Page 49 of The Fall

Twenty-Six

Pink.

It’s the first thing that draws every eye when I walk in.

“Look at that beaut !” It’s Hollow, of course. Then a wolf whistle rises from Divot’s direction. The locker room stills for a long second, and then the clapping starts.

The Nerf war victim has arrived.

“Yo, Kicks!” Hawks howls over the chaos. “You’re looking solid!”

“Who the fuck needs a slap-shot when you’ve got a Barbie arm?” Simmer shouts.

More laughter, more noise. My face heats until I’m sure I’m fluorescing as bright as this wrap job. I hold up the cast like I’m showing off a trophy. It’s ridiculous, but it worked for Lily, so fuck it. I’ll take the ribbing.

“Is that glitter?” Divot stands on the bench to get a better look.

“What the hell happened to you?” Reid is laughing, peering at my stickers.

“Gentlemen,” Hayes announces, striding to the center of the room. “Allow me to explain.”

He throws his arm around my neck and drags me close. He’s rocking his base layers and knee-high socks with slides, and his grin is a Cheshire’s slink.

God, here we go.

“Y’all don’t even know— don’t even know —what really went down with this hero yesterday.

I’m in the ER, fuckin’ losing it with my baby girl and her broken arm.

Erin’s stressing, Lily’s in meltdown mode, and then this guy—” He points to me, drawing it out.

“This legend himself—” He sweeps a grand gesture from my head to my toes.

“—waltzes into the hospital and decides, you know what? Being a hockey player isn’t badass enough. ”

He’s in full showman mode. His voice rises, peaking in all the right places.

“No, Kicks isn’t over here signing autographs or kissing babies.

No, no. This hero comes in and sits down next to my wailing baby girl and tells the nurse he needs his own fucking cast, one that matches hers, because he wants to be one of the cool kids, too. ”

Laughter roars. Even the trainers, who were halfway through packing up their gear, stop to look at me.

A voice calls out, “You serious, Kicks?”

“Dead serious,” Hayes booms. “My man saw a crying four-year-old and said there’s no way this kid’s going into cast life alone. Put me in, coach!”

I thread my uncasted hand through my hair, hoping to hide the flush still crawling across my skin. “It’s just a cast.”

“Just a cast? Kicks, you straight up told the nurse, ‘Hit me with the pink one.’ Tell me that isn’t the realest fucking thing you’ve ever heard?” Hayes spreads his arms wide, asking the room.

I cave finally, laughter slipping out. Hollow’s doubled over, slapping a towel across his knees.

Then Hayes regales the guys with the Epic Kitchen Nerf War, excruciatingly describing how I was felled by a hail of darts behind the cupboard door. “It was a Delta Force takedown!”

“Future team star, right there,” Hollow hoots.

“Better than her father!” Hawks and Hollow fist bump.

Hayes doesn’t even tap the brakes. “Kicks goes full-on death scene, and I am telling you, there was daylight between his soul and his body.”

Simmer stands and starts to clap. Hollow follows, and Hawks, then Divot.

There’s more cheering, more whoops, and the guys climb onto the benches and holler and chant my name.

I have never had this, never, not on any team.

Torey Kendrick, emotional disaster. Torey Kendrick, chaos knight of Nerf wars.

Over the cascade of noise, I spot Blair.

He’s sitting in front of his stall, arms crossed. A fire burns low under all his cold steel and control, but a small laugh breaks from his throat, followed by the curve of his lips. His eyes, that steady lighthouse gaze, lock onto mine.

I can’t look away. His eyes hold me in place, and the room around us dims and blurs. We’re the only two points of clarity in a swirling fog. The corner of Blair’s mouth lifts a fraction more.

This is dangerous. This feeling spreading through me like wildfire is dangerous.

I manage a twitch of my lips in return, hoping it doesn’t betray the riot inside me.

My pink cast is too tight. I flex my hand against the stiffness, needing a distraction from drowning in his stare.

Hayes is still talking, but I’ve lost the thread completely.

All I can focus on is the way Blair’s shoulders relax, how his hand taps a slow rhythm against his bicep, how his head tilts like he’s trying to figure me out.

What conclusions is he drawing, what boxes am I checking or failing to check?

I force myself to look away, to nod at a point Hayes is making that I didn’t catch. I’m splintering, fractures running right to my soul.

The door swings open, and in barrels Coach, breaking the spell.

He zeroes right in on my cast. “Kendrick, what the fuck? You break your arm and you forget to mention it to fucking medical?”

There’s a half-second blister of silence where everyone looks from me to the cast and back to Coach.

“Nah, Coach, it’s cool, it’s cool.” Hayes rides to my rescue. “Our man Kicks here was a true hero, sir. You should put him up for an award. ESPN Man of the Week.”

Coach arches one eyebrow. “Explain. Fast.”

“It was for Lily,” I say. “She broke her arm. She needed emotional support.”

Coach’s eyebrows climb and climb, and he stares me down like he’s seen a lot, but never this. I’m being judged, sized up against years of rooms and hijinks and insanity. Behind me, everyone is snickering and hiding their faces in their towels and base layers.

“Y’know what, I don’t even want to know.” Clearly, there’s no corralling us this morning. “Everyone on the ice in ten minutes! And get that fucking cast off, Kicks.”

The door slams shut behind him, and the room erupts again. A chant begins, my name, over and over. Kicks, Kicks, Kicks.

Hayes claps me on the shoulder. “C’mon, man. Let’s de-pink you.”

When we get to the medical suite, Hayes pops up onto the table beside me. “This whole ‘best teammate ever’ persona might be your new brand.”

The trainer walks in, and Hayes regales his captive audience with a grand retelling of my pink cast’s origin.

With each retelling, the story becomes more dramatic, my heroics even more knightly.

The whirring of the cast saw rattles up my arm as the blade splits apart the layers of plaster.

Step by step, the pressure loosens, and with it, a small part of me.

When the trainer steps back, I pull the two halves free and stare at them. These stickers—the one-eyed monkey, the dinosaurs—were a little girl’s battle armor. “I’m keeping this.”

“Aww, miss it already?”

“I gotta keep it for our Nerf wars. I need to figure out how to get it back on.”

Hayes loops his elbow around my neck and rubs his knuckles into my head. “Man, hockey is the best. Where else do you get crazy-ass teammates like this?”

The locker room is empty when we get back, all the rest of the guys out on the ice already.

The place is a disaster zone of clothes and leftover gear, water bottles and protein bars, sandals and charging cords, and ball caps all left behind.

Hayes saunters to his stall to finish dressing, no hurry to him at all, when a voice behind me says, “I’ve got an idea. ”

I turn and Blair is standing there, a fistful of Velcro in his hand. “I pulled these from the equipment room.”

My brain stalls, unable to connect the man in front of me with the bundle of black straps he’s holding. He must have heard me talking to Hayes. He went and found a solution without a word.

“For the cast?”

“Yeah.” He steps closer, and the space between us shrinks to nothing. “Can I?”

I nod, not trusting my voice, and hold out the two halves of pink plaster. He takes both and flips each over like he’s handling a fragile artifact. I don’t dare move, don’t say a word.

“Hold this.” He passes me one half while he works on the other.

He moves carefully, aligning the edges, matching seam to seam.

He’s so careful, like he’s setting a fracture himself.

I study the line between his brows, the softening there as he concentrates.

He fits the adhesive backing of the Velcro strips along the saw marks; my gaze is fixed on his hands, on the delicate brush of his thumb.

He works, and I memorize the curve of his jaw, the way his lashes cast shadows on his cheeks when he looks down. This close, his scent of coconut and sunshine reach me, cutting through the perpetual funk of the locker room.

When he’s done, I can Velcro the cast back around my arm whenever I want. “Now you can lose to her again.” Blair’s lips quirk up at the corner, and he hands the cast back to me.

“Thanks.” My voice is too quiet for how fast my heart is beating. A current passes between us, hot and silent as the space between stars.

Reality shatters back into place, too loud and too fast in the form of Hayes. “Yo. We’re late. Coach is gonna fucking eat us alive.”

Shit. We scramble. We throw on our gear and waddle down the tunnel as fast as we can, hit the ice in a blur.

“Punctual as ever.” Coach doesn’t even look at us. “Take laps. Skate until I get tired of looking at you.”

We skate, lap after lap and lap.

The burn returns. I lean into it, let it fuel my glide, my turns. To my right, Blair appears, matching me stride for stride, our edges slicing the ice as one. We cut the turn at the same moment, pushing back to center like magnets clicking together; we move like we’re caught in the same wave.

Blair’s eyes meet mine as we round the next lap. The corner of his mouth lifts and he shakes his head, a bark of laughter escaping out of him before he can stop it. I laugh back, breathless, and we keep skating, stride for stride, side by side.

It’s late. Most of the guys are gone, but I’m in the gym because there’s always more I can work on. I can rebuild my life if I do the work the right way.

I’m not alone. Blair’s clean-jerking weight that most of us have no business looking at.

His form is perfect—back straight, shoulders set, the bar rising in a smooth arc as he drops into a squat and then stands.

Sweat darkens his shirt between his shoulder blades.

I count every breath he takes, matching my inhales to his exhales.

I should leave. I know I should. But my feet stay rooted to the floor, and my eyes stay fixed on him. His shoulders are broad enough to carry a team. Once, they carried me?—

No, they didn’t. I need to keep my head on straight. I’m not here to get lost in the past or in what-ifs. I’m here to rebuild, to push myself back to where I need to be. I will not beg the past to spoon-feed me a future.

And the truth is, these memories I’m clinging to aren’t memories; they’re ghosts that haunt me. They are whispers of a life that never was.

I want to be better. I want to be worthy—of my dad’s expectations, of the league’s aspirations, of the fans’ excitement for me when I was drafted. I want to be better for me, for all of my dreams and hopes and lost wishes.

And… I want to be worthy of the love and pride that used to be in Blair’s eyes, even if that love was never real, and even if it only ever lived in the over-excited synapses of my concussed brain.

Fantasy masquerades as memory. Memory masquerades as craving.

Either way, I want him to know all of me: the parts I’ve buried, the pieces I’ve worked to forget, and the places I have yet to discover inside myself.

Blair’s eyes dart up. They are endless, saltwater-blue, the ocean on a windless day running off the edge of the world.

A winter ocean; that’s what he is, roiling dark waters that would take you away if you stepped wrong.

His glance used to find me, and there’d be warmth in it, a spark that said we were in this together.

Now his gaze slides past me, set on some far point only he can see.

He’s carrying something heavy and he won’t set it down. The more he holds it, the more he hardens around it.

I want to be the place he exhales. I want to hand him a reason to lean without flinching at the word.

I want to say, give me part of it, I can hold it and I won’t drop it.

My brain writes sentences I never say, whole conversations where he lets me in.

In those, his voice goes soft again, the way it does when he talks to me alone, and the cold in him warms enough to glow.

I want to be everything for him.

I haven’t made that easy. Vodka isn’t exactly a love letter. Inconsistency isn’t either. If I were him, I’d look at me and wonder whether I can be counted on.

His gaze holds mine for one heartbeat. Two. Three. He doesn’t speak, and neither do I, but we’re tangled now, my silence answering his.

Then his eyes drop, and the moment splinters.

I turn away, pretend to adjust the plates on my bar. My hands are steady but my insides quake. This is what we’ve become: a collection of near-moments, of glances that linger a second too long.

Blair goes back to his clean jerking. His body language is sharp and raw, his motions hard and brutal.

I have to believe that the dark he’s in isn’t permanent. It’s a season. And even in the stillness, and even when he gives me nothing, I am rewritten by him.

So I stay here. I stay with the man who used to be my world, even if I’ve been exiled, even if my memories are a mosaic of broken glass.

I’m a man walking an unfamiliar shore. The place I left is behind me and what’s ahead of me isn’t mine.

The sand shifts beneath my feet, unstable and treacherous, like everything else in my life right now.

I love him. It’s a love that wants to carry water for him, sharpen his blades, and stand in front of whatever wind is cutting his face.

I will swim in these dark waters forever as long as Blair is there with me.