Free Taking a Shot by Catherine Gayle Page A

me.”
    “When the pictures come in, can I have a set?”
    I hadn’t even known if I’d wanted a set of them—because of my alien head—but he’d insisted on buying the biggest package, not just the bare minimum for Mom. “You want them?”
    “Yeah. Because that was the first time I got to see you—all of you. And it was beautiful.”
    “I—”
    He kissed me on the forehead. Dad cleared his throat right behind me. Jamie and I both jumped.
    “Good night, Babs,” Dad said. He opened the door.
    Jamie let me go and took a step back. “Good night, Katie.”
    He was through the doorway and Dad was closing the door behind him when I hurried to block him.
    “Jamie?” I said.
    He stopped and looked at me with a goofy grin, his blush and his dimples making him as adorable as ever.
    “I’ll keep a set for you.”
    He smiled all the way to his eyes. “I’ll see you soon.”
    “Not too soon,” Dad said gruffly. He closed and locked the door.
    I stretched up on my toes and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll see him tomorrow at your practice.” Before he could respond, I hurried up the stairs to my room and closed the door behind me.
    Jamie had given me the most perfect night of my life, and I wasn’t going to let anyone spoil it. Not even my dad. I didn’t know how many more perfect nights I had left, but I did know this: I was done with forgetting about all the things I enjoyed and loved. I may have cancer, but that didn’t mean I had to stop living. Jamie had given me that tonight. He’d given me a reason to kick cancer out of my life, or at least to give my all fighting for that.
    I touched my fingertips to the spot on my forehead where he’d kissed me, leaning back against the door and sighing.
    There was no way to know what life was going to throw at me next. Whatever it was, I was going to embrace it. Anything less was cheating myself.

 

 

 

     
     

    I WAS ABOUT to cross over the Hawthorne Bridge when I saw hazard lights blinking on a car up ahead, the bright yellow flash jarring against the darkness of the night. The car had pulled into the cross section between the highway and the exit before it had stopped, which was the worst place to break down short of blocking a lane of traffic. This spot wasn’t really a shoulder, and it was directly over the bridge.
    People used those spots to make ill-advised passes sometimes, almost causing wrecks in the process. Earlier tonight, while I was out exploring the city, I’d witnessed someone making a last-second exit by cutting across the exact spot where this car was stopped.
    I tried not to worry too much because I didn’t know this person. At first I succeeded because it looked like whoever had been in the car was gone. I assumed the driver must have turned on the hazards, popped open the hood to see what the problem was, and then left the car like that. Maybe someone had stopped to give them a ride.
    But as I got closer in my rental car, my heart stopped.
    A woman came around from in front of the old Buick and opened the back door on the driver’s side. She kneeled down to the pavement, the free-flowing, flowery skirt of her dress and her unbound blonde hair flying from the wind of speeding traffic. Her bare feet and the open car door were actually in the lane closest to her while she searched for God only knew what.
    Images of Livia flashed through my mind—my beautiful, sweet wife Liv, who had never wanted to leave our native Sweden but eventually did it for me. Thinking about her always brought a sharp ache to my chest. Then came the even more painful images of the wreckage, the ones they’d flashed across the news in the immediate aftermath and that the hockey media kept showing every time they talked about my inability to score since the accident.
    I swallowed hard and blinked rapidly. Crying and driving would never be a good combination. Besides, it had been over a year and a half. I should be able to think about her without losing it now,