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Look where that got me. 2:37 a.m., a year into a future I can’t remember, huddled in front of a toilet, staring at a man who loves me. And who, if my own texts are to be believed, I love back.
I don’t know what to do, and I’m so scared of fucking this up. If this is a hallucination, it’s immersive. If it’s consequence, it’s cruel. I can’t decide which hurts deeper: the loss of the past year, or the envy for the me who earned all this.
I lean in, closing the distance. Our lips meet. It’s not Blair’s first kiss, but it is mine, and it’s perfect. It’s fireworks and lazy mornings and gentle midnights, promises and declarations and silent, secret glances, all at once. It’s a tidal wave, pulling me under, and I’m not even close to fighting it. I’ve dreamed of this moment, but reality is so much better.
We stay there, sinking into the night. This love is a language my soul understands, even if my mind is struggling to catch up. I squeeze his hand. The fear is lurking, but so is this. I don’t know how to hold on without breaking, but I’m here. Right now, I’m here.
My last thread of consciousness is tethered to Blair’s touch, to his lips on my shoulder as he kisses me, slowly, gently. So this is what it feels like to be found.
I’ll piece together the fragments of this past year and I’ll grind and fight for every moment, every smile, every touch. Losing Blair, losing hockey, losing everything I’ve apparently fought so hard to gain is unthinkable.
I really really hope this isnt thenarrative for the whole book
“Sometimes I look at you,” he says, his voice low, “and I forget how quiet my life was before.”
know, as deeply as any man can know a foundational truth: Blair and I are meant to be together. On the ice, off the ice. We are two halves of one singularity.
“Every time,” he breathes. “Every single time, you rock my entire world.” God, there is no part of me that isn’t his.
It scares me how deep this love runs when I have no memory of how we got here. Every atom of me is oriented toward him. He is my North Star.
This is what it feels like to be cherished, to be wanted for everything you are and everything you aren’t yet, but could be, if only— If only has arrived, though. I’m here, I’m living it. This is my life, my beautiful, wondrous, amazing life. With Blair. The missing pieces don’t matter. The uncertainty and the fear—all of it falls away. This is everything. I’m complete.
“I love you,” he whispers. “So much it terrifies me sometimes.” Fear shimmers in his eyes. The world feels stripped down to this, our skin pressed to skin, our hearts still racing. I brush my thumb along his jaw. “Me, too,” I whisper back. My voice is rough from everything he’s taken from me tonight. He finds my lips with his again, softer this time. “I love you,” he breathes between kisses. “I love you, I love you.”
Ahhhh. This is lovely, but Can these two please talk to each other
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.
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 is a deep and final shift in my soul when it recognizes its other half and knows it is finally home. My future has a name, and that name is Blair, and this night defines our forever.
He finds my hands with his again and leads me to the bed. “I never used to believe in soul mates,” he breathes. “But you…” The mattress gives beneath us as he lays me down and settles above me. I cradle his face, feel his stubble catch against my fingertips as I trace the angle of his cheekbone, the curve of his lower lip. “You are my forever.”
As long as I have this, as long as I have him, I can face anything, do anything, become anything. Even myself. So let the sea pull me out past the breakers and into the wild blue; with Blair wrapped around me, 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.
It’s all a dream, a beautiful dream. I remember skating beside him last night, last week, a year ago, a year from now. I remember his lips on mine, both never and forever. Past and future collapse into this single point where Blair exists, where we exist together, where every version of us that ever was or could be converges into now. I breathe through it, through this ache that tastes like hope and fear.
To him, we traded jabs about my knee. To me, the universe smiled and showed me its center. He is the center.
Hayes’s voice softens. “You gave him something no one else could. You let him remember Cody alive, not just… gone.” I lift my head and meet Hayes’s eyes.
He’s right and wrong at the same time. He’s describing the player I’ve always been, but that player disappeared the second Blair crumpled. “Beautiful hockey doesn’t mean shit if you’re not there.”
“I can take hits,” he says. His voice is soft. “I’ve taken worse than tonight. I can’t take you breaking yourself for me. Don’t. Don’t, Torey.”
“I only want to make you proud,” I whisper. Blair goes very, very still. For a long second, then two, there is only the frantic beat of my own heart in my ears. Then, his throat works as he swallows. He turns his head slowly, and his eyes find mine in the dim light. I brace for him to recoil, to laugh, to say anything that will shatter this moment into a million jagged pieces I deserve. His voice, when he finally speaks, is a low rasp that slices right through me. “You already have.”
My entire life trajectory changed because his brother died.
“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 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?”
“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.” He leans into my touch like he’s starving for it, like my hands are the only things keeping him upright. “I look at you and I want things I haven’t wanted in so long. I want—”
“Blair, I’m already—” 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. That agony in
“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.”
“I was thinking…” His voice trails off, then comes back stronger. “Would you want to get away with me?” “Only us?” “Yeah.” He’s staring at a red light that will not change. “We could go somewhere. Together.” “Yeah?” I try to sound cool. “Where were you thinking?” Anywhere. A deserted island, a crowded city, the dark side of the moon, doesn’t matter as long as he’s there.
That,” I say, “is exactly what I want.” My thumb strokes over his jaw. “You’re not the only one falling in love.” He cups the base of my skull and holds on, forehead resting against mine. “Don’t say it unless it’s real.” “It’s real.” It’s you, Blair. Everything in me starts and ends with you.
I say, softer than a secret, “Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”
Blair is nothing but shoulders and jawline and those eyes fixed steadily on me. “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.”
“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.
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 love you,” he whispers, over and over and over again, while starlight spills across our tangled bodies and all our tomorrows wait on the other side of this perfect darkness.
this is lovely but why isn't torey saying it back to him??
This is what I lost. This is what I found again. The feeling rises in me like water, like light. I’ve held it in so long, kept it locked where it couldn’t be taken from me again. I’ve loved him forever, it seems, this love sunk beneath my skin, ink bled deep into paper. I turn in his arms until we’re facing each other. “I love you,” I whisper to him. “I have always loved you, Blair.”
about time!!
“I love you.” The words slip out of me again, unstoppable now that I’ve let them free. My voice breaks on the words, but I don’t care. I need him to know how deep this runs. Firelight catches the moisture filming his eyes, turning them to liquid sapphire. He leans closer, our foreheads touching, and the world outside the two of us dissolves into a soft blur of fire and sound. A small, shaky laugh escapes him, full of wonder. “I want to spend every day making you happy, Torey.” “You already do,” I whisper.
He takes my hands in both of his. The calluses on his palms rasp against mine, hockey hands touching hockey hands. “Welcome home,” he says softly. I kiss him. “Wherever you are is home to me.”
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.
in my universe. No matter how many times reality resets, how many times memory betrays me, he is the center of my soul. There’s no logic to it; all the rules can blur, timelines fracture and fold, but nothing touches the core of what Blair means to me. If love alone could rewrite fate, I’d already have dragged us clear of every nightmare.
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.
No. I won’t give up, or give in. I love him for a million tiny reasons, all of them adding up and up to infinitely greater than the sum of each part and piece. I have mapped him with my kisses and my touch, crawled inside his quiet, tender places, and worshipped at the fault lines of his soul. His wounds speak to mine, and mine turn soft in his hands.
He is proof that love can build a man, and rebuild him if he falls apart. He taught me the worth of persistence and of hope that does not wither or rot, and he taught me that love isn’t a word, it’s lived day by day.
I close the distance between us and pour my answer into my kiss. 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.
breathing finally evening out. Warmth bleeds outward from where he settles against me, and he shifts just enough for his nose to nudge behind my ear. He hums low in his throat, his arms tightening around my waist. I don’t need to look at him to know he’s watching me. His lips brush my skin as he says softly, “I’ve got you.” The candles gutter on the dresser. Their light slides over his shoulder and across the rumpled line of his jaw. Damp hair clings to his brow, and sweat cools on our skin. His breath stirs the hair at my temple. “I love you,” he whispers. “Never forget that.” I close my eyes
...more
I try to burn this into my soul: the salt-sweet taste of his skin, how his fingers curl around mine, the impossible tenderness in the space between his heartbeat and mine. If I’m going to lose this again, if I’m destined to watch it all unravel, then I’ll take this with me. Every cell, every nerve ending, every fragment of my soul will remember. If time is a loop, let tonight be the axis it turns on.
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.
If blair dies i will throw my kindle against the wall
“I’ll always fight back to you.” I have, and I would again, as many times as fate needed me to. I would make the slow, terrifying, beautiful crawl back to him in every life, in every time, with every breath I draw.
Our fingers thread together like they’ve done a thousand times, and like they’ll do it a thousand times more, for the rest of our lives.
