Page 76 of The Fall

Those are not Blair’s jerseys.

Those were Cody’s.

“Couldn’t sleep?” His voice is deeper than usual, dark water scraping over hidden rocks.

“No,” I breathe. “Blair…”

“This was his room,” Blair says, answering the question I didn’t need to ask. “He stayed with me before…”

This room holds everything he’s lost, each silent night layered on top of the next.

On the dresser, two boys mug for the camera at an outdoor rink, Cody’s grin sharper than Blair’s careful smile.

Hockey sticks gather dust in the corner.

His brother lives everywhere here, the boy from these snapshots frozen forever between puck-drop and next season.

I study the photo on the wall beside me: Blair and Cody, arms thrown around each other, grinning wildly, two dark-haired boys on skates. They had the same ocean-eyes, the same jawline. “He was handsome,” I say. “Like you.”

The ghost of a smile touches Blair’s lips. “He was the pretty one. He always had girls throwing themselves at him.”

I sink onto the rug in front of Blair and reach for his hand. He has them knotted between his knees, knuckles white and bloodless. “Tell me about him?”

Blair’s fingers twitch against mine, squeezing tight. His eyes stay fixed on some invisible point beyond the empty bed, as though Cody might materialize there if he watches long enough.

“He laughed all the time,” Blair finally says, his voice barely above a whisper. “Even when things were shit. Especially then.” A small, broken sound escapes him that might be trying to be a laugh of his own.

I run my thumb across his knuckles, over the ridges and valleys.

“Sometimes people thought we were twins. We’d let them think it, too. We used to drive our mom crazy, answering to each other’s names.”

The moonlight through the window catches on something shiny tucked into the corner of a framed photo, a medal or pin, I can’t tell. Blair follows my gaze and swallows hard.

“First tournament we won together. He scored the winning goal.” His voice cracks. “I assisted.”

He unspools the story of his brother’s career: the promising start, the devastating setbacks, the slow unraveling.

“He bounced between leagues in Europe and started partying too much. Then came the drugs.”

First it was just recreational stuff, Blair tells me. Pills to keep the energy up during games, something to take the edge off afterward. The slippery slope that became an avalanche. Blair’s throat works as he swallows down whatever’s threatening to break free.

“I’d get these calls at three in the morning. He’d be somewhere in Prague or Helsinki, completely out of his mind.” Blair’s fingers tighten around mine until it hurts, but I don’t pull away. “I flew out twice to bring him home. The second time, his team had already dropped him.”

I take the pain of his grip. His eyes grow distant, traveling across oceans and years to hotel rooms and foreign streets where he tried to gather up his brother’s broken pieces.

“What was he like when you found him?” I ask.

Blair’s breath catches. He stares at our joined hands like they’re the only solid things in the room.

“A stranger,” he says. “Thin. Angry. Convinced everyone was against him.” He pauses, the memory carving new lines around his mouth. “I packed his things while he screamed at me. Threw a lamp. Called me every name he could think of.”

I stay quiet, giving him space to continue or stop. The moon shifts behind clouds, casting the room in deeper shadow.

“I tried so fucking hard,” he says, his voice dragged over broken glass. “I thought if he was near me, if I kept watch, he’d be okay. We went to meetings every day after. I had him on clean-eating meal plans and workouts. I thought if we kept moving forward together we’d make it through.”

I know how much wanting can cut you when it isn’t enough. “I’m sorry.”

“He was good for a while,” he breathes. “But summer ended and…” His voice snags.

Silence hangs between us. He breathes deep; his knuckles blanch.

“I didn’t— ” Each syllable he forces out is raw. The guilt in his voice rides shotgun with a love so strong it bends everything around it. He tries again. “I think about it every night,” he whispers. “What I missed.”

He looks over, eyes too deep for any storm-wrecked sea, and his agony seizes me. “Turns out you can’t save somebody who doesn’t want saving.”

If love alone fixed people, none of us would break at all. “Blair…”

“Some mornings,” he confesses, “I wake up and forget. I reach for my phone to text him about a game or a stupid meme, and it hits me all over again that he’s gone. And sometimes it feels like if I just sit long enough he’ll walk back through that door.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Outside, the canal waters rock lazily against the dock.

Palm fronds shush and sigh. I know so, so deeply what it is to wish you could fix what you never broke and that hollow ache of responsibility that isn’t yours to carry, but you shoulder it anyway because the alternative is surrender.

Thinking if you try harder, love better, find the right words, you could change the path.

They’re different griefs, but same impossible wish: to turn back time, to find the perfect combination of words and actions that would have changed everything.

The fantasy haunts us both: that love, if applied correctly, could have been enough.

“You couldn’t have known,” I say, the words inadequate but necessary. “No matter how many times you replay it.”

A ripple passes through the water outside, the canal answering the night breeze with gentle lapping.

We breathe in time with our hauntings and each other. We’re sharing corners with ghosts and wishes tonight. The bedroom holds them all—his brother’s memory, my broken mind, paths not taken.

There’s safety in this quiet darkness.

He shifts, pulling back to see my face in the dim light. His eyes search mine. There’s a question forming in the air between us.

I stand slowly and tug at his hand. “Come to bed.” Come curl into me and don’t be alone.

He rises from the chair.

I walk backward, leading him, and he follows me out of Cody’s room, pausing to switch off the lamp. In the darkness, he presses a kiss to his fingertips and then touches them to the door frame. A goodbye, a goodnight.

We move through the dark of his house, moonlight pooling around our feet. When we get to his bedroom, we crawl beneath the sheets together and lay on our sides, facing each other and sharing a pillow.

His eyes are so wide, so open.

My knee slides between his; our feet bump and hook and settle. His inhale ghosts my lips. Gentle symmetry fills the gaps between us. I could lie here forever and still want one more second.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump this on you,” Blair whispers. “Not tonight, before our trip.”

“You didn’t dump anything on me.” I shift closer, erasing the distance between us. Our foreheads touch.

How do you ask someone who saved you how they were saved first? His chest rises and falls. He lost his brother, lost himself, fought his way back for a ghost and a game. Then I showed up, and he loved me enough to dig himself out of the darkness. How do you ask about that?

His voice is so quiet I nearly miss it. “Torey—” His hand ghosts over my cheek. “Thank you for finding me.”

I tighten my arms around him. “I’ll always find you.”

His thumb moves over my cheekbone. “Can I kiss you?”

The question hangs between us. His eyes hold mine.

“Yes,” I breathe, the word barely formed before it leaves my lips.

He doesn’t move right away. Instead, he studies my face like he’s memorizing it, like he wants to remember this exact moment. He moves so slowly, each millimeter of distance disappearing. His breath mingles with mine, warm and sweet, and craving builds in me until I can barely breathe.

I close the distance between us, sealing my lips to his.

Blair’s lips are velvet against mine, a slow-drawn line of heat and salt.

His exhale melts into my mouth, a silent surrender that turns my blood to honey.

I sink into him, letting the warmth spread from my lips down my neck, through my chest, pooling low in my belly.

His hand cups my face, fingertips gliding into my hair as his mouth moves against mine.

Every brush of his lips unravels another thread of tension I’ve been carrying.

His tongue brushes my bottom lip, and I open to him, meeting him halfway.

A small sound escapes him when our tongues touch, half sigh, half groan.

The sheets rustle as we shift closer, legs tangling further, my thigh between his. I break the kiss only to breathe, but stay close enough that our lips still brush when I whisper, “Blair.”

“Again,” he whispers. “Kiss me again.”

This time it’s deeper. Slower. His lips part under mine like he’s giving me permission to know him completely. I open to him, too, and let him steal the breath from my lungs and replace it with everything he is.

I give him everything he asks for, and then more.

His chest rises and falls faster under my touch, and I can’t get enough of the way his body responds, the way his breath stumbles every time I angle my head to deepen the kiss.

I drag my lips from his to trail them along his jaw, tasting the faint roughness of stubble, the warmth of his skin under my mouth.

His head tips back, giving me access, and the quiet gasp that slips from him when I nip at the edge of his jawline sears straight through me.

“Torey,” he breathes.

My chest heaves as I hover, lips inches from his, caught in the pull of him. Every inch of me yearns to close the gap again, to drown in the heat of his mouth, but I linger for a heartbeat longer.

His hand settles over my heart. Can he feel it? Can he feel how desperately I’ve wanted this— him —for so long that the wanting has turned me inside out?