Scottie Reed
Cash: i saw a dog that looked exactly like you today
Me: Excuse me?
Cash: tiny, judgmental, looked like it wants to bite me
Me: Did you just call me a bitch??
Cash: i would never
***
The rink in Charlotte smells exactly like it should—sharp ammonia, frozen dust, and the lingering, stubborn scent of decades of old sweat soaked into the plywood behind the players’ benches.
It’s a massive relief after the five-hour nightmare drive from Washington last night.
We spent two brutal hours huddled in a roadside gas station bathroom, shivering and waiting for the storm to break, before finally giving up on comfort and pushing through the dark, torrential downpour to get here.
Now, it’s the next morning, and I’m leaning against the scuffed plastic of the viewing glass, a lukewarm hotel coffee cooling in my hands. The morning light is filtering through the high, grimy windows of the arena, casting long, slanted beams of dust-mote-filled light across the ice.
Down on the surface, Cash is staring at a man who isn’t wearing skates.
Yuri Chenkov is a mountain of a man with dark, weathered skin, a thick, silver-streaked beard, and a bald head that reflects the harsh fluorescent lights of the rafters.
He’s wearing a heavy, oversized gray tracksuit and standing directly inside the crease in a pair of pristine, blindingly white sneakers.
Yuri was a legendary goalie in the nineties who walked away from the game at his absolute peak to study “alternative movement” in the mountains of Bulgaria.
Cash stands square in front of him, looking massive and incredibly confused in his full goalie pads, his chest protector making him look like a wide-shouldered, armored linebacker.
“Forget the net, Cash,” Yuri says, his voice a deep rumble that carries all the way up to the glass. “The net is just lines. If you think about the lines, you panic. Enter the crease as a current.”
Cash blinks behind his steel cage. His mouth hangs open for a second before he finds his voice. “A current? Like… electricity, Yuri? Or are we talking about the ocean? Because I’m a pretty decent swimmer, but I don’t think that translates to goal tending.”
Yuri ignores the sarcasm. “Be the river. The rock stands against the water and is worn away. The river doesn’t fight the mountain. It flows around it. When the shooter comes, you don’t block. You dissolve.”
I press my pen to the yellow legal pad in my lap. I pause. I lower the pen and just write three giant question marks.
Cash looks back at me through the glass, his eyes wide and frantic behind his mask. He mouths: What the hell does that mean?
I give him a helpless, one-handed shrug. Just flow, O’Connell.
“Alright,” Cash mutters to himself, resetting his stance and dropping into a loose, low crouch. “I’m a river. Let’s do the river thing. Whatever that is.”
Cameron, a new college kid we hired to shoot on him, looks equally confused. He’s standing at the top of the circles, shifting his weight from skate to skate, balancing a puck on his blade.
“Begin,” Yuri says, waving a hand.
Cameron lets a wrist shot fly. It’s a standard, mid-height shot toward the glove side—the kind Cash usually handles without even thinking. Cash, acting on pure, instinctive NHL muscle memory, flashes his glove out and snatches the puck cleanly out of the air.
“Stop!” Yuri barks, looking genuinely pained. “No. That is the ego, Cash. You gripped it. You captured it. You cannot capture the wind.”
“I caught it, Yuri,” Cash pants, his voice muffled by the cage. “That’s my job. If I don’t catch it, it goes in the net. That’s generally considered a bad outcome in this league.”
“Your glove is the moon,” Yuri says, deadpan, stepping closer to him. “The puck is the tide. The moon does not hunt the water. The water is drawn to it. Let the tide find your moon.”
I stare at Yuri. I look down at my notepad and aggressively scribble over the entire page until the paper tears.
Glove = moon? Puck = tide?
“Okay,” Cash mutters. He’s trying so hard to be respectful because the agency paid this guy a massive retainer, but I can practically hear his brain short-circuiting. “Glove is the moon. Got it. I am the moon.”
Cameron tracks back, grabs another puck, and fires a low, hard slapper toward the bottom right corner—the blocker side.
Cash tries to be the moon. He hesitates for a fraction of a second, trying to let the ‘gravity’ work, but the puck is moving at eighty-five miles an hour. It slams violently into the iron post with a loud ping and deflects away into the corner.
“Yes!” Yuri beams, clapping his hands together. “Beautiful! You dissolved! You allowed the mountain to pass through you!”
“Yuri, that hit the post,” Cash frowns, standing up straight. “If it’s two inches to the left, that’s a goal. That’s a loss in a tie game.”
“But it was not,” Yuri counters, unbothered. “Do it again.”
For the next forty-five minutes, my notebook becomes a total disaster.
I’m supposed to be documenting his recovery tracking and shoulder load management for the front office. Instead, I’m frantically writing down phrases like “Your pads are the roots of an ancient oak” and “Do not cut the mother ice.”
“Why did your shoulder lift?” Yuri asks after a particularly awkward scramble.
“Because the oak tree got sniped, Yuri,” Cash pants, his jersey soaked through with sweat, his face bright red behind the cage.
“Your shoulder lifted because you feared the shadow of the hawk,” Yuri tells him, waving a finger. “The blocker is the sky. The hawk cannot hurt the sky.”
I flip to a fresh page and write:
If blocker is sky, what are the skates?
Five minutes later, Yuri tells Cash to “Glide like oil on water.”
“Glide like oil,” Cash repeats, his voice entirely deadpan. He looks over at me through the glass, his eyes wild, pleading for a rescue mission.
By the time Yuri calls it, Cash looks like he’s just crawled out of a trench. He plods heavily toward the locker room gate, his head down, his stick dragging on the ice behind him like a broken spirit.
Yet, as I watch him go, I realize something.
His shoulder didn’t flinch once during that last drill. The tiny, protective hitch he’s been trying to work out since the injury was completely gone.
He was so busy trying to figure out how to be a river that he forgot to be afraid of the pain.
Ten minutes later, the locker room door clicks open.
Cash walks out, his massive, battered gear bag slung over one shoulder. He’s showered, his blonde hair damp and sticking up in three different directions, wearing a clean gray sweatshirt and black track pants.
We walk out of the rink in total silence, our sneakers clicking against the concrete as we hit the gravel parking lot. The sun is bright, burning off the last of the humidity from last night’s storm, making the air feel thick.
We walk half a block before we both stop by the van. I turn my head slowly to look at him.
“What,” I say, my voice flat, “was that?”
“I don’t know, Scottie,” he says, his voice a low, horrified whisper. “I honestly don’t know. At one point he told my blocker to become a lung. A lung, Scottie. How do you block with a lung?”
“He told your glove hand to be the moon, Cash. The moon.” I rub my temples, feeling a headache brewing. “I have six pages of notes and I look like a lunatic. I wrote ‘Do not cut the mother ice’ in all caps.”
“I tried to flow around the mountain,” he says, letting out a long, low groan as he covers his face with his hands. “My shoulder doesn’t even hurt because my brain shut down to protect itself from the philosophy.”
“We have three more sessions with him, Cash. It’s non-refundable.”
Cash looks at me, his eyes filled with genuine terror. “Three more? Scottie, by tomorrow he’s going to have me meditating in the crease while guys shoot pucks at my ribs.”
“You’re the river, O’Connell,” I say, a small, involuntary laugh breaking through my lips. “Start flowing.”
“I hate the river,” he mutters, though the corner of his mouth twitches upward. “I want to go back to being a wall.”
***
By 8:30 PM, the absolute ridiculousness of the afternoon has faded into a pleasant, humming exhaustion.
I’ve taken a long, hot shower, washed the travel-day stress out of my hair, and changed into my favorite lounge set.
I’m lying on the king-sized hotel bed, my hair damp against a plush white towel, flipping through a local design magazine and feeling finally, blissfully, disconnected from the office.
A sharp, rhythmic knock echoes against the wood of the door.
I freeze. I glance at the digital clock on the nightstand. 8:36 PM.
I get off the bed, my bare feet sinking into the thick carpet, and walk over to the door. I look through the little peephole.
Cash is standing in the hallway. He’s changed out of his track pants into a clean black t-shirt and dark jeans. He’s holding a paper bag from the bakery down the street in one hand and has his phone in the other.
I unlatch the chain and swing the door open six inches, leaning my shoulder against the dark wood of the frame.
“It’s late, O’Connell. The Shark is off the clock.”
Cash doesn’t look at my clothes or my wet hair; his eyes just fix on my face, that familiar, bright grin breaking through his exhaustion, the gold flecks in his eyes catching the warm light of the hallway lamp.
He holds up the paper bag, shaking it slightly until the scent of cinnamon and powdered sugar reaches my nose.
“The river is restless, Scottie,” he says. “And the moon told me you need a donut. Change your shoes. We’re going to go find some stupid trouble in the city.”
I look at the bag, then at his crooked smile, and the corporate armor doesn’t stand a chance.
“Give me two minutes.”