The Fall

by Tal Bauer

I should be better than this, but I don’t know how. How do you fix yourself when you don’t know what’s broken? How do you find your way when you’re so lost you don’t know which way is north? Or worse—what if you’re not broken and this is just you, as good as you’ll ever get?

This love is a language my soul understands, even if my mind is struggling to catch up.

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

I am no longer afraid of how deep I might go. He is both tide and shore: every wave that threatens to swallow me ends up carrying me home to him.

The team orbits around him even when he’s silent, especially when he’s silent, because Blair himself speaks louder than any pregame speech ever could.

How can I love a man I’ve never met? And how can you miss what never was?

I had everything, and now I have nothing. Less than nothing, because it was never real. There was no great love story, no epic, timeless romance between me and Blair. There’s only me, shattered and alone and clutching these fragments of a life I never lived and a love I never had.

He’s gone, and he was never mine to lose.

Those whispers from him? They’re not coming from my memories; they’re coming from the cracks in my mind. That shade of blue from a pair of eyes I can’t forget? That’s the color of the frequency you hear when you lose it.

He believes I can do everything. I know I can’t do anything. He hasn’t caught up yet.

I am the aftermath of my own destruction.

I’ve been dismantling myself, piece by piece, learning how to be nothing, and now Blair’s going to see the truth. He’s going to see what I really am—what I am without him. The failure. In every sketch, he’s perfect, and here I am, surrounded by the evidence of my obsession.

Tell him? Tell him what? The truth would sound like madness. I remember loving you. I remember your mouth against my spine on mornings that never happened. I remember dying with you.

That Blair radiated heat, but this Blair burns cold and dark. He is the sun gone black and cold.

Even his skating has changed—where he used to glide, now he punches through the ice like he’s trying to break something, or like he’s trying to break himself. I know that feeling. I’m doing the same thing, only quieter. While he rages, I dissolve. While he hardens, I fracture.

How do you mourn someone who’s standing right in front of you? How do you let go of a love that was only ever yours?

“I learned my lesson about trying to save people from themselves.”

The ice sprays beneath my edges as I cut harder into the turn. Each morning I come here and measure myself against a ghost—against the brother Blair lost, against the player I was before.

He draws a skate onto his lap and threads the lace through the first eyelet. He is putting himself together, buckling the armor on over the wound. One knot. Then the next. He is building the captain back from the ground up. His shoulders, which were bowed moments ago, straighten by millimeters. He is coming back. For us. For the game. It is the quietest, bravest thing I have ever seen.

Then, only the two of us are left, and he drags me into a back-breaking bear hug. “You are Lily’s new best friend, man.” He says it like a badge of honor. “And you’re stuck with us forever.”

“Dead serious,” Hayes booms. “My man saw a crying four-year-old and said there’s no way this kid’s going into cast life alone. Put me in, coach!”

I want to be better. I want to be worthy—of my dad’s expectations, of the league’s aspirations, of the fans’ excitement for me when I was drafted. I want to be better for me, for all of my dreams and hopes and lost wishes.

Back in the room, I retape my stick. The wrap job’s still garbage, but time’s up. We line up for the walk to the bench; my legs are like concrete. Before the anthem, Coach leans in on the bench and whispers to me, “So you know, this wasn’t my call. It was his.”

“You’re getting old, Kicks.” I shoot a loose puck at his skates. “You’re four years older than I am.” “But who’s the one that needs the walker, eh?” His eyes are dancing. “Fuck you,” I say. “I’ll race you to the blue line tomorrow. Loser buys coffee for a week.” “Deal.” He taps his stick against my shin guard. “But I’m not taking it easy on you because you’re decrepit.”

To him, we traded jabs about my knee. To me, the universe smiled and showed me its center. He is the center.

“You could have anyone centering you.” In the half-dark, Blair’s face is all shadows and certainty. “I don’t want anyone. I want you.”

“Does… he want me there?” Hayes doesn’t look up from hunting down the chicken at the bottom of his Alfredo bowl. He snorts. “Jesus, Kicks. If I waited for that guy to want things out loud, I’d be dead several times over.”

“You’ve changed this team,” he says. “You make everyone around you better. You should be fucking proud of that.”

“How’d you get the glasses?” “Asked the bartender. Pretty sure he thought I was trying to impress a girl.” “But you brought them to me instead. He’ll be disappointed.” “I’m not.”

He saw. He was paying attention when I felt most invisible.

My entire life trajectory changed because his brother died.

You shouldn’t want me to be proud of you; you should be proud of yourself for showing us all how wrong we were.”

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

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.

Hockey isn’t the real problem. Neither is the concussion or the pressure or even what happened in Vancouver. The real problem sits in her office, pretending everything’s fine while falling apart inside. The real problem is me.

“You are all I think about, Torey. You’re there when I’m taping my goddamned sticks. You’re in my fucking head when I’m running drills. All I think about—” His teeth clench, the words fighting their way out. “—is you.”

“I don’t know how to let someone in when everything inside me is broken.”

My heart is a monument to your name.

He kisses me like he’s trying to crawl inside my skin, and I kiss him back like I want to let him.

“I don’t know how not to fall for you.” His confession sinks past bone and into the very center of me. “Fall,” I choke out. “I’ll catch you.”

Everything about this night is perfect exactly the way it is. He may have wanted to woo me, but all he had to do was open the door.

“Softie.” I drop a kiss to his nose. “Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to uphold.”

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.

If love alone fixed people, none of us would break at all.

The kiss deepens until it stops being one kiss and becomes a whole conversation, one I’ve waited so long to have that I scream every syllable of it.

The Torey who left Vancouver drowned in his own failures, and I’m not him anymore. But knowing I’ve changed doesn’t stop the memories of falling and failing under those lights while everyone sharpened their knives and waited for the impact.

“I can see that when I watch you play.” “You watch my games?” “Every one. You look happy, Torey. Really happy.” Happy. He’s not saying I’m playing better or that I’m producing more. He’s saying I look happy.

I want to skate out there and be the player I’ve become, not the ghost of who I was, but this city makes me small again.

In nine months, I’ve gone from wanting to disappear to wanting to live forever. Blair did that. This team did that. Hockey did that, when I learned to love it again through Blair’s eyes.

I’m standing in a moment I’ve already lived, terrified of a future I can’t remember, in love with a man I’m destined to lose. Again.