Page 25 of The Tiger in the Sack

I checked my phone for the seventh time since we’d gotten into the film room and there had still been no text from Cheerleader, and there continued to be no text from her, and I was a professional athlete and I was going to focus on this fade-route-not-a-screen-pass and not think about cute girls with tight curls and freckles that probably dotted her whole damn, juicy body.

I was a man of considerable athletic training. I lifted large amounts of weight three days a week. I stood in pockets while three hundred pounds of defensive linemen barreled toward me with my demise in their eyes. I lived, breathed, and ate football for breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, lunch, dinner, and late night snacks.

Nothing distracted me from being the best quarterback I could be.

My phone buzzed.

I dropped my pen.

Fox saw me do it. “Bro.”

“Shut up right now or I will sit on you.” I’d done it before, I would absolutely do it again to shut him up. “I will sit on you in this chair and you will be very embarrassed.”

Coach turned around at the board. “Are you boys going to be okay back there?”

“Yes, Coach,” Fox and I said simultaneously, in the same eleven-year-old voice we had probably used in Pop Warner huddles. The laptop on the desk in front of me, in some other universe, was running a fade route, and in this universe my phone was burning a hole in my pocket like a small radioactive object that had been delivered to me personally by a woman who had not yet decided whether to let me take her on a ride.

Coach turned back to the board.

I pulled my phone halfway out of my pocket.

I tilted the phone and looked at the screen through the slit of my pocket all sneaky like.

Cheerleader

Tig asked me to send this to Vito. Please forward at your convenience.

A picture popped up below the text of her floofball orange menace sitting in a cereal bowl, with a couple of magically delicious marshmallows stuck to his fur and a spoon sticking out from under his butt.

This woman.

Days ago I’d sent her a photo of Vito with wild eyes and a puffed up tail while a pigeon walked past my window. And now, on Tuesday morning, after ninety-six thousand hours of considered silence, she’d finally replied in kind.

I dropped the phone back in my pocket.

I went back to looking at the laptop.

The fade route ran for fifteen yards and a touchdown. The film cut to the next play.

In my pocket, the small radioactive object did not buzz again.

It had been the only thing keeping me alive for forty-five seconds.

Fox leaned in. “You okay, sweetheart?”

“Fox,” I gritted his name out like a warning.

“Oh, she texted.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Or did she sext? Are there pictures?”

“It is none of your business.” That would drive him crazy.

“Oh my gawd, there are pictures. She texted you, and you went pale because your entire blood supply has rerouted to your… phone.”

Coach turned around again. “Kingman. Daws. You two are killing me. Meeting dismissed. Go run twenty laps before drills this afternoon.”

Fuck. I didn’t love getting my balls busted by our new coach the first week of camp. But also…maybe I did need some cardiovascular exercise. My heart was already beating at a low aerobic pace as it was.

Coach pointed toward the door. “Get out. The rest of us are going to have some coffee and maybe a cookie while we put our feet up.”