Seduced by the Game (28 page)

I wasn’t even close to
ready and I couldn’t make my body stop shuddering, but I said, “Yes. Do it.” I
tilted my head back so I could see him, and I gave him a big, fake smile before
lowering my head again. I’d always been a good actress, but based on the way
his eyes were shining, he hadn’t bought it this time.

My attention shifted to
Babs—Jamie Babcock, the youngest guy on the team, and the one I’d had the
hugest crush on for forever. Or at least since I’d first met him when he’d
started playing for the Storm. He looked as green as I’d tried to be in order
to convince Mom I was sick. I didn’t want him to see me bald—he might turn his
back on me as fast as all my school friends had—but I couldn’t kick him out. I
was the intruder here, not him. Besides, I was going to be bald one way or
another soon. Unless I was planning on hiding out in my bedroom for the next
several months, chances were he was going to see me like that.

“Okay,” Dad said finally,
his usually steady voice shaking as hard as I was. He trailed his fingers
through my hair in the back, as though he needed to touch it one more time in
case it never came back.

I couldn’t look away from
Babs, and he didn’t look away from me. He was sitting on the bench at his
stall, his hands fisted at his sides, as the cool plastic guard touched down
against my forehead. It glided back along my scalp, and large clumps of my hair
rained down onto the towel over my shoulders. I caught a piece of it in my free
hand. The long, brown strands still felt vibrant and alive.

Not like me. I hadn’t felt
vibrant in so long I almost didn’t remember what it was like, and I didn’t know
if I wanted to be alive anymore if it had to hurt this bad.

I let the hair slip
through my fingers and fall to my feet.

It didn’t take long for
Dad to finish the first pass with the guard, even with being careful around my
ears. He powered the clippers off and removed the guard, tossing it back into
the shoebox behind him. A moment later, the now-familiar buzzing sound filled
the room again.

This time, I could feel
the metal against my flesh. It was warm from the motor and a little scratchy,
but it was oddly comforting. My scalp had been sensitive for days—a sure sign,
according to my oncologist, that the hair loss would start soon. Dad went over
some spots multiple times, then he rubbed my bald head to feel if he’d missed
anything.

He turned the clippers off
again, picked up a few strands of hair from the towel, shoved them in his
pocket, and kissed the top of my head.

“You’ve got to tell me,” I
said. “Do I have any weird bumpy spots?” I needed some warning about things
like that before I looked in a mirror. It was going to be enough of a shock to
see myself without any hair. I’d always had a full head of long, thick brown
hair, ever since I was really little. Even in my baby pictures I had a lot of
hair. Mom said I’d come out that way.

“No weird bumpy spots,”
Dad said. He sounded gruff. I knew this wasn’t easy for him. None of it was.

“Okay.” I carefully took
the towel off, looking down for the first time to see the mound of brown hair
at my feet and surrounding the chair.

Jonny brought over a damp
cloth and handed it to Dad. It was warm when he wiped it over my head, neck,
and face to pick up any loose hairs.

I got up and kissed Dad on
the cheek. “Is there a mirror around? I need to see.”

Zee jerked his head to the
side, toward another part of the room. “Over here.”

I went to where he’d
indicated and stared in shock at my reflection. It was still me—still my blue
eyes, even though they seemed tired and sunken in, still my nose and my dry
lips, still my slightly hollowed out cheekbones. But I looked like an alien. If
my friends hadn’t already dropped me, they definitely would now. Who would want
to hang out with the weird alien girl? The lack of hair only seemed to
emphasize the features that made it obvious I was sick. I let my hands run over
my head as I turned to see myself from every angle.

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.