The Fall

by Tal Bauer

God, Blair’s beauty nearly scrapes the sanity off my bones. Each time I look at him, sleep-creased and imperfect in the half-light, snoring softly from exhaustion, legs spilling out in all directions, I’m hit with a wave that has no name. Happiness, maybe, cresting right at the lip of fear.

because before his first cup of coffee, Blair is apparently preverbal. Partway through his first cup, Blair had caged me against the kitchen island, where I was picking at a banana. He’d wrapped one arm around my waist and rested his forehead on my shoulder. We stood like that, breathing together, him holding me, nothing but the single sink lamp on in the kitchen, and it was… Indescribable.

Of course it doesn’t work like that. Amnesia isn’t healed by osmosis of furniture.

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.

His lips brush my temple. I don’t remember loving him, but like this, with his heart thudding against mine, I can’t imagine not.

Our eyes meet. He gets this look whenever he sees me. He keeps his gaze locked on mine longer than he should, like he can’t tear himself away. Heat washes over me in waves. I’m a neon sign, glowing for him.

“Sometimes I look at you,” he says, his voice low, “and I forget how quiet my life was before.” I cannot form a response, cannot find the version of me who would know how to. He speaks of a shared history as if it’s solid ground while I am trying not to fall through the cracks in my memory. How do you become the reason a man like this feels settled? What did I do to become the person who could fill a silence in Blair Callahan’s life?

Blair stands, and it’s like someone hits pause on the whole plane. He’s got that captain’s aura, that indefinable something that makes you want to follow him into battle. Or off a cliff. Or head over heels in love.

The only thing we’re owed is the chance to prove ourselves tomorrow night.”

No one offers you greatness. You have to reach down and find it in yourself.”

His voice softens. “Kicks.” He talks about power plays and clutch goals, but his words are a river carrying a deeper meaning. The quiet mornings, the iced bruises, the whispered confessions in the dark are all there in his voice. He’s telling me I give him a reason to believe in tomorrow again.

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.

The tension bleeds out of his shoulders as he smiles, that slow burn that starts in his eyes and spreads down to his mouth. That’s my smile, the one he only gives to me.

“Tell me,” he says against my lips, not quite touching. “Tell me what you want.” I close the distance, pressing my lips to his. God, his mouth feels like a homecoming, and I melt into him, boneless.

“Tell me what you need.” Jesus. “I need...” I swallow hard and force my words out, my voice shaking. “I need you.” Three words, heavy as a vow. Blair’s blues flare, turn molten. He surges up, seizes me in a kiss that sears my soul. “You have me,” he says against my lips. “All of me, always.”

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

I want to become part of him, so deep he cannot breathe without thinking of me.

God, we had small pieces of heaven in our hands, torn down from the sky, together.

Blair glides across the ice while I drown in static silence. I know his body. I have felt the heat of his post-game muscles bleeding into me as we sat close together on our charter plane. Haven’t I? Here I am in the dark, clutching him through the static of my phone screen. Blair in pixels, me in fragments.

If I pick up this fucking pencil and nail down the angles where his cheekbones slide into his jawline, maybe I can catch a piece of him to hold on to. Maybe I can preserve the whole ocean that stays trapped behind his eyes.

Tampa’s losing to Nashville and I’m losing my mind.

If I can remember one thing, one goddamn detail that lines up with reality, then maybe the rest of it… “I love you,” I whisper. “God, I love you.” My words hang. For the space of a breath, I let myself believe that maybe, maybe⁠— But reality slams back: I’m alone in the dark, whispering to a drawing of a man I’ve never met.

The seatbelt sign goes dark. Everyone stands. Overhead bins snap open around me, but I can’t move. Somewhere in this city, Blair is completely unaware that I’m about to walk into his life carrying a dream that died before it began.

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?

I turn the puck over, and turn him over in me. Could I compress my love for Blair into a puck I can pass to him so he could catch it, cradle it, keep it near? Could I wrap a strip of tape around my love and scribble My first, My only, My you for him?

should be moving, too, should be showering, but I don’t want to yet. When I leave this moment behind, it becomes memory, and memories have proven unreliable in my life.

I need to stop performing and start… actually living.”

Torey Kendrick, emotional disaster. Torey Kendrick, chaos knight of Nerf wars.

It’s always at the margins where I feel the agony the sharpest. The almost. The nearly. The fragments of who we were. The math shouldn’t hurt this much: one person plus one year minus one concussion equals zero-sum game. I know the equation. I live it every day.

To him, we traded jabs about my knee. To me, the universe smiled and showed me its center. He is the center.

“You’re harder on yourself than any coach would ever be. Trust your instincts,” he says. “Trust me.” “I do trust you,” I say. “Then trust me when I tell you this: you belong here. On this team. On my line.” I turn my head, and suddenly we’re too close, close enough that I could count his eyelashes if the light were better, close enough to see the exact shade where sea meets the sky in his eyes. “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.”

“Does… he want me there?” Hayes doesn’t look up from hunting down the chicken at the bottom of his Alfredo bowl. He snorts. “Jesus, Kicks. If I waited for that guy to want things out loud, I’d be dead several times over.” “But it’s his birthday.” “Exactly.”

“Blair doesn’t throw flowers; he writes you into his battle plan. You’re on his line, right? From him, that’s saying a lot.”

Blair’s voice echoes inside me: if you want something breathtaking, you better be willing to burn for it. I want to blaze.

“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.”

“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.”

Nothing here belongs to me yet except hope.

We take our time, stretching minutes into forever. I’m going to drown inside of him, lose myself entirely, and when I do, it will be perfect. I’ll shatter, and shake out all my broken pieces, all the wrong fantasies and desperate hopes that rotted within me, and I’ll be made new, made whole, made his.

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.

“I’m not the easiest man to love, and I don’t have everything figured out. I want to try to give you everything, Torey. Every day, I want to try.”

He lines up my sneakers next to his boots in the closet. He glances over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth tugging up. “Now you’re officially moved in.” I lean against the doorframe as he fusses with my shoes. There’s pride in the way he arranges my life with his. “That easy, huh?” “That easy.” He takes my hands in both of his. The calluses on his palms rasp against mine, hockey hands touching hockey hands. “Welcome home,” he says softly. I kiss him. “Wherever you are is home to me.”

Blair works through the knot of guys and throws his arm around my neck. We’re in the spotlight, on a national broadcast, in the middle of a sold-out arena, but I want to kiss him and never stop. He pushes his helmet against mine, forehead-to-forehead. “Play stupid games.” Blair grins. “Win stupid prizes. Nobody fucks with what’s mine.”

For all his strength on the ice, this is where he’s vulnerable, in the places where fear finds him.

I know how to fight for what I love, though. That’s the one thing that saved me before. It has to save me—save us—now. So let fate circle. Let ghosts prowl the door. There is no universe in which I will let go of this life. And I will not let him go.

Every version of me orbits this same truth: he is the fixed point in my universe. No matter how many times reality resets, how many times memory betrays me, he is the center of my soul. There’s no logic to it; all the rules can blur, timelines fracture and fold, but nothing touches the core of what Blair means to me. If love alone could rewrite fate, I’d already have dragged us clear of every nightmare.

His breath stirs hair near my ear as he moves behind me. I built this. I chose this. I fell in love with him through a thousand small moments. Didn’t

His hand cups my cheek. His thumb strokes my jaw. “Torey...” Blair has always been able to pack entire conversations into the way he says my name. “I’m okay,” I tell him.

Dreams don’t leave scars this deep. Whatever it was, that life left me with these shards, these instincts. When I woke up, I carried these convictions in my bloodstream: Blair is the rest of your life, clutch Hayes like a brother, your future has a name.

In this half-light, half-sleep, my thoughts soften and blur. I may have existed before I met Blair, but I never lived until I loved him.