Page 98 of The Fall

Forty-Eight

I roll the protein bar Hollow tossed me between my palms as my mind slips, tugged both toward phantom memories and the life happening in front of me.

My teammates sprawl inside Tampa’s private terminal. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame our charter plane on the tarmac, where the pilot circles his aircraft, inspecting it, moving through patches of shadow and light.

I chew and force the protein bar down. It sticks in my throat, dry and chalky as I track the pilot outside, counting his steps around the plane. One, two, three... The repetition helps quiet the noise in my head. The boundaries between then and now keep blurring.

I rub my temples, trying to press away the pressure building there. Dr. Lin cleared me for the roadie this morning after I sat in her office and fed her all the right words. I passed her test, but I’m failing my own. Every time I close my eyes, fragments of things that haven’t happened yet flare.

“How are you feeling?” she’d asked me as soon as I sat down.

I gripped the edge of the exam table as she’d studied me. My brain scrambled for what to say, what I’d said before, what I should say now. The edges of memory rippled and blurred.

“Good. Ready for Philly.”

Her eyes had narrowed. “Any lingering symptoms? Memory problems?”

“No.” I’d wanted to laugh, to tell her that the problem isn’t memory loss, it’s too much memory, a doubling back on itself.

She asked about my sleep, my appetite, whether I’d experienced any more dizziness or confusion. She saw a player recovering from a hit. To me, the walls were closing in; part of me wanted to ask her if a soul can get a concussion. Is what’s eating at me neurological or existential?

But I gave her the answers she needed to hear, and I walked out with my clearance.

“Torey,” she’d said. “If anything feels off, you call me. No heroics.”

“I’ll come straight to you.” I gave her my best team-guy smile. The lie had rolled out smooth as tape on a fresh stick. Fake it ’til you make it, right?

My tongue scrapes against my teeth. Outside, the tarmac ripples in the heat. The pilot’s on his fourth circuit now. I breathe in, slow and deep, trying to sync my rhythm to his pace.

Through the reflection in the glass, my teammates are scattered across the lounge, twenty-odd pros trying to kill time.

Axel tips his head back and closes his eyes.

Svoboda’s passed out across two chairs, long limbs everywhere.

The same low buzz of conversation, the same clink of a water bottle, the same sharp bark of Novak’s laugh after a FIFA goal.

My world is a sequence of recognitions: a word, a glance, the angle of light slanting through the window, echo layered over echo.

And then there’s Blair, my lighthouse through it all. His dark hair falls forward, the same way it did that first day after skate, when he was sweat-soaked and angry at the world. The static in my head grows louder, drowning out the hum of the air conditioning.

Blair turns, as if my stare tugs him around.

God, that smile, the one that says there you are like I’m the answer to a question he’s been asking his whole life, starts in his eyes when he sees me.

I’ve spent nine months earning it, learning its variations: the quick flash in the locker room, the devastating full version that only appears when we’re alone, when his walls come all the way down.

An inside-out sense of déjà vu sets up camp inside me. It was my choices that brought me here, wasn’t it? My choices, my path, my life. Blair and I have built this year together.

So why does it seem I’m walking in footsteps already pressed into the earth?

A flight attendant appears in the doorway to the jet bridge. “Gentlemen,” she says, “we’re ready to board.”

On the plane, bags slam into overhead bins, music blares from someone’s phone, and Hollow’s already dealing cards before we’ve found our seats.

I slide in next to the window, and Blair stops in the aisle beside me.

The white fabric of his shirt pulls taut across his shoulders as he rolls up his sleeves, revealing the corded muscle of his forearms. I’ve traced those muscles with my tongue.

He drops into the seat beside me.

“Kicks, you in?” Hollow waves the deck of cards from across the aisle. “Calle’s not invited.”

I glance at Blair, who’s watching me with a half-smile. The cards don’t interest me, not when Blair is right here, his body a whisper away from mine, the memory of this morning’s kiss still on my lips.

Blair’s eyes darken as they hold mine, and I know he’s remembering too: the water cascading down us, his mouth on my skin, his hands on my cock. We nearly made ourselves late.

“Maybe later.”

Blair’s hand finds mine between our seats, hidden from view. Our fingers tangle together.

“Sometimes I look at you,” he says, his voice low, “and I forget how quiet my life was before.”

I want to tell him how he does the same—he makes the noise in my head fade, and his laugh is the only thing that can pull me back from the edge. I love him so much it’s almost unbearable. It’s sunlight pouring through stained glass, gold and blinding and impossible to hold. “Me, too,” I whisper.

The plane’s engines roar to life. We push back from the gate and begin our slow taxi toward destiny. Acceleration presses me back into my seat?—

—the sudden drop in my gut, falling, falling. For a heartbeat, I’m sinking instead of rising, trapped, darkness above and below, water pouring in, screaming, so much screaming ? —

My eyes slam shut as the wheels leave earth. We’re airborne, ascending, not falling, but I can’t tell the difference.

Blair’s palm slides over mine, and his fingers thread between my knuckles, gripping hard enough to break through my panic. I focus on his touch, on the rumble of engines carrying us up, up, not down.

When I open my eyes, blue sky stretches endlessly through the window. We climb toward the Florida sun, banking over the coast, and Tampa shrinks to a speck of green and blue. From up here, the world looks simple.

When we level off, Blair stands, and every eye turns to him. “Listen up.” Two words, and the plane goes church-quiet. Even the engines seem to hush.

He grips the back of the seat in front of him. My gaze hooks on the column of his throat, the way the muscles there shift when he swallows.

“A lot of teams,” Blair says, voice rolling through the cabin like distant thunder, “get here and start believing the universe owes them something. Like the finish line’s already waiting.

” His fingers tighten on the seatback. “We know better. The only thing we’re owed is the chance to prove ourselves tomorrow night. ”

His words are ghosts on the air. My memory shivers.

“Every man here fought for every inch this season. There were days we could have quit, days when walking away would’ve made more sense than showing up.” His gaze sweeps the cabin, touching each face. “But not one of you took that door.”

My fingers curl into my pants. Every syllable he breathes matches the fragments echoing in my mind.

“This is our time,” Blair continues. His voice carries enough certainty to split atoms. “Every single one of us has bled for this, sweated for it, lost for it. Nobody hands you a playoff berth. You claw your way there, and we’ve spent all year doing exactly that—fighting through doubt, through…

” He hesitates, eyes finding mine for a heartbeat before moving on.

“Through losses that could’ve buried us. We didn’t let them. We kept fighting.”

I remember this speech. Last time—in my dream? In my concussion? When was the last time?—I was caught in an undertow, desperate to understand. This time, I know the cost of each word he says.

“I keep saying it because it’s true: you can quit any night you want.

You can pack it in, make it easy, tell yourself you’ve done enough.

Or you can lace up tomorrow and take what’s yours: victory, and the chance to keep going, all the way.

Nobody’s going to hand that over. No one offers you greatness.

You have to reach down and find it in yourself. ”

These men have walked through fire to get here, Blair most of all.

He’s stitched together from heartbreak and hard-won trust, and he drags this team’s fate with him.

He has kept faith even after faith has cost him everything.

He can turn a group of men into a brotherhood with his belief.

And all of it, every battle won in the quiet corners of his life, has led him to this moment, to this flight, to these words, and?—

To me.

Hayes’s chin drops to his chest, right on cue. Across the aisle, Hollow’s hands tighten on his armrests.

“And we did exactly fucking that. And that resilience?” Blair’s voice drops. “ That’s our edge. That’s what is going to separate us from the teams who watch the playoffs from their couches.”

We earned this, every single inch of it. Him most of all.

He talks about our season, not in generalities, but in moments: a blocked shot by Hayes in overtime, a game-winning goal from Reid, Hollow’s defense, Hawks’s breakouts, Divot and Mikko sacrificing their bodies to block shots.

I know what’s coming; I feel it gathering, a hurricane on the horizon.

“Last but not least—” His voice softens. “Kicks.”

The guys turn to look at me, but I only have eyes for Blair.

He talks about my performance, about power play percentages and clutch goals, but beneath the captain’s words I hear everything else: every game night when he’s held ice to my bruises after, every whispered confession in the dark about how I make him believe in tomorrow again.

And when he calls me elite, the word doesn’t mean what it used to.

It doesn’t mean draft rankings or highlight reels or contracts; it means the way I know how he takes his coffee and the laugh I can pull from him that no one else can.

It means being the person he reaches for.