Double Major (Portland Storm)

by Catherine Gayle

  Katie leaned over so she could whisper in my ear. “Kally seemed really jealous when this chick paired you up with Burnzie for all the wedding stuff.” Kally was what everyone involved with the team called Liam. They all had nicknames for each other. It could be a little confusing at times, but it didn’t take too long to sort it out usually…especially since I knew most of them by their nicknames and not by their real names, anyhow.

  Had he really seemed jealous? Liam knew there was no need for anything like that. I didn’t want to be with anyone but him, and the wedding events would only last for a weekend. Besides, it wasn’t as though I was going to be doing much at all with Keith Burns. He was going to escort me out, and we’d stand next to each other at a few points, and I was pretty sure she’d said that we would have to dance together for one dance. That was all. But out of all the members of the wedding party, Burnzie and I were the only two who weren’t already part of a couple that had both halves involved in the wedding. It only made sense to pair us up together.

  I tried to brush Katie’s comment away, but it kept niggling at the back of my mind while we went through the rehearsal, which proved to be a whole lot of standing around and waiting for instructions.

  A few minutes later, Liam returned to the chapel and took a seat in the back row, next to the Storm’s goaltender Nicklas Ericsson. My focus landed squarely on Liam instead of all the things the wedding coordinator was telling us. Sure enough, when we ran through the way we would be exiting, with me holding onto Burnzie’s arm as we walked down the aisle, I felt Liam’s eyes boring into the pair of us. Katie had been right, even if I didn’t understand why any of this would make Liam jealous.

  Not long after that, we finished up with the rehearsal, and we all went to a nearby steak-and-seafood restaurant for the rehearsal dinner. Liam handed my phone back to me as we walked out to our rental car. I dropped it into my purse before reaching for his hand.

  “Katie thinks you’re jealous of Burnzie.”

  He flashed me an earth-stopping, heart-shattering sort of smile. “Katie’s very perceptive.”

  We arrived at the car, and he opened the door for me.

  “You know there’s no reason for that.”

  He waited for me to sit, then closed my door and went around to the driver’s side. Once he was in his seat, he said, “It’s just that he’s getting all your attention for a couple of days.”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s getting all my attention.”

  “More of it than I want him to get.” He put the car in reverse and draped his arm over the back of my seat, looking over his shoulder to back out.

  “But you’re the only one getting my kisses.”

  Liam gave me a heated look and kissed the tip of my nose before shifting into drive.

  “What did you tell Chris about the downstairs bedroom?”

  “That,” he said silkily, “is a surprise.”

  “A surprise, as in they burned the house down and we have to start this whole process all over again? Or a surprise, as in they made it into a shrine to Puck?”

  Liam burst out laughing, which brought a smile to my lips, too. “Is that what you want it to be?” he asked. “A room for your dog?”

  “Not necessarily.” But now that I thought about it, it wasn’t a horrible idea. Puck was getting bigger every day, quickly outgrowing all the dog beds and other things we’d gotten for him. I was starting to think he might outgrow the backyard of this new house sooner rather than later, and then I didn’t know what we’d do. I might have to take him to the park a lot more than I’d initially expected to. Of course, then maybe I could plan doggie dates with Sara and Jonny’s dog, Buster. That would be nice. “Just tell me. Please,” I begged.

  Liam pulled into the restaurant lot and found a spot to park. “If you insist on ruining my surprise, I was thinking it could be more like a room to honor your parents. A place we could fill with as many memories of them as we could. Your brothers still have some pictures and a few other things that came from your parents. And Ethan said he had a phone number for a cousin—someone who might have some pictures from your parents’ wedding and other stuff like that. They’re going to make some calls and see what they can scare up.”

  My heart and lungs had apparently decided to reposition themselves somewhere in the vicinity of my throat. I couldn’t swallow past the huge lumps there. My parents had been killed in a convenience store robbery several years before, and in the time since, the house had been repossessed and then the car I’d been living out of—that housed all of my memorabilia from my parents—had gone up in flames.

  The thoughtfulness behind Liam’s idea was stunning. I clutched his hand, drawing it up to my lips so I could kiss his knuckles. “Really?” I finally squeezed out despite my tears.

  “Unless you don’t want it.”

  “I do. I want it more than I could ever say.” I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Except… “Just my family, though? Couldn’t it be about your family, too?”

  “And mine, too, if you want it to be.”

  “I do.” I threaded my fingers with his, tugging his hand closer to my body. “Do you still have any of Liv’s wind chimes?” Liv had been Liam’s wife, but she’d died in a car accident a couple of years ago. She needed to have a place in this room, too. She would always be part of Liam, and I wanted to honor that. I wanted to honor her as much as he was trying to honor my parents.

  “I still have some,” he said cautiously.

  “Some that we could bring to Portland? She should be represented.”

  He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and a rush of peace washed through me.

  WE REALLY SHOULDN’T have left Laura in charge of the bachelorette party, despite the fact that she was one of my best friends—and one of our joint bridesmaids—but somehow she’d finagled her way into that position, anyway. I should have tried harder to insist that Sara would be better suited to the task and had Laura deal with the bridal shower. Instead, the pair of them had ended up in charge of the exact opposite event we had been hoping for.

  Laura meant well, but she’d had so much on her plate lately with Katie’s illness and graduating high school, and then also with Dave retiring and moving into a different part of his career, that she had forgotten some things—like my panic attacks. Even now, she seemed so caught up in the moment that she wasn’t aware of my extreme discomfort.

  That was how I ended up in my current predicament. Not only did I have to figure out a good excuse for turning down wine and other drinks at every turn, but I also had virtually nude men shaking their thong-clad backsides in my face in the hope that I’d shove a bill in the string. That wasn’t going to happen. I’d come a long way in the last year and a half but not so far that I had any intention of touching a strange man’s ass. But because I was one of the two brides, the strippers were paying particular attention to me, no matter how many times I refused to participate. At least they didn’t touch me. They just hoped I would touch them—and at least that left me in control of the situation.

  Sara would have probably found a classier bar to take us to instead of a strip club. Then I would only be dealing with the alcohol aspect of this uncomfortable night. It was too late for a change of plans, though.

  Once the current stripper gave up and went to shimmy for Rachel, our waiter came over. He was wearing pants, thank God, but no shirt, just a bowtie, leaving his waxed chest bare.

  “You sure I can’t bring you something, sugar?” he asked, giving me what I was sure he thought was a seductive smile. To me it only seemed smarmy. “Brides drink free at bachelorette parties here. I could get you a sauvignon blanc…a sex on the beach…maybe a pomegranate cosmo?”

  Katie leaned over so she could whisper in my ear. “Get something and give it to me if you don’t want it. Mom won’t notice tonight. She’s…distracted.”

  I rolled my eyes at her and turned my attention back to the waiter. “I’m sure. Just water for me.”
>
  “Spoilsport,” Katie muttered, but she was grinning. She knew there was no chance I was going to give her alcohol with her mother sitting three seats over. She should just be glad that her father didn’t know she was here. Yeah, he knew she was with us, but I doubted Laura had filled him in on the precise details of her plans for the evening.

  Katie was eighteen now, so she was a legal adult, but that didn’t mean he was any less protective of her than he always had been. Especially not after she’d just been given a clean bill of health.

  The waiter worked his way through the rest of our group getting more drink orders, and a new song came on, signaling a new stripper coming to the stage. I tried to brace myself for another onslaught of naked man-flesh wobbling in my face.

  “So why aren’t you drinking?” Katie asked, sipping from her Shirley Temple. She kept her voice down so she wouldn’t catch anyone else’s attention. “You never drink much, but you usually drink some.”

  Her mother had asked me the same question earlier, narrowing her eyes on me as though that would give her X-ray vision into my mind. I’d managed to brush Laura off long enough for the show to start up and drive her attention away from me.

  I would have thought the show would distract Katie, too. She was only eighteen, and I was pretty sure she’d never been to a strip club before. Yes, Portland was the strip-club capital of the United States, but they were almost all clubs with female strippers. I only knew of one that had male dancers, and it was a gay club that only catered to clientele with XY chromosomes.

  “I just don’t want to be hungover tomorrow,” I hedged. “Not for my big day.”

  “One glass of wine isn’t enough to give you a hangover.”

  “But one leads to two…”

  “You’re pregnant,” Katie whispered. “Aren’t you?”

  Before I could answer, a naked butt cheek was waving in my face, nearly whacking me in the nose he got so close. In my haste to get away, I leaned back in my chair so far I almost knocked it over and fell onto the lap of whoever was sitting behind me. I had to close my eyes and concentrate on remembering to breathe so I wouldn’t start having a panic attack. That wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend the night before my wedding.

  Katie helped to right my chair, and my eyes shot open wide. She took one look at me and then leaned across the girls between her and her mother. Laura had a fistful of dollar bills, and Katie whipped two of them free. She shoved them into the dancer’s thong and smacked him on the ass, and he went away.

  “Aren’t you?” she repeated as soon as he was gone. She was acting as if what she’d just done had been no big deal, like it could have been an everyday occurrence. How could she be so calm about something like that?

  “You can’t say a word to anyone,” I hissed at her. “I might not be. I don’t know yet, I just think I might be. But no one knows, no one at all, and Eric should be the first to find out about it if I am.”

  I’d just realized this morning that I was almost a week late. With everything leading up to the wedding, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Eric and I always used protection, but nothing was one hundred percent fail-safe. It could just be the stress of wedding planning that had thrown a wrench in my cycle, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

  Katie grinned. “But you don’t want to take any chances tonight in case you are.”

  “Right.”

  “Our little secret. Not gonna say a thing to a single soul.” She shot her eyes over to Sara, and her lips twisted into a bit of a grimace, and I knew without her saying another word that she was thinking the same thing I was. Sara had just miscarried a couple of months ago. I didn’t know how she’d take it when she found out I was pregnant—if I was pregnant. She’d been through a lot of counseling, but this was definitely going to be a blow. I wanted to make sure I handled it well, if and when it was time to let her in on the happy news.

  Things like this were just one of many reasons I really liked Katie. She was young, but she was very sweet and thoughtful.

  “We should get one of those tests,” Katie said. “You should find out tonight so you can tell Zee tomorrow.”

  That was actually an excellent suggestion. If there was one thing that would make tomorrow more perfect than it already should be, it would be being able to tell Eric I was going to have his baby.

  I nodded and winked at her now, and she turned her attention back to the stage. None of this seemed to be fazing her, even though it was shocking me to my core. I mean, there’s a difference between knowing strip clubs existed and experiencing all they had to offer half an inch away from your face. I kind of wished I could go back in time and revert to the knowing-they-exist phase.

  We had more than just the women in the wedding party here tonight. Several of my former teammates from my high school and college hockey teams had joined us, as well as some of the women I’d worked with at Love Handles when I’d still lived here in Providence. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves, at least—much like Laura and Sara were. Rachel kept blushing, her cheeks turning as bright red as her hair, and Katie seemed almost immune. And then there was Noelle Payne, who had her back turned to the whole thing so she could talk to the woman behind her. I had to laugh at her ability to tune it all out. She might as well be at home or at work, or anywhere but with a bunch of almost-naked men gyrating nearby. She was oblivious to it all in the best possible way.

  I made up my mind to try to be more like her for the rest of the night. Whatever it took, I wasn’t going to let any of this get to me. I wasn’t going to let it set me off. I’d been doing too well lately, and the last thing I wanted to do the night before I got married was allow something as silly as this to cause me to take a step backward.

  I turned back to Katie. “So…you and Babs. When’s this going to become a real thing?” I understood all the reasons they hadn’t become an official couple before now, but those reasons seemed to have all evaporated. Katie was old enough now and wasn’t in high school anymore. The cancer was gone. Her dad was going to be one of Babs’s coaches now, not his teammate—but Sara and Jonny had already tackled that hurdle and come out all right in the end. There didn’t seem to be anything else standing in the way of the two of them becoming the couple we all knew they were destined to be.

  She turned big doe eyes on me—sad eyes—and my heart ached for both of them before she even opened her mouth.

  “I don’t know if we will be a couple. I don’t want to hurt him, but I just…”

  I couldn’t make heads or tails of that. Those two belonged together.

  “You just what?”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “It’s just that Jamie should be the first to find out.” She brushed a tear away from her eye, and then she forced whatever was breaking her heart out of the way for now. “That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to have a good time.”

  I didn’t know if that was possible for me, but I grinned for her benefit. “Okay. But if you need to talk…”

  “I know. But let’s focus on you for now.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and drew her closer to me for a side hug. “Just don’t hurt yourself unnecessarily.” That was something I had experience with—not my fault, of course, but still. I didn’t want to see her run away from something she ought to be running toward.

  I NEVER IMAGINED I’d be doing this—getting ready to walk down the aisle—at least not after my divorce. Jason and I had gotten married in front of the justice of the peace with a couple of strangers standing beside us as witnesses. Back then, I’d thought I would marry once and only once. I’d believed that Jason was it for me, and that marriages were for life no matter what. Long ago, I’d given up on the girlhood fantasy of the white dress and flowers and candles and a huge room filled with people who loved me. A big, traditional wedding was just one of many dreams Jason stole from me. We’d been teenagers having a shotgun wedding since I was pregnant, and then he’d turned into the m
an who molested my little girl.

  Then I became a single mom with two kids, and I’d allowed the idea of finding a happy-ever-after ending for myself fall by the wayside. Forget about the idea of a wedding at all; I hadn’t thought I would find love. I hadn’t even been sure I wanted it. Of course, I wanted the real deal for my kids, Maddie and Tuck, but I had been telling myself for years that I would be happy as long as I could be certain they were happy—and I’d set out to make sure they were as happy and well-adjusted as possible. I’d really believed it, too, that giving them the life they deserved was enough for me.

  But then Brenden Campbell had kind of shoved his way into my life—our lives—and he’d changed all of that. So here I was, wearing a white dress, my hands wrapped around a bouquet of flowers, getting ready to walk down the aisle to stand beside the love of my life. Maybe happy ever after didn’t have to be only a dream. Maybe it could become my reality. I bit down on the inside of my cheek just to be sure all of this was actually happening. It hurt like crazy, and I was pretty sure I tasted blood, so that must mean it was real.

  Dana Campbell had been one of my best friends since I’d moved my family to Portland, and now she would soon be my sister-in-law. She looked over at me and took a deep breath. She was in a white dress, too. Hers was long and straight and simple and utterly elegant. It was sleeveless, with a sweetheart neckline and a sea-foam green sash tied beneath her breasts. The ends of the sash trailed down to the floor, further highlighting how tall she was—at least in comparison to me.

  My dress had cap sleeves and some bead work on the bodice. The skirt a had lace overlay—some of it white and some in the same sea-foam green as Dana’s sash—emphasizing the way the fabric draped to highlight my curves.