I blinked.
Murph was waving a hand in front of my face, grinning like the unhinged gremlin he was.
“You’re doing the thing again,” he said. “The ‘I can’t believe this is my life’ thing. It’s embarrassing.”
“Shut up.”
“Seriously, bro, you look like a golden retriever seeing snow for the first time. Every. Single. Flight.”
“I said shut up.”
Kevin Murphy, Murph to everyone who’d known him longer than five minutes, was the Lightning’s starting left winger, the team’s unofficial chaos agent, and somehow, inexplicably, one of my best friends. He was five-foot-ten, built like a fire hydrant, and had the energy of a caffeinated squirrel with impulse control issues.
He was also a menace.
An absolute, unrepentant, prank-pulling, shenanigan-loving master of mayhem.
On our last road trip, he replaced all of my underwear with thongs—and not just any thongs,bedazzledthongs. I still don’t know where he found them or when he made the switch, but I had to play a full game in what amounted to a glittery dental floss nightmare because it was either that or go commando—and cups were far less forgiving than sequins.
The trip before that, he somehow convinced the hotel staff that I was deathly allergic to the color blue. I spent three days in a room where every blue item had been replaced with beige alternatives, including the toilet seat.
The man was a lunatic, and for some inexplicable reason, I loved him like a brother.
“Window or aisle?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Window. Always window.”
“Cool, I’ll take aisle so I can trip people as they walk by.”
“Please don’t.”
“No promises.”
We settled into our usual seats near the back of the plane, far enough from the coaches to talk shit, while close enough to the snack station to make regular raids. The rest of the team filtered in, clumps of twos and threes. Sounds I’d learned to love bounded off the metal tube’s interior: good-natured chirps, laughter, and someone’s terrible taste in music that bled from headphones that were cranked up way tooloud.
Thankfully, the flight to Columbus was smooth. Murph slept most of the way.
Our hotel was decent, and practice the next morning was exactly what I needed—hard skating, crisp passes, and the kind of focused work that cleared my head and reminded me why I loved this sport.
Murph, naturally, spent the entire practice trying to pants Erik during drills.
He succeeded twice.
Coach made him do bag skates while the rest of us tried not to laugh.
“That wassoworth it,” Murph wheezed afterward, bent over and dripping sweat. “Did you see his face?”
“You’re going to die young,” Erik told him flatly, his accent making even those words droll. “And I am going to be the one who kills you.”
“You know I love it when you talk dirty to me, Daddy.” Murph blew him a winded kiss.
After practice, I hit the hotel gym while Murph “recovered” in our room, which meant he was setting up some elaborate trap to surprise me on my return. I’d learned to check every surface, every drawer, every inch of any space we shared. The man had once rigged a confetti cannon to my suitcase. I had topick tiny bits of paper out of my equipment bag for weeks.
By the time I got back to the room, exhausted from a serious leg day routine, I was ready to collapse. I pushed through the door and scanned for tripwires or suspicious objects.
“Relax, dude,” Murph called from his bed. He lay sprawled like an overly muscled starfish watching something on his phone. “I’m too tired for shenanigans tonight.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, continuing my scan before stepping through the doorway.
