The Fall

by Tal Bauer

I gave hockey everything, but all it has done is broken me and laughed at what spilled out.

God, Blair’s beauty nearly scrapes the sanity off my bones.

I want the memory of us, of Blair’s hands mapping my skin, of what meals we ate, when we first touched, who started what. I can’t remember falling in love with him, or how he fell for me. I do not have the keys to any of these doors.

I want to remember how I fell in love. Let me try, at least. If I built this life once, maybe I can build it again.

How do you know when you’ve gotten everything you ever wanted, even the things you didn’t know you needed? Does it feel exactly like this?

The fractured parts of my life are finding their center, and that center is him.

This year is the dream, the one they’ll write books about. Every piece fell into place, creating this perfect, unstoppable machine. The right guys, the right mix. Except— Except the season they’re talking about lives in a blind spot in my memory. The games, the wins, the journey that brought us here—it’s shadow and smoke, and the harder I chase it, the faster it runs.

For a second, I’m staring into a memory I can’t quite catch, trying to remember the contour of something that keeps slipping away.

I keep hoping for something to slip out. One gesture, one look, one particle of proof that everything inside me is not complete insanity.

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.

“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.”

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.

Grief rewrites at the cellular level. It changes how love moves through your body.

I’d walk through fire for the way he looks at me. I have walked through fire, I have crawled on my belly, through the wreckage and the refuse and the ruin, slowly, terrifyingly, beautifully all the way back to him. And I will do it again, as many times as this life demands.

If time wants to play games, fine. If I have to live through every practice, every meal, every conversation twice or ten times or a hundred times, I will. I’ll become an expert in our destruction. I’ll map every path that leads us to ruin until I find the one road that doesn’t.

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.

a world without him is a cruelty I cannot bear.

Did I carry this love back with me or was it always there? Where is the beginning?

“Every day before you, I felt unfinished and never knew why,” he murmurs. “When you walked into my life, it felt like the part I’d been missing finally showed up.”