And I had no idea—not even a basic framework of an idea—how any ofthatworked.
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—thismoment. This little pop-upbox 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 Ineededto 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.
