The Fall

by Tal Bauer

The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be this Torey forever. I never want to slide back to those dark days and nights when I was alone and when no one relied on me or trusted me or wanted me for any damn thing. I want this. I want to be Blair’s warm body in the night, the hand he reaches for, and the man he opens his eyes to. Blair’s chest rises and falls. What about tomorrow? What about next week? Next month? I need to be ready for anything—another hit, another concussion. Another year gone? No, I can’t think like that. I burrow closer to him. “I love you.” You are the part of me I never knew was lost, my missing piece I never knew I needed.

There are twenty more minutes in this game. And after this? If I make the team—unlikely—what comes next? A season with him across unbridgeable space, carrying memories of our love that never existed? 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?

He’s carrying something heavy and he won’t set it down. The more he holds it, the more he hardens around it. I want to be the place he exhales. I want to hand him a reason to lean without flinching at the word. I want to say, give me part of it, I can hold it and I won’t drop it. My brain writes sentences I never say, whole conversations where he lets me in. In those, his voice goes soft again, the way it does when he talks to me alone, and the cold in him warms enough to glow. I want to be everything for him.

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. So I stay here. I stay with the man who used to be my world, even if I’ve been exiled, even if my memories are a mosaic of broken glass. I’m a man walking an unfamiliar shore. The place I left is behind me and what’s ahead of me isn’t mine. The sand shifts beneath my feet, unstable and treacherous, like everything else in my life right now. I love him. It’s a love that wants to carry water for him, sharpen his blades, and stand in front of whatever wind is cutting his face. I will swim in these dark waters forever as long as Blair is there with me.

“Blair’s birthday,” he says. “We always do something low-key. Erin cooks, Lily makes cards with dinosaurs and glitter. You’re coming.” “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.” “But it’s his birthday.” “Exactly.” Hayes leans back and stretches out his long legs like he’s got the world sorted out. “Blair doesn’t throw flowers; he writes you into his battle plan. You’re on his line, right? From him, that’s saying a lot.” Hayes clatters his dishes back onto his tray, then pats my shoulder on his way out. “Wear a shirt that doesn’t make you look haunted.”

What do you give the man who steadied you through storms and then hands you back the sky? I need something that says “thank you” without screaming “I’m in love with you.” Blair doesn’t acquire objects; he assumes responsibilities. His gift to me—that he doesn’t even know he gave—was a space on his line, a seat next to him on the plane, wanting my opinion. He gave me his trust. I want to give him… everything. How do you wrap love in paper and a bow? What do you give the man whose heartbeat I can still feel against my cheek, even though he’s never held me that way?

Blair points to my stick. “That’s staying right there,” he says. “As a reminder of what happens when you never, ever quit.” The thunder of sticks against floor reaches fever pitch. Blair’s voice cuts through it like a blade. “And if you want something breathtaking, you’d better be willing to burn for it.”

Blair’s voice echoes inside me: if you want something breathtaking, you better be willing to burn for it. I want to blaze.

“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?” Heat floods through me. My knees threaten to buckle. “You want to touch me?” A sound tears from him. “Want? Christ, Torey. Want doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

“I swore—” He chokes on the word. “Fuck. I swore I wouldn’t do this. I swore.” His voice splinters. He digs his forehead into the wall. His voice is quaking. “I’ve tried to keep my distance. I told myself it was better that way. For the team. For you. For me. It would be so much easier to keep you out, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But I can’t.” “Why?” My voice sounds braver than I feel. He shoves off the wall and turns back to me. He’s a wreck. His eyes are too bright, his mouth a thin line of agony. “Because you’re already inside of me.” The words tear from him. “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.”

“Torey...” His voice is raw silk, barely there. His chest rises against mine, that scent of coconut and lime and salt threading through my head. “Tell me what you need.” “You.” My thumbs smooth over the inside of his wrists. I angle up to kiss him again, lips and breath, a question and an answer. He answers all the way, opening, letting me taste him, letting me lead. Heat curls under my skin. I breathe into him and he breathes back. He swears under his breath, barely a word, and I feel it within our kiss. His fingers flex at my hips, and then those hands slide up, under my shirt, warm palms on bare skin. Mine thread into the soft strands of his hair. “Blair...” 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.”

This isn’t a hallucination, or dream, or fantasy. This is real; this is happening. This is now, and this is us. I say, softer than a secret, “Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”

A fire burns inside Blair, a love so fierce it could consume the whole world, but I’ve seen that fire extinguished. I felt its last embers grow cold before the fall. I will do anything—rewrite destiny, break the loop, or die trying—to keep him alive. If this is all I get, then I’ll love him fiercely enough to echo across all of time. I’ll hold him close enough to leave marks on eternity, and when the fall comes, I’ll face it knowing this: 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.

“No limo. Cancel the car.” A beat of confused silence hangs between Hayes and me. “Buddy, what are you talking about?” He laughs, a note of uncertainty in it. “We’ll take your Escalade.” I want to break down and scream, or hurl his phone into the walls, or, worst of all, to tell them the truth, but if I did, they would think my concussions were talking, or that I was cracking. They would handle me with care and get me to the medical unit, and then they’d climb into the limo without me, and⁠— No, we have to do this together, and I have to be the sanest man in this room. “I’ll drive,” I say.

I meet Blair’s gaze. I would rewrite the stars for you. I would tear the universe apart to keep you safe. “I’m sure.” Time is a river that only flows one direction, but I am the stone in the waters. I will break the waves before they crash against Blair’s beach. I will bend this tide to my will. This is the line I’ve crossed a thousand times or none at all. Does the loop begin or end here? “Give me the keys.”

“Torey.” He lifts our joined hands, turns mine over, and drops his lips to the center of my palm. “Say it again,” he whispers against my skin. “I’ll keep you. Today, tomorrow, always.”

The doors swing wide, and I’m wheeled through. My neck cranes back, desperate for one final glimpse. Blair crumples. His knees hit the floor hard, and a sound tears from him. It’s animal grief, a guttural scream that shatters the air on its way out. He folds into himself in the hallway, shattering the way he must have shattered before, in some other corridor, when Cody disappeared behind doors that never opened again. Dad drops beside him and wraps his arms around Blair, and Blair collapses into the shelter of my father’s arms. They rock together on that cold hospital floor, my dad’s hand cradling the back of Blair’s head while Blair’s shoulders heave with sobs that crash down the corridor. The doors seal shut between us.

“We made it,” I whisper. “Through different storms.” A breeze lifts the end of the velvet, and it brushes against my ankle. It trails from my fist to our bare feet, pooling in soft curves along the dock boards, the story of us unfurling to its last page. We stand together on the edge of land and sea, two people who came together across time, across pain, across all the barriers that should have kept us apart. Time brings us where we’re meant to be, and I’m exactly where I belong.

“I would have found you,” he says, “even if it took a thousand lifetimes, I would have found you, Torey.” And he did. He found me when I was lost in Vancouver, a ghost haunting my own life. He saw me; he wanted to pull me out of there. He found me here in Tampa, and he found me again in the water, pulling me from the wreckage. We found and find each other time and again. He leans in. His kiss holds the quiet peace and infinite patience of the ocean. He is the beginning and end of every timeline.