Seduced by the Game (33 page)

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 him. 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.