“Our agent says it’s good to do one every now and then,” Spencer added.
“And it only helps them to increase their presence in the local community,” Jessica put in. “It’s the same thing as when you guys get involved in something local. You don’t have to donate your time or your money, but you do it anyway.”
We did, but hockey players were small potatoes compared to The End of All Things. They were up there in the stratosphere with The Beatles and Elvis and shit. These guys couldn’t go anywhere without their security guards at their sides. It was even worse than what Katie had been dealing with, and her ordeal was more than enough.
“If you’re sure,” I said.
“We’re sure,” Emery said. “So then it’ll be up to you to get Katie to stay at the arena after the game.”
“Exactly,” Spencer said. “You get her to stay, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
I half laughed, half snorted. “Right.” That would be easier said than done. By then, she was bound to be in the midst of chemotherapy. I wasn’t positive she would want to come to the game that night to begin with, but even if she did, she would probably want nothing more than to go home and go to bed once it ended.
“You can convince her,” Brie said. “They’re her favorite band. It’ll be something fun she can do, and we all know she hasn’t had much fun lately.”
That didn’t even begin to cover it.
This time was worse than last time. Maybe not the nausea part of it, but just in general. I could tell she ached everywhere from the soft moans she let slip every time she rolled over in her bed, the notebook she’d been writing in knocked to the floor, splayed open at the spine with pages crushed due to falling from her bed. Standing here in the doorway and watching her made me feel so fucking useless. I should be holding her. I should be rubbing her aches away or keeping her wrapped up in my warmth so she wasn’t lying there—alone—with her teeth chattering from the cold. But instead I was here, leaning against the doorframe to her room, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing to make her feel better.
The doorbell rang, and she didn’t even look up. Not that we would let her get out of bed to answer it anyway. Soupy and I were both here, and Jim Sutter had dropped in for a bit to check on her, as well. That was one of the things I respected most about Jim. He cared as much about the friends and family of his players as he did about the players themselves. When he said we were a family, he meant it.
I headed down the hall in time to see Soupy crutching toward the front door. Levi came through when he opened it. And Koz, surprisingly, who was carrying a vase with white and yellow Gerbera daisies. This was the first time Koz had ever voluntarily done anything with me outside of the rink, and he’d brought flowers. I didn’t know what to think of that.
They both had notebook-paper-sized bits of poster board in their hands that had charity information scrawled on them. I’d stolen the idea from a few other celebs who’d been hounded by the paparazzi. I had handed out the poster board and permanent markers, told the guys what to write on them, and to hold the signs up and make sure any pics the fucking hidden cameramen decided to take of us as we went into Katie’s house would have the messages included. It meant they were less likely to post shit about her online, and even if they did, at least we were sending out a good message. I was sure they weren’t ready to give up on their current obsession, anyway, especially since even more of the guys were coming over and giving them more gossip fodder, but there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot else we could do, short of staying away. I didn’t know about the rest of the guys, but they would have a hell of a time keeping me away when I could be here.
“How’s she doing?” Levi asked.
I shook my head. “Not well.” There wasn’t a hell of a lot to say other than that.
“Can I…” Koz held up the vase and angled his head toward the hall.
“Just be sure you keep your distance,” I said. I had no clue if he’d been paying attention when I’d told everyone who wanted to come see her how far away they had to be.
“Got it,” he said, and he took off toward her room.
Levi and Soupy followed me into the living room, and Soupy plopped down on the sofa, putting his injured leg up on the coffee table.
“You could go home now,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Can’t do that. Rachel’s orders.”
Jim chuckled. He was in the dining room at the table with his laptop open, doing Lord only knew what. The guy was always working.
“Rachel’s orders?” I repeated.
“I’m supposed to be sure you don’t stay too long, you don’t get too close to Katie, you don’t touch her, and you absolutely don’t kiss her under any circumstances. If I fail to uphold my end of things, my wife is going to withhold certain privileges that I have no intention of giving up on your account. So I’m staying.”
“She would never have to know,” Levi pointed out, and I agreed wholeheartedly.
“Rachel knows everything,” Jim said. He looked up at us over the tops of his bifocals. “That’s why I can’t do my job without her. I wouldn’t advise putting that to the test.”
“And I don’t intend to,” Soupy said, smirking. “Sometimes I’m on Katie-sitting duty. Today, it’s Babs-sitting duty. But if she pukes, you get to clean it up.”
“Levi can do that.”
“No fucking chance.” He shuddered.
“Point is,” Soupy said, “I’m looking after you as much as you’re looking after her today. That’s just how it’s going to be, so you might as well accept that I’m going to be here until you go back over to your place.”
I rolled my eyes, but I left it alone. We all sat around talking for a while, but then I realized that Koz still hadn’t returned from taking Katie the flowers. I excused myself to investigate. The door to her room was open, and I popped my head in. She was sitting up in her chair by the window, the flowers on a table next to her and a book in her hands. Koz was on the other side of the room on the floor, knees bent and arms stretched out across them.
The thing that surprised me most, though, was to find Katie smiling and Koz laughing. She glanced over at me and her smile got even brighter.
“Did Koz show you these?” She pointed toward the flowers.
“He did,” I said, still feeling wary because I didn’t understand what was going on or how he’d gotten her to mood to lift in such a short amount of time. I mean, he’d just brought her flowers, for fuck’s sake. Anyone could do that. I hadn’t, but that wasn’t the point.
“He’s been telling me how he used to take flowers to his grandma every day when she was going through radiation and chemo.”
“I didn’t know your grandmother had cancer,” I said.
He shrugged and gave me a fuck-you look. “You never asked.”
That was true. I had never bothered to learn much of anything about the guy. I knew what everyone had been saying about him when he’d come over in the trade, and I’d assumed it to be the truth. It was the same thing people had been doing to Katie, and it was bullshit.
“I never did,” I said. “You’re right.” I had always just assumed the worst about the kid, and I figured it was all rubbing off on my brother, and I didn’t like him because of it. The room-escape activity had helped me to learn a lot about him just through observation, things I never would have realized otherwise. But now I was coming to understand that maybe there was even more to the story than I ever would have imagined. I sank down to the floor just inside the doorway, taking up a position much like his.
“She loves daisies. Always has. They made her smile when there wasn’t a hell of a lot worth smiling over. She said it helped her get through the worst of her treatments. She knew she would always have fresh flowers in the house. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if it would help Katie smile, too.”
And apparently, it had. She was still beaming. “How’s she doing?” I asked him.
“She just bought a m
otorcycle,” he said, and he actually grinned at me. “And over the summer, she asked me to go with her to the tattoo parlor. We got matching ink.”
“Which tat?” I asked.
“The one on my left shoulder.”
I did a double take. “Your grandma got a tattoo of giving someone the finger?”
“Giving cancer the finger, because that’s what she’d just done.” He sobered. “She raised me. My mom was still a kid when she had me, so Grandma took over.”
Which served to prove that you never really knew someone’s story, even if you thought you did. I’d pegged him as a spoiled rich kid who’d never been told no his whole life.
For the rest of my time with Katie that day, the two of us got to know more about Koz. Even though it was very obvious that she still felt like hell, she was smiling when the guys and I left. A real smile, not one she’d pasted in place so we wouldn’t worry.
I wasn’t sure if the signs the guys and I carried with us as we came and went from Katie’s house were helping, or if it was just the fact that she was staying out of the public eye. Whatever was behind it, the media was finally easing up on her and finding some other celebrities to feed their addiction.
That was one positive thing.
The way the team had been playing of late was another positive. Whether Koz was starting to feel more like he belonged or we were treating him more like he was one of us, there had been a huge change in the way he was playing. He was listening more and talking less, but when he did speak up, he usually had something constructive to say. He saw the ice differently than most of us, almost like he could see a play forming from up above. He realized not only where the guys on the ice were at the moment but could see where they were heading. Now, when he said something, the rest of us listened.
Our puck luck was starting to change for the better, and everyone was playing a lot looser. Well, almost everyone. I hadn’t been playing my best. I hadn’t scored a goal in nearly two weeks, and I’d hardly even gotten any assists. Those I had gotten had been due to luck more than any of my own efforts. My aim and timing were off, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried not to let it get to me, but it was. I felt as if I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain, and that didn’t make me a very good captain.
In my weekly leadership meetings with Bergy and the rest of the coaches, we always discussed the things we could do to keep the team moving in this direction, keep the guys focused on the big picture and our overall goals. Bergy was a huge proponent of goals, big and small, short-term and long-term.
Even though I knew my game was suffering, it surprised me when, during our most recent meeting, Bergy wasn’t happy with the short-term goal I’d written down: Spend a day on the road with Koz to get to know him better.
“That’s not a good goal for you,” Bergy said.
“Why isn’t that a good goal?” I asked.
“Because you’ve already done what you needed to with Koz. Now you need to trust the rest of the guys to pick up where you left off. He’s being a team player now. He’s found his voice in the room and on the ice. He doesn’t need to be your focus anymore.”
I must have been giving him a confused expression because he scowled, crossing his arms. “You need to make goals about your own game. Not the team. You need to figure out what’s going on with your own shit instead of worrying about everyone else’s for a while.”
“It’s easier to worry about them than to deal with what’s wrong with me.”
“I think you know what’s wrong with you.” Bergy handed me another three-by-five index card. When I didn’t immediately start writing, he said, “Tell him what he needs to focus on, Danger, because he’s not getting it.”
“If your personal life isn’t in order, your game is going to suffer,” Danger said. “It’s a simple fact. Right now, your focus shouldn’t be on the team as much as it should be on your life away from the game.”
My life away from the game. Right now, that was just Katie. Nothing more and nothing less. And obviously, the ways I worried about her had probably been affecting my play.
“It’s only normal to worry about the people you love, Babs,” Burnzie said. “That’s what we do. You need to find ways to channel that when we’re off the ice so that during games, you can think about what’s happening there.”
I chewed on that for a while, and then I remembered what Koz had said about bringing his grandma flowers every day because it had made her smile. He had done it because it was something that lightened her load, even just for a moment, and that made living his own life slightly easier. He couldn’t cure his grandma’s cancer any more than I could cure Katie’s, but he could bring her flowers. He could make her smile, even if it was only a brief respite. I could do the same thing.
I wrote down a new goal: Make Katie smile every day, no matter what it takes.
Bergy looked over my shoulder, and then he nodded and walked away. “I think that’s good enough for this week, boys. Let’s get ready for practice.”
“The tumor is definitely shrinking,” Dr. Oliver said.
I grasped on to that like it was a life buoy. “Then no surgery.”
He glanced up over the top of my chart. “It’s shrunk, but not enough to rule out surgery. It’s not gone, and I doubt it will completely disappear until you have the thyroidectomy. You’re skipping over steps, Katie. Important steps.”
I sighed like a deflating balloon, and Jamie took my hand. We’d hardly had this much contact in a month, and I let his warmth cocoon around me.
For the last couple of weeks, he’d been bringing me flowers every day and having them delivered while he was out on the road. My house was starting to look like a spring garden. Daisies, tulips, roses, lilies, carnations…he’d given me every flower under the sun in every color imaginable. I kept running out of vases and having to send someone out to buy me more so I’d have room for them all. That wasn’t what had touched me the most, though. He’d given me a soft, stuffed cat, a toy like you’d give a five-year-old. So you’ll have something to hold when you’re not allowed contact, he’d said. I’d felt silly at first when I’d snuggled that cat close to me at night, but eventually the thought had faded and I’d been glad for something to hold.
But now, he was next to me. Holding my hand. Helping to settle me through the simple act of touching me. I doubted he understood just how healing his presence could be, but it was a balm to my soul at a time when I felt as alone as I’d ever been in my life.
“Radiation has definitely helped things along,” the doctor said. “It hasn’t helped enough, and I don’t think this is something we want to just keep throwing radiation at. I think we definitely need to move on to chemotherapy, as we discussed previously.”
I bit my tongue to keep from throwing a fit. Radiation had been awful, and chemo was worse, but at least chemo wouldn’t keep me in isolation nonstop. I would be allowed to touch people again. To touch Jamie, like we were doing now. To let him hold me. Maybe we could even make love sometimes, as long as I felt up to it and he wasn’t disgusted by my bald head and all the other fun things that came with the territory.
“Okay. Chemo next, and then maybe the tumor will disappear.”
The doctor grimaced, and Jamie squeezed my hand, and I almost lost my shit.
“I know!” I said. “I shouldn’t get my hopes up about that, and I know that I’m probably going to end up having surgery. But I have to have hope that I can avoid it. Don’t take that one small thing away from me.” My damn tears were back, and it pissed me off. I batted them away with the back of my free hand. “Please. Just let me hope, even if you know that there is absolutely zero chance in hell that it’ll go the way I want, at least have the decency to leave me with some hope.” I took a shuddering breath, bracing myself for him to tell me the same shit he’d been telling me all along and squash my plea and my spirit in a single blow.
Dr. Oliver set the chart aside and fixed me with his professional stare. “There i
s always hope,” he said.
I took those words in and held them tight to my heart.
We spent some time hashing out all the details for my upcoming chemotherapy regimen. I would go in to have a port implanted in a few days, and I’d start the first round of chemo in a week. Dr. Oliver said I could start getting back to being around people like normal, as long as I was up to it. I needed to still limit the time I spent touching kids, pregnant women, and animals for another week or two, but I could have sex again—thank God—and have fairly normal contact with Jamie other than spending a full night together. The doctor said that should wait a week, as well, but we could gradually build ourselves up to the type of physical relationship that we wanted.
Once all of that was arranged, Jamie drove me home. It wasn’t a game night, and he’d already finished everything he was required to do for the team for the day, so he was mine until I had to go back to my place and sleep.
As soon as he opened the door from his garage, Blackbeard made a running leap for him.
“He’s so big!” I said. In a month, that kitten had to have doubled in size.
Jamie grinned. “Over two pounds now. He’s still underweight for his age, but he’s catching up as fast as he can.”
He headed into the living room, Blackbeard going along for the ride, and I followed. The fishing pole feather toy was on a table, up out of the kitten’s reach, so I took it down and gave it a swish. That was all the enticement Blackbeard needed to turn into a rabid feather hunter. He leaped and twirled, doing backflips, twisting in midair, and generally contorting his body in ways that left me and Jamie in stitches. I had to stop because I was laughing so hard it hurt, but Blackbeard acted as though he could have kept going forever.
I collapsed on the floor, flopping on my back until I could catch my breath. Four tiny paws ended up on my chest, and two wild, gigantic kitten eyes stared right at me.
“Oh, you haven’t had enough, have you?”
“Never,” Jamie said.
I flushed with heat from the promise in his voice. “I didn’t mean you.”
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