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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? What if this is it?
I have to believe that the dark he’s in isn’t permanent. It’s a season. And even in the stillness, and even when he gives me nothing, I am rewritten by him.
I don’t know how to be anything else. I don’t know how to want without apology. I don’t know how to reach for greatness when good enough has been my ceiling for so long.
“And if you want something breathtaking, you’d better be willing to burn for it.”
But I do need to apologize for something. For this confusion, for not knowing what’s real, for wanting things I’m not sure I should want.
“You proved me wrong. You proved everyone wrong. No one gave you a chance; you took everything you earned yourself.”
“You’ve changed this team,” he says. “You make everyone around you better.
“I only want to make you proud,” I whisper.
His voice, when he finally speaks, is a low rasp that slices right through me. “You already have.”
I lie flat on my back on the bed, tie loose. I’m dressed for success, and failure has never been closer. I’m not tired. I’m empty.
“I’ve been trying so hard.” My voice breaks and I hate it. “I can’t mess this up.” “You’re not messing up, Torey.” “I thought I could outwork… everything. The stress. The noise. The pressure. I thought I could prove…” My voice drops. “That I’m not broken.”
“Do you know what it’s like? Watching you on the ice, knowing I can’t touch you the way I want to? Knowing that every time you look at me, I’m one second away from ruining everything we’ve built?”
“I don’t know how to let someone in when everything inside me is broken.” His voice drops to almost nothing. “I don’t know how to want you this much and not destroy us both.”
“Everything,” he rasps. “I want everything with you. I want to wake up and not dread the day. I want to remember what it feels like to be whole. I want— I want to stop being so fucking scared all the time. Of losing. Of feeling. Of you.”
“I don’t know how to do this halfway,” he says, voice rough as gravel. “I don’t know how to want you a little bit. It’s all or nothing with me, and that should terrify you.”
“I want to,” he whispers. “God, I want to. But I— Torey, my head isn’t right when it comes to you.” He leans in. “I can’t be casual about you. I won’t even pretend to try.”
“I don’t have a map for this. I’m not—Maybe you think I’m swimming in loads of experience here, but I’m not, and you mean too much to me…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “So if you don’t want to wait for me,” he forces his words out, his voice turning to gravel, “or if you need to hook up before I can give you… Don’t tell me, okay? If that’s part of this... Don’t tell me. Keep me in the dark.”
He lowers his head to my neck and breathes me in, laying open-mouthed kisses on me as slow as a prayer. His next words are low enough only I could ever hear them: “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.” He stills completely. The roaming of his hands halts. Every muscle in his body goes taut. For a long second, he doesn’t move. Then, slowly, he lifts his head. “I think you already have.”
“I’m scared I’ll lose everything again. Especially you. I’m afraid I’ll blink and you’ll be gone.” “Never.” His eyes hold mine, steady and sure. I want to believe him. I want it so badly I can taste it.
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.
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?
“Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”
I won’t lose him to clocks unwinding or days repeating. The world can try to erase what we’ve built, but my memory of him is set deeper than time can touch. I’ll find him in every version of reality, every timeline where he exists.
That’s the cruelest part, this partial blindness. I know the taste of loss without remembering how it happens. I carry grief for a loss that hasn’t occurred yet, or has occurred and been erased, or keeps occurring in a loop I can’t break.
You can’t outmuscle fate. You can’t check destiny into the boards.
How do you fight a shadow? How do you dodge a blow you can’t see coming? What if I’m supposed to fail? What if watching Blair die is my punishment for something I did or didn’t do, some cosmic debt I keep paying? I am in a thousand versions of this moment where I tell him different lies and where I swallow different truths.
“What if what?” Blair asks. What if I’m in love with you in every timeline that there is and I’m always destined to lose you?
Why does love always feel like holding your breath underwater, waiting for either salvation or the sea to claim you? I’ve carried him in dreams and daylight, our past and present blurring until our love has become its own haunting. I’m envious of him. He hasn’t woken up in a different life with the ghost of another still burning in his chest, or watched himself fail what he needed most. If fate rips him away again, if there’s a universe where I wake up alone—again—I won’t survive.
Those nightmare fragments keep circling, vultures patient for their meal. Water. Glass. Falling. Free fall— “Blair,” I whisper. “I don’t know how to save us.”
I am his across any and every life. I will never let him go, not in any timeline, not in any reality, not in any version of our story.
I loved him once without knowing why. I love him now knowing everything. I’ll love him always, even when time steals him away again.
He is the beginning and end of every timeline.
