Page 10 of The Tiger in the Sack

“You too,” I said. Professional. Clean. Completely normal tone of a woman who was not currently running an emergency background check on why his voice sounded so damn familiar.

Umm, duh. He was on TV all the time. Who in the sports world hadn’t heard his voice?

He was looking at me with an expression that in my experience usually lived on the faces of men who were very accustomed to women reacting to them and had gotten bored of it. Which was annoying, and also possibly exactly the energy I needed him to have because it made the next part significantly easier.

Because I did not do football players. Not anymore.

That was the rule. The rule that was going to keep right on existing regardless of jawlines or warm handshakes or voices that snagged on something both comforting and exciting.

I released his hand.

He put it directly into the pocket of his jeans.

“Monty’s waiting for us in the small conference room,” Gabrielle said.

“Right.” His eyes moved to me for just a second, still that careful, held-at-distance look. “Good luck with the squad,” he said in a voice that was extremely even, and then he turned and walked away down the corridor.

I watched him go, definitely not ogling his football butt for one second exactly before I remembered I was a professional.

Nope. Not going there.

The knock on my office door came at three-fifteen while I was rearranging my spreadsheet of potentially returning squad members for the third time.

“Come in.”

She was about my height, dark skin, braids pulled back in a bun without a single strand even attempting escape. She wore a Tigers warm-up jacket over workout clothes and had the posture of someone who’d been trained to hold themselves that way.

“Zahra Smith,” she said. “I was one of the captains last season.”

“Clover Freeman.” I stood and extended my hand. “I’ve been hoping to meet you.”

Her eyes did the thing I recognized because I’d been on the receiving end of it all my life. The quick scan. The recalibration. The microscopic adjustment of whatever she’d been expecting versus what was standing in front of her.

I let her have it. I didn’t flinch and I didn’t fill the silence and I didn’t perform competently for her. I just waited, steady and ready, and let Zahra Smith take her time.

She sat without being invited to. I respected that more than I was going to tell her.

“I’ve been on this squad for four years,” she said. “I had a good working relationship with Coach Daniels. I built my training schedule around her program, and a lot of the other women did too.” She folded her hands on my desk and looked at me directly. “I’d like to know what we’re walking into with you.”

Reasonable. Professional. Fair.

I made my decision in about two seconds.

I could be vague, keep it general, say we’ll talk at auditions. She’d accept that and leave and I wouldn’t have to watch her face do whatever it was about to do. But that wasn’t why I’d taken this job. I believed in this vision. I wasn’t going to hide it from the woman I hoped would return as one of my captains.

“We’re going to rebuild this squad with body diversity as a foundation, not a footnote,” I said. “With women who’ve been told there wasn’t a place for them. Community recruitment beyond the traditional pipeline. We’re going out into Cincinnati to find athletes who’ve never thought to audition for something like this because the door’s never been open to them.”

I watched her face the whole time.

The professionalism didn’t disappear. Something underneath it did.

“That’s Gabrielle Jackson’s idea,” she said.

“One I’ve been tasked to proponent. And I will because I believe in it.”

Zahra studied me for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was still controlled, but the precision of it had a different quality. Sharper. Like something had been decided.

“So Gabrielle Jackson, who has been the new president of this team for one hot minute, who has never worked in professional cheer or danced a day in her life, has decided that the squad her father built needs to be, what? A social experiment.” Not a question. “And she’s hired you to run it.”