Dropping Gloves (29 page)

I texted Katie to see if she was awake. No answer. Even though I was desperate to at least
see
her, despite the fact that I couldn’t
touch
her, I stayed at my house all night. She needed her sleep. Not that I got any. The whole night, I tossed and turned, going crazy being this close to her again and not being able to talk to her or touch her, to let her know that I was here and do whatever I could to make her feel better. Blackbeard wasn’t a fan of my insomnia. Every time I rolled over, he grumbled at me and readjusted, sometimes nipping my nose or my ear to be sure I understood the gravity of his displeasure.

Morning finally arrived. I felt like shit from lack of sleep and having flown all the way across the country after yet another loss, but it didn’t stop me from texting to see if she was up. Still nothing. I took a shower, made my breakfast, and played with Blackbeard for a bit, waiting for her to wake up.

She didn’t respond, though.

I needed to leave for practice soon. Bergy had told me I should take the day off. He and Jim were willing to call it a maintenance day for me even though I didn’t have any injuries that needed to be rested. I didn’t feel good about that, though. Yeah, the guys all knew that Katie had cancer again, and I needed to be with her, but we were finally starting to play like a team even if we were losing. Skipping out on practices didn’t seem very captain-like, so I wasn’t going to go there.

With about ten minutes left before I had to head out the door, I thought maybe I could look across the back fence to see if I could get a glimpse of her through one of her windows. Right now, anything would help to ease my worries. I went out back and walked up to the fence to find her swinging under the tree.

“Hey,” I said, and she swiveled her head to look at me. I propped my arms on top of the rails and rested my chin on them, staring. Just staring. I couldn’t get enough of her.

“Hey,” she said, her sweet voice cracking.

“I texted to see if you were up yet.”

“My phone’s inside. I came out to watch the sun come up. Haven’t moved since.”

She had on a checkered shirt with a soft, fuzzy blanket draped around her shoulders. It wasn’t cold out, but she was shivering hard enough I could see it from here. All I wanted to do was go over to her side of the fence and hold her close until she stopped shaking. We both knew that wasn’t possible right now, though.

“Why don’t you go inside and warm up?” I suggested.

She turned her head again, looking off into the distance. “Why? So I can turn on the TV and see the latest headlines and figure out what they’re accusing me of next?
Katie Weber bought a house across town so she can screw every guy in the NHL right under her father’s nose!
Next thing you know, they’ll be saying I’m screwing Dad, too. Or maybe that he’s my pimp. I bet that’s it. He’s sending you guys my way so he can take a cut of the profits, and Mom’s working as my madam. Maybe I’m busy training up all the other WAGs so they can prostitute themselves, too. I bet that would make for a great headline.”

“Have you thought about revealing that you have cancer again?” I asked. I didn’t want her to have to do that if she wasn’t ready for it, but I was grasping at straws to figure out a way to get them to leave her alone. “Maybe if you let the world in on what’s really happening, the gossip sites would leave you alone.”

“Or maybe they’ll just find a new way to twist it into something worse than it already is,” she bit off. “
Breaking news! Katie Weber is funding a radical, costly, and dangerous cancer treatment by whoring herself out to everyone with a cock and two pennies to rub together.
Thanks, but no thanks.”

I wished she would look at me. I wished I could see her face and know she was looking in mine, so I could reassure her in some way. But there wasn’t much I could say, and it felt as if there was even less that I could do to actually help.

“I’ll figure something out to get them to leave you alone,” I said.

“Good luck with that. For all we know, they’ve found some way to tap our phones. They’ve probably been recording our calls, and they’re saving that to broadcast sometime soon, when the latest bit of gossip has died off.
Sordid phone sex with Katie Weber is just a button away…for the right price!
Just wait. It’s coming.”

But it wasn’t. Not if I had anything to say about it.

“New Year’s Eve?”
I repeated after Brie, glancing up at her, Jessica, and the guys from The End of All Things to be sure I’d heard correctly. They nodded. It seemed so far off even though it wasn’t all
that
far at this point.

It was a day off for the Storm, and Katie was with her mother at the cancer center to get another round of radiation. She’d refused to let me come with her.
All I have to do is drink some nasty shit and wait for it to start working. And by the time it does, all I want to do is puke, and you can’t be around me then, anyway.
I’d still go over to spend my couple of hours with her later, but this had given me the perfect excuse to get together with Brie and see where our plans stood. She’d set up a meeting with the band and Jessica so we could all be together at the same time and hash out the finer details. We were at the Light the Lamp offices, and Jessica’s assistant was manning the phones while we talked over coffee and Voodoo Doughnuts.

“That’s the soonest we can possibly get something put together,” Spencer Braddock, the lead guitar player, said. “We’ve got the final leg of our tour to finish up. While we’re doing that, we can have Brie, Jessica, and some of our people back here doing the legwork.”

“But what about the Light the Lamp event that night?” I argued, adding cream to my coffee. Every year, Jessica put on a big event on New Year’s Eve for her foundation, a party where addicts and anyone else who wanted to join in could come and hang out for a sober good time. It acted as a fund raiser for Light the Lamp, too, since she got local hotshots to be celebrity drivers for the night. If we were in town, she usually wrangled a bunch of the Storm players to take part. Katie and Beau had done it last year since they’d been in town. People would bid on the opportunity for us to drive them home afterward. It didn’t seem fair to take that night away from Light the Lamp in order to do something for Katie.

“We’re going to figure out a way to combine it all into one big night,” Jessica reassured me. “This is actually going to work out great for Light the Lamp because if we can get the band involved, the turnout will be through the roof.”

“We’ll pay for the production costs for the concert out of the ticket prices,” Brie said. “Everything that’s left after that is going to be split equally between Light the Lamp and the Katie Weber Foundation.”

“Laura and I should be done getting the new foundation set up in the next couple of weeks, so it’ll all work out,” Jessica said.

“And you guys don’t care that you’d be working for free?” I asked the band.

“It won’t be the first charity gig we’ve done, and it won’t be the last,” Emery Johnson said. He was the keyboard player for the band, and the one who did most of the songwriting. He was the one I wanted to get Katie involved with more than any of them.

“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 motorcycle,” 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.