31. Cash
Cash
I wake up with my face buried in Scottie’s hair.
My left arm is pinned beneath her shoulder, dead from the elbow down, tingling with that frantic, pins-and-needles static.
I don’t give a shit. I just lie there for a minute, listening to the slow, steady hitch of her breath against my collarbone.
It’s the kind of quiet that feels like it could last forever, if I’m lucky.
She stirs, her elbow digging right into my lower ribs with a sharp poke.
“Finn,” she mutters, her voice thick with sleep. “Your ribs are too hard. It’s like sleeping on a piece of gym equipment.”
“You’re the one who fell asleep using my chest as a pillow, Scottie,” I murmur, my own voice raspy. “I’m just the furniture.”
Scottie’s eyes blink open, bright green and surprisingly clear behind a thin layer of exhaustion. She looks at my hair, which I know is currently sticking up in four different directions, and a sudden giggle leaks out of her mouth.
“What?” I ask, my mouth twitching into a grin.
“You look like you got electrocuted by a Zamboni,” she says, her fingers sliding up to tug on a stray spike above my ear. “It’s an aggressive aesthetic for seven in the morning.”
“It’s called style,” I say, rolling over onto my side until I’m hovering over her, my forearms flanking her shoulders on the white sheets. I watch the way the morning light catches the messy, beautiful copper of her hair spread across the pillow.
“Want to give me my trophy again before we pack the duffels?” I ask, my voice dropping an octave.
“Absolutely not,” she laughs, though she doesn’t push me away.
Instead, she arches into my touch, her hand resting against my forearm.
“I have bills to review, Cash. And you have an actual contract negotiation pending if I can get the front office to respond to my last addendum. Get off me, you giant.”
I let out a dramatic groan, letting my full weight drop onto her for three seconds until she shrieks and bats at my ears, before I finally roll off the bed and onto the hardwood floor.
I reach for my gray shorts, shaking out a piece of dried grass, and look back at the bed. The room feels smaller now, the reality of the road trip creeping back into the space.
“Where to now? We’re getting to the end of the line on this tour.”
Scottie is sitting up against the headboard, her hand reaching for her phone on the nightstand to check the agency routing schedule.
Her fingers freeze above the glass. She looks at the screen, her thumb scrolling once, twice. The light from the device reflects in her eyes, turning them a sterile, unreadable gray.
“Oklahoma,” she says.
I stop with my t-shirt halfway over my head, my eyes locking onto her profile. The red hair is hanging down the side of her face, blocking my view of her expression, but I can see the sharp, rapid pulse beating against the hollow of her throat.
“Oklahoma,” I repeat, watching her closely. “That’s fun.”
“Yeah, fun,” she says.
She slides out of bed before I can say anything else, her bare feet hitting the floorboards as she snatches her clothes, walks into the bathroom and shuts the door before I can even ask if she wants coffee.
The shower runs for twenty minutes. When the water stops, there’s another long stretch of nothing. No hair dryer, no rustling bags, just silence.
When she finally opens the door, the girl who was laughing at my hair is totally gone.
“We need to load the van.”
She doesn’t look at me. She goes straight for her briefcase on the desk, her fingers snapping the latches shut with two loud, metallic clicks. Her face is a mask of professional, detached efficiency.
“Hey,” I say, taking a step toward her. “Is everything alright?”
“Everything is fine, Cash. We’re just on a schedule.”
By the time I carry the rest of the bags out to the parking lot, she’s already in the passenger seat with her laptop open, the screen casting a cold, blue glow over her face.
I climb into the driver’s seat of the old van and start the engine, waiting for her to do her usual routine—pick a playlist, complain about my driving, or make some joke about the grease on my shorts.
Instead, she just types. Her fingers hit the keys with a hard, aggressive rhythm that fills the quiet cabin.
“You want to stop for breakfast?” I ask, keeping my tone carefully neutral. “There’s a diner down the block. I think they have those pancakes you like.”
“No. I’m not hungry.”
“You’re always hungry in the morning, Scottie. You usually eat half my eggs.”
“I said I’m not hungry, Cash.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, my hands tightening on the thin, oversized steering wheel.
I don’t get it.
Ten minutes ago she was giggling, her fingers tangled in my hair, warm and soft against me. Now, it feels like if I breathe too loud, she’s going to explode.
***
The sky has turned that bruised shade of gray, a low ceiling of mist that drags against the tops of the mountains as we make the long haul toward the city.
The vibe inside the cabin is shot.
Scottie doesn’t say a word. She also hasn’t looked out the window once since we crossed the state line.
The silence is loud, but the typing is louder.
Her fingers hit the keys with a fast, aggressive rhythm that fills the entire front seat.
Click, click, click-tap. It sounds like a tiny machine gun going off in the passenger seat.
“Scottie,” I say, keeping my voice low. “You’ve been staring at that spreadsheet for too long. Close the screen for five minutes and rest your eyes. I can put on a podcast or something.”
She ignores me completely, her fingers moving even faster. She doesn’t answer, she doesn’t nod, she doesn’t give me anything.
“Scottie,” I repeat, frustration starting to prick at my skin. “Take a breath. You’re going to break the keys.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” she lets out a sharp, forced laugh. “I’m just focused. You should be focused too.”
“I am focused,” I say. “But you’re being weird. What’s in Oklahoma besides the rink?”
“Nothing,” she says instantly. Too fast. “It’s a city, Cash. It has hills and cowboys and a hockey coach. That’s what’s in Oklahoma.”
She doesn’t speak again for fifty miles.
The silence stretches out, growing heavier with every mile marker we pass. I try to clear my throat, and she visibly flinches, her shoulders hunching up toward her ears like she’s trying to shield herself from the sound.
I reach over to adjust the volume on the radio, just trying to get some background noise to drown out the tension, and the second my fingers touch the dial, she snaps.
“Do you have to fidget so much?” she demands. “It’s incredibly distracting. Some of us are trying to actually work here.”
“I’m turning up the radio, Scottie. Jesus.”
My chest burns.
I feel like a stray dog she’s letting ride along in her car, unwelcome and totally in the dark about what I did wrong.
The girl who threw forty plastic checkers across a motel room floor has vanished, replaced by an edgy, irritable ghost who seems to flinch every time the van hits a seam in the concrete.
We hit a construction delay—just a long line of idling semi-trucks and a guy in an orange vest holding a stop sign under the gray drizzle.
“Are you kidding me?” Scottie snaps, slamming her laptop shut. “We’ve been sitting here for three minutes.”
“Scottie, the guy has a sign,” I say, my thumb tapping the steering wheel. “Unless you want me to drive the van through a ditch full of wet gravel, we’re waiting. Relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax!” she barks, her eyes meeting mine, and they are wild, frantic, and filled with a hurt I can’t identify. “You don’t have to manage the partners, Cash! You just have to stand in a net and let people hit you with pieces of rubber!”
I stare at her. The silence inside the van turns cold.
“That was uncalled for.”
Scottie blinks, the sharp edge of her anger faltering as she reads the hurt on my face. Her mouth opens, as if to say something—maybe an apology, maybe a retraction—but she stops.
She doesn’t apologize. She just turns her shoulder toward me, pressing her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window, her breath fogging the corner of the pane.
“Whatever,” she mutters. “Just… drive when he moves the sign.”
When the van crosses the state line, the sign welcoming us to the Evergreen State passes by in a blur of gray mist and green pine. Scottie doesn’t even look at it.
She has pulled the sweatshirt up over her chin, her knees tucked back into her chest, her whole body shrunk into a tiny, defensive ball against the door.
She has completely shut down. She isn’t typing, she isn’t checking the waiver wire, and she isn’t looking at me.
She’s just a ghost in the passenger seat, staring out into the gray rain as the highway leads us straight toward the city lights in the distance.
I keep both hands on the wheel, my eyes fixed on the wet road ahead, praying that I can get my Scottie-girl back soon.