Page 12 of The Tiger in the Sack

Front row seat.

I made an ugly duck face for a second. Just a second.

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” I said.

Front row seat to something historic that the football players were going to do.

Not how did it feel to walk into that building. Not tell me about the women you want to recruit. Not what are you going to build there that’s historic too, baby girl.

I knew what he’d say if I pointed it out. He’d say he already knew I was going to do something incredible because I always did, and he’d mean every word of it.

I drove home.

Tig had the blanket from the back of the couch arranged in the center of which he was now sitting, satisfied like a cat who’d had a very productive afternoon.

“Aww, you built your nest,” I said.

He blinked.

I pulled a pillow from the other side of the couch and sat there because I’d learned through experience that disturbing the nest was not worth it. He rearranged himself immediately onto my legs, turned three times, and settled with his full weight across my thighs.

I grabbed my phone for some scrolling, because it was now illegal for me to get up off the couch while Tig was on my lap.

Cat Daddy was still there between Camille and Dad’s assistant, right where I’d left him when I’d decided to be smart.

Instead of scrolling through my FaceSpace or Instasnap, my mind was already scrolling through my day. Monty Whyte’s weird micro-agressions that I was sure he had no clue he’d committed while meeting me. Zahra Smith and her very fair question about whose side I was on and the fact that I hadn’t been able to answer it well enough. My dad and the front row seat and my very long seven-minute drive home.

And then I thought about a man in a helmet who had climbed a tree in motorcycle boots without being asked, and talked me down branch by branch by asking my name, and caught me like he’d been waiting at the bottom of that tree his whole life. Who had called me Clover once in a voice that sounded like he was trying it out and deciding he liked it.

He had zero context for who I was or wasn’t.

That felt, tonight, like the most important thing in the world.

I opened the contact. Stared at it. I put the phone face down on the cushion.

Tig shifted his weight and purred.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said.

He wasn’t looking at me like anything. He was a cat.

I left the phone face down. I was being smart because really, who texts a guy who won’t tell her his name or let her see his face?

And also I was so, so dumb, because I knew I was going to text.

PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

ISAK

What the hell was I doing? Why hadn’t I said something when Gabrielle introduced me to her?

Because I was a dumb ass. And I was going to continue being one because now it was too late. I’d fucked it up and no matter what I did, Clover was going to think I was... well, a dumb ass. Which I was.

Fox was in the kitchen doing his seven-step Korean skincare routine when I got home, which meant I had to act casual because he’d call me on even the slightest weirdness in a second. That’s what happened when you lived and worked and partied and gamed with your brother from another mother.

I was great at pretending everything was fine. Yep. Nailing it. Very casual. Totally normal evening. Nothing had happened today.

“You’re being weird. What happened?”