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 wasthateven possible?
No amount of preparation would havemade 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.
Two things became immediately, undeniably clear.
The first was that I had no idea what I was doing. The mechanics on display were foreign territory—a whole atlas of physical possibilities I’d never mapped and never even known existed. Some of it I could intuit from basic geometry. Some of it defied geometry or gravity or physics.
And some of it made me tilt my head sideways like a confused dog trying to understand a magic trick.
The second thing that became clear—the thing that hit me like a three-hundred-pound defenseman at full speed, the thing that no amount of clinical, analytical, “studying game tape” self-deception could explain away—was that I was aroused.
Not mildly.
