34. Scottie-girl
Scottie-girl
Me: Do you ever take anything seriously?
Cash: yes
Me: Like what?
Cash: you
***
I’m sitting on a rusted metal folding chair behind the glass of the home bench, wrapped in my own wool pullover, Cash’s oversized gray winter coat, and a generic fleece blanket I found in the back of the van.
The cold is a living thing; it seeps through the concrete floor and settles into my bones until my very marrow feels frozen.
Out on the ice, Cash is a massive, dark silhouette against the low-wattage yellow house lights. His goalie pads look huge in the gloom, the white leather scarred with hundreds of black puck marks from three different leagues.
He hasn’t stopped moving since his skates hit the surface.
“Too deep,” a voice says.
Coach Wade is seventy-four years old. His hips are so shot he doesn’t even wear skates on the ice anymore; he just stands out there in a pair of ancient, salt-stained leather boots.
His spine is curved like an old pine tree, and he leans his entire weight onto a wooden stick with a blade that has been shaved flat from fifty years of scraping snow.
It’s our first twenty minutes with him, and he hasn’t said more than six words.
Cash recovers from a cross-crease slide, his right block hitting the post with a hollow clack. He’s breathing like a racehorse, the sweat dripping from the chin bar of his mask onto the blue paint of his crease.
Tap.
Wade doesn’t look at Cash’s face. He just drops the heel of his stick onto the ice once.
Cash doesn’t argue. He just resets, his massive shoulders dropping three inches, his skates digging back into the crease as he adjusts his depth by two inches—no more, no less.
“Again,” Wade mutters.
I look down at my ledger, trying to force my thumb to coordinate with my index finger to slide the pen across the page.
Oklahoma GM flight delayed until 2:00 PM, I write, the letters shaky from the chill. Wade session 1: Depth recovery metrics stable. Cash’s lateral slide response time decreased by 0.14 seconds under stick cue.
My phone buzzes against my thigh inside the three layers of jackets. It’s a text from the agency office in Boston.
Is O’Connell on the ice? Scouts are asking if the shoulder rumor is real.
I look back through the scratched Plexiglas.
Cash is currently dropping into a full butterfly, his massive limbs expanding to cover the bottom four inches of the net as a puck comes screaming off the automated shooting machine Wade set up at the slot.
The puck hits his chest protector with a blunt, wet thud, dropping dead into the snow between his skates. He gathers it with his glove, drops it, and resets before the machine can click again.
I type back with one thumb: Shoulder is fine. Regular maintenance skate.
“He’s letting the left heel float,” a voice says right next to my ear.
I jump, my pen skittering across the ledger page in a long, blue streak.
Wade has moved from the blue line to the bench opening without making a single sound on his leather boots. He’s standing right over my folding chair, his face a landscape of gray stubble and deep, permanent wrinkles from thirty winters in the Western Hockey League.
“Mr. Wade,” I say, my voice sounding tight from the cold as I try to stand up.
“Sit down, girl,” he grunts, not looking at me. “You look like a frozen turnip. Why aren’t you inside the warming room?”
“The warming room window has three coats of yellow paint over it,” I say, rubbing my numb knuckles together. “I can’t see him from there.”
Wade lets out a dry, rattling sound from his throat that might be a chuckle. He leans his hip against the wooden boards of the bench, his ancient hands still buried deep in his track jacket.
“He’s a big lad. Stubborn.”
I look down at my shoes. “Mr. Wade, I wanted to apologize about yesterday. The cancellation. It was unprofessional on my part. We had some… logistical delays, and I should have managed the notification better. The agency—”
“The agency can kiss my wrinkled ass,” Wade says smoothly, his tone not changing by a single octave. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a white winter mint, and pops it into his cheek with a loud click against his teeth.
“I’ve been in this game since the six-team era, dear. I know what a boy looks like when his brain is full of mud. If he’d skated yesterday, he’d have spent sixty minutes fighting his own shadow and he’d have pulled a groin trying to prove something to a scout who wasn’t even in the building yet.”
I freeze, my thumb stopping on the edge of my notebook. “What did he tell you?”
“He called me,” Wade grunts, his gray eyes turning down to look at me for the first time. “Said he wasn’t taking the ice. Said he needed twenty-four hours to take care of someone he loves.”
My breath hitches sharply, my fingers tighten around the leather planner so hard the cardboard core bends.
Someone he loves.
Cash has never said those words to me. We aren’t together. We aren’t a couple.
We’re an agent and a client who crashed through a boundary line on a dark highway, and hearing it dropped into the cold air of an Oklahoma rink makes my pulse do a frantic, terrifying sprint against my ribs.
Wade watches the sudden, frantic color flood into my face. The corners of his eyes crinkle into a deep set of wrinkles, his mouth twisting around the mint.
“And from the way you just reacted to that,” Wade says, “I’m guessing that was you.”
“Mr. Wade, it’s not—we aren’t—the professional arrangement is strictly—”
Wade waves a thick, calloused hand, cutting me off before I can launch into an administrative protocol. “Oh, girl, I don’t care about your relationships.”
He turns his eyes back to the ice, his ancient hand resting flat on the top of his wooden stick. “I just know he took the break he needed, and now everything is alright. Look at him out there. He’s playing like a star.”
He turns back to the ice, raising his stick six inches off the floorboards.
Tap.
Cash instantly snaps his head toward the bench.
“The glove is dropping when you move south, Finnian!” Wade shouts. “You’re tucked in like a pregnant hen. Keep the thumb up or I’m turning the machine up to ninety.”
Cash doesn’t say anything. He just raises his left hand two inches, his glove pocket opening up like a net, his body going perfectly still as the machine clicks into gear again.
“He’s better than the tape they sent me from Boston,” Wade says, his voice dropping back into that low, private rattle.
“In Boston, he was playing like he wanted to break the posts. Out here, he’s just…
taking up space. That’s what a goalie is supposed to do.
Be a wall that doesn’t have an opinion.”
“He has a lot of opinions,” I mutter under my breath.
“Not when he’s on the ice,” Wade says.
***
“You look like a blue crab, Scottie.”
“My toes have been dead since seven-thirty,” I say, my teeth clicking together as I try to stand up. My knees groan from the prolonged chill. “If we stay here another ten minutes, you’re going to have to wheel me into the GM meeting on a hand truck.”
Cash drops his hand onto the top of my head, his fingers cold and damp from the glove liners but his palm still throwing off an incredible amount of body heat.
He gives my head a small shake, his mouth twisting into that familiar, lazy smirk that means the Gary Potts persona hasn’t entirely left his system.
“That old man is a lunatic,” he rumbles. “He told me my lateral recovery looked like a duck with a broken hip.”
“He said you look like a cement mixer when you’re angry,” I say, wrapping the fleece tighter around my shoulders as we start walking toward the dressing room.
“The old man is right about the heel, though,” Cash grunts, pulling his goalie pants down over his hips as we hit the threshold of the small, white-tiled room. “I’ve been letting the left skate drift since the preseason. Nobody else saw it.”
“Wade saw it from sixty feet away without his glasses,” I say, sitting down on the wooden bench across from his stall. “The Oklahoma scouts called twice while you were on the ice. They heard a rumor about the shoulder.”
“What did you tell them?” He doesn’t look up, his fingers working the thick leather straps of his leg pads, dropping them onto the floorboards with two thuds.
“I told them you were doing regular maintenance,” I say.
“Maintenance,” he echoes, the word coming out as a low, dry chuckle. “What am I, a Ford F-150 with a loose alternator?”
“Basically,” I reply, leaning back against the wooden lockers and crossing my ankles.
“I told them that your joints are fully optimized for stealing games away from anyone foolish enough to doubt it. And then I asked if Boston was still struggling with their power play percentage, because I figured they had too much free time to be calling me directly.”
Cash laughs out loud then, a rich, full sound that bounces off the white tile and fills up the empty dressing room. He drops the rest of his gear with a clatter and strides across the floor, stopping right in front of the bench.
“Remind me never to get on your bad side,” he says.
“You spend like 50 percent of your time on my bad side,” I point out, offering a dry little smile. “You did play out of your mind today. You were terrifying, actually.”
“That’s the goal.”
Down the concrete hall, a heavy door swings open, followed by the low, polite rumble of the home team’s general manager.
Cash rolls his eyes toward the hallway, letting out a breath, but the lazy smirk is back on his face.
“Duty calls.” He grabs a fresh black polo from his stall, tugging it over his shoulders as he steps out to greet him. “Hold down the fort, Scottie. Try not to sell off my goalie sticks while I’m being polite to our host.”
“No promises,” I say as he moves toward the door. “If the price is right, those pads are getting listed by two o’clock.”
He flashes a grin over his shoulder before heading down the corridor, leaving the room quiet again, save for the hum of the overhead heaters and the lingering warmth of him sitting right here beside me.