Chapter 20
Skyler
I’ve always been a preparer, an overpreparer, really, maybe even a bit psychotic in my need to prepare. It’s the thing coaches loved about me growing up, the trait that separated me from the gazillions of other kids with fast legs and decent hands who showed up to every tryout dreaming of the NHL.
Talent got you noticed.
Preparation got you drafted.
By the time I was fourteen, I had a pre-game routine that would’ve made a NASA launch director weep with pride.
I did film study the night before—at least an hour, sometimes two, breaking down the opposing team’s breakout patterns and penalty kill formations.
I applied stick tape at exactly 9 p.m., always white, always three wraps at the toe.
Even my gear was laid out in order: base layer, socks, jock, pants, skates, shoulder pads, elbow pads, jersey.
Always that order.
Never deviated.
Not once.
In juniors, I added nutrition tracking.
In college, I added meditation.
By my second year in the NHL, my preparation routine was so comprehensive that our equipment manager once joked I could publish it as a self-help book. “The Skyler Shaw Method: How to Overprepare for Everything Until the Universe Has No Choice But to Let You Succeed.”
The point is I didn’t wing things.
I didn’t walk into situations blind.
Not ever.
When I faced a new opponent, I studied their video until I could predict their moves before they made them.
When I learned a new system, I drilled it until the patterns lived in my muscle memory, automatic and instinctive.
When I rehabbed an injury, I researched every protocol, every timeline, and every possible complication until my physical therapist begged me to stop sending her articles at 2 a.m.
Preparation was my superpower.
It was the foundation of everything I’d built—every goal, every win, every moment of my career that had led me to wearing the C on a jersey in the best league in the world.
So, when I woke up the morning after kissing a man for the first time in my life with a date on the horizon and zero understanding of what I’d gotten myself into, there was only one logical course of action.
I was going to prepare.
I would research, study, and do film review, metaphorically speaking, of course.
I would approach this the same way I’d approached every challenge in my life: with rigor, discipline, and the quiet confidence of a man who believed that no situation was unmanageable if you did the homework.
That was the plan, anyway.
The plan did not survive first contact with Google.
At 8:47 a.m., sprawled on the couch in only my boxers, I opened my laptop, made sure the door was locked (yes, I lived alone and there was no one to walk in, but this was a big deal, so give me a break already), and typed my first search query with the gravity of a man launching a nuclear weapon.
“gay love”
I hit enter.
The results were . . . not helpful.
Wikipedia gave me a scholarly article about the history of homosexuality in ancient Greece, which was interesting on a theoretical level but not useful unless I planned to seduce Jacks while wearing a toga and holding an ancient spear (no, that was not a sexual reference).
A psychology website offered “10 Signs You Might Be Gay,” which felt about three weeks too late. Several results were for a movie I’d never heard of, and one was a recipe blog that had somehow been indexed incorrectly.
I refined my search.
“gay dating advice”
This was better. Slightly.
I found a few articles—“Your First Gay Relationship: A Guide” and “What I Wish I’d Known Before Dating Men.
” I devoured them with the intensity of a student cramming for finals.
Some of it was useful: communication is important (duh), don’t rush into labels (I didn’t even know there were labels), and every relationship is different (so helpful, thank you, Yoda).
Most of the articles were vague enough to apply to any relationship, gay or straight. Hell, most of them could have applied to brothers or sisters or business partners or world leaders. None seemed aimed at a dude in my dire dilemma.
It all felt like I was studying game tape of a team playing a completely different sport. The general principles of competition applied, but the specifics were useless.
I needed better intel.
I opened Instagram and searched “gay dating.”
This was more productive.
My explore page, a curated feed of hockey highlights, workout videos, and sponsored protein powder ads, transformed before my eyes into a colorful mosaic of male couples.
There were guys holding hands at farmers markets, guys kissing on beaches, and guys laughing together over brunch, cuddling on couches, and slow-dancing in kitchens.
They all looked . . . happy.
Really, genuinely, radiantly happy.
I scrolled for a while, studying these strangers’ lives with an intensity that bordered on stalkerishly creepy.
Two guys with a golden retriever had a whole account documenting their relationship, and I found myself deep in their grid, watching story after story of them cooking together, traveling, and being ordinary and completely in love.
Something loosened in my chest.
This was real.
This was possible.
Men loving other men was just . . . life.
I could have this.
The thought was so simple and so enormous that I had to set the phone down and breathe for a minute.
When I picked it back up, I kept scrolling.
There were more couples, more happiness, more proof that the thing I’d been so terrified of was simply love.
It looked shockingly like the same love everyone else got to have with different packaging.
While I felt better seeing happy men doing happy men shit, none of this was answering my actual question, the one I’d been circling around like a winger afraid to drive the net, the one that had kept me up half the night, staring at my ceiling, alternating between giddy replays of Jacks’s mouth on mine and low-grade panic about what came next.
Because kissing was one thing.
What came after kissing was another.
And I had no idea—not even a basic framework of an idea—how any of that worked.
It was the equivalent of being told I was starting in an NHL game tomorrow but the sport had been changed to cricket. Sure, they both involved athletic men swinging sticks at things, but the overlap ended there.
I needed game film.
Real tape I could watch and understand, maybe replay when points got murky.
I needed the kind of videos that showed what happened on the ice—or in this case, off it.
I stared at the laptop.
It looked back at me.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Do it, Shaw. You’re a grown-ass man, a captain, for God’s sake, a born leader.
Finally, my fingers moved, and I typed the phrase that instilled terror in my very soul.
“gay sex”
My finger trembled over the enter key.
This was purely educational. It was research. Tape study.
It was the same thing I’d do before facing every new opponent—study the film, understand the systems, learn the mechanics.
This was . . . opponent analysis.
Except the opponent was my own ignorance.
And the arena was my laptop.
In my boxers.
At 9 a.m. on a Tuesday.
Fuck it.
I hit enter.
Google, in its infinite wisdom, threw up an age verification screen.
“Are you over 21?”
I stared at it. Why would I need to be over twenty-one for a Google search?
For some reason, this felt like the real threshold, not the kiss or the date or the moment I’d backed Jacks against a wall—this moment. This little pop-up box asking me to confirm that I was, in fact, a legal adult before it showed me what I’d asked to see, what I was sure I needed to see.
In point of fact, I was twenty-seven years old. I’d played professional hockey for six years. I’d broken my collarbone, torn my MCL, and taken a puck to the face that had required fourteen stitches.
And a Google age verification had me peeing in my cup—metaphorically, of course.
I clicked proceed.
The screen loaded.
And I was confronted with a wall of images so explicit, so detailed, so aggressively pornographic that my brain short-circuited and my hand slammed the laptop shut with enough force to rattle my coffee mug.
So I sat there.
Blinking.
Rapidly.
My heart was hammering so hard I was certain it had detached from whatever biological moorings held it in place and was now ricocheting around my rib cage like a pinball.
What the—
How did they—
How was that even possible?
No amount of preparation would have made me ready for that.
No film study in the history of film study had ever ambushed me so completely.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to unsee what I’d seen, but the images were already seared into my retinas with the permanence of a brand.
Men.
Doing things.
A lot of things.
Things I hadn’t known were things.
Things that weren’t covered in any manual I’d ever encountered, and I’d read the NHL’s entire concussion protocol handbook twice.
I lowered my hands and stared at the closed laptop. The damn viper looked like it wanted to bite a chunk out of my leg. I swear I heard it hiss and everything.
I blinked a few more times.
It was a laptop, a laptop sitting on the coffee table, looking innocent. It was silver and slim and unbothered by the fact that it had detonated a bomb in the middle of my understanding of human sexuality.
Slowly—very, very slowly—like a goalie peeking through his glove after a shot he’d rather not have seen, I reached forward and opened it.
The images were still there.
They were still explicit and graphic and very much a lot.
But this time, instead of slamming the laptop shut, I looked.
Really looked.
I studied the images the way I’d look at game tape—clinically at first, while trying to understand the systems at play and identify the patterns, positions, and basic mechanics of what was happening on screen.
Jesus, using the word “positions” had been such a bad idea, even in my own mind.