26. Cash
Cash
The key card blinks green, and I shoulder the oak door open before the lock can click back into place.
Scottie doesn’t move toward her own room key in her pocket. She doesn’t say a word about the room across the hall. I drop the van keys on the laminate dresser and close the door, the latch falling into place with a definitive, heavy thunk.
“You’re staying in here tonight,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
Just okay. No legal arguments. No snappy remarks about client boundaries or corporate protocol.
My right hand is starting to throb now, a dull, hot ache spreading across the second and third knuckles where the bone met his jaw. I flex my fingers, the skin tight and sticky with dried blood.
Scottie turns around. Her eyes are massive against the pale skin of her face, her red hair still a messy, wild cloud from the rain and the wind. Her gaze drops down to my hand, staring at the dark red smudges on my skin.
“We need to clean that,” she says. “Cash. Your knuckles. They’re… you’re bleeding.”
“It’s not mine,” I say, looking down at the hand. “Most of it isn’t, anyway. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” She crosses the room to the small bathroom, her shadow long against the wall under the yellow entry light. “Sit down on the edge of the bed. Don’t touch anything.”
I do what I’m told. I drop onto the edge of the mattress, the springs groaning under my weight, and rest my elbows on my knees, staring at the ugly, patterned carpet between my sneakers.
Scottie comes back out of the bathroom carrying a plastic ice bucket filled with cold water, a couple of white motel towels, and a tiny, wrapped bar of generic soap. She sets the bucket on the nightstand and drops to her knees on the floor right between my feet, her knees sinking into the carpet.
“Scottie,” I say, leaning back a little. “Get up. You don’t have to be on the floor.”
“Shut up, Cash,” she mutters, her fingers already reaching out to grasp my wrist. “Just let me do this. Please.”
I freeze, my whole arm going tense as she dips one of the small towels into the cold water. She wrings it out with a wet, twisting motion, then brings the damp cloth down against my split skin.
The cold hits the raw scrape, and I let out a sharp, hissing breath through my teeth, my instinct making me want to pull the hand back. But her grip on my wrist tightens, surprisingly firm, her thumb pressing into the soft skin near my pulse point to keep me still.
“I know,” she whispers, her eyes fixed entirely on her work. “I know it stings. Just hold still.”
She works in silence for two full minutes, her thumb gently moving the cloth across the bruised, swollen skin. She rubs the tiny bar of soap until it lathers, her movements incredibly careful, almost reverent, as she clears away the dark red crust around my knuckles.
She’s breathing through her nose, short, shallow puffs of air that hit the back of my hand every time she leans closer. Her face is so close I can see the tiny, faint freckles across the bridge of her nose that usually hide under her makeup.
She looks so small down there, curled between my sneakers, treating my hand like it’s made of glass.
“Why did you do that?” She doesn’t look up. She just keeps rinsing the towel in the bucket, the water turning a faint, cloudy pink. “You could have broken a finger, Cash. If the coach sees your hand looking like a piece of meat—”
“I don’t care about the coach. I care about you,” I say. “I told you that in the parking lot. I’m not letting anyone talk to you like that. Not while I’m standing there.”
Scottie’s fingers go still against my wrist. She stays frozen for three long seconds, her head bowed. Then, she lets out a breath, her shoulders rising and falling in one jerky motion.
She drops the towel into the bucket and presses her forehead straight into the knee of my sweatpants, her hands remaining locked around my wrist.
“Don’t,” she whispers into the dark fabric, her voice so muffled I can barely catch the shape of the words.
“Don’t what, Scottie?”
“Don’t make me love you.”
My heart does a violent thud against my ribs.
“Scottie,” I say, my voice thick, reaching down with my left hand to catch her under the chin.
I pull her face up, forcing her to look at me. Her eyelashes are wet, her cheeks flushed a dark, painful pink, her lips parted.
I lean down, my head tilting, my mouth moving toward hers to take the space away, to slide back into the heavy, desperate rhythm we found in the front seat of the van.
I’m an inch from her lips when she shifts, her hands coming up to press against my chest, her mouth opening to meet mine.
And then I stop.
The memory hits me like an ice bath—the first night in Philadelphia, the muffled scream, the way her body had been vibrating with a suffocating terror, her green eyes wide and seeing something that wasn’t there.
The absolute panic of a nightmare that she never explained, that we never talked about, that she just buried under three layers of corporate schedule the next morning.
I pull my head back an inch, my thumb still resting against the soft skin of her jawline. My heart is hammering, my lungs burning, every single instinct in my body screaming at me to just lean back in and lose myself in her.
But I stay right where I am, my chest heaving, my eyes fixed on hers.
Scottie blinks, her breath catching, a sudden, confused hurt flaring behind her wet eyelashes. She shifts her weight on the floor, her mouth twisting into a tiny, defensive line.
“Huh,” she whispers, her voice shaking as she tries to force a laugh that drops flat into the carpet. “This is… this is the part where you kiss me, O’Connell. Did I miss a step or something?”
“Scottie,” I say. “Look at me.”
She tries to pull her chin back, but I hold her steady.
“The first night,” I say, the words coming out slow. “In Philadelphia. When you had that nightmare.”
It’s like the temperature in the room drops thirty degrees in a split second. Scottie goes rigid in my grip, her spine straightening, her breath hitching so hard it makes a tiny, clicking sound in her throat.
“Cash,” she says, shaking her head. “Don’t. That’s… we don’t need to do this.”
“We do,” I say. “Listen to me, Scottie-girl. You don’t have to tell me anything. You don’t have to give me details, or explanations, or any of it. That is your experience. It belongs to you. I just…”
I let out a long breath, my fingers moving to tangle in the hair behind her ear. “I just need to know that this is something you actually want. Right now. With me. I’m not moving another inch until I know you’re completely here.”
She stares at me, her chest heaving, her hands still pressed against the cotton of my t-shirt. She’s looking at me like she’s trying to find the trick, trying to find the contract clause where I pull the rug out from under her.
But there is no trick. There’s just me, sitting on a cheap bed, waiting for her to tell me where the boundary line is.
She licks her lips a couple of times as if trying to force the words out of her. She looks down at my shirt, her fingers tightening into the fabric.
“It was… it was a couple of years ago,” she whispers. “I was in a relationship. We’d been together for two years.”
I keep one hand on her face, the other on her arm, my thumb moving in a slow, steady circle against the tattoo on her wrist to keep her anchored.
“We were… we were staying at his apartment,” she says, her words coming out in a sudden, jerky rush, like she’s trying to unload a heavy weight before she loses the nerve to say it.
“I went to sleep early. And I woke up… I woke up in the middle of the night because he was… he had climbed on top of me while I was asleep.”
A sharp, violent jolt of pure ice shoots straight down my spine, my teeth clicking together so hard my jaw aches.
Every muscle in my body goes rock-hard, the urge to find this bastard and kill him instantly overriding everything else in my brain. But I force it down. I force my hands to stay completely soft, completely still against her skin.
I can’t be the scary thing in the room right now.
“And the thing is,” she says, her voice cracking, a tiny, horrible sound of shame leaking into the quiet. “I didn’t push him off. I didn’t scream. I didn’t do anything that a tough, smart woman is supposed to do.”
She lets out a small self-deprecating laugh. “I just… my brain just shut down, Finny. I was so confused, and so tired, and I…”
She swallows hard.
“I mean, it wasn’t like I said no.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t actually say the word. My throat just locked up, and I couldn’t get it out. So I just pretended to still be asleep. I just lay there, perfectly still, with my eyes closed, pretending I couldn’t feel it until he was finished.”
A shuddering breath escapes her, her shoulders hunching inward as if she could shrink away from the memory.
“I kept telling myself it didn’t count. He was my boyfriend.
We lived together. It wasn’t like a stranger in an alley.
It was just a terrible, messy night, right?
I spent months convincing myself it was just bad communication.
That it was somehow my fault for not waking up all the way and telling him to stop. ”
“Scottie—”
“If he’d been awful from day one, I would’ve left after the first date,” she says, ignoring me. “Or even the second. But fuck, I thought he was a good guy.”
She swallows hard.
“He was so sweet,” she whispers, frowning. “He remembered how I took my coffee, he walked me to my car, he was always respectful. I never thought… I never thought that was even possible with someone like him. You expect the bad guys to actually look like bad guys, right?”
She sighs, like she’s disappointed in herself for not seeing it earlier.
“The next morning,” she whispers, her eyes fixed on my collarbone, refusing to look up. “I got up before he woke up. I walked down to the CVS on the corner and bought a Plan B pill. I took it with a bottle of lukewarm water in the parking lot.”
She pauses.