Taking a Shot (3 page)

No weird bumpy spots. Dad hadn’t lied.

The clippers buzzed to life again, and I raced back into the main part of the locker room. My dad was in the chair. Jonny was shaving Dad’s head.

“Oh, Daddy.” I’d been able to get through losing my own hair without crying, but this time I couldn’t hold my stupid tears back. “Mom really will kill you now.”

He winked and reached for my hand. I held it, watching as his salt-and-pepper hair joined mine on the floor around the chair. Jonny finished shaving Dad’s head a lot quicker than Dad had done mine.

“No weird bumpy spots?” Dad asked me.

I brushed away a tear and shook my head. “No weird bumpy spots.”

He got up and left without saying another word, heading toward the mirror.

Jonny started to put the clippers away, but Babs got up and said, “Not yet. Do mine next.”

“No!” I couldn’t believe I’d just shouted at him, but I couldn’t let Babs do that, even though the thought that he was willing to made my belly flip.

I loved his hair. It was this perfect blondish-brown shade, and he had it cut in a faux hawk lately that made me want to run my fingers through it. I couldn’t do anything like that. Dad would kill Babs if he even looked at me funny, whether he’d done anything or not—not that he ever would. I was just another girl with a crush on him. He had more than enough of those to choose from. There was no reason he should choose me over any of the rest of them.

Babs was only a couple of years older than me—only twenty—but I didn’t think age was really the issue for Dad when it came to the thought of me and a guy. He was stuck on the fact that I was still in high school, and he seemed to think I shouldn’t even date until I was about sixty or seventy, or maybe not even then.

It didn’t seem to matter to him that I’d already turned eighteen and was old enough that I could make my own choices. It happened two and a half weeks ago, actually, on the day that I’d started my first chemo treatment. Happy birthday to me. Here’s some cake you can puke up later.

Babs stood in the middle of the locker room, his hands still balled into fists at his sides, staring at me. “I want to,” he said. “I feel like it’s the only thing I can do.”

There wasn’t anything
for
him to do. I shook my head, this time feeling like I might actually get sick. “Please, don’t. I can handle losing my hair, but I don’t think I can take it if you shave yours off. Plus, all of Portland would hate me.”

He laughed, but it was an angry sort of laugh. Hurt. Like I’d hurt his feelings, which made no sense at all. He clenched his jaw, and it made his dimples come out. “Okay,” he said finally. “But only because you asked me not to.”

I took a couple of steps until I was standing right in front of him. “Thank you, Babs,” I whispered.

“Jamie,” he said. “Call me Jamie.”

As he spoke, I could smell the sweet-and-spicy cinnamon scent on his breath from the mints he was always popping in his mouth. I was that close.

I stretched up on my toes and kissed him on the cheek, right where his dimple always showed up. “Jamie…thank you.” I don’t know what made me kiss him like that, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

He brought his hand up, and I thought he might touch my cheek or my head. My pulse thundered like a wild stampede, and I couldn’t breathe for wanting him to touch me in some small way, even though it was a crazy thought in the first place.

“You’d better back away from my little girl, dipshit,” Dad said from right behind me.

Jamie dropped his hand to his side so fast you would have thought Dad had shot it.

I took a step back, almost bumping into my dad. “It’s my fault. He didn’t do anything.” I turned to face him, and Jamie backed away to busy himself with something else. “Really, Dad.”

“Your mother’s waiting for you,” he said, but I knew he was pissed. His eyes were more bloodshot than before, like he’d been crying. That was probably why he’d left for a minute—not so much to look at his own bald head.

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m going.”

“Are you two coming to lunch with us today?”

“If I can get her to stop crying once she sees me like this. I’ll text you to let you know.” I raced out of the locker room before either of us started crying again and hurried past the reporters before they realized I didn’t have any hair left.

MY CHEEK STILL
tingled where Katie Weber had kissed it.

I tried to push that from my mind because her dad was glaring at me from across the table at Amani’s Italian Restaurant like he wanted nothing more than to use his steak knife to cut off my balls and then feed them to me as my lunch instead of the chicken and pasta the waiters were serving us.

Amani’s was our go-to restaurant for a pregame meal. It was a family-style place, where we ordered a few big dishes and all helped ourselves, and the staff always knew to expect us on the day of a home game. They made it feel homey—even if right now, Webs was doing his best to prevent me from feeling any sort of comfort.

Self-preservation seemed to be the wisest course of action after I’d almost fucked up and touched Katie. The last couple of months had really screwed with my head, with her being sick—mainly because there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. That was the only excuse I could come up with for whatever idiocy had caused my lapse in judgment. Well, that and the fact that I’d completely lost all grip on reality when she’d kissed me.

Not that Webs would give a shit about my excuses. As soon as he had seen Katie take the seat directly across from me at the restaurant, he’d plopped himself down right next to her, and he hadn’t stopped glaring at me since.

She had a scarf tied around her head now, a soft blue silky one that matched the color of her eyes. For some reason, without any hair on her head, her eyes stood out even more than usual. I didn’t know if she’d chosen to put the scarf on or if her mom had insisted once she’d seen that all Katie’s hair was gone. It didn’t really matter, I supposed. But I liked how it made it easier to see her eyes. You could see a lot in Katie’s eyes, if you knew to look.

Liam Kallen jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow to get my attention, and I snapped out of it long enough to take the bowl of pasta he was trying to pass to me. Kally was new to the team, and he was living with me now. He’d joined us at the trade deadline about a week ago along with Riley Jezek and Viktor Ellstrom. Kally and RJ had been playing for the Islanders, and Eller came over from Winnipeg.

Kally used to be one of the most prolific goal-scorers in the league—until his wife died. Everyone said that when she’d died, he’d stopped living, too. I wasn’t so sure about that, but he was still trying to figure out how to score again, even though it had been more than a year since she’d been killed.

I put some of the pasta on my plate and passed the bowl on to my best friend on the team, Ray Chambers. Razor loaded his plate with about three times as much as I had and then reached for the salad in the middle of the table. I’d never met anyone who could put away as much food as he could, and that was saying something since I had six younger brothers and every single one of us played hockey and ate like a pig according to my mom.

Once I stopped staring at Katie and started eating, Webs finally focused more of his attention on his meal instead of inventing new and exciting ways to torture me.

Razor stuffed a massive forkful of pasta into his mouth. He had barely chewed and swallowed when he said, “So, Katie…you going to prom with the same guy as last year? It’s coming up pretty soon, eh?”

Not only did Razor eat more than anyone I’d ever known, he was also quite possibly the most fucking clueless guy on the face of the planet when it came to tact. I kicked his shin hard under the table.

“Fuck, Babs!”

“Watch your fucking mouth in front of my daughter, asswipe,” Webs grumbled at him.

Razor shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, Katie.” But he didn’t sound sorry.

I couldn’t make myself look anywhere but at Katie, though. She’d ducked her head down to stare at her plate and was as red-faced as she’d been while Webs had shaved her hair off a little bit ago. “I don’t think I’m going to prom this year,” she said quietly. She sounded sad. She always sounded sad lately.

Most of the guys started up their own conversations, turning their attention away from her. They probably didn’t want to embarrass her any more than Razor already had. But not all of them turned away. Zee was sitting on Katie’s other side, across from Kally. He handed her a basket of bread and asked, “Why aren’t you going?”

“Who would want to take the bald girl to prom?” She tried to laugh it off, but I could see the pain in her posture, just like I’d seen her fear through her bravery when she’d asked Webs to shave her head. She passed the bread to her father without taking any. “Besides, I’m not even going to classes right now. Out of sight, out of mind. They don’t even know I exist anymore.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” Kally took a sip of his water and used his napkin to wipe his mouth. She gave him a dubious look, but he didn’t let it stop him. “You should go anyway. You could show them what they’re missing. Make yourself some good memories.”

Katie gave a tiny shake of her head. “I don’t think I have that kind of courage.”

“You have a hell of a lot more courage than you give yourself credit for,” Kally replied. When she gave him a questioning look, he pointed at the scarf on her head.

She blushed. “That wasn’t courage. That was fear of looking stupid with bald patches.”

“Courage,” Zee said slowly, but his eyes were on me and not on Katie while he talked, “is doing something you know you need to do even though you’re scared to do it.”

What was he getting at? I took another bite and stared down at my plate. That was better than looking at Webs with his ball-busting glares or at Zee and his meaningful glances that didn’t really impart any meaning, at least.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” But then she started eating her meal and stopped talking, and that was the end of the conversation.

After we finished eating, everyone headed home. We had a game against Colorado tonight, and most guys take an afternoon nap on game days.

Kally had moved in with me when he’d been traded here because I had an extra room. I’d been living with Brenden Campbell—Soupy to the guys—but he’d moved across the hall to live with his fiancée, Rachel, and her two kids on trade deadline day.

It was nice having Kally around, even if he was closer in age to Webs than he was to me. He was a quiet guy, but he could cook, which was a definite bonus for me, and he didn’t care if I had Razor over to play video games. Plus, he was a deep thinker. At first I’d thought he was a little weird, which wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary considering he was Swedish. It felt like half the team consisted of Swedes these days, so I should know about how weird some of them could be. They tended to stick to themselves and not hang out with the rest of us, and I’d never met one who didn’t have some crazy habit like sleeping naked with the windows open in January. But Kally usually had some pretty insightful things to say—the sort of things that would fuck with your head. At least he did on those rare occasions when he decided to open his mouth and say something.

Since the three of us—Soupy, Kally, and me—were all headed the same place, we’d driven in for the morning skate together in Soupy’s SUV. When we were about halfway home, Kally turned around in his seat and looked at me with that intense stare he got when he was about to spout off something profound and life-altering and mind fucking.