Chapter 6 Skyler
Skyler
Thirty thousand feet above Kansas, surrounded by the best teammates a guy could ask for, I was alone.
Not literally.
The plane was full.
Murph was passed out two rows ahead, his apish mouth hanging open, a thin line of drool connecting his chin to his shoulder.
Erik had his sleep mask on and noise-canceling headphones clamped over his ears, dead to the world.
Tyler was curled against the window like an oversized cat, using his balled-up hoodie as a pillow.
The whole team was out cold.
Three hours ago, this cabin had been a circus.
Kowalski had started a card game that devolved into accusations of cheating within minutes.
Someone had smuggled a Bluetooth speaker on board and blasted “We Are the Champions” until Coach threatened to make everyone do bag skates for a week.
Murph had attempted to give Erik a wet willy and nearly lost a finger in the process.
Now?
Silence.
Only the hum of the engines and the occasional snore from somewhere near the back.
I should have been asleep, too. We’d wrapped a twelve-day Western Conference swing: Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Denver, and Vegas.
Six cities, six games, one loss.
We were sitting at the top of the conference with a four-point cushion, playing the best hockey of the season.
I was exhausted.
Every muscle in my body ached.
And my brain felt like it had been scooped out and replaced with wet sand.
Still, I couldn’t sleep.
Fucking allergy meds.
I’d popped a Zyrtec-D before the flight because something in the Vegas hotel had made my eyes swell up like golf balls. Now, I was paying the price: wide awake and wired while everyone else got to rest.
I shifted in my seat, trying to find a comfortable position, failed, then shifted again.
I was still uncomfortable.
The leather squeaked beneath me, loud in the quiet cabin, and I froze, not wanting to wake anyone.
My phone sat on the armrest, fully charged thanks to the outlet at my seat.
I stared at it for a moment, weighing my options.
I could watch a movie, but by the quarter point in our season, I’d already seen everything worth watching on an airplane, and nothing that remained sounded appealing.
I could read, but I’d left my book in my checked bag like an idiot.
I could sit here and stare at the ceiling for the next three hours.
Or . . .
I grabbed my phone and opened Angry Birds.
Don’t judge me.
It was mindless and required zero brain cells, which was about all I had left to spare.
I flung birds at pigs for a solid forty minutes, working my way through levels I’d beaten a hundred times before. The familiar sound effects were comforting in a weird way: the stretch of the slingshot, the squawk of the birds, the crash of collapsing structures.
Then I ran out of lives.
“Shit.”
The word slipped out before I could stop it.
I glanced around, but nobody stirred.
The plane slept on, oblivious to my very important gaming crisis.
I could wait for my lives to regenerate, but that would take, what, thirty minutes? An hour? I didn’t know because I’d never been desperate enough to find out.
Or I could find something else to do.
Instagram it was.
I opened the app and started scrolling. The feed was the usual mix: teammates posting workout videos, brands pushing products, and fans tagging me in posts I’d never see.
Nothing interesting.
Nothing that required actual engagement.
Scroll. Double-tap. Scroll. Ignore. Scroll.
My thumb moved on autopilot, my brain barely registering the images flashing past.
A sunset.
Someone’s dog.
Someone’s dog in their lap.
Someone’s dog licking their face.
Someone licking their dog’s face.
Okay, ew.
Then a familiar logo caught my eye.
Barbacks.
My thumb froze.
It was a photo of some elaborate cocktail with lightning bolts drawn into the foam, captioned, “Game day specials! Come watch the boys bring home a W!”
I clicked on the account to find it had maybe a few thousand followers, nothing huge, but Instagram’s algorithm had decided I needed to see it, probably because I’d looked at their page once or twice before.
Or maybe more than once or twice.
I couldn’t remember.
I stared at the photo for longer than was normal.
The drink looked ridiculous in the best way, Benji’s work, almost certainly. That guy had a flair for the dramatic and an undeniable skill with a tasty libation.
Without thinking about it, I tapped the search bar and typed: Jackson Armstrong.
The results populated.
There were a lot of Jackson Armstrongs.
I shrugged at the common name. Of course, there were a lot of them, idiot.
Some guy with a podcast.
A real estate agent in Ohio.
A kid who looked about twelve.
I added Tampa to the search.
There were still too many results.
I tried Jacks Barbacks.
And there it was.
There he was.
The profile picture was small, but I recognized him, that reddish-brown hair, slightly messy, and his easy grin. He was mid-laugh in the photo, looking at something off-camera, completely unposed.
jacks_mills_52
847 followers.
His bio read: “former athlete, current barback, Lightning lover” with a lightning bolt emoji at the end.
I tapped through to his page.
The content was sparse.
A few photos of the bar, some shots of food, a group picture with people I didn’t recognize.
There was a video near the top that caught my attention: Jacks attempting some kind of bottle flip behind the bar. He wound up, released, and the bottle spun through the air before bouncing off his forehead.
The camera shook as whoever was filming dissolved into laughter.
I watched it three times.
His reaction was the best part.
He didn’t get embarrassed or angry. He stood there, rubbing his forehead, grinning like getting hit in the face was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him.
I scrolled further.
More bar stuff.
A tailgate photo where he was wearing an FSU jersey.
A candid shot of him and some friends at what looked like a Cuban restaurant.
His posts were infrequent, maybe one every few weeks, but each one felt genuine in a way that most social media didn’t. He didn’t use filters or a curated aesthetic. His images were glimpses of a life that seemed warm and full and ordinary.
I was still scrolling when I realized I’d reached the bottom of his feed.
I’d looked at all of it.
The timestamp of his oldest post was years ago.
I’d spent God knows how long going through three years of some dude’s Instagram.
What the hell was I doing?
I closed the app.
Then stared at clouds in the darkened sky through the tiny porthole.
Then opened Insta again.
And stared at his profile picture.
The plane hummed around me. Murph snored. Somewhere in the back, someone muttered something in their sleep.
I should put the phone down and try to sleep even though the Zyrtec made that impossible.
I should do anything except what I was about to do.
For the love of hockey, I knew I shouldn’t—
My thumb found the Message button.
The text field blinked at me, empty and waiting.
PuckingSkylerShaw: Hey
I typed the word before I could think about it.
It was only three letters.
The most basic, boring, low-effort message in the history of human communication.
My finger hovered over Send.
This was stupid.
And he was a fucking dude. Who messaged another guy on Insta? Out of the blue? For no good reason?
Besides, I barely knew the guy. We’d talked twice, maybe three times total. He probably wouldn’t even remember me or he’d think I was weird for sliding into his DMs at one in the morning from a plane somewhere over the Midwest.
But I wanted to talk to him.
I couldn’t explain why. Shit, I didn’t even understand why. I just wanted to.
The want was simple and uncomplicated, sitting in my chest like a fact.
I wanted to know what he was doing.
I wanted to hear about whatever chaos Benji had caused this week.
I wanted to make him laugh the way he’d laughed in that bottle flip video.
I wanted to know him better.
It was all friend stuff, normal stuff, the kind of stuff teammates did all the time.
There was nothing weird about it.
My finger kept hovering.
It’s only a message, I told myself. People send messages. That’s what Instagram was for. Stop being weird, some distant part of me whispered.
But something held me back.
Some instinct I couldn’t name, some hesitation that felt bigger than the moment warranted, demanded I hold back.
Outside the window, the sky was black and endless. The clouds below caught the faint light of the moon, silver-white against the dark. We were suspended between places, between moments, in that strange liminal space that only existed on overnight flights.
Inside the plane, I felt suspended in a different form of amber, unable to think or move or breathe, as my finger made decisions my mind refused to consider.
Three letters.
One tap.
I pressed send.