He lifted a brow at me in challenge.
I turned tail and headed for the door. The sooner I could get her away from his prying eyes, the better. Part of me wondered if Webs had gotten them to install video cameras at the school gym so he could spy on us from home. I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Wait!” Laura practically shouted behind us. “Pictures. I need to have pictures.”
“They’re already late enough,” Webs said, but he turned around. “They’ll have a photographer at the prom, won’t they?”
“Have you seen the kinds of pictures those photographers take?” Laura countered.
“It’ll be fine, Mom,” Katie said. “You’ve got the pictures from last year anyway. And we’ll make sure they take good ones. Won’t we?” She looked at me when she asked that last bit.
I nodded. “Absolutely.” Not that I had a clue how I could make sure of something like that, but I had seen Laura Weber staging photo shoots before at team events—ordering people around like a drill sergeant. If I let her stop us now, we’d be here for another hour. Maybe longer.
She scowled, but she let us go.
When we got to my car, I opened the passenger door for Katie. Webs helped her in and shut the door before spinning around on me.
I had my free hand up in self-defense without thinking. “I swear I’m not going to—”
“Shut up, Babs,” he interrupted.
I dropped my hand to my side, readjusting my grip on Katie’s sweater and scarf. “Sorry.”
“I just wanted to thank you. For this.” Webs waved his hand haphazardly, encompassing everything around us. “And to say I’m sorry I’ve been an ass. I just don’t know—” He cut himself off just as suddenly as he’d cut me off, and he blinked hard a couple of times. “I just needed someone to blame. Someone to take it out on. And I used you for that, even though it wasn’t fair.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” It might suck for me, but it made me really glad Katie had a dad who cared enough to be like that. That’s how families are supposed to be.
“I do,” Webs said. “And I really do appreciate what you’re doing for my little girl, but if she isn’t inside my house by midnight, all my previous threats are back in play.”
I bit down on my tongue to keep myself from laughing. Moments like this, I was never sure if he was joking around with me or being serious. I figured it was somewhere in the middle. “Yes, sir. I’ll have her back.”
“You’d better. And if you fucking call me sir again…” Webs headed back toward the house without finishing his thought. “Take my little girl to her prom, Babs. Get out of here before I change my mind.”
I headed around to the driver’s side and got in with an uncontrollable smile on my face. I set her scarf and sweater down on the center console.
Katie put her hand on my forearm as I put the key in the ignition. “Was he horrible? Please tell me he wasn’t awful to you.”
I turned the key, and the engine purred. I might have been purring, too, because she was touching me. Shit, I was a mess. “He wasn’t awful. He just loves you,” I said finally. I almost said something crazy like Just like I love you, but I stopped myself. I didn’t even know if I loved her. I knew I liked her a lot—more than I should, considering she was Webs’s daughter. But tonight wasn’t about me spilling my guts and making her feel like she needed to reciprocate. Tonight was about giving Katie a night where she could be a princess. “But we’d better not be late getting you home. I don’t want him to turn my car into a pumpkin.” Or me, for that matter.
I’d never imagined I would think the school gym looked pretty, but that was exactly the right word to describe it.
The prom committee had strung tons of white Christmas lights from a disco ball in the center out to every corner of the enormous space, like a canopy of fairy lights hanging above us. Ribbons of red and white—our school colors—had been woven through them. They drifted down to flutter over our heads. The typical folding tables you’d expect to find had been covered with delicate tablecloths, and each of them had some sort of centerpiece—a flower arrangement, candles and mirrors, those sorts of things. Even the chairs had been draped with cloth covers, so they fit the decorative scheme.
I held Jamie’s hand tightly to steady myself and let my head fall back to take it all in as soon as we got inside. I wobbled slightly, dizzy from tilting my head back so far.
He gently tugged me closer to him, lending me more of his strength. “I’ve never seen a school gym decked out like this before,” he said.
“Never? Not even at your own prom?”
“I didn’t get to go to my prom.” Jamie shrugged and flashed a dimpled grin in my direction. “We were playing in the Memorial Cup while it was going on.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that he probably would have missed out on his prom, among countless other things when he’d been in high school—things I took for granted. He’d played for the Windsor Spitfires in major junior hockey, so he hadn’t even lived with his family for his last couple of years of school. He’d lived with a billet family.
My dad may be a professional athlete and so I had a lot of privileges that other kids hadn’t, but for the most part, Mom and Dad had made sure our lives were as normal as possible. Even now, most people Jamie’s age were off in college trying to figure out who they wanted to be when they grew up. He was already living it.
“Do you ever feel like you’re missing out?” I asked. “Do you wish you’d done things a different way?”
“Sometimes.” Jamie put his arm around my back, supporting me more than he could by just holding my hand.
I got goose bumps everywhere he touched me. It was like an electrical current was flowing to each point of contact, leaving me hyperaware. He met my gaze and held it so long I had to fight off a head-to-toe shiver.
“But then I remember,” he said, “that I’m experiencing things most other people never will, so I should be grateful for what I have. And then I remember that if not for the path I chose, I wouldn’t know you right now. I would hate that.”
He made it sound like knowing me could make his decisions worthwhile. Like I really mattered to him. I hadn’t felt like I mattered to anyone but my family in months. My heart thundered so loud he must’ve been able to hear it.
I bit my lower lip. “Should we go get pictures taken now, do you think? So we don’t forget and my mom doesn’t kill us?” I needed to redirect my thoughts—to do something so I could stop myself from wishing for more than what Jamie was really offering. Wishing for anything, really.
“If you want. I’ll do anything you want me to do tonight, Katie.”
He sounded so serious and earnest. There he went, being completely perfect again. It seemed like I was destined for a huge letdown at some point because I kept building his pedestal higher and higher in the sky, so high he would surely have to fall from it somewhere down the line.
But not right now. Right now, at least for tonight, he could be perfect.
“Then let’s do that before I change my mind and don’t want permanent reminders of how I look.” Getting pictures taken as an alien princess might not be my brightest move ever.
The photographer was set up in the opposite corner from where we’d entered the gym. As we walked over to him, I felt stares following us each step of the way.
I couldn’t make myself look at them. It would hurt too much to see their pity or disgust at my bald head, or their shock to see me at prom, or their jealousy that someone like Jamie would be here with someone who looked like I did right now. I didn’t want to feel any of the emotions those things would call to the surface. Not tonight. So I stared straight ahead at our destination, not letting my eyes wander even the tiniest bit.
There were a few couples ahead of us in line when we arrived at the photo station. I watched the photographer work, but all the while I kept reveling in the corded muscles in Jamie’s arm as he held me close to h
im. He made me feel safe and secure, just like my dad always had, but it was different, too. None of the boys I’d ever dated had made me feel that way—like he could fight off anything in the world that might hurt me.
They couldn’t fight off everything, though—Jamie and Dad. They couldn’t fight off leukemia. The drugs and doctors had to do that. And me. Somehow, I had to find the strength within me to fight back, and the courage, too, even though all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry some days. Even though sometimes I just wanted it all to end. I had to figure out how to kick cancer’s ass even though I didn’t feel strong enough to kick a fly’s ass right now. He was making me want to find that strength, though. I let myself lean on Jamie a little more than I had been, let him take a bit more of the burden of my weight.
Parker Jones and Sasha Marino were up first—the quarterback of the football team and one of the cheerleaders. The photographer and his assistant had them pose under a flower-lined arch, with Parker standing behind and just to the side of Sasha, putting his hands on her hips. It looked as completely forced and unnatural as it possibly could. I’d seen dozens of good pictures of those two over the years—they were completely photogenic—but something told me these would not be among their better shots. They definitely wouldn’t be going on the keeper shelf. The photographer worked them through a series of three other poses, each as awful as the last, before they were done.
When Parker and Sasha walked past us, I realized I was still staring at them. Sasha caught my eye. She smiled, but her eyes kept moving back to the top of my head. I bit down on my tongue so I wouldn’t say anything I might regret. I’d known before I’d ever agreed to come here that these were the types of reactions I would get. Expecting something and experiencing it were two very different things, though.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jamie said quietly in my ear once they were gone. “They’ll get over it. If they don’t move on, then they don’t matter.”
“I’m not worried about them.”
“You are. You’re all tense.” He slid his hand up my back to my shoulder and kneaded, his hands touching my bare skin and making me shiver. “I don’t want you to worry about anything tonight.”
Right. No worrying. That was easy for him to say. Not so easy for me to do. I took a breath and tried to relax into him while we watched the photographer pose the next three couples in the exact same horrible poses he’d put Parker and Sasha in.
“I don’t want to do those poses,” I said to Jamie when the couple in front of us was finishing up. It was bad enough that I was going to be an alien in my prom pictures. I didn’t want this guy’s bad staging to make them even worse than they already would be.
“Okay. Then we won’t do his poses.”
A moment later, the photographer called us over and positioned us beneath the archway. Like everyone else, he kept staring at my head. I was starting to wish I’d given in and worn the scarf as Mom insisted, but more because I hated how they were staring at my head than because of being cold. He looked up at Jamie. “If you’ll stand just behind her like—”
“We’re going to do our own poses, actually,” Jamie interrupted him.
“But, I…” He trailed off when Jamie turned me around to face him, wrapped both his arms around me, and enfolded me in a hug. “Right,” the photographer said. “You’re right, that’s better. Just…here.” He adjusted my arms so I was holding on to Jamie’s rib cage and tilted my head so I was looking toward the camera, my cheek resting on Jamie’s chest. “That’s it. On three…two…one.”
As the camera bulbs flashed, I felt Jamie’s lips press down on the top of my head. My pulse came to a standstill and then jolted back to life. What was he doing? Why would he kiss me like that? No one had kissed me like that other than Daddy, right after he’d shaved my head—not in as long as I could remember.
“Beautiful. Stay right there,” the photographer said. I forced myself not to snap my head back and question Jamie, and the bulbs lit up again. After a few shots, the photographer urged us to try something else.
Jamie tipped my chin up so I could look into his eyes. “Hold on around my neck.”
I had to stretch up on my tiptoes to reach him that way. While I did that, my breathing going haywire, he dropped his head down so that our foreheads were touching and the end of his nose brushed the end of mine.
It was too perfectly sweet and intimate. I couldn’t take it. The way he was looking at me, I felt like I was naked—not just my head, but all over—and he could see every part of me. Surely the camera must see it, too. I turned my eyes away, desperate to find a way to protect my heart from shattering like glass.
“No. No, look at him,” the photographer said. “Just like you were a second ago. It was perfect.”
It was perfect, which was why I couldn’t keep doing it without falling apart.
“Just for a minute,” Jamie said quietly.
I raised my gaze up to meet his again, mainly because he’d asked me to, but the sting of tears pressed at the backs of my eyes. He had a tear in his eye, too. The realization of that left me weak-kneed, and only Jamie’s strong arms holding on to me kept me upright.
The photographer snapped a few shots, and then he asked for one more pose. I didn’t want to do another pose. I wanted to walk away from there and not look back. Because even if the camera wasn’t seeing the most hidden, private parts of me, I knew that Jamie was—parts that had been buried so deep that I wasn’t even sure if I’d seen them before myself. The parts where all my fears had been hiding. The parts that weren’t ready to die yet. The parts that still had some hope.
And that was terrifying. I didn’t want to be so vulnerable. So exposed.
I tried to let him go because I needed to walk away and pull myself together again, but Jamie lifted me into his arms before I could. I sucked in a breath, my jaw hanging slack. I put one arm across his shoulders for balance, but I didn’t need to. Jamie wouldn’t drop me. He would never let me get hurt if he could help it—I could feel that in the gentleness of his touch and see it in the concern drawing his eyebrows together.
He sat on the gym floor, keeping me in his arms and positioning me on his lap.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I want,” the photographer said. He directed his assistant over to adjust my legs, wrapping them so that they curled around. She fidgeted with the way the skirt of my gown draped over them before giving a satisfied nod.
When she moved out of the shot, sniffling and brushing away tears of her own, Jamie said, “I want to kiss you.”
I must have misheard him. My whole body trembled, and I shook my head. “What?”
His gaze traveled over my whole face—my eyes, my cheeks, my lips—as though he was memorizing every detail and etching them on to the surface of his mind. “Can I kiss you?”
“I—” I couldn’t breathe for needing to let my tears loose, but I could never tell him no over something I’d been dreaming of for so long. “Yes,” I whispered.
His lips pressed to mine, soft and tender, and the dam holding back my tears burst just as the camera’s flash lit us up. He cupped my cheeks with both hands and used his thumbs to brush away the wetness on my cheeks. Gently, so very gently, he moved his lips over mine. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t even slow the tears because I was too filled with emotions. They were of every variety, all filtering through me at such a rapid pace I couldn’t even hope to keep up: joy, fear, hope, longing. My sobs kept coming, uncontainable and impossible to explain with words.
Our kiss tasted like cinnamon breath mints and the salt of my tears.
My eyes fluttered open when he broke away from me. His were so blue, so intense, so deep as he stared back at me, still caressing my cheeks with the pads of his thumbs.
“Do I need to apologize?” he asked, his voice cracking on the words.
My gut clenched at the thought of him apologizing for making me feel so incredibly safe and protected and loved. “No. Please don’t.”
Jamie nodded. He kissed me again, on the forehead this time, and I heard the shutter of the camera once more.
A boy whose face I recognized but whose name I couldn’t remember stood over us, holding out a stack of tissues for me. I took them from him and wiped my eyes. “Thank you,” I said, but my voice was all stuffy and watery.
He kept his hand out and reached for mine. “I can help you up, Katie.”
When I was on my feet again, Jamie stood next to me and put his arm around my waist. He turned us, and in the area where the line waiting for the photographer had been, there was now a massive crowd—probably at least a hundred students, many of whom had been my good friends—all of them staring. Or I thought they had been my friends. Maybe they still were. Half of them were crying just as hard as I had been.
My breath caught, and I couldn’t make my legs move. I leaned back into Jamie’s chest.
“Are you all right?” he asked me, his voice soft and sure by my ear.
I nodded.
“I’m right here with you,” he said, and he guided me toward this sea of faces I’d written out of my life.
Before I could process anything that had just happened, I got sucked into the sobbing whirlwind of people I’d thought had written me off as dead. Some reached for me to hold my hand as I passed. Others drew me in for a hug.
“We’ve missed you, Katie,” they said.
They’d missed me? If they’d missed me, why hadn’t they made any effort to see me? To support me when I might be dying? Why had they all been avoiding me like I had the plague? Maybe Mom had been right after all and they just didn’t know how to deal. Maybe they were just as scared as I was.
A few kept saying, “You’re so brave.”
I didn’t feel brave. I had felt terrified every single day since the doctor told me I had cancer, and my fear only seemed to grow by the minute. Even now, I wouldn’t be here at all if not for Jamie—if not for him asking to bring me here, for him holding on to me and lending me his strength. I would be hiding out in my house and letting that fear take root in my mind. Letting it suck all the hope out of me until I wanted to give in.
Seduced by the Game Page 24