“THAT’S IT,” DANI said emphatically, propping herself up against the pillows. “You’re not allowed to make decisions about your love life anymore.”
I rolled my eyes and shifted my body in her bed, crossing my left ankle over my right instead of the other way around. My legs and feet were going numb from being in the same uncomfortable position for too long—I shuddered to think how uncomfortable she must be by now, which was all the more reason I kept bringing her goodies. “Hate to break it to you,” I said, “but you don’t exactly get a say in this. And I don’t know that I’d call it a love life, anyway. I wouldn’t say I have one of those. Besides, Blake and I have only been on one date. One.”
“Two.” She scowled spectacularly. My homegirl was nothing if not dramatic. “And the fact that you’re calling him Blake now speaks volumes.”
“I’m not counting the first one. It was a huge flop due to a misunderstanding. We’re starting from scratch.”
“Scratch sounds good. As in if he does anything to hurt you or if he comes near me, I’ll scratch his eyeballs out.”
“Good thing he won’t be coming near you, then.”
“Are you scared to bring him near me? I think you are. And I think it’s because you know he doesn’t deserve you.”
“And it’s even better that you’re stuck in bed so you can’t do anything to him,” I added, ignoring what she’d said about him not deserving me. If anything, I was starting to think it might be the other way around. I’d thought nothing but the worst of him for so long, and most of it was due to a misunderstanding. He had his fair share of flaws, sure. But who didn’t? I definitely hadn’t been giving him enough credit when it came to his ability to see past my flaws—and my own inability to do exactly that.
“I will cut off his balls with a rusty spork if he does anything to hurt you,” Dani said fiercely. “I notice you conveniently neglected commenting on that part of my statement.”
“He can’t hurt me unless I let him.” And I wouldn’t be allowing him close enough to hurt me. Would I? Hmm. Didn’t think so. But still… “And to cut off his balls, you’d have to be close enough to reach them. And you’d have to get your hands on a rusty spork. No one in your life is going to give you access to either of those anytime soon.”
“I can get my hands on one,” Dani insisted.
“And I can inform Cody and everyone in your family of your plans and make sure it doesn’t happen,” I countered. “Between them, I’d guess your father, Cody, Jamie, Luke, and now Cole can restrain you.”
She harrumphed. “All sorts of places will deliver. Some of them even deliver within an hour. I’ve got an app on my phone for that.”
Further proof that there truly was an app for everything.
I chuckled. “And you’re stuck in bed, so how are you going to accept your delivery?”
“Just because I’m supposed to stay in bed as much as possible doesn’t mean I’m completely incapable of getting out of it. I have to get up to use the bathroom and other crap every now and then, you know.”
“Doesn’t mean you should be going up and down stairs. Especially not on your own. That sounds like an accident waiting to happen.”
“I can hold on to the rails.”
I lifted a dubious brow. “So you’d put your baby at risk over this? You’d take the chance of falling down the stairs just to prove a point or get revenge for a slight when you don’t even know the full story?”
Dani gave me a pout that could put all other pouts in the history of the world to shame. Apparently, I’d finally struck the right nerve.
“What kind of misunderstanding?” she demanded, making me do a double take.
“Huh?”
“You said it was just a misunderstanding on that first date.”
“The date that we’ve agreed wasn’t a date?”
She waved a dismissive hand through the air. “I haven’t agreed to anything.”
Wasn’t that the truth? I sighed. “He said something that I took to mean one thing when really, it was about something else entirely.”
“Maybe he’s just trying to save face by claiming that. Maybe he really did mean the other thing and he just wants to get back on your good side. I mean, the guy has no filter. He says everything he’s thinking—but that means he has to be thinking it to begin with, or it wouldn’t come out of his mouth.”
I chose to ignore the niggling bits of doubt that wanted to creep back into my mind. She had a point, no matter how much I wanted to believe what Blake had told me. I didn’t want Dani to be right. For some reason, I wanted to believe in Blake and his pure intentions.
Was it lust talking, though? Was I only having a change of heart because of the sensations he’d roused in my body when he’d kissed and touched me? It was hard to know, because I’d never been involved in any relationship of this sort before now, and so I had nothing to gauge my response against other than the ways I felt when I read certain books or watched certain movies.
But I wasn’t ready to give in to that sort of thinking so soon. I wanted to believe—not only in him but in my skills sensing ulterior motives. “You can think whatever you want, Dani. I can’t change that. All I know is what I believe to be the truth.”
She pouted. In defeat? I could only hope that she would give up so easily. She never had before. My chica liked to dig in her heels, especially when she was sure to lose.
“Seriously, though?” she said. “Koz? Of all the men in Portland that you could have possibly started a relationship with, why does it have to be Koz?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it a relationship. Not yet, at least.”
“Meaning you want it to be one.”
“I don’t know what I want.” More than that, I wasn’t sure what my fears would allow me to go after. He’d had a point about my insecurities, and I had to be ready to confront them or else this would all blow up in my face in the worst possible way.
“You let him kiss you.”
“We don’t choose who we’re attracted to,” I said, shrugging.
“Looks aren’t everything.”
“I never said it was about looks. Attraction isn’t solely based on that.” Lord knew the attraction on his side couldn’t possibly be physical. I was moving forward with this on the belief that he was so attracted to my personality that he could look past the physical. For now, at least. I was sure things would change if and when I ever let him see what was going on beneath my clothes.
But Dani had just started to work up a head of steam. “That’s it. You’re just blinded by lust. You just need to get laid by some other hottie and then you can get Koz out of your system.”
“First off, I have no intention of getting laid by some random guy—”
“You totally should,” she said, interrupting me with an adamant nod. “A hot, sweaty screw will do a body good. Besides, it’s great exercise. You could walk a bit less and just do some boinking for your workout that day. And then you can tell me all about it, and I can live vicariously through you because Cody is bound and determined to make me follow doctor’s orders to a T, and my OB-gyn seems to think that sex would be a bit too vigorous due to my stupid complications or something, and I’m horny as hell and as big as a boat and I can’t get any action.”
“What makes you think I’d tell you all the gory details?” Emphasis on gory, since that’s all it could be once my saggy, baggy skin was involved. Was it possible to have sex fully clothed? Doubtful, but I’d have to research the possibilities.
And if I was thinking about that, it meant I also needed to see my doctor. And sooner rather than later.
Dani didn’t seem inclined to go along with my reasoning. “Because I’ll beg and plead and annoy the ever-loving shit out of you until you do.”
“And that’s different from the way you behave all the time how, exactly?”
She tossed a pillow at my head.
I grabbed it and stuffed it behind my back.
“Please let me arrange for some hottie to screw you into oblivion and remove Koz from your life,” she begged.
“Not going to happen.”
“Oh, come on. You’re such a spoilsport.”
“Nope. I’m a pragmatist. And I don’t have any intention of letting anyone ‘screw me into oblivion,’ as you put it. Not Blake and not anyone else.”
“Chicken.”
I tucked my thumbs in my underarms, flapped my arms, and bocked.
“How come you’re calling him Blake?”
“It’s his name, isn’t it?”
She let out an aggravated sound.
“You might be surprised. He’s not so bad once you get to know him.”
“Once you get to know… You like him!” She shouted it as an accusation, not an observation.
“So what if I do?”
Dani let out a sound of disgust, wrinkling her nose at me. “One of these days, Bea. One of these days, I’m going to set you up with the man who’ll get you out of your funk once and for all, and then you’ll owe me big-time.”
I had to bite back the urge to tell her I’d already found someone who could do exactly that.
And maybe he’d be willing.
But was I? Not sure.
I laughed and shook my head to brush her off. But now, I couldn’t stop thinking about letting Blake screw me into oblivion, as Dani had so callously put it, or get me out of my funk…and I doubted the thought would go away easily.
Would I be ready for it if and when the time came?
I ARRANGED FOR a substitute teacher to fill in for me one afternoon a few days later while Blake and the Storm were gone for a long road trip—because I decided to bump up my annual appointment with my surgeon by a couple of months. For…well, for reasons. Or for one reason, in particular. But this one was a doozy.
“Looking good,” Dr. Dennison said, scanning the numbers on my chart. “Your blood work is excellent. Still no problems with getting all your vitamins or your protein? You’re not missing doses or skipping meals?”
“No more problems than normal. I might forget a dose of vitamins about once a month or so, but for the most part, I take them on schedule. And eating every two to three hours is just a habit now. I don’t have to think about it. If I ever go too long without a meal or a snack, I get cranky—and I have a few good friends I can always count on to point out if I’m being a witch and tell me I need to eat something.”
“A witch?” His laugh was unexpected.
“To put it politely. I get irritable when I need some protein, apparently.”
He winked. “Your weight is holding nice and steady. Looks like you’re down about three pounds from your last visit.”
“Today it might be down, but yesterday I was up by about two pounds. It fluctuates but stays within about a six-pound range.”
“That’s fairly normal for anyone, whether they’ve had weight-loss surgery or not. It’s just how the human body works. Water weight, what you had to eat, how much exercise you got, whether you’re retaining water due to your menstrual cycle...”
“How close we are to the full moon and whether I danced naked around a fire…”
He chuckled. “The actual number on any particular day isn’t what matters.” Then he faced his computer again and eyed some more of the numbers and results. “Are you comfortable at this weight?”
“I wouldn’t mind losing another ten pounds, but I’m fine being where I am. My body feels comfortable at this weight.” And frankly, I didn’t relish the thought of losing too much weight. As it was, my grandmother was always bemoaning how skinny I was and that I wouldn’t eat her cooking anymore. Abuelita didn’t know and didn’t care about the differences between carbs and proteins and fats. To her, food was food was food—and if she made it for me, I should eat it. It could be tough trying to be healthy when the people in your life didn’t respect your decisions, but that was neither here nor there.
“Comfortable, hmm?” the doctor said. “Bet you never thought you’d say those words.”
I grinned. “Never. Not in a million years. But I like being able to say them, and more than that, I like being able to mean them.”
“And how are you feeling about your excess skin? We talked about it a bit last year, but you still weren’t done losing weight at that point.”
I shrugged. “Resigned?”
“You could probably get some of it removed,” he pointed out. “There are plastic surgeons who specialize in this sort of operation these days. You’ve been at a steady weight for long enough that a good plastic surgeon would consider you an excellent candidate for surgery. There are a couple in this practice, even. I could refer you…”
“I could get some of the excess skin removed if I could afford it,” I pointed out. “But on a teacher’s salary, that’s not going to happen, whether a surgeon would take me on or not. So I’m just going to have to deal with it.”
“Is any of it causing you health problems? Because you could maybe get your insurance to cover it if there’s a medical reason behind it. Rashes? Does it pull you over sometimes? Cause back pain?”
“It just annoys me. I don’t have anything like that going on.”
“All right, then. I’d say all in all, you’re doing better than anyone could have predicted or expected. You’re a model example of what bariatric surgery can do for someone. I feel comfortable saying I’ll see you again in a year, unless you have something come up before then, or if you need anything else from me.”
“There is one other thing I wanted to talk to you about on this visit,” I said, my nerves suddenly getting the best of me. Not that there was a good reason for me to be nervous about this. Dr. Dennison had seen me at my absolute lowest points, the heaviest I’d ever been in my life, and he’d been by my side through every step of this massive transformation. There would be no judgment coming from him. Not now and not ever.
In fact, he’d been my biggest cheerleader for the past couple of years, encouraging me when I struggled and cheering me up every time I hit a setback in my weight loss or energy level.
“Why do I get the sense you’re having problems asking me whatever you need to ask me?” he asked.
“Because I don’t know how to tackle this particular subject matter. It’s not something I’ve ever felt the need to talk to anyone about before, doctor or otherwise.”
“Out with it, whatever it is. There haven’t been any secrets or subjects that were off limits between us, not through this whole process. We’ve talked about everything from exercise to poop. You’ve told me the nitty gritty, and I’ve seen your insides. No point being anything less than up-front and open about it all, whatever it is. Right?”
He was right. And more than that, we both knew it.
I took a deep breath and spit it all out in a rush. “You told me to come to you if I ever changed my mind about birth control and so I need you to prescribe something because this might not happen, but it might, and I need to be prepared for it, right?”
He gave me a sly wink, then turned back to face his computer and scan my chart. “I had a feeling it might be something like that. You finally dipped your toes into the dating pool, hmm?”
“Something like that,” I mumbled.
“Any chance you’re already pregnant?”
“Unless I’m the second coming of the Virgin Mary…”
“I’ve got to perform a pregnancy test, just to be sure. To be safe.”
“There’s really no point.”
“Other than the fact that your insurance won’t pay for your birth control unless I do the test.”
Well, then. “That’s fine.” One more poke wouldn’t kill me. And I had no intention of getting pregnant accidentally. Particularly not if I could do something to prevent it. Otherwise, I would never have brought up the idea of birth control in the first place, after all.
“Do you feel comfortable taking a daily pill and not forgetting a dose? Or would you prefer to go with something like an IUD or a shot?”
“I already take my bariatric vitamins every day. A daily birth control pill wouldn’t be any different.”
“The pills are very effective, but so are the other methods. You do have options.”
I shook my head. “I think I’d prefer to stick with pills.”
He typed a few things into my chart. “Same pharmacy as before?”
“Hasn’t changed.”
“It’ll be ready for you to pick up later today. Shoot me an email or call my office if you have any questions about how best to take the pills. You can take them at the same time as one of your other daily doses so you won’t forget. And it’ll be more effective if you take it at the same time each day, within about an hour or two.”
Taking pills on a schedule was something I was already well used to. “No problem.”
“You’ll need to start this first pack on the Sunday after your next period. Same day your period starts if you begin on Sunday.”
“Got it,” I said. “What if I want to start them sooner?”
“Can’t wait?”
I shrugged. “Just in case.”
“You’ll be protected within two days of starting the pills on this one. But it’ll mess with your regular cycle. You might have some spotting.”
“Spotting isn’t the end of the world.”
“And be sure you use a backup method of contraception until then. And save the informational packet so you’ll know what to do if you miss a dose.”
“Thanks, Dr. Dennison,” I said, gathering up my things.
“That’s what I’m here for.” He printed off the notes from today’s visit and then handed them to me, as well as another slip of paper with the orders for me to take to the lab. “And if you ever decide you want to have babies, that can be in your cards, too, now. You’re more than healthy enough to have a successful pregnancy. And you’re plenty young enough, too.”
Thoughts of Dani’s current misery rushed through my mind, and I shook my head. “Doubtful. Seriously doubtful.”
“Mm hmm. I seem to remember you saying the same thing about how you’d never need a prescription for contraception…”
He was right, but having children was a completely different idea than having sex.
Wasn’t it?
Had to be.
ABOUT TWO MONTHS into the season, we had a long road trip with several stops along the East Coast. The games were grueling, mainly because of the travel and being three time zones away from where we lived.
Although we had to play against every team in the league, we didn’t face these Eastern Conference teams often. The lack of familiarity with their playing styles could have proven to be problematic, yet we had come away with wins against Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Tampa already. We still had two more games to go before flying home: one tonight against Carolina, and another in two days against Florida.
This was our longest road swing of the season—the longest we’d be away from Portland at any one point—and I was shocked by how much I was missing home.
I’d never been overly attached to Portland before now. I mean, yeah, Jim Sutter and the coaching staff had been great to take a chance on me after I’d made an ass of myself in my first NHL stop in Anaheim. And for the most part, my teammates tended to put up with me—some more than others, but still. Hell, a couple of them might actually like me, like Babs. Most of them just tolerated me, but that was a crap-ton better than I’d experienced in other places.
But despite my comfort level with the team and the familiarity I’d developed with my surroundings, Portland had never truly felt like home to me before.
Home was with my Grandma in Upstate New York.
Or it had been. She was still there, along with an enormous chunk of my heart, but another piece of my heart was somewhere else.
For the first time ever, I missed Portland. I missed it like crazy.
It wasn’t the city so much as who I’d left behind: Bea.
She had the sweetest, sexiest laugh. It was one of those full-bodied laughs that made your sides hurt because it was just so fucking good. And the more I was around her, and the more she laughed, the more she made me laugh, too.
I’d texted her a couple of times on this trip, the first time claiming I needed her assistance with my current crocheting project and the second time asking for her color recommendations for one of the stupid coloring books I’d taken with me.
She’d rattled off the directions for crocheting by rote, as if she hadn’t even needed to take the time to think about it. That hadn’t been the case at all for coloring; she’d flat out refused to tell me what colors to use.
“That’s the beauty of art,” she’d said adamantly. “There’s no right or wrong. If you want to make your sky pink and the grass blue, you can do it.”
“But this isn’t grass and sky. It’s a mandala,” I’d argued.
“Even more reason I won’t tell you what colors to use. You can do anything you want, and it’ll be great.”
No matter how vehemently I’d argued, she’d refused to budge. That was what led me to Googling color combinations from my Raleigh hotel room at three in the morning instead of resting up for tomorrow’s game.
Apparently, teal and orange went really well together, so I had already colored four different mandala designs with various combinations of teal and orange shades. But now I was getting bored with that pairing, so I needed to come up with a new set of contrasting colors to use. My orange and teal markers would run out of ink, and I’d still have tons of ink left in the other markers—and that would probably set off my ADHD, and I’d flip out.
Also there was the fact that I was getting bored with mandalas. It didn’t matter how complex the designs were—they were monotonous. Which, I supposed, was the point. Repeating patterns. Soothing designs. Some shit like that.
I took my laptop out and connected it to the hotel’s WiFi, and I started Googling adult coloring books. Maybe I couldn’t get anything better while we were on the road, but I could probably order some books and have them waiting for me at home by the time we returned to Portland.
I typed in adult coloring books in the search bar and got all sorts of hits. Most of them were the same mandala and landscape types of books I’d already bought, but after a few pages of search results, I started finding books that were much more interesting.
Or at least more interesting to me.
Some of them were curse word coloring books, full of flowery lettering that spelled out words like fuckwad, dipshit, twatnozzle, fucktrumpet, douchecanoe, cumbucket, and even a few curse words I’d never encountered before. And then after a couple of pages full of books like those, I found some coloring books filled with designs of pinup girls and other almost naked chicks with massive tits and tiny waists.
Fuck. Yes.
I whipped out my credit card and picked out a few of both types of books that had good reviews, and I placed an order so they’d be waiting for me at home by the time we returned to Portland. If I could add a bit of spice to this coloring shit, it might just work out for me.
For now, I needed to content myself with the mandalas, though. I went back to coloring and hoped it would lull me into sleep at some point.
THE NEXT DAY, I ended up doing more of the same. I pulled up the color wheel I’d saved on my phone, which showed me which colors contrasted with one another. Red and green was too much like Christmas. Nope. Not going there. Purple and yellow seemed like an okay option, so I selected all my variations of those colors from my marker kit and settled in to work.
Yeah, maybe I was supposed to be napping before the game, but since when had I ever managed to nap?
Since never, that’s when.
I was halfway through shading the meticulous design when my phone lit up with a text message. Habit had me peeking at the screen just in case it was from Bea—because she consumed most of my conscious thoughts these days, and even a few of my subconscious thoughts.
But it wasn’t from Bea.
Grandma: Call me later. AFTER your game, not before it. I need to talk to you.
Well, fuck. She never sent me cryptic messages like that. Never. Grandma was as straightforward and to the point as they came. She knew what this kind of shit would do to me. She knew I’d never be able to think about anything else until I found out what she needed to talk to me about.
If she was messaging me and asking me to call her after the game, there was only one thing this could possibly be about.
God damn it all. Her motherfucking cancer was back.