Dropping Gloves (31 page)

Blackbeard had curled up on my chest and started purring, but he wasn’t alone. I was almost positive that I was purring, too.

“I need to make love to you,” Jamie said. “I need you so bad I can hardly stand it.”

He couldn’t need it as much as I did. I fisted my hand in his hair and drew him down to my lips, and I almost cried when they finally touched.

He kissed me slow and deep, his tongue exploring every hidden area of my mouth. He dislodged the kitten and rolled onto his back, bringing me up on top of him and cradling me against him.

I rested my head on his chest, savoring the sensation of him drawing his fingers through my hair—hair I wouldn’t have soon.

He buried his nose where his fingers had just been and drew in a deep breath. “Have I ever mentioned how much I fantasize about your hair?” he murmured.

He didn’t need to tell me. I knew.

“I want you to take me to bed, Jamie,” I said. “I want your hands on me, and I want to feel you inside me so that every time I get scared and lonely and can’t have your touch to calm me down, I can reach back in my mind and remember. I need your touch seared in my memory. I need it burned into my skin so it will never leave me.”

So he did. He got up and carried me to his bed, and we made love as though it were the last chance we would ever have. Having him inside me, looking into my eyes as though they were the key to my soul, allowed me to feel again. I’d been fighting to numb myself, not wanting to experience the emptiness that had surrounded me. But it was the moments afterward—when he held me like I’d been dreaming of for weeks on end, his fingertips methodically untangling my mass of hair—that I truly savored. Those moments allowed me to breathe again for the first time in weeks. He tenderly eased apart the knots in my hair, and I filled my lungs with life.

As the weeks passed
, leaving Katie behind while the team went on road trips was getting to be more and more difficult. I honestly didn’t know how the guys with wives and kids could stand it, especially when someone they loved was sick. But throughout the league, players did it all the time. I never heard any of them complain about it, so I had to do it, too, and bite my tongue if I had to.

It was easier for me than it might have been, since I had Webs around to commiserate. He’d been leaving Laura and their kids behind for as long as I’d been alive. Not only that, but he cared about Katie as much as I did, so he understood the emotional toll it took on me each time we had to get on that damned charter plane. He helped keep me focused when we were out on the road.

Being able to talk to Katie every day—even if it was just a quick chat through text messages—helped me even more than having her father around did. I still spent a hell of a lot of my time worrying about her, though, and I didn’t know if that would ever ease up. At least not until the doctors gave her a clean bill of health again, which we all knew would be a long time coming.

I was still sending her flowers every day. Sometimes I’d throw in a teddy bear or a box of chocolates, anything I could think of to make her feel better even if it was just for a moment. In return, she sent me a selfie every day. It was something I’d hounded her for, even though I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them.

We started on the day that she went to the cancer center to have the chemo port put in. She took the picture on her cell phone from her hospital bed, hair covered by a cap and tubes connected to her. She looked more resigned than scared that day, despite her smile.

One by one, she sent me more pictures of herself, even on the days when the team was in Portland and I was with her. Some days, she was laughing and being goofy. Every now and then, she would pull Blackbeard into the shot, and he would be a blur of movement trying to get free or rubbing noses with her. Sometimes she would have her pen and notebook in hand, ink smudged on her cheek. Other days, her pain and fears came through in every aspect of her appearance.

The one that stabbed me in the gut came when we were in Winnipeg for a game against the Jets. She took a shot of her bare feet with teal-blue toenails—Brie and Mia had been over that day and they had given each other pedicures—with piles of her hair everywhere, and a message of only two words:
It’s starting
.

Years ago, I’d been there the day that her hair had started to fall out. She’d come to the locker room and had Webs shave the rest of her hair off with Jonny’s clippers because she couldn’t bear the thought of waiting on it to fall out bit by bit. This time, we were all miles and miles away. I got choked up thinking of how she would handle it. This time, Jonny had just flown in to join us after going home for the birth of his daughter, Cassidy. He went with me to the hotel’s gym that day and held a bag still so I could punch the shit out of it. Not that it helped.

When we got back to Portland, I went straight home. She was in my bed, as bald as the day she was born, with Blackbeard snuggled up by her shoulder. I stripped off my suit and got into bed with them, and I kissed every inch of her head while she cried.

After being cleared
to be around kids, Katie had started to come to some of our home games when she wasn’t feeling completely miserable. Once she lost her hair, though, she stopped coming.

At first, I didn’t understand. I mean, she had been through this before, and she hadn’t let losing her hair stop her from living her life back then. She’d thought about it, at first, preferring to hide at home instead of going to her prom or any of the other things she normally would have done. But then she’d gotten over it. She’d worn a wig or put on a scarf and gone on with her life. Hell, when I’d taken her to her prom, she’d gone without a fucking thing covering her head.

Not only that, but she’d just spent an entire month where she had been essentially a prisoner within her own home. Her contact with the outside world had been so limited, I didn’t understand why she would put herself through that again voluntarily. It was only when I realized that every time she left her house for any reason, she looked up and down the street, searching for photographers hidden in bushes or behind cars. Once I picked up on that, I got it.

Katie wasn’t ready for the world to know that her cancer had returned. She was waiting for the paparazzi to pounce again.

As soon as I connected the dots, I called up Brie. “I think this is a mistake,” I said the second she answered the phone. “The concert, getting her up on stage with them, proposing in front of the crowd, the whole shebang. I think I fucked up. Really, truly, royally fucked up.”

“It’ll be all right. You’re overreacting.”

“I’m not overreacting. We have to cancel it.”

“We can’t cancel it now,” she said. “It’s in two weeks. Everything’s booked. Jessica and Laura already got the foundation set up in Katie’s name. The show’s almost sold out. We’ve had dancers preparing for it for weeks, and the band has been pimping it out all over the place. There are too many wheels in motion, Babs.”

I knew all of that as well as I knew the back of my hand, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had made a huge blunder in putting this together without explaining it to Katie first. Without seeing if she was even
interested
in performing with them. What if she didn’t want the world to see her as she was? What if she wouldn’t go out on the stage and sing with them? Everything we’d been planning would go up in flames, just like that.

“People will find out sooner or later anyway,” Brie said. “She can’t hide the fact that she’s sick forever. And she shouldn’t. There are a lot of people out there who would want to support her through it, and she’s not giving them the chance.”

“I don’t disagree, but shouldn’t it be on Katie’s terms?”

“Are you chickening out of proposing? Because that doesn’t seem like you.”

“I’m not chickening out. I want to marry her.” I just didn’t want to traumatize her in order to do it. She’d already been through enough without me adding to it.

In the end, I’d accepted that things had already gone too far for me to change any of it. I would just have to hope for the best and figure out a way to minimize the damage if Katie didn’t respond well.

Katie’s treatments progressed
as expected. Most of the time, she felt like shit and wasn’t up to doing much. She was tired a lot, and she ached. I tried to help by giving her gentle massages when I could, but most of the time she just wanted me to cuddle her. Her sex drive was almost non-existent these days, but I didn’t imagine I would want to get it on, either, if I were going through what she was.

The days immediately following her treatments were the worst, but after a bit of time passed, she would get up and start doing things. Webs and I had finished setting up her studio, and sometimes I would find her in there with headphones on, picking at the keyboard or strumming a guitar, humming a melody. Other days, I would come home and she would be on the swing in her backyard with her notebook, writing down lyrics or completely lost in thought. Even in this time, which for so many people would be the lowest point of their lives, Katie was figuring out who she was and who she wanted to be.

Usually, when I found her like that, I smiled to myself and backed away, leaving her to her work. Sometimes she looked up and saw me before I could escape, though. She would smile and pat the seat beside her, and she would play me a bit of what she was working on or sing a few lyrics for me. There was a lot of sadness in her music, but always with an underlying sense of hope. That gave
me
hope, too. I locked those moments away in my mind. I didn’t want to lose them.

The entire Weber family got involved in the preparations for the big night. Laura had been working with Jessica on setting up the foundation, of course, but it didn’t stop there. She was the one making sure Katie was occupied whenever I needed to get together with someone for planning some aspect or another of the big night.

When Dani came home from school for a weekend, she and Webs went ring shopping with me—Dani because she knew Katie’s style and the two of them wore the same ring size, and Webs to be sure whatever I chose was good enough to be worthy of giving to his little girl.

Luke and his teammates at the University of Minnesota filmed a video, getting everyone on the team and in the stands at one of their games to do a dance that Brie choreographed to a song called “Summer Stars.” She and Mia flew out together to teach everyone the dance and film it, claiming they were each going to visit relatives so Katie wouldn’t suspect anything. The song was Katie’s favorite by The End of All Things, and the one that the band would bring her on stage to sing with them. The video would be played on the Jumbotron while they performed.

My family was trying to get involved, too. My birthday fell just before Christmas, but since all my brothers played hockey, my parents tended to pick which of their kids they would be with for the holidays. This year they were coming to Portland and bringing my three youngest brothers—Seth, Isaac, and Jack—with them. It was supposed to be Cal’s turn to have Mom and Dad for Christmas, but he said he would be more than all right hanging out with the billet family he was living with in Oshawa, and Reece was going to spend Christmas on the road with the Binghamton Senators in his first year as a pro.

The contingent of Babcocks arrived in Portland one day before my birthday, just in time for a home game against the Sharks. I offered to set them up in the owner’s box, along with most of the other relatives who were in from out of town, or get tickets for regular seats, but Mom had other plans. They decided to watch the game at my house with Blackbeard and Katie, since she still wasn’t going out much other than to her doctor’s appointments and hospital visits.

Katie texted me her selfie for the day just before I shut down my phone prior to the game. She had Blackbeard in a grip he was frantically trying to escape from, and my parents and three teenaged brothers were all surrounding her. Isaac, a sixteen-year-old with arms as long as I was tall, held the phone out to fit them all in the shot, and he had his head turned like he was going to kiss Katie on the top of her head if not for the kitten claws zooming straight for his nose. I laughed and powered off my phone, setting it in my stall.

“At least we know one thing about tonight,” Koz said over the hip-hop music playing in the background and all the talk as everyone got ready.

“What’s that?” Burnzie asked. The two of them were on much better terms lately, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot. Burnzie still thought Koz needed an attitude adjustment and wanted to be the one to give it to him. I had decided to let those two sort their differences out themselves.

Koz finished taping his socks and tossed the roll of tape to Levi. “The best fucking captain in the game tonight’s going to be playing for the home team,” he said.

I snorted. “Not sure it means much when the other team doesn’t have a captain.”

Burnzie gave me a disbelieving look and shook his head. “Take what you can get, Babs. Take it and run.”