The Fall

by Tal Bauer

Blair’s eyes darken. “Come here,” he says. I’m moving before my mind catches up, leaning into his chest. He’s so solid, so real. I want this life, this man. I want to remember loving him, and I want to love him again. It’s going to happen, my second first kiss⁠—

I exhale and hold him tighter to me. I can do this. I can be the Torey that Blair loves, the Torey I want so desperately to remember being.

Maybe in this life, in this version of me, being good is as easy as breathing.

We stand there, holding on to each other, Lily’s laughter and the splash of water fading away. It’s like falling in love again, all at once. I don’t know how I got here and I don’t know what I’ve forgotten, but I know I want 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.

It’s such a strange thing to be happy and devastated all at once. And, God, the fear. I am afraid to touch this life I have, to hold it, to breathe on it, to walk too close in case it shatters or twists away or slips through my fingers.

Blair rolls over until he’s facing me. There’s a patience in him I don’t fully understand. What did I do to deserve this love? I wish I could remember.

So this is what it feels like to be found.

He turns, and⁠— All of my terror, all of my fear, melt away. It’s Blair; my heart and soul know him.

He finds my hand with his between our seats, hidden from view. I turn my palm up to meet his, and we lock our hands together in the shadowed space between our seats. “Sometimes I look at you,” he says, his voice low, “and I forget how quiet my life was before.”

I 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.

I’ll follow him anywhere, into the unknown, into the depths of my own soul.

“Every time,” he breathes. “Every single time, you rock my entire world.” God, there is no part of me that isn’t his.

How does he do this? Create the feeling that we’re the only people in the universe with a touch, a look? As if we’re tangled in sheets and whispering secrets against each other’s skin? Does he see how unsteady I am now, how thoroughly undone?

Here is where it matters most that I have lost my past year. No, our past year, because I haven’t only lost my memories. I’ve lost us, the history of what we’ve built, what we’ve shared, what we’ve confessed, what we’ve made. There is no feeling my way through this, no muscle memory to follow. This is a canyon I must cross to get back to him—to us—one way or another.

If this is dreaming, I don’t want to wake up. If this is real, I don’t know if I deserve it, but I’m not letting it go.

I think I’ve found the answer to all the questions I’ve asked. 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?

You are the part of me I never knew was lost, my missing piece I never knew I needed.

How can I love a man I’ve never met? And how can you miss what never was?

I remember loving you. I remember your mouth against my spine on mornings that never happened. I remember dying with you.

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?

In another life, you loved me.

Erin catches my eye from the backseat. “You okay, Torey?” I nod; what else am I supposed to do? Tell her we’re driving to the one person who makes me both whole and hollow? That I’m about to sit across a table from someone who doesn’t know he owns pieces of me?

It may never have happened, but the heartbreak I feel is real, and so is this craving.

Inside me, the world has ended, but these little lights keep casting their glow. I’m not alive. I’m not breathing. I’m not anything. I’m not anything except his, and I belong to him, and I belong to him, and I always have, and I always will, and⁠—

“Tampa wasn’t an accident, Torey. I asked them to bring you here.”

Another firework screams upward, and in the brief flash of green light, I want to tell him he was—and is—every reason I had to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep building, that he was my sun when everything turned to darkness. He is my sun and my moon and every star in my sky.

“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.”

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

“Let’s do it,” I whisper. “Let’s fall all the way in love together.”

“Look at you,” he whispers. “Standing here like you walked out of my dreams.”

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.

For tonight, for this, for him, please; let me keep this love.

“You are everything,” he breathes. “You’re the part of me I didn’t know was missing.”

Blair sleeps beside me, unaware that I’ve loved him across time, that I’ve lost him already, that I might lose him again. Each breath he takes is a beat in a song I am about to forget.

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.