“Sky.” I cupped his face in my hands, forcing him to look at me instead of the mirror. “Breathe.”
He took a deep breath, then another, his shoulders relaxing slightly.
“Better?”
“Better.” He leaned into my touch. “I . . . this is happening. It’s really happening, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, this isreallyhappening.”
It had been six months since the press conference that changed everything.
Six months of interviews and photo shoots and think pieces about representation in professional sports.
Six months of mostly positive fan reaction, with only a handful of ugly comments that we’d learned to ignore, and an entire hockey season that had been nothing short of magical.
The Lightning had sailed through the playoffs like a team possessed, sweeping the first round, winning the second in five games, taking the conference championship in six. Skyler played the best hockey of his career, and while they’d lost the Stanley Cup Final in game seven to Colorado, the series had been so thrilling, so perfectly played by both teams, that nobody could call it anything but a triumph.
“The season ending was supposed to be sad without the Cup,” Skyler had said the night after they lost game seven. “But it feels like the beginning of everything else.”
Everything else, as it turned out, includedthis.
“You ready?” I asked now, adjusting my own bow tie in the mirror behind him.
“I’ve been ready since the day I met you.”
The chapel at the Don CeSar Hotel was small and intimate, the perfect size for the wedding we’d planned. We’d chosen this place because it felt like us—elegant but not pretentious, beautiful but not overwhelming. It was a place where our two worlds could come together without looking or feeling forced.
“Did you ever think,” Skyler said now, straightening his cuffs for the hundredth time, “when you were handing me that first beer at Barbacks, that we’d end up here?”
“Honestly? I thought you were hot butwayout of my league. I was hoping you’d come back for a second beer.”
“I was planning to come back every night until you agreed to go out with me.”
“Oh, really? Every night?”
“Every single night we didn’t have a game.”
A knock on the door interrupted us. “Five minutes, gentlemen,” came the voice of the wedding coordinator.
“Five minutes,” Skyler repeated, like he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Five minutes before we start a lifetime together.”
Skyler’s smile could’ve melted all of Antarctica.
We walked to the door together, hand in hand. I glimpsed the chapel through the crack as someone entered from the main area. It was packed, every seat filled with cameras set up in the back and a low murmur of conversation that suggested everyone was as excited about this as we were.
“You see all those people out there?” Skyler whispered. “They’re all here for us.”
I nodded, no longer trusting my voice against the lump in my throat.
Our families would be in the front rows—Skyler’s parents and Dean and Marcus on one side, my parents on the other. Behind them would be Mark and Benji, Erik and Tyler And Murph, the Lightning players and coaching staff who were still in town and able to attend, and select members of the Tampa Bay sports media who had covered our story with respect and professionalism.
“Ready?” Skyler asked, offering me his arm.
“Let’s get hitched, Mr. Shaw.”
We walked out together, side by side, and the chapel erupted in gentle applause, but as we made our way down the aisle, I saw something that made me stop short.
