Chapter 12 Skyler
Skyler
The locker room sounded like a cage full of baboons who’d been given energy drinks. I could hear it from halfway down the tunnel: laughter, shouting, the thump of music cranked too loud, and underneath it all, the unmistakable sound of hockey players being absolute idiots.
Home games after a successful road trip always had this energy, like we’d been holding our breaths for two weeks and could exhale. Add our standing atop the conference and the distance between us and second place, and the inmates were running the asylum.
I pushed through the door and immediately ducked as a roll of tape sailed over my head.
“You missed!” Murph shouted from across the room.
“I wasn’t aiming at Shaw,” Kowalski fired back. “I was aiming at your giant forehead, but you moved.”
“My forehead is perfectly proportioned, thank you very much.”
“Your forehead has its own zip code.”
“At least I have a forehead. Yours disappeared along with your hairline years ago.”
A chorus of laughs and jeers preceded a glove whizzing by.
I navigated through the chaos, stepping over discarded equipment. A balled-up sock hit Erik square in the chest. The Swede looked down at it with the kind of icy disdain reserved for war and mosquitos.
“Who threw this?”
The silence was instant.
Nobody moved.
Even the music seemed to grow quieter.
“I will find out,” Erik said calmly. “And when I do, there will be consequences.”
“Sounds like a threat,” someone muttered.
“It is a promise. My people do not need threats.”
The mayhem resumed, with Murphy chirping about “Erik’s people,” while others offered colorful options for what those people should be called.
I reached my stall and started unpacking my gear, letting the familiar routine settle my nerves.
The energy was infectious, but underneath the excitement, something else hummed inside my head.
A low-grade buzz that had been there since this morning, since the text exchange with Jacks, since he’d agreed to lunch.
Tomorrow.
Thinking about it made my stomach clench.
“You’re quiet tonight.” Tyler sat at the stall next to mine, already half dressed. “Everything good?”
“Yeah, fine. Just focused.”
“Focused is good. We need focused. Boston’s been playing out of their minds lately.”
“We’re better.”
“Obviously, but it’s still gonna be a fight.” Tyler grinned, then clarified. “The fun kind, not the kind to make the trainers wince.”
I pulled on my base layer and tried to push everything except hockey out of my brain.
This was what I was good at. This was what made sense.
The ice, the puck, the simple clarity of competition.
No confusing feelings, no questions I couldn’t answer.
Just the game.
Coach stuck his head in around 6:30, gave his usual pre-game speech about playing our game and trusting the system, then disappeared to do whatever coaches did before puck drop.
The music got louder.
The energy ramped up.
By the time we filed into the tunnel for warmups, we were a coiled spring ready to, well, do whatever the fuck springs did.
The arena was sold out, 19,000 strong, a sea of blue and white that roared when we hit the ice.
Young boys and girls screamed and banged the glass; our sticks slammed the ice, returning their salutes.
I did my usual lap, letting the noise wash over me, feeling the familiar surge of adrenaline that never got old no matter how many times I experienced it.
This was home.
This was where I belonged.
For the next three hours, nothing else mattered.
Tyler had been right. The game was a war.
Boston came out swinging, scoring twice in the first period on goals that made me want to break my stick over my knee.
We answered with one of our own before the intermission, but it wasn’t enough.
We were playing catch-up, always a step behind, and Coach’s face during the break looked like a thundercloud about to unleash holy hell.
“We’re better than this,” he said, pacing in front of the whiteboard. “We’re faster, we’re smarter, and we want it more. Start fucking acting like it!”
And so we did.
The second period was a different story.
Murph scored on a beautiful redirect that had the arena shaking. Tyler followed up five minutes later with a wrister from the slot that beat their goalie clean.
3 to 2, Lightning.
Then Boston tied it up with two minutes left in the period, and we went into the third knotted at 3.
The final twenty minutes were chaos.
Both teams traded chances, both goalies stood on their heads, penalties were nonexistent as the refs let us play.
And the crowd?
The crowd was so loud I could barely hear myself think.
With five minutes left, I took a hit along the boards that rattled my teeth and left me gasping for breath. It was worth it. I’d drawn a penalty, the first of the game.
We didn’t convert on the power play, but we kept pressing.
The clock ticked down.
Three minutes.
Two.
One.
Fifty seconds left.
Still tied.
Coach called a timeout and drew up a play. It was simple and direct: get the puck to Erik at the point, crash the net, and put bodies in front of the goalie.
Create chaos and capitalize.
“Shaw,” Coach said, pointing at me. “You’re the trigger. Erik gets you the puck, you bury it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
We lined up for the face-off in their zone.
I won it clean, kicking it back to Erik.
He held, surveyed, waited for the traffic to develop in front of the net.
I found my spot.
Stick on the ice.
Ready.
Erik’s pass was perfect.
Tape to tape, right on my blade.
I didn’t think.
Didn’t hesitate.
Just loaded and let it fly.
The puck left my stick, threaded through a maze of bodies, and found the top corner of the net with 3.7 seconds left on the clock.
The red light spun.
The horn blared.
And the arena exploded.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. Bodies piled on top of me, gloves rained down on my helmet, and the roar of the crowd was so loud I thought the ice might crack.
We’d won.
Somehow, impossibly, we’d won.
When I extracted myself from the celebration, Erik was grinning at me with something akin to emotion, which for him was the equivalent of tears.
“Good shot,” he said.
“Good pass.”
“I know.”
Cocky fucker.
I laughed and let myself be swept toward the tunnel, riding the high of victory and feeling more alive than I had in weeks.
The locker room afterward was beautiful chaos.
Music blasted, guys shouted, equipment flew.
Someone had produced a family-sized plastic bottle of Coke and was spraying it around like it was champagne and we’d won the Cup. Coach walked through with an actual smile on his face, stopping to clap shoulders and offer praise that would have seemed alien coming from him on any other night.
“Hell of a game, boys. Hell of a game. Shaw, that shot was textbook. Erik, fucking great pass. Everyone else, you showed up when it mattered. That’s what champions do.”
Champions.
Coach called us champions.
I sat in my stall, still in my gear, letting the celebration wash over me. My phone lay in my locker, and I had to keep myself from checking it. Jacks had said they’d be watching at Barbacks.
Had he seen the goal?
Had the bar gone crazy?
Did he cheer for me?
The thought made my chest want to burst open in a way that had nothing to do with the exertion of the game.
“Shaw! Press room in ten!” One of the media coordinators poked his head in, then disappeared before I could respond.
Right. The press. The part of victory I liked least.
I stripped out of my gear, ran hot water over my body, and threw on the standard post-game track suit. By the time I made it to the press room, reporters were already assembled with cameras rolling and recorders ready.
The questions started easy.
How did it feel to score the game-winner?
What was going through my mind on that final shot?
How important was this win for the team’s momentum?
I answered on autopilot, giving the standard responses I’d perfected over years of professional hockey.
Team effort.
Trust the process.
One game at a time.
Then a reporter in the back raised her hand.
“Skyler, you’ve seemed different lately, more energized and focused. Something’s changed. What’s got you all fired up and scoring like this?”
It was a simple question, one she could’ve asked Erik or Tyler or any of the guys—but she’d asked me, and it hit me like a check I hadn’t seen coming.
My brain short-circuited.
She knew. She had to know.
Someone had seen me at Barbacks, seen me talking to Jacks, and now it was going to be everywhere. The headlines would write themselves.
NHL Captain Spotted at Gay Bar.
Shaw’s Secret Friendship with Former Football Star.
Lightning Star Dating a Man.
“I, uh . . .” My mouth was moving, but nothing coherent was coming out. “Just, you know, I’ve been working hard, trying to stay focused, that sort of thing. The team’s been great, and, uh, we’re all trying to—I don’t know, to play our best hockey.”
The reporter frowned, unsatisfied with the non-answer. “Is there anything specific? A new routine? Something in your personal life that’s—”
“Nope. Nothing. Definitely nothing personal. No personal life here. None at all. Don’t have one. Just hockey.” I was already standing, already moving toward the exit. “Thanks everyone, appreciate the questions. Go, Bolts.”
I fled. Like a prisoner who’d dug out the last spoonful of dirt under the jail, I ran for my life.
There were no other words for it. I practically sprinted out of the press room, ignoring the confused looks from our media coordinator, not stopping until I was back in the locker room with the door closed behind me and my chest heaving like I’d just run a marathon.
What the hell was wrong with me?
It was a simple question.
A softball, really.
Fuck, it was the kind of generic “what’s your secret” fluff that reporters asked all the time. And I’d fallen apart.
Because for one terrifying moment, I’d thought she was asking about Jacks, which made no sense.
Nobody knew about Jacks.
There wasn’t even anything to know about Jacks.
We were friends. We texted. We’d had one conversation in a booth and made plans for tacos.
That wasn’t a story.
It wasn’t anything.
So why had my first instinct been to panic?
The locker room had emptied while I was gone. A few guys lingered, packing up, but most had already headed out to meet family or catch late dinners. I sank onto the bench in front of my stall and stared at nothing, trying to get my heart rate under control.
“Hey.”
I startled and looked up.
Tyler was standing a few feet away, bag slung over his shoulder, concern etched into his features.
“You okay? You left the presser like your ass was on fire.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Bullshit.” He dropped his bag and sat down on the bench across from me. “What’s going on, Cap? And don’t say nothing, because I’ve known you too long to buy that shit.”
I rubbed my face with both hands, buying time. “It’s nothing. Really. I just got flustered by a question.”
“The ‘what’s got you fired up’ question? You’ve handled way worse.”
“I know. I . . . I don’t know why I choked.”
Tyler was quiet for a moment, studying me with the kind of attention he reserved for reading opposing defenses.
“Is this about Brooke?”
“What? Brooke? No.”
“Because I heard you guys ended things. Which, for the record, you didn’t tell me about. I had to hear it from Murph, who heard it from someone’s girlfriend, who knows Brooke’s roommate.”
“Tampa’s too small.”
“Way too small.” Tyler leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “So talk to me. She seemed cool. I thought things were going okay.”
“They were okay. That was the problem.” I sighed. “She said I wasn’t present, that I was always somewhere else.”
Tyler waited.
“She was right.” The admission was harder than I expected, much harder than it had been when I’d told Jacks about the breakup. I made a mental note to add that to the growing list of things that confused me.
“Somewhere else? Like where?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
Or rather, I had an answer, but it was one I couldn’t articulate. Shit, I hadn’t even formed the words to speak in my own mind, much less aloud to another human being.
“I don’t know, Ty,” I said. “That’s the problem; I don’t know what’s going on with me.”
Tyler nodded. “You rebounding already? Is that what this is? Got your eye on someone new and that’s why you’re all fired up?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m not . . . I’m not looking for anything.”
“Sometimes you find things when you’re not looking.”
“Thanks, fortune cookie.”
Tyler grinned, but it faded into something more serious. He glanced around the empty locker room, then back at me.
“Look, man. I’m going to say something, and I want you to hear me out. Okay?”
“Okay . . .”
“You know you can talk to me about anything, right?” He held my gaze, steady and unwavering.
“I mean it. Fucking anything. You’re my brother, always will be.
Whatever’s going on in your head, whatever you’re working through, I’m here.
I’ll always have your back . . . even if it’s something you . . . don’t think anyone else will get.”
The words hung in the air between us, dripping with meaning I couldn’t quite decipher. Tyler’s expression was open and patient, like he was leaving a door ajar and waiting to see if I’d walk through it.
Did he know something? Or suspect something?
Was he being a good friend, offering support without knowing what he was offering it for?
“Thanks, Ty,” I managed.
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.”
He held my gaze for another moment, then nodded and stood, grabbing his bag. “Get some rest, Cap. You’ve got tacos tomorrow, right? With that barback from the place we went to?”
I froze. “How do you know about that?”
“You mentioned it yesterday when you were texting at practice and Coach almost benched you for not paying attention.” Tyler grinned. “Have fun. He seems like a good dude.”
Then he was gone, leaving me alone in the empty locker room with nothing but the hum of the ventilation system and the echo of his words.