Page 50 of The Fall

Twenty-Seven

The season hiccups into rhythm. We grab a win in Detroit, a point in Chicago, and drop a shootout heartbreaker in Jersey.

My fourth-line minutes hold steady. Game by game, the ice starts to make sense again.

I pick plays cleaner, recover my edges mid-shift, stop second-guessing the puck when it snaps to my blade.

I rack points; small ones, secondary assists, and plus-minus ratings that climb in slow inches.

It’s nothing flashy, but my stats are creeping up.

It’s still not enough. There’s still a gap between what I am and what I need to be.

I stickhandle up the boards during practice, one tap after another, pretending the puck is all that matters, but Blair is in my periphery, leaning against the glass. He doesn’t say more than ten words to me in a week, and I live off those ten words as if they’re calories.

“You’re off,” Blair finally says to me during morning skate, his voice hooking me mid-turn.

I stop too quickly. “How?”

“You’re not fast enough off your inside edge,” he says, chin jutting toward my left skate.

I shift my stance, testing its give against the grooved-up ice. “Didn’t know you were watching.”

“I’m always watching.” His eyes are on mine when he says it, and they linger a second too long before he skates away.

“Keep your head up, Kendrick. You’re looking at the puck too much.”

I go for another lap around the ice, and the sting in my thighs deepens, my tendons dragging like frayed cables.

“Your pivot’s shit.” His voice cuts clean across the rink, slicing through the slap of pucks and sticks. “You’re stuck in your knees.”

The ice rattles under Hollow’s slap-shot behind me. Blair’s ahead of me, waiting at the blue line. “Your edge work’s lazy,” he says as I near. “You’re playing soft.”

Soft. I bite the metal inside my cheek, fingers flexing on my stick. He’s not wrong.

“Go again.”

The boards blur on my next lap. I pump through the turn, forcing more into my edges.

Weight through the heels, deeper bend at the knees.

I drop harder, drive through. Hips low, core locked.

My stride is cleaner, and my balance holds when I lean into the turn.

He’s there when I straighten at the far hash marks, finishing my lap.

“Again,” he says. “This time, keep your stick on the ice through the whole turn.”

I push off before he finishes. My quads scream on the crossover, but I keep my stick blade flat to the ice, feeling the drag of it, the way it wants to lift when I hit the curve. Every part of my body wants to pull up, to cheat the angle for speed. But I hold it, grinding through the arc.

When I come around again, he’s still tracking my approach.

His stare pins me as I glide in front of him. I tighten my grip on the stick and skate closer.

Blair holds my gaze. “You ready?”

I nod.

“Prove it.”

I get an apartment.

It’s nothing flashy, a one-bedroom north of Punta Gorda. My things still live in duffel bags and I eat cereal and oranges standing in my shoebox-kitchen. It’s empty, it’s quiet, and it’s lonely.

I don’t sleep much. I lie in the dark, my mind doing laps it never gets to finish.

I still sketch him during game tape and replays.

Line after line, his shoulders emerge, the way he stands with his body shifted to one side, that slight tilt of his head when he’s analyzing a play.

I don’t mean to fill so many pages, but my hand keeps moving as my eyes track his power plays and penalty kills on my screen.

Later, when the room is dark and the game has long since ended, I open my sketchbook again, checking if I got his jawline right, if I captured his eyes a little bit truer today than I did yesterday.

The graphite smudges under my thumb. I trace the shadow beneath his cheekbone, the curve where his neck meets his shoulder.

Every version is wrong—too soft or too sharp, missing the exact way light catches in his eyes when he turns.

I flip back through weeks of attempts. Blair in profile.

Blair mid-stride. Blair’s hands wrapped around his stick.

I close my sketchbook and set it on the floor beside my bed.

My ceiling fan wobbles, throwing uneven shadows across the walls. I count the rotations—one, two, three—until my eyes burn. Tomorrow Blair will correct my form again. Tomorrow I’ll pretend his voice doesn’t follow me home. Tomorrow I’ll add another page to the collection I’ll never show anyone.

The sheets twist around my legs. I kick them off and stare at the red numbers on my alarm clock. 2:47 a.m.. In four hours, I’ll be back on the ice. In four hours, he’ll be there, too, watching my edges, cataloging my mistakes.

I reach for the sketchbook again.

“You’ve got the wrong angle, Kendrick,” Blair calls. “That’s why you’re losing all your draws.”

I stay crouched at the dot, one hand choking my stick as he skates into my peripheral vision.

“Left foot.”

He drops into the circle, his body tilting into the same stance I’m supposed to have: hips low, posture pitched-forward, knees flexed, spine braced. “Lower,” he says.

I mirror him, or try to.

Blair’s stick taps the ice once.

His eyes aren’t on the puck when it drops; they’re on me. He wins the draw; the puck is his before I can react.

He resets. The puck drops again.

I miss.

I miss again.

“You’re holding too much in your arms. Let your hips do it.”

“I’m not?—”

“You are.”

He adjusts his stick and nudges mine with a correction. “It’s timing, not reflex. Let your momentum carry it.”

The puck drops.

Fucking hell.

I almost have it, almost.

He knocks my stick free of the puck with a twitch of his wrist, too fluid to be fair. I curse.

“You’re close,” he says. “Shift your inside knee in.”

He skates around behind me and adjusts my grip.

“This,” he says, his voice low. He repositions my foot with his own skate, ankle to ankle beside me.

“And here.” The heat of him bleeds through my gear.

His chest hovers an inch from my back, so close that I feel the shift of his breathing.

“Feel that?” His voice is low, right at my ear. “That’s where your balance should sit.”

“Your shoulder.” His other hand pushes on my shoulder blade. “Drop it.”

I force the muscle to release, to soften under his touch. He pulls back, but not far. He’s still close enough that if I shifted my balance wrong, if I leaned back even an inch?—

Then he’s back in front of me, setting up across the dot. Our eyes lock.

The puck drops.

I win it clean, snapping it back between my skates before he can react. My body remembers the position he put me in, holds it as if it’s muscle memory I didn’t have five seconds ago.

“Again.”

We reset. His skate brushes mine as we settle into position. The puck drops, and I win it again, cleaner this time.

Our eyes meet. The smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth betrays him. “There. You feel the difference?”

I nod, not trusting my voice.

“Good.” He holds my stare. “Fourth line centers don’t draw for possession. They draw to kill chances. Is the fourth line all you want to be?”

“No.”

“Good. So go again.”

The meeting drags ass, and Coach’s marker squeak-squeaks across the whiteboard.

We’re going over some detail about new forechecking schemes. Strategies are marked, erased, marked again. Strategies, rotations, adjustments.

“So, what’s missing?” Coach asks. Hawks has fallen asleep in the second row. Hayes is stretched and sprawled, taking up three spaces with his spider legs and arms. Blair is in the back corner, tucked against the wall.

“The weak side. We’re not shading far enough,” I blurt out.

Heads swivel toward me. My heart rate kicks up. Coach raises an eyebrow at me.

I sit straighter in my chair. The words are already out there. No taking them back now. “Their left winger keeps drifting. If we don’t shade over, he’s got all day to set up.”

Coach’s marker taps against his palm. Once. Twice. The sound echoes in the quiet room. Hawks stirs but doesn’t wake. Hayes shifts, his knee knocking into the chair in front of him.

From the back corner, movement catches my eye. Blair uncrosses his arms and leans forward.

“Kicks is right. We’re leaving space.” That’s Blair, speaking up for me. “Let’s force their playmaker inward. He’s got less space to work with if we own the perimeter.”

Coach looks back at me. “Kicks?”

I clear my throat. “If we pull our wingers in tighter on the forecheck, we can funnel their breakout exactly where we want it.”

“That works,” Coach says, nodding. “Anyone want to challenge that?”

The room stays quiet. I risk a glance back, and sure enough, Blair’s eyes are on me.

“Good. Because Kicks is right.” Coach nods to me. “Well done.”

“You’re thinking too much.”

“I’m not—” I start, but Blair’s already shaking his head. His eyes burn cobalt today, a glint of heat submerged in winter frost.

“That move you keep messing up.” He gestures loosely toward the net where I sent another shot wide. “You’re overcomplicating it.”

My shoulders drop, and I adjust my grip on the stick, sweat making the tape slick under my gloves. The rink is colder where he’s standing, as if he pulls all the warmth toward him and leaves me in the wake of it.

He glides closer, one push off his back skate that brings him into my space, close enough that coconut and sea salt cut through the sharp bite of ice and rubber. He takes the puck from between my skates with a casual hook of his blade.

“Watch.”

The puck slides from his stick to mine, and I track the subtle shift of his wrists, the way his whole body flows through the motion instead of fighting against it.

“Your turn.”

I mirror what he showed me, but the puck wobbles, catches wrong on my blade. My jaw tightens.

“Stop.” His voice drops lower. “You’re holding your breath.”

I hadn’t realized. Air rushes out of my lungs, fogging between us.

“Better.” He circles behind me, and I track the scrape of his blades even when I can’t see him. “Now try.”