Dropping Gloves (32 page)

I’d never spent
much time around Jamie’s family before other than Levi until the last couple of weeks. Mom and Dad had invited them over for a big Christmas dinner. Levi and Koz joined us, too, as well as Ghost, Harry, RJ, and Luddy, a few of the other young, single guys on the team. Luke and Dani were both home from school for the holidays.

My parents’ house wasn’t big enough for the whole clan, so Jamie suggested we do it at his place. We could have overflow and an extra kitchen with my house, and we could open up the gate between the two backyards for everyone to easily move from one place to another. It worked out great, with Mom and Mrs. B taking over the food prep.

I spent most of the day curled up in a ball on one of Jamie’s recliners. I’d had my latest round of chemo a few days before Christmas, and while the nausea had passed, my whole body ached. I didn’t have the energy to do much, but I didn’t want to be shut away from everyone in my room, either. Sometimes, Jamie would pick me up and steal my chair, drawing me onto his lap to cuddle with me. Other times, he was off keeping the guys entertained, playing pool or video games or something similar. That was when Blackbeard would jump up for a snuggle session. I was surrounded by people I loved the whole day, though.

When everyone else left to go home for the night, Jamie took me back to my house, carrying Blackbeard along with us. He handed me a small box that shook as he passed it over.

I gave him a wary look.

“Just open it,” he said, laughing.

As soon as I untied the ribbon, the lid popped off and a black-and-white tuxedo kitten climbed out.

“You didn’t.” I had to blink back tears of surprise and awe.

“I figured it couldn’t hurt for you to have one of your own, even though Blackbeard sometimes prefers you over me.” Jamie picked the new kitten up and set it in my palm. “She’s a snuggly thing. I thought, since I can’t be with you all the time when you need someone to hold you, maybe you needed another cat to curl up with. And it couldn’t hurt for Blackbeard to have someone else to play with, right?”

“She, huh?”

He frowned and picked up the kitten again, holding her to the light so he could check the appropriate parts. “Unless I’m mistaken. So I guess you’d better come up with a name for her before Levi gets any bright ideas.”

“Why don’t you name her since I named Blackbeard?”

“Yeah?” he asked.

I nodded.

“What about Oreo? She’s about as sweet as one, at least, and it fits her coloring.” He set her on the floor to join Blackbeard since she was squirming to go explore, and then he sat next to me on the couch, drawing my legs over his lap.

“Oreo works for me,” I said. So did the way he was kneading the muscles of my forearm, working all the tension out.

For his Christmas gift, I’d given him a hand mixer and a promise that I’d teach him how to use it while making sure he didn’t burn down the house. All of a sudden, that felt wholly inadequate in comparison to a kitten who would keep me company for years and years to come.

The two kittens ran around for a bit, but it didn’t take long before they were as worn out as I was. Oreo climbed up on the sofa and curled up on my lap for a nap, and Blackbeard headed straight for his traditional perch. I decided he had the right idea and copied him, resting my head next to Blackbeard on Jamie’s shoulder. That was one of their many uses, after all.

The Babcocks stayed
in Portland through the holidays, even though the team had to go on a brief road trip between Christmas and New Year’s. “We want to go to the concert,” Mrs. B explained when I questioned her about it. “The boys
love
The End of All Things. And it’s a great opportunity to get to know you and your family without Jamie and Levi getting in the way.”

Mom and all the WAGs helped me keep Jamie’s family entertained while the team was gone. Nicky’s two nephews, Hugo and Nils, planned some pickup hockey games for all the kids, and the Babcock boys were a welcome addition to the regular crew.

A couple of days before the big concert, I went back in for more tests. The primary one I was concerned with was the MRI that would show how much my tumor had shrunk. I wanted that sucker to be gone. Zapped. Kaput. Finished.

“Well?” I asked the radiologist as soon as I came out of the tube.

“Dr. Oliver will fill you in once he and I have a chance to go over the results,” she said. I’d known she would say that, but it still sucked to hear it.

Jamie came with me the next day to get the news.

“No change,” Dr. Oliver said, and I nearly slammed my way out of his office in frustration.

“None?” I demanded. “Nothing at all?”

“Nothing, which is actually a good thing,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “That means it hasn’t grown. We’ve kept the cancer from spreading. But you can’t spend the rest of your life on chemo and radiation in the hope that it will remain contained.”

I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear anything more he had to say, and if not for Jamie squeezing my hand, I would have mentally checked out right then and there.

“So how soon will she need to have surgery?” Jamie asked.

Hot tears pricked at the backs of my eyes. “I’m not having surgery.” In the last few weeks, the songs I’d written had finally started to come together. They were still really raw, and the lyrics were maybe a bit too emotional and honest, so it might be better for me to work on making them a little more vague and generic. But the fact was, they were
good
. They were something I could envision myself singing in front of a crowd, and the more time I’d spent writing them, the more it was something I wanted. I didn’t know if simply writing the songs would be enough. I wanted the chance to perform, to get up on a stage and use the voice that I’d been born with in order to touch people.

Jamie turned to me with a pained look in his eyes, the same sort of expression he used to have before we’d gotten back together. “You have to,” he said. “You remember what you promised me? That you’d fight with everything in you.”

“I have been,” I forced out. “I still am.”

“And now it’s time to ramp up the fight,” he said. “You’ve got to do this. You know it. We’re not just trying to push you into something because we’re sadistic fuckers who want to torture you.”

Hot tears splashed on my lap. The way I saw it, I had two choices. I could follow my dreams or my heart. I’d already followed my dreams once before, and everyone knew how that had turned out. I supposed that meant I knew what I had to do next.

I swiped the back of my hand over my cheeks, brushing away the tears, and looked across the desk at Dr. Oliver. “So when can I get on the schedule for surgery?”

When New Year’s
Eve finally rolled around, I pulled out my most natural-looking wig and even put a bit of makeup on. I hadn’t been bothering with trying to make myself look decent lately. I didn’t
feel
decent, so what was the point? But for this? I figured I ought to make myself presentable.

My thyroidectomy was scheduled for the following Tuesday. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to sing again after that, so I was determined to make the most of tonight. I was going to have fun at the game with all the other WAGs and Jamie’s family. Then I was going to the concert, and I was going to sing to my heart’s content in the audience. And damn it all, I was going to look good while I did it.

I tried on about a dozen different outfits before settling on a blue A-line dress that had just a hint of sparkle. I used to sparkle all the time, but there hadn’t been much point in wearing glittery things lately. Getting to see The End of All Things was a good enough reason to glam it up some.

Jamie did a double take when I answered my door, his eyes moving up and down in an appreciative sweep.

“Too much?” I asked, slipping my coat on as he held it up for me.

He kissed my forehead. “Never.”

The whole way to the arena, he kept glancing over at me every chance he got, his expression heated in a way that made my previously dormant tingles of awareness come back to life. There was a part of me that wished we could turn around and go home again so we could just be together. He had a game to play, though, and I wasn’t about to give up all that I had planned for tonight.

I kissed him and wished him good luck before he headed for the bowels of the arena and I made my way up to the owner’s box. Mom and some of the other girls were already there, so I headed over to join them.

The Storm were playing the Oilers tonight, and the crowd in the building was raucous. Jamie got the team out to an early lead, scoring on a breakaway only two minutes in. The guys didn’t look back from there, running over the Oilers to the tune of a six-to-nothing shutout, with a hat trick for Jamie.

By the time the game was over, my exhaustion had given way to the excitement coursing through the building. Brie and Jessica headed downstairs as soon as the game ended so they could oversee getting everything switched out from a hockey setup to a rock concert layout. I waited with Mom until Jamie came to collect me. His eyes were still shining with postgame intensity as he took my arm and we headed down to ice level.

The crowd had dispersed after the game, but the arena was already starting to fill up again. Excited fans pushed their way through the concourses, but Jamie expertly guided me to a back hallway where we wouldn't be jostled.

“Brie arranged for you to meet the guys,” he explained.

A few more turns, and then we were being ushered into the dressing room, where the band was getting ready to go on stage, and I turned into a blushing, gushing, twelve-year-old girl again.

Brie was in there, too, in full dance costume for one of the numbers she’d be performing in later tonight. She tapped Emery on the shoulder and brought him over to me, and my knees nearly buckled underneath me.

“Hi, Katie,” he said. He reached for my hand, smiling, and all I could do was gape like a fish out of water and let him take it.

A few of the other band members came over, shaking my hand and greeting me like I was an old friend. I felt woozy, probably from too much excitement, and they led me to a chair and helped me sit down. Jamie hovered nearby but not too close, letting me enjoy the moment.

I had almost gotten my nerves under control when Kellan Davies, the lead singer, sat down next to me and said, “So do you want to come on stage and sing with us? We were thinking about doing something special with ‘Summer Stars’ tonight, and I thought you could help us out with that.”

I picked my jaw up from my lap and put it back in place. I mean, yes, I was something of a celebrity and people knew who I was. I’d done quite a bit of singing on
The Cool Kids
,
but that didn’t mean I had any business getting on stage with The End of All Things. Their fans hadn’t paid good money to hear me. They wanted to hear Kellan.

“You’re joking, right?” I said.

He took a moment and then looked up at Brie. “You weren’t kidding when you said it might take some convincing, were you?”

I watched the
show from the wings, still in awe of the fact that this was even happening. Kellan Davies from The End of All Things really
had
asked me to come on stage and sing with him, and the rest of the band was on board, and none of this was a joke. It was all so surreal that I kept pinching my arms, and it hurt every single time.

“You’re going to end up with some hard-core bruises if you don’t stop that,” Jamie said, laughing beside me.

“Just trying to be sure I’m awake and this is really happening.”

“It’s really happening,” he said in my ear. He put his arms around me, drawing me against him. I leaned back and let him bear the burden of keeping us both upright. He didn’t appear to mind.

Even though it seemed too good to be true, and I had just decided it made so much more sense to follow my heart than my dreams, this wasn’t the sort of opportunity I could pass up. I wasn’t deluding myself into thinking anything would come of it. It was one night, one song. A blip on the radar that would be quickly forgotten. If I
was
going to make a career for myself in music after my surgery, it was going to be the result of a lot of hard work, not some fluke opportunity like this.

They played through several of their newer songs, including one that had been getting a ton of play on the radio in the last few months. The audience was on their feet, singing along at the tops of their lungs. Every now and then, Kellan would cut away and hold out his microphone to pick up the voices in the crowd.

That only increased when they started playing “Open Spaces,” one of their biggest hits of all time from a few years back. It had a slinky, seductive beat, and soon the whole arena lit up with the lights of thousands of cell phones. When they got to the chorus, Brie and another dancer joined them on stage, performing the dance they’d choreographed for the music video. She was far enough along in her pregnancy now that she was showing, but she didn’t let that stop her from doing all the lifts and other intricate moves that were called for. Their movements were just as intoxicating as the music. When that song came to an end, the band dropped the volume but kept playing, and Kellan spoke over the applause.

“On behalf of The End of All Things, I just wanted to thank everyone for coming out tonight. We love Portland!” Massive cheers filled the arena. “Portland has always been our home, but these days we have to spend a lot of our time away from here. It’s always good coming home, though. We know a lot of you would have come to see us even if we weren’t donating all the money raised tonight to a couple of very worthy causes.”

A couple? I glanced up at Jamie, but he shrugged, as lost as I was.

A video popped up on the Jumbotron overhead, showing some highlights from events Light the Lamp had been part of in recent years.

“For a few years now, the Light the Lamp Foundation has been helping to turn around the lives of a lot of people in this community who’ve fallen victim to drugs and alcohol. They’re putting addicts in touch with people who can help them, and they’re giving addicts a way to give back—through building homes, cleaning up parks, serving meals to the homeless, and dozens of other projects that most of us would never think of. As a band, we’re proud to support them in their efforts. And we’re also proud to be supporting the Katie Weber Foundation.”

It was a very good thing I was already letting Jamie hold me up because I would have been on the floor otherwise.

“There is no Katie Weber Foundation,” I hissed at Jamie.

“There wasn’t,” he said in my ear. “There is now.”

“Katie is another product of Portland,” Kellan said as the video on the Jumbotron switched to the one the Storm had put together for Hockey Fights Cancer night a few months ago. “She may not have been born here, but she calls Portland home, and you can be damn sure we claim her. She was only seventeen when she was
first
diagnosed with cancer. Katie’s friends and family have set up a foundation in her name to support cancer research and to monetarily aid families of children with cancer.”

“How much of this did you have a hand in?” I asked Jamie.

His arms tensed around me. “All of it.”

“How much more is there?” I needed to know. I needed to get a grip on myself or I would never be able to go out there and sing. I’d barely gotten through the Star-Spangled Banner back in October after watching this video, and that was before I knew the cancer had returned.

“A decent amount,” Jamie said.

There wasn’t much hope of avoiding all these tears, then. I just hoped my makeup would withstand it. I forced myself to watch the video, determined not to fall apart. This was my life on that screen. It was filled with the people I loved and the moments that had brought me to this place. Kellan kept talking, but I didn’t hear him. Not now. A thousand memories drowned out the sounds of the present.

I had braced myself for the prom picture, but nothing could have prepared me for the images that came after it. All the selfies I’d been taking and sending to Jamie over the last several weeks popped up in a montage. They flashed across the screen in chronological order, showing the almost twenty thousand people here tonight all the things I’d been attempting to hide from myself, even, not to mention the world.

Taking those pictures had required a hell of a lot of acceptance—of myself, my appearance, the reality of my health and present situation. But it had also forced me to love myself exactly as I was. Because Jamie loved me. He didn’t give his love to just anyone. For him to love someone the way he loved me, you had to be worthy of it.

Not so very long ago, I hadn’t been so sure that I deserved his love. I’d made a lot of mistakes over the years, and he had been here being his flawless, perfect self. He hadn’t stopped loving me, though, and that had to count for something.

In my book, it counted for a whole hell of a lot.

“Is this why you wanted them?” I asked. “For this video?”

He squashed me to him, holding me so close I could hardly breathe but couldn’t bring myself to care about that. Because it meant he didn’t want to let me go. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them when I asked for them. I only figured it out later.”

“Hmph,” I said, but I couldn’t put any heat behind it.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked, pressing his lips to the wig.

I shook my head, realizing too late that it would knock the wig askew, and I was about to have to go out on that stage in front of all those people, not to mention their cell phones and cameras and Twitter accounts. But that was all right, because they’d already seen the truth of the situation. They knew I had cancer again. They knew I was the bald alien-girl I’d been at my senior prom, so there was no point in pretending I wasn’t that person. She was me, and I was her, and that was that.

Within a few moments of that happening, the band starting playing the opening strains of “Summer Stars,” and Kellan turned to the wings of the stage and held out a hand to me, urging me to join him.

I took a breath and squeezed my eyes against the tears that were attempting to fall. Then I stepped out of the protection of Jamie’s arms. My wig slipped out of place, so I reached up and took it off, pressing it into Jamie’s hands. He met and held my gaze, and I nodded—maybe to reassure him, or possibly to reinforce the surge of confidence bubbling up within me to fight off the stage fright and fears.

I stepped out into the spotlight, moving toward Kellan. The crowd roared over the strains of music pulsing through the sound system, but I couldn’t see them. The lights left me blind to anything but what was immediately in front of me, but for whatever reason, that soothed me. Because I knew what my future held now. A life with Jamie. A life, however long, of a love so pure and steadfast and honest that it filled me with peace in a world that seemed bound and determined to threaten me at every turn.

And I knew that what Kellan had said was right. This was my home. Whatever life held in store for me, I would experience it here with the people I loved.

Sometimes in life, dreams aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. When they’re not, though, there’s usually another dream—a better dream—waiting for you in the wings.

There was something
about the stage lighting that made Katie look like an angel. It seemed appropriate, considering how she fit within my life. She always said she looked like an alien without her hair, but she was wrong.

She took the mic Kellan held out for her and held it up to her mouth. It was as if the roof opened up to let the sun pour into the arena when she sang. The video her brother’s team and school had put together started playing, and Kellan tapped Katie on the shoulder to point up at the Jumbotron. She kept singing as she looked up, and then she laughed into the microphone, shaking her head in disbelief. “My brother has some serious moves, people,” she said in a break between the verse and the chorus. “Watch out. He’ll be the next big thing.”

Behind me, our families quietly moved into place, along with just about every guy from the team and all of their loved ones. I handed the wig to Laura. Levi came up to stand next to me. He fished out the jewelry box from his pocket and handed it to me. I nodded, shoving it into my own pocket.

Kellan joined her to sing the second verse, and the crowd went wild. The lighting changed when they got to the chorus again. Everything went a deep blue, except for a spotlight hitting the disco ball overhead, giving the effect of stars twinkling in a perfectly clear night sky.

Everything picked up for a big push to the end, but then the band members dropped out one at a time, until it was just the drummer keeping a rhythm along with Kellan and Katie. Two voices and a simple beat, thumping like a heart. By the time they came to a finish, there wasn’t a single person in the arena still in his seat.

A cameraman focused in on the two singers, and that image replaced the video her brother had made.

Kellan grinned at Katie. She smiled and waved at the crowd, and she made to hand the mic back to him, but he shook his head. “Keep that. You’ll need it.”

She shook her head in confusion, and that was when he caught my eye and waved me onto the stage. “There’s someone here who needs to talk to you,” he said.

It took a second—and a none-too-gentle shove from Burnzie, along with a cuff to the back of my head and, “At least you bothered to fucking comb your hair after you showered this time”—to get my feet moving.

The spotlights blinded me, and I blinked a few times as I crossed the stage. By the time I reached the pair of them, my eyes had adjusted. Kellan handed me his mic, but my hands were shaking so badly I didn’t know if I could hold on to it. The crowd was so quiet that you could hear every time someone shifted in his seat or coughed, which only made me more nervous. What the hell was I thinking? Katie was used to getting up on a stage in front of people. She had cameras on her all the time, and she knew how to say what she wanted to when the spotlight was on her. I couldn’t even figure out what to say in front of twenty fucking teammates, though.