Page 104 of The Tiger in the Sack

“I want to be the one who decides how this goes,” Clover said. “All of it. The when and the how and the how fast. I’ve spent my whole life letting rooms tell me where I’m allowed to stand. I’m not doing that here. Here I stand wherever I want.”

“Stand wherever you want,” I said, and my voice came out wrecked, the way it had on the balcony with my dad, the way it comes out when the truth is too big for the fast mouth. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m a fixed structure. I’m a load-bearing wall. Tell me where you want me and I’ll be there for fourty-hundred years.”

She climbed into my lap.

Facing me. A knee on either side of my hips, settling her weight down onto me, all of her, and I made some sound that wasn’t a word, and she went still, watching my face, checking it, and I understood the check, the check was the whole thing, the check was a woman who’d spent too long being told in a thousand small quiet ways that her body was a thing to apologize for.

Sitting her full self down in a man’s lap and watching to see if his face did anything but want her was instinct.

My face did not do anything but want her.

“You’re going to have to tell me what you want,” I said, because the Kingman men were raised by a quiet man and a memory of a loud woman and the one rule that outranked every other rule in our house, the one Dad never had to say twice: You do not lay a hand on a single thing that hasn’t told you yes, out loud with its whole chest. “I’m serious. I need the words. I’ve got a thousand of them and I need a few of yours.”

“I know about the rule,” Clover said. “Your house rule of enthusiastic consent. Trixie told me. A lot of women know the Kingman boys are like this, it’s apparently famous, Kelsey called it the only green flag in professional sports.”

“It’s not a green flag, it’s just manners.”

“It’s a green flag. Shut up. I’m deciding things.” And then she smiled, slow, the realest one, the one I’d been chasing since a content shoot, and she said it. The word. With her whole chest, enthusiastically.

“Yes,” she said. “I want this. I want you. All the way. That’s the word, that’s me using it, you can stop holding your breath.”

“I wasn’t holding my—” I was absolutely about to turn blue. I let it out.

But then I forgot about breathing all together, because Clover lifted the pretty summer dress by the hem, pulled it over her head, and dropped it on the floor. And she was wearing a matching pink bra and panty set.

“Okay. Yes. Copy. Loud and clear. Receiving.”

“You’re doing radio voice.”

“I panic in radio voice. It’s a documented condition.” But my hands had come up to her waist by then, careful, asking, resting there light enough that she could move and heavy enough that she’d know I wanted to, and she covered both my hands with both of hers and pressed them down her hips, and toward cupping her soft, plump ass.

She was telling me I could, and the breath went out of me all over again for an entirely different reason.

Here’s what nobody tells you about getting the thing you wanted so long you stopped admitting you wanted it. It’s quiet. I’d imagined this, I’m a man after all. I’d imagined this with some frequency, I’d imagined it the first night on the bike with her arms locked around me and I’d hated myself a normal amount about it. In every version it was loud, frantic, a highlight reel. And the real one was quiet. It was her deciding the next thing and then the next thing, and me waiting each time for her to decide it, and the waiting being its own kind of unbearable and its own kind of holy.

She set the pace slow. On purpose. I understood it was on purpose because everything she did tonight was on purpose, a woman who’d spent her life letting other people decide how much of her was allowed in a room taking the whole decision back into her own two hands and going slow with it because she could, because nobody was going to hurry her out of a space she’d finally claimed.

“You can look,” she said. Reading my face, the way she read everything. “I can feel you not-looking. You’re allowed to look, Isak. I didn’t climb up here to be polite.”

So I looked.

I’d been waiting far too long to look. I’d said it to her on a motorcycle and at a content shoot and thought it probably four hundred other times in ways that would make anyone blush, the freckles, I wanted to see all of her freckles. From her nose to her toes, but most especially in all the places in between.

And now she was letting me, and the longing fell away and left just the truth of her skin, her beauty, her body sitting on my lap with nothing to hide behind.

There were so many more freckles than I’d been allowed to know about.

“There’s a galaxy of you,” I said, and my voice came out stupid and wrecked and reverent. “I’m going to count them. I’m starting a count. One⁠—”

“You are not counting my freckles right now.”

“Two. Three. I lost three already, hang on, I have to start over, you keep — you’re distracting the census⁠—”

“Isak.”

“I’m at a thousand and two,” I said, which was not a number I had reached by any honest method, and she laughed, the real one, and the laugh moved through all of her at once and I forgot the census entirely because the laugh was the most beautiful thing her body had done yet and her body had been doing a lot of beautiful things.

I touched the marks low on her belly and hips, the silvered lines, the ones a lesser and stupider man might’ve thought she’d want unmentioned, and I did not have it in me to leave them unmentioned because not worshipping them properly would’ve been a lie about how I felt looking at them, and I’d retired from lying about how I felt at a very recent press conference.