The Fall

by Tal Bauer

If the universe forced me into hundreds of looping lives, I’d use every one climbing back into his arms.

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.

Why does love always feel like holding your breath underwater, waiting for either salvation or the sea to claim you?

Blair, if wishes live anywhere, let them find you.

what I already know in my soul. I’d follow him anywhere, and I have. Into fear, into vulnerability, into love. Into forever. “Honestly? I want to be wherever you are.”

Blair is the reason that storms break, the man who grieved without breaking and loved without pride, and he waits for my answer. Between us sits everything I yearn for. Longing is a ribbon dragged from his heart to my finger. Every inhale I take is him, and God, I could breathe him in forever. In his eyes, I see the man I love, and behind him, the ghost of the man I lost.

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.

Does he know that if I could fuse myself to his skin and stay there forever, I would?

he is surrendering to me one heartbeat at a time. I steady him and let my rhythm build slowly. Every part of me aches to give him more, to carve this memory of me so deeply into his soul that even fate can’t dig it out.

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

Yes. Yes. Always yes. This is what drowning feels like when you want to go under. This is what burning feels like when you’ve been cold your whole life.

He is my beginning, my middle, my forever. There’s only this, only us.

love you,” he whispers. “Never forget that.” I close my eyes for a heartbeat, long enough to feel his lips on my brow. If this is what forever tastes like, let it linger; let it echo. “Say it again,” I breathe into the dark. His lips find the shell of my ear. “I love you.” Then softer, like a secret: “I love you.” Once more: “I love you.” Three times, like a spell. “I will never forget you,” I promise.

If love could anchor us, we’d never fall. But time doesn’t suspend itself for love. I have fought and failed and found myself in him, and each day I love him sharper, deeper, truer than the one before. I will love him when he is beyond reach, and I will love him when he is beside me, always, always. This moment—his breath against my skin, his arm across my waist, the moonlight catching the curve of his shoulder—is what I choose to carry forward. This is what I refuse to lose.

This is our home. This is the life I have lived twice. I know where I am. More than that, I know when this is; all the versions of my life coalesce. I am here and now, and I was there and then, and I know the sickening certainty of what follows. I understand now; I’m back at the beginning that was really the middle, heading toward an ending I’ve already endured.

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.

He is the calm at the center of my cataclysm, my only fixed coordinate, my shore in the tides pulling me out to sea. “You and me, Kicks,” he says. He is what the universe will take from me. “You and me, forever.”

He’s making a vow he doesn’t know he’s breaking. Forever is not an open expanse of days; it’s a closed loop with an ending that rips me open every time I reach it. His forever is a promise; mine is a memory I’m doomed to relive.

My forever is the handful of seconds right now: the glare of the lights on his visor, the set of his jaw, the certainty in his eyes. I’ve tried to find the variable to rewrite our ending, but what if there isn’t one? What if loving him more fiercely, playing harder, being braver⁠— What if none of it matters? If none of it matters, then everything matters, not for what I do, but why I do it. Every second, every breath, every choice, everything⁠— For him.

What good is focus when every thought leads back to the same end? Each breath counts down another fraction of time I’ll never get back. And what good is breathing when tomorrow he’ll be gone? If the loop resets and I live this all again, I’ll be without him again. I’ll wake up alone and screaming in a hospital bed, and I’ll remember his touch and his voice and the taste of his lips, and I’ll be without him, again. And again and again and again, if I can never save him.

Victory is my damnation. I fought for a year to rebuild this life, and I have only succeeded in reconstructing the path to the grave.

victory and relief. But this is how it begins: with joy, with us. If I hold on tight enough, maybe I can graft him to me, make us one inseparable being so the future can’t tear him away.

gaze. I would rewrite the stars for you. I would tear the universe apart to keep you safe.

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?

Take me. Let them stand on that bridge yelling my name and breathing. Let Erin laugh tomorrow. Let Hayes dance with his little girl. Let Blair walk out of this night. I’d pay that price twice.

That’s my final, fixed fact. I’m grateful, I am. I wanted forever, but I only ever had a year, a minute, a heartbeat. Still, I’d give it all up for him. He is my ocean, and he is finally free of the storm.

“Don’t let go.” The words tear from me, hoarse and desperate. I grip his hand harder, my knuckles white, trembling. “Don’t you dare let go.” Blair’s face crumples. He brings our joined hands to his lips, covering my bruised knuckles in kisses. “Never. God, Torey, never.”

would have followed you,” he confesses, his voice so, so soft. “In the water, or here. If they hadn’t brought you back, I would have followed you.”

but pain is proof: proof that this is real, proof that we’re still here.

guide his hand up until it rests over my heart. “Count them,” I whisper.

our foreheads are pressed together and our noses brush as he counts. There is no prayer or promise more sacred than giving him my heartbeats.

“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.

“You promise me, too,” I whisper. “That you’ll stay.” There is no future without his hand in mine, and no universe worth waking into if he lets go.

“I love you, too. More than anything.” The ocean sits in his eyes, his storms spent, the horizon finally steadying.

I reach for his hand again, needing the connection, needing proof that we’re both here. My fingertips map the back of his hand, charting rivers I want to follow for the rest of my life.

His thumb drifts along my collarbone, and the tremor in him finds the tremor in me.

would hold him like this forever; I would carry his weight for the rest of my life.

“I’ll keep you. Today, tomorrow, always.”

Does it matter if a scar brought me to him? Does it change the fact that loving him remade me, and that he lives in parts of me no surgeon could ever reach? If they opened my skull tomorrow and cut away that damaged tissue, Blair would still be inside me, written into the spaces between synapses. He exists in me beyond anatomy, beyond what any scan could capture. He is the other half of me.

This love is not a symptom. Whatever brought me to him, whatever made it possible for us across time and space and impossibility, I claimed it.

Hayes laughs, but it sounds gruff and torn from somewhere deep, the sort of laugh that’s really grief with a different mask.

“You need me more. And I need to be here, with you. That’s not negotiable, Torey.”

He’s anchoring himself to me at the cost of everything he’s fought for, and I don’t know how to bear being chosen like this.

“Someone I love is facing something I can’t fix or fight. You think I care about hockey right now? You think anything matters except being here?”

sometimes the only way through is straight into the collision. You brace, you commit, you trust your body to remember how to fall and get back up.

Our love is the greatest truth I have ever known. This is my fight now, for him, for the future he’s willing to burn down his present for. Blair and I were meant to fly across that ice together, to read each other’s thoughts in the split second before a pass connects, to celebrate crashing together against the boards. That future exists. I just have to reach through fire to grab it.

“We heal together,” he says. “However long that takes, however messy it gets. And when we’re ready to go back—because we will be ready, Torey—we do it together.”