Page 74 of The Fall

Thirty-Six

Practice is winding down, thank God. Sweat drenches every inch of me, and my lungs are burning from the last dog-shit drill Coach put us through.

There’s only two more games left until the mid-season Four Nations break, and we’re all counting down the minutes.

Blair drags his stick along the boards. He’s wound tight, his shoulders taut, his jaw working as if chewing over an argument he’s not ready to let out.

“Last one,” Coach calls; I’ve never been so grateful to hear those words. “Make it count!”

We line up. Wait for the whistle.

I push myself to match Blair’s pace. We’re neck-and-neck down the ice, at the turn, and racing back. We stay together through every leg of sprints. When we finally stop, I’ve got nothing left. I double over, hands braced on my knees, gulping down air.

Blair stands next to me, his breath coming in harsh pants. He’s not much better off, but he recovers faster. My jersey sticks to my back, soaked through completely.

“Good hustle,” Blair says, tapping his stick against my shin pad.

I nod, still too oxygen-starved for words. Coach blows his whistle one final time, and practice unravels. The guys heave toward the bench, a mass of exhausted bodies and steaming equipment.

Blair stays close. He’s different today. His eyes keep darting toward me and then away when they meet mine. I grab my water bottle, drain half of it in one go.

The locker room smells like mid-season funk, and I strip down layer by layer, my head swimming from exhaustion.

My muscles burn, and that ever-present throb beats above my eye.

It’s been there so long I’ve stopped noticing it until moments like this.

I toss my pads into my stall and sit heavily on the bench, working my hands through my sweat-matted hair.

“You good?” Blair asks, his voice cutting through the post-practice haze.

“Yeah.” I drag my shirt over my head, wincing as the movement pulls at tight shoulders. “Wiped.”

Blair nods but doesn’t move away. He hovers near my stall, pretending to organize his own gear while shooting glances my way. Something’s definitely up with him today.

I grab a towel and head for the showers, and by the time I’m finished, Blair’s already dressed and waiting near my stall, scrolling through his phone. “Ready?” he asks without looking up.

“Yep.” I grab my bag.

Carpooling has become a convenient excuse, a way to explain my constant comings and going with Blair. No one bats an eye as we head out together.

Axel’s Porsche growls out of the garage while we’re walking to Blair’s truck. Hayes leans out the driver’s window of his Escalade and shouts, “You owe me Chipotle tomorrow, Kicks, or I’m zip-tying your skates together!” His laugh echoes as he pulls away, tires squealing against concrete.

Blair watches him go, then tosses our bags into his truck bed. The thud reverberates through the parking garage. He’s still got that strange energy crackling around him.

“You’re enabling him,” Blair says, unlocking the doors.

I slide into the passenger seat; the leather seat creaks under me. “He owes me from that shootout drill last month.”

The truck rumbles to life beneath us. His knuckles turn white against the steering wheel as he puts it in reverse, and he peels out of the garage before I get my seatbelt clicked.

Blair’s hand rides the wheel as sunlight stripes his forearms. Tight little tells bleed off of him.

His jaw ticks every time he checks the mirror.

His lips pinch as if he’s chewing on an argument.

When the sun shifts, he flexes his hand.

I track him the way I’d follow a giveaway twitch on a defenseman’s stick.

Usually Blair fills the drive back from practice with captain’s chatter bleeding out of his brain, a come-down from practice as important as stretching. Most days I hear all about the guys’ gap management, our next opponent’s forecheck, and how our injured guys are doing, but today…

He grips the steering wheel the way a defenseman locks down a crease: white-knuckled, jaw tight, eyes forward even at red lights. He’s silent, but not settled.

We catch a string of green lights, and Tampa’s late-afternoon haze stretches over the bay, washing every palm frond. The city fades and stretches in the reflection of his sunglasses, and I wait him out through two stop signs and half a red light. “Only two games left,” he finally says.

That’s not his full thought; it’s the front edge of a sentence he’s worked on since the rink.

His thumb drums against the wheel. “Can’t believe the break is already here.”

The Four Nations tournament looms, a two-week mid-season break where the league pauses, stars scatter to national teams, and the rest of us get a breather. A lot of guys plan Cancun blowouts or Colorado powder stints, but my wants are simpler: Blair. Only Blair.

Neither of us were picked for Canada’s team. Not a surprise on my part, but the slight to Blair stings when I think about it too much.

“Feels unreal,” I say. “Didn’t the season just start?” The season has both crawled and sprinted. September is yesterday and forever ago.

“Two weeks is a long time,” he says, eyes fixed on the road. He shoots me another glance, longer this time. “The guys are scattering. Hayes talked about Colorado. Hollow booked Cabo.” Another pause. “What about you? Got plans?”

Plans. The word sounds fancy, as if I would own a catalog of them. My plans involve soaking up every possible second near him. How do I say that without sounding completely pathetic?

“Nothing concrete,” I manage. “I’ll probably stick around here. Extra ice time, maybe?”

Lie. All I want is to dissolve into him, map the freckles on his shoulders, listen to the ocean-rumble of his breathing while he sleeps.

I hesitate, then add the truth. “Honestly? Spending time with you is all I really want.” Every hour I spend with him, I want doubled, tripled, carried over into the next morning.

His shoulders seem to drop an inch, tension easing slightly from his grip on the wheel. “Yeah?”

“What about you?” I ask.

“Hayes wants to drag the boys to Miami for a few nights, but I need quiet.”

Quiet with me; say it, please.

“I was thinking…” His voice trails off, then comes back stronger. “Would you want to get away with me?”

“Only us?”

“Yeah.” He’s staring at a red light that will not change. “We could go somewhere. Together.”

“Yeah?” I try to sound cool. “Where were you thinking?” Anywhere. A deserted island, a crowded city, the dark side of the moon, doesn’t matter as long as he’s there.

“Somewhere warm. Sun. Sand. The ocean.”

That sounds perfect, absolutely fucking perfect. So why does he sound as if he’s suggesting we get couples’ root canals? “Tell me when and where, and I’m yours.”

He nods, but the muscle in his jaw jumps again. Whatever’s eating at him, the idea of a vacation isn’t fixing it. The radio burbles into an insurance ad, and he drums three tight notes on the wheel. The rest of the drive is a stretched-out string of silence.

By the time we curve down his street and into his drive, the horizon is boiled copper with a rinsed blue sky. He glides into his driveway and puts the truck in Park but keeps both hands on the wheel.

“Blair?”

He shakes himself out of the middle distance he’s fallen into. “Inside.” He’s unreadable, storms collecting behind those blue eyes.

We walk in, shedding shoes and gym bags at the door. He heads for the kitchen, pulling off his practice hoodie.

I follow.

The kitchen’s lived-in now after weeks of me: my sneakers are kicked off under the island, our water bottles are caught in a drift on the counter. His place is golder than usual with the winter sunset pouring through the glass sliders.

I grab a tomato from the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter and toss it to him, then start rifling through the fridge for sandwich guts. “Sandwiches for lunch?”

“Sure.”

When I turn back, he’s rolling that tomato over and over in his palm. He’s not here; he’s orbiting something big and dangerous in his head.

“Avocado or plain?”

“Whatever you want.”

I lean on the island, my gaze on him as he takes out a cutting board, grabs a knife, and starts slicing. He’s building a wall out of perfectly sliced tomatoes.

I can’t watch him pace a rut through his own head any longer.

I come over without thinking. My feet carry me to him before my brain catches up.

I lean into his back, wrapping my arms around his stomach.

He stiffens for a second, then melts into my touch.

His scent fills my lungs—coconut shampoo, the clean sweat from practice, and that hint of ocean that seems to live in every corner of this house.

His knife stalls halfway through the tomato.

“Talk to me.”

“I’m thinking.”

“I figured. Tell me the scary part.” I slide my hands up his sides and rest them flat on his chest. His heart is hammering way too fast for slicing tomatoes. “What’s got you so stressed about a vacation?”

A slow inhale lifts his back against my chest. His hands cover mine. “It’s not the vacation.” His voice is low. He turns slowly within the circle of my arms, facing me. “It’s us.” His eyes flicker, tidal blue, full of risk, and tangled with fear. “I need to be honest with you.”

A thousand worst-case scenarios flash through my mind: he’s sick, he’s leaving the team, he’s breaking up with me before we’ve even really started. The kitchen hangs on his words.

He looks down at our joined hands for a long moment before he speaks. “If we do this,” he says softly, so unlike himself. “I’m going to fall in love with you, Torey. All the way in love.”

My heart stumbles, caught off guard, as if the ground beneath me has shifted.

“I’m already halfway there,” he continues. “But if we do this, that’s it for me. I’ll be hopelessly in love with you.”

His eyes search mine, as if confessing this is more terrifying than any fight or overtime loss. “If that’s not what you want, or if you don’t feel the same, I?—”

He falters, a fissure opening for me to see all the hurts he’s hiding inside himself. His voice runs out, hanging there. Finally, he says, “If that’s not what you want, then...”

Don’t break me, Torey. The unspoken plea vibrates between us.

Is he afraid I could possibly turn away from him? That I could ever tell him no, you’re not the pair to every part and piece of me, you’re not everything I’ve ever dreamed of?

I have loved him forever. I’ve loved him when he didn’t know me, when he barely tolerated me.

I’ve loved him through every brutal drill and tentative smile and shoulder brush on cross-country flights.

I’ve loved him with my sweat and my muscle tears, with the burn in my bones, with my sunrise skates and my midnight workouts.

I’ve loved him for so long and so deeply, the embers of that love sparked and caught and remade my whole world.

I breathe him in, slide my hands up and cup his face. His heartbeat races to match mine. I count the twitches in his jaw, the quarter-inch flares of his nostrils. Was he born this intense or did he learn it?

He’s showing me all his cracks and fault lines, and he’s letting me slip through them and into him, into his heart and his fragile hopes.

He’s waiting for me to destroy him or save him.

I trace the curve of his cheekbone, memorizing the texture of his skin, the slight stubble beginning to roughen his jaw. How do I tell him that he’s been the center of my universe for longer than he knows? That every milestone has been measured against the light in his eyes when he looks at me?

“That,” I say, “is exactly what I want.” My thumb strokes over his jaw. “You’re not the only one falling in love.”

He cups the base of my skull and holds on, forehead resting against mine. “Don’t say it unless it’s real.”

“It’s real.” It’s you, Blair. Everything in me starts and ends with you.

All his edges soften. His arms wrap around my waist and he buries his face in my neck. Relief, pure relief, pours off him in waves, soaking into me. He holds me like he’ll never let go, like I’m the only solid ground in his world.

This isn’t a hallucination, or dream, or fantasy. This is real; this is happening . This is now, and this is us.

I say, softer than a secret, “Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”

His breath catches, and his eyes close, and he leans into me like I’m holding him up.

When his eyes open again, they’re clearer than I’ve ever seen them, his storms finally breaking into something bright and endless.

He pulls back and searches me. I let him look; I let every soft and hungry part of me surface where he can read it in plain sight.

The sigh he releases could drain an ocean.

“Okay. Let’s do it,” he breathes. “You want to plan it with me?” He pulls out his phone, crowding us together as he scrolls through pages of turquoise seas and sand so white it burns the screen.

“I already started looking at places. I was hoping you’d say yes. ”

As if there were any other answer I could have given him. “Show me everything.”

He flips through a half dozen websites. There are private islands with thatched villas, white sands, and neon shores.

“I kept coming back to this one,” he says, tapping on an aerial shot of a white-sand crescent beach thickened with dense jungle along the interior.

The seas around the postage-stamp island are every shade of turquoise.

“Kamara Cay,” he says. “Seven private bungalows on the south rim. It’s a three-hour charter from Miami. The staff sign NDAs. Everything you want is there: snorkeling, paddle boards, hammocks, and quiet. No nightlife.”

“What will we do? Play board games?” I nudge his hip. “Risk? Strip Uno?”

Color climbs his cheeks. “Whatever keeps us busy.” His thumb hovers over the screen. “Say yes and I’ll book it.”

I look at him offering himself up to me. “Let’s do it,” I whisper. “Let’s fall all the way in love together.”

He taps the screen, and just like that, our escape is booked.

“Two weeks,” he says, setting his phone down to cup my face. “Two weeks of us.”

I want to bottle this moment, preserve it against whatever storms might come.

We have two games left, nine periods and maybe an overtime thriller if the hockey gods get dramatic, but after that, the world turns into the shush of waves on sand and the sound of his breathing beside me at night.

I imagine Caribbean water lapping over our ankles and a horizon free of pucks and clocks and doubt.

The future tilts open, wide and blue, bright as saltwater in July.