Page 64 of The Fall

I go still. “What do you mean?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. He turns his head, looking out over the glittering expanse of Dallas as if the answer is written in the rivers of light below. The hard line of his jaw is clenched.

A thousand impossible explanations flicker through me. He didn’t want me. It was business. It was pity. It was… something else.

Hope is a terrifying thing, rising in your throat after you’ve spent so long learning to live without it. He finally turns back, his eyes finding mine in the glow.

“I watched them waste you in Vancouver, and I hated it.” He breathes in slowly. “Right before your final year on your contract in Vancouver, I told management that you had a shot to be great if someone around you actually gave a shit about your development.”

A roar fills my ears, but it’s just my blood rushing. He saw. He was paying attention when I felt most invisible. The thought is a fault line splitting open the barren ground I’ve learned to walk on.

The wind whips his hair across his forehead, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s waiting for me to absorb it, to understand what he’s not yet said.

“Tampa wasn’t an accident, Torey. I asked them to bring you here.”

I wait for him to say it was one of a million offhand asks, like when he wants the vending machines refilled with peanut-butter M you should be proud of yourself for showing us all how wrong we were.

” He exhales. “I’m so fucking sorry, Torey. ”

He’s wrong about so many things. About me doing it alone, about not needing his pride.

“You didn’t abandon me,” I finally manage. My voice sounds strange, rough with everything I’m not saying. “You were drowning.”

His jaw flexes. The city below us continues its relentless beat, but up here we’re suspended.

“That’s not an excuse.” The words are barely audible over the next explosion of color above us. Red this time, showering down like falling stars. “You needed someone to fight for you, and I?—”

“Stop.” His head snaps toward me, eyes wide at my tone. “Stop casting yourself as the villain in my story. You’re not.”

Another firework screams upward, and in the brief flash of green light, I want to tell him he was—and is—every reason I had to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep building, that he was my sun when everything turned to darkness. He is my sun and my moon and every star in my sky.

Fireworks paint his face in flashes—shadow then light, darkness then color.

He watches another firework climb into the sky, waiting until it bursts into a shower of silver before he speaks again.

“With you, the game isn’t broken, Torey.

With you, I’m not broken.” He tries—and fails—to smile. “Even if I am.”

I breathe in the night air. My hands shake. I hide them in my pockets where he won’t see. “You’re not broken,” I say. “Not to me.”

Gold fades into violet, and another firework rises behind it, cobalt this time, spiraling skyward before it explodes. Whistling cuts through the night, and then we’re surrounded by color, every hue and shade rising and bursting before us.

The display grows wilder. Red bleeds into green bleeds into white-hot silver. Smoke drifts across the rooftop, carrying sulfur and burned paper. Blair’s ocean eyes reflect every color, but underneath it all, they’re watching me.

The last firework climbs higher than all the rest. When it detonates, the explosion is pure white and blinding. For a moment, the whole city disappears. There’s only light and sound and Blair beside me.

Then darkness rushes back in. The smoke thickens, drifting in lazy spirals. Somewhere below, people cheer. Car horns blare. The city celebrates another year survived.

“Happy New Year, Torey,” Blair whispers.

“Happy New Year,” I whisper back.

He shifts, and for a heartbeat I think he might reach for me. My breath catches. But then he turns back to the skyline, and the moment passes like smoke through my fingers.

“We should probably head back,” he says, but he doesn’t move. Neither do I.

The rooftop is a different world, separate from everything waiting for us below.

Up here, we’re not captain and rookie. We’re not the guy who lost his brother and the guy who might remind him of that loss.

We’re Blair and Torey, standing at the edge of a new year with the taste of truth still fresh between us.

“Yeah,” I agree, even though leaving feels like breaking a spell.

He pushes off the railing first, and I follow.

We move toward the door, our footsteps echoing in the rooftop quiet. I’m hyperaware of him when he holds the door open for me. There’s something unfinished hanging in the air between us, words unspoken, possibilities unexplored.

But we let it go, let it dissolve as we walk back to reality.

We’re halfway down the stairs before he nudges my hip with his. “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“Anything.”

“I have a tradition,” he says. “You could call it an annual one.”

That throws me. I stop on the landing.

“Every year, after New Year’s, I pull a prank on the team.”

I turn to face him. His eyes sparkle. Oh, no; this playful Blair is dangerous territory for my already confused heart. “You need an accomplice?”

“I need you,” he corrects, and my traitorous heart stumbles. “They’ll never suspect you’re in on it.”

“What’s the prank?”

He leans forward, breath warm against my ear as he outlines his plan. I’m barely listening to the details, too caught up in the vibration of his voice and the clean scent of his skin.

“So?” he asks when he’s done explaining. “Wanna help in the morning?”

“Count me in.”

An hour later, we’re squeezed into a corner booth at the hotel bar, sharing a piece of chocolate cake. The place is empty, save for the bartender wiping down his glasses and a couple in business attire nursing whiskeys at the bar. The guys are still out.

“So the equipment manager is in on it?” I ask, digging my fork into the frosting.

“Pete’s my accomplice. Has been for years.”

“What’s your favorite prank you’ve ever pulled?”