall so easily into those waters.

Light from the back-bar turns the vodka into a clear blade. Cold beads across the outside of the glass. Somewhere there’s a version of me who doesn’t need this anymore, who stopped needing it because he found something better to want.

I shove. The glass scrapes across the wood, away from me.

The bartender looks up. One eyebrow lifts, the cloth in his hand mid-swipe over the counter. His gaze flicks from the glass to my face before he gives me a small nod. He takes the drink away without a word.

The wood grain beneath my palms holds a thousand scars from nights like this one. My hands rest on the bar, empty. I curl them into fists, then release and watch blood flow back into my fingertips.

I look exactly like what I am in the reflection behind the bottles—a man hanging on by his fingernails.

But I am hanging on.