The Fall

by Tal Bauer

“But you left…” “I had to.” His voice cracks on the admission. “If I’d stayed—” He pulls back, and his eyes are wrecked, pupils blown wide and dark. “Do you have any idea what those did to me? Seeing myself through your eyes like that?”

“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.”

“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?”

“You got past every defense I had before I even knew to guard against you.” His hands shake as he reaches for me again. “You saw me at my worst and you stayed.”

“Do you know what it did to me?” His other hand comes up to frame my face. “To see that you looked at me like—like I was worth capturing?”

“Every time I step on the ice with you, every time you smile or laugh, I am breaking. I’m so far gone for you.”

“It’s easier to stay angry, to shut it all down. To slam the door. But with you—fuck, with you… I remember the guy I used to be.” His voice is half-there. “I hear him again when I’m quiet next to you. And I miss being that guy so fucking much.”

“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.”

“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.”

Yours. I’m already yours. I’ve been yours since the first time you looked at me like I mattered. Your love unraveled my soul. My heart is a monument to your name. I’ve dreamed of your touch every night for months.

“Tell me to stop,” he says against my lips. “Tell me this is a mistake. Tell me we’re going to ruin everything.” “Tell me not to kiss you, and I won’t.”

“There’s no one else. There hasn’t been anyone else since you.”

His blues search mine, desperate, disbelieving. This is the look I’ll remember when he walks out tonight. This is the look I’ll spend forever sketching: his whole being caught on the edge of wonder, of hunger, of astonishment. This is the wild and terrifying edge of yes.

“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.”

It’s a kiss that draws a line in the sand between before and after. Before Blair, and with him.

“Fuck, you drive me crazy.” I brush my thumb across his lower lip. “Good crazy?” “The best kind.”

You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted. Everything I think I know about love starts and ends with you.

“If we do this,” he says softly, so unlike himself. “I’m going to fall in love with you, Torey. All the way in love.” My heart stumbles, caught off guard, as if the ground beneath me has shifted. “I’m already halfway there,” he continues. “But if we do this, that’s it for me. I’ll be hopelessly in love with you.”

“That,” I say, “is exactly what I want.” My thumb strokes over his jaw. “You’re not the only one falling in love.”

I say, softer than a secret, “Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”

I look at him offering himself up to me. “Let’s do it,” I whisper. “Let’s fall all the way in love together.”

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

“Torey—” His hand ghosts over my cheek. “Thank you for finding me.” I tighten my arms around him. “I’ll always find you.”

“I want everything with you.” Blair’s hands cup my face, tilting it up until our eyes meet. “Then everything is what you’ll get.”

“Torey…” he breathes. “Torey, I love you,” he whispers, so quietly that only the ocean and bone carry his words into me. “I am in love with you.”

“Tell me again.” “I love you, Torey Kendrick.” His words flow into me, rich as honey. He kisses the corner of my mouth, then my chin, then returns to my lips. This is how forever starts.

He doesn’t know he’s the only man I’ve ever kissed, and I only know how to touch him because of my dreams about our life that never existed. This is the truth: he is my first, my only, my always. He is teaching my body a language I’ve only ever dreamed of speaking.

I can’t keep the sea salt or the sun, but what we built isn’t so fragile. Two weeks ago, we arrived brand new. Now, we leave unbreakable.

“You’re playing prison rules.” “They want to make it about him?” Blair’s voice drops. “Then I’ll make it about them.” I should find this less attractive than I do, but Blair ready and raging to take on my entire former team because they’re being mean to me hits buttons I didn’t know I had.

If I tell myself it’s all in my head, why do these moments still line up, dominoes in perfect formation?

I know how to fight for what I love, though. That’s the one thing that saved me before. It has to save me—save us—now. So let fate circle. Let ghosts prowl the door. There is no universe in which I will let go of this life. And I will not let him go.

If love alone could rewrite fate, I’d already have dragged us clear of every nightmare.

Even when my mind unspools, even when nothing is certain, loving Blair is the single thread I refuse to let go. If there’s any choice left in me, I’ll use it for him.

How many times have we done this exact dance? His eyes meeting mine across a crowded room, a look that says yes, you and always you without words.

If this is all I’m given, if this loop is the last time I get to love him whole, let it matter.

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 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 may have existed before I met Blair, but I never lived until I loved him.

His touch is the language of us, and this is one of his most fluent verses.

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.

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 can’t remember what it felt like not to love him, and I don’t want to. We are everything unsaid, everything unfinished. This moment is the only truth that matters; everything else can burn.

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’d stand between him and any storm. If life tries to pull him under, I’ll be his mooring. For every scar he hides, I’ll press a promise against it: you’re not alone. I want to be the undoing that doesn’t wreck him, the safe place after where he can shelter his soul.

Whatever cosmic force thinks it can separate us doesn’t understand. We have chosen each other across impossibilities, always and forever. We belong in the same story, on the same pages. Our love defies the physics of space and time. Nothing will stop me from loving Blair.

This love I carry for him has been worn smooth by age, deepened by loss, sharpened by the terror of almost. It lives in me, older than this morning, older than this version of us. Every cell in my body recognizes him as home, as necessary as oxygen, as the reason my heart keeps beating even when everything else collapses.

Everything is wrong when you don’t know what leads to ruin.

“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?

“Are you… is this you asking me to marry you?” The blue in his eyes runs deeper than any ocean trench. “Not yet,” Blair says. “When I do, you’ll know. Trust me.” His chest rises, falls. The candlelight catches in his eyes. “Torey…” My name is a prayer in his mouth. “Do you want to be asked?”

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. “Ask me,” I breathe.