Page 72 of Unmanageable

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.