The Fall

by Tal Bauer

Blair meets my gaze. The entire drill, the entire world, condenses to this patch of ice between us. He’s the other half of my thought. I shift and Blair nods, enough to say I’ve got you.

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.

“You could have anyone centering you.” In the half-dark, Blair’s face is all shadows and certainty. “I don’t want anyone. I want you.”

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?

“Don’t fight for me,” he says. “That’s not what I want.” “I’ll take on the whole fucking league for you, Blair.”

“You think you know what hard work is? Or sacrifice? Or pain?” He’s not speaking anymore; he’s growling. “But pain and sacrifice and hard work are not costs: they are the base requirement to succeed.”

“And if you want something breathtaking, you’d better be willing to burn for it.”

“I only want to make you proud,” I whisper.

“You already have.”

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— God, these lights turned Blair’s eyes into midnight sparklers. He spun me in a circle, kissed my knuckles. He held me close; we had forever.

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.

“With you, the game isn’t broken, Torey. With you, I’m not broken.” He tries—and fails—to smile. “Even if I am.”

His eyes sparkle. Oh, no; this playful Blair is dangerous territory for my already confused heart. “You need an accomplice?” “I need you,” he corrects, and my traitorous heart stumbles. “They’ll never suspect you’re in on it.”

I want to ask him a thousand questions. I want to ask if he dreams about a life he’s never lived. If he ever wakes up reaching for someone who isn’t there. If he’s ever felt like he’s missing something vital but can’t name what it is.

Because I’d give him anything he asked for and more besides. I’d listen to him talk about anything—his childhood, his fears, his dreams—for hours. Days. All I want is to bring him peace, even if what he needs isn’t me. Even if I unravel. Even if I break.

“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.”

“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.” His touch burns through me, sets every nerve ending alight. “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?”

“What do you want?” The question barely escapes my lips.

“Everything,” he rasps. “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.

“Kiss me, Torey,” he begs. “Please.”

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. “Say it again.” The words are barely sound, more breath than voice. “Only you.” I turn my face into his palm. “It’s only ever been you. There’s nobody else, and there never could be.”

“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 think you already have.”

He exhales, and then he’s kissing me. His hands slide up my back, pulling me to him until there’s no space between us. Full lips. Hot silence. He tastes like someone who’s been starved for softness.

I can’t hold still; my hands cradle his face, tracing the sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his cheekbone. Every part of him I’ve memorized from a distance is warm and real and here. I could stay here forever, never breathe again unless it’s through him.

Everything I think I know about love starts and ends with you.

I stole from my dreams of him. I only know what I know and want what I want because it’s always been him. I loved him breathlessly for a year I didn’t live;

He is the beginning and end of my desires; he defines every one. All my certainty is him.

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. His chin tips up. “Yeah?” I brush the hair off his forehead. “Yeah.”

“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.”

Is he afraid I could possibly turn away from him? That I could ever tell him no, you’re not the pair to every part and piece of me, you’re not everything I’ve ever dreamed of? I have loved him forever. I’ve loved him when he didn’t know me, when he barely tolerated me. I’ve loved him through every brutal drill and tentative smile and shoulder brush on cross-country flights. I’ve loved him with my sweat and my muscle tears, with the burn in my bones, with my sunrise skates and my midnight workouts. I’ve loved him for so long and so deeply, the embers of that love sparked and caught and remade my whole world.

“Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Our foreheads touch. How do you ask someone who saved you how they were saved first? His chest rises and falls. He lost his brother, lost himself, fought his way back for a ghost and a game. Then I showed up, and he loved me enough to dig himself out of the darkness. How do you ask about that?

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

“Blair.” “Again,” he whispers. “Kiss me again.”

His arms tighten around me, and we roll until I’m beneath him. The kiss deepens until it stops being one kiss and becomes a whole conversation, one I’ve waited so long to have that I scream every syllable of it. The room dissolves into skin and breath and the faint rustle of cotton sheets. There is a terrifying rightness to his lips moving over mine, as if we’ve done this a thousand times when we’ve barely begun.

“Tell me what you want.” “You,” I gasp.

He can’t know how true that is for me, how it feels like I’ve lived lifetimes loving and losing and loving him again.

“I’m...” Words fail me. How do I tell him I’m broken open and put back together all at once? “Perfect.”

“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.”

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. There is no other way to love him. Blair was always meant to break over me, his waves scouring my soul, tearing at my shorelines and rebuilding me. He finds me, and he builds me, and he remakes me, every damn time.

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.”

“I love you. I love you,” I say again. “Only and always you.”

I’m starving for him, for the drag and push of him, for the way he unravels me. Every frayed edge of me, every broken piece, knits together around him. I see my own soul reflected in his eyes. There’s no part of me left that isn’t his.

“I was supposed to protect him. That was my job.” “You loved him⁠—” His laugh is soundless. “Not enough, clearly. I failed him. I missed something. I feel crazy sometimes, like if I replay every second maybe I’ll see what went wrong, or I’ll know what to say⁠—” There are no words large enough, or strong enough, or soft enough for this. I move closer, pushing my forehead to his temple. I squeeze his hand until I feel bone. “You loved him.”

“You know what scares me most about loving you? That I’ll fuck it up the same way. I’m terrified of missing something important again and—”

“I’m so fucking scared of losing you.” “You won’t lose me.”

“When did you know?” he whispers. “That you wanted this. Us.” I knew from the moment I woke up beside him in my dream, in my not-real life, when my broken mind was a scrambled box of puzzle pieces, but that’s not a story I can tell.

“It was everything, every single piece of you.” I shake my head. “Loving you is like breathing. I can’t stop if I tried.”