Page 96 of The Fall

Forty-Seven

I slip into the bathroom, and the door clicks shut behind me.

A hush, thin as tissue, settles over the tile, and I wait for a flicker, for a trapdoor to swing open and toss me into some other night. Time can’t be trusted anymore; anything could happen.

Nothing does.

My reflection stares back from the mirror, and the face looking back is the me I know. Months of clean-cooking, good sleep, great play, and love have filled out the hollow places. I’m wearing the face of a man who belongs in his life.

But my eyes can’t lie, even to me, and questions chase each other behind my pupils.

I run the tap and cup my hands under the flow, splash water onto my face. It’s cold enough to drag me halfway back from the brink I’m teetering over, and have been all night.

Everything is echoing: Erin’s smile at dinner, Blair’s hand catching mine under the table, Lily shrieking as Nerf foam pings off her forehead.

Earlier tonight, Erin laughed at one of Hayes’s jokes, throwing her head back the way healthy people do, careless and whole. The sound rang across their patio while Hayes watched her like she might evaporate. She’s here because months ago, I planted a seed that I didn’t understand.

It was me who told Hayes to get Erin checked out in Pittsburgh, not because I knew, but because something inside me had whispered get her checked , and those words became a life saved, a family preserved, cells caught before they stole a future.

Now their lives are altered because of a reason I’ll never be able to name.

Hayes is still a husband. Lily’s mother is still here.

How do I explain that? Who tells a stranger to look for tumors?

There’s no vocabulary for this, no framework that holds both the rational explanation and the certainty that won’t let go.

The doctors would call it confabulation, my brain stitching fiction into the gaps where memory should be.

But confabulation doesn’t save lives. Delusions don’t catch cancer before it spreads.

The water drips from my chin onto the counter, each drop a mark between who I was and who I am, between what’s possible and what shouldn’t be.

When I opened my eyes in that Vancouver hospital, my heart beat for a man I’d only loved in…

What? What was that other life? Where are these feelings and instincts and shards of memories from ?

Dreams don’t leave scars this deep.

Whatever it was, that life left me with these shards, these instincts. When I woke up, I carried these convictions in my bloodstream: Blair is the rest of your life, clutch Hayes like a brother, your future has a name.

There’s no exit from this. Either I’m losing my mind in slow motion, or something happened to me that science can’t explain. Both options leave me standing here, water drying on my skin, trying to reconcile love that predates its own beginning.

Is that what insanity is?

This is what brain damage does, creates false patterns, phantom memories, the illusion of prophecy where there’s only broken neurons firing.

What’s happening to me is fallout from Zolotarev’s hit last year and this year building on each other, rattling loose the part of my brain that sorts cause and effect, now and then.

I’m hallucinating. Déjà vu is a documented phenomenon.

Concussions can fuck you up sideways, and I am sideways fucked.

It’s safer to believe in brain injury than in loops or in fate. Safer to believe Zolotarev broke me. No concussion protocol allows for worrying about time loops; the medical forms don’t let you fill in “afraid I am repeating my own life.”

If reality has seams, they must be here, behind this face that looks like mine in the mirror and whatever lurks behind his eyes. If I could peel back one corner of this reflection and slip through, would whatever is keeping me here, whatever is doing this, let me out?

Christ, I need to breathe.

I drag a towel across my face and blink away the leftover drops of water. “This is insane,” I whisper. “People don’t move through their lives twice. That’s not how shit works.”

But neither does waking up with memories that never happened and a soul-deep love for a stranger.

I squeeze my eyes tight and try to will this constant ache behind my eyes back into hiding, but it’s no use.

Pain beats with each heartbeat, a throb that spreads from temple to temple.

Nothing helps. This headache is different from the others, more insistent, as if my brain is trying to convey a message I can’t understand.

I open my eyes and stare at the bathroom ceiling.

I should tell Blair. Maybe. Or maybe that would only confirm what I fear most, that I’m losing my grip. That Zolotarev’s hit did more damage than anyone realized.

I exhale slowly, counting backward from ten.

Hold on. Breathe. My hand closes on the doorknob, my grip tight, then loosening.

Part of me wants to slide down against the door and stay here until morning, until this feeling passes or until I wake up in another version of my life, but I can’t hide forever.

I step back into the bedroom.

Blair is there, in bed, his beautiful body painted by the indigo glow of the lava lamp.

“Hey,” he says. “I have something for you.”

His voice could calm surf or summon a hurricane. I want to sink down beside him and tuck myself into the space he makes with his arms and his quiet. It’s safe there, in his arms. “Oh yeah?”

He pats the bed beside him and shifts onto his knees. “A massage. Lie down. Get comfortable.”

I cross the room barefoot and climb into bed. The sheets hold his smell, the warm salt, Key lime, and coconut scent that’s only him.

He straddles my thighs. Above me, a cap clicks, and then massage oil drips in a slow line from my shoulder blades to the waistband of my sweats.

Warmth blooms across my skin as Blair’s palms begin their slow journey, his touch seeking out all of my knots. My sighs dissolve into the hush between us, and heat builds beneath his touch.

He leans in, velvet voice grazing my ear. “You’re so tense. Let go. I’ve got you.”

The room is a low-lit landscape, shadows moving on the wall with his movements.

His hands trace along the latitudes of my ribs and my hips.

A memory flashes: me in this same bed, receiving the same massage, trapped in confusion.

Memory or dream? Real life or made-up? Was it exactly the same, down to every stray sock?

I focus on small details: the moonlight drawing across Blair’s forearms, the shifting tides of his touch.

The plastic hockey players floating inside the lava lamp look like they’re dancing in slow motion, and the blue bubbles of light drift and shift, casting shadows on the walls like we’re underwater.

Underwater. The word pulls at memories I can’t reach.

In this half-light, half-sleep, my thoughts soften and blur. I may have existed before I met Blair, but I never lived until I loved him.

His palm flattens against my lower back, fingers splayed, thumbs nudging my hipbones. Those plastic hockey players drift in their eternal dance. If I look closer, the one on the left will bump against the glass in three... two... one...

Knowing doesn’t mean this life isn’t perfect, though, and expecting his touch doesn’t change how it devastates me. His hands slide from my back to my sides, knowing the map of me better than I do. His touch is the language of us, and this is one of his most fluent verses.

Blair finds that spot at my hip that always locks up after games, and I groan as his fingers dig in.

“Right there?”

“Yeah. Right there.”

Let the whole world spin away, and let my memories spiral into the dark.

All I need is here. I followed fate’s breadcrumbs all the way back to him, and he is the man I built this life with.

He is the man and the love I fought for.

Somewhere, a shoreless dark uncoils, a place I walked before, where salt and silence tangle and upend my story.

It is the edge of every tide, every return, where beginnings and endings share the same undertow.

Blair’s breath stirs the hair at the nape of my neck as he drops a kiss to my shoulder.

If time is circling, let me stay inside the spiral. Let this moment loop and fold over itself, soft as breath. Let me drift in the blue-lit hush with Blair’s lips dropping soft kisses on my skin.

Quiet wraps around me like gauze, and the room brims with the faded heat of sleep. The light in the bedroom is a lazy watercolor draining in from the half-shut patio doors. My arm stretches across the mattress, palm flattening where Blair should be.

I push myself up on my elbows. The bathroom door stands ajar, steam curling through the gap, and I listen to the steady rhythm of water hitting tile.

Blair is in there.

My legs swing over the side of the bed. This isn’t my first time with a man anymore; this is my thousandth morning choosing Blair, and every shower he takes alone is a missed chance to be with him.

God, he’s beautiful. Blair under the water is a painting; he rakes his fingers through his hair, head tilted back under the spray as water streams over him in silver ribbons and droplets race down the compass points of his body and catch in the dark trail of hair at his stomach.

A bead of water rolls along the line of his jaw, and I want to catch it in my mouth, want the salt of it, the taste of him.

I shed my boxers, let them pool on the floor. Warm air kisses every inch of my skin, but all I want is Blair’s touch, Blair’s mouth, Blair’s body against mine.

For half a breath, past and present overlap. Once, I stood in this spot, uncertain of almost everything except the pull between us. Now I know his body as well as my own; our love lives in my blood. I can’t imagine existing without him.

“Blair.” Heat drapes itself around me as I step inside the shower.

He turns, and closes the distance between us in two steps. “I figured you were out for another hour.”