The Fall

by Tal Bauer

“Does it matter?” Blair asks. “The how or why?” I look at him, studying the face I’ve loved across two lifetimes. Did I carry this love back with me or was it always there? Where is the beginning? I follow the lines around his eyes, the curve of his mouth, searching for a start to our story that makes sense. This is too much, too big⁠—

“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.”

Blair never minds. He’s rewritten his existence around my recovery, and the magnitude of his sacrifice is a second heartbeat inside me.

think about how water remembers, how it holds the impression of everything that touches it, if only for a moment. “How many versions of ourselves do you think there have been?” I ask. He turns his head, the water barely rippling around him. “I don’t know, but I feel bad for all of them. None of them get to be here now.”

You make me brave enough to be vulnerable.” “We make each other brave,”

Where is the beginning? Is it with a brother’s wish? A hand reaching through time, gathering together what only he could know, how our two souls were made to be together? Did he…?

You draw me the way I hope to be, not just the way I am. I hope I can live up to the man you see.

“I love you, Torey Kendrick. I want every day with you: the good ones, the hard ones, all of them.” His voice breaks as he falls to one knee. “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” I say. “Yes, Blair. Yes.”

A breeze lifts the end of the velvet, and it brushes against my ankle. It trails from my fist to our bare feet, pooling in soft curves along the dock boards, the story of us unfurling to its last page. We stand together on the edge of land and sea, two people who came together across time, across pain, across all the barriers that should have kept us apart. Time brings us where we’re meant to be, and I’m exactly where I belong.

But they couldn’t explain to me how I knew that Blair Callahan was the man who would save my life, not only by pulling me out of those dark waters and the sinking Escalade, but by pulling me out of every crashing wave and all the thousand drownings I was succumbing to. Blair saved me in a thousand quiet ways.

I no longer need, or want, an explanation. What happened is the map that led us here, to each other and to the rest of our lives. Some might call it fate. Others might say coincidence. I call it ours.

The waves recede, then return, washing over our feet as if the ocean is reminding us that some things are constant. Some things are certain. Some things are ours.

would have found you,” he says, “even if it took a thousand lifetimes, I would have found you, Torey.”

He leans in. His kiss holds the quiet peace and infinite patience of the ocean. He is the beginning and end of every timeline.