Page 48 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Yeah.”

“And then.”

“And then I said it all badly and she said she doesn’t date football players and ordered an Uber.” I laid my head on the back of the couch. “I stayed until it came. She told me I’d had the whole ride to tell her myself. Then she left.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

“You really do like her,” Jules said.

“Doesn’t matter now.”

“It matters because it’s why this one is going to sting longer than you think.” She looked at Fox, then back at me. “She’s going to be there Monday.”

“I know, Jules.”

Fox cleared his throat. He had his thinking face on, which usually preceded either a genuinely good idea or the worst idea I had ever heard. There was no in between with Fox.

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh, picked up the smoothie he’d made, held it out in my general direction, and said, “You know what the Broasis needs? A name that doesn’t remind anyone of a mid-tier spa resort.”

Jules looked at him.

“I’m just saying. The space deserves better. I’ve been workshopping. I have candidates.”

“Not right now, Fox,” Jules said, but there was something in her voice that wasn’t quite irritated.

“No, obviously not right now.” He set the smoothie on the coffee table in front of me. Sat back down. Let the room be quiet again.

That was Fox. He couldn’t fix it and he knew it, so he handed me a coconut smoothie and floated a terrible idea about the apartment and sat close enough that I wasn’t alone in it. I had known him for three years and he had never once tried to be more than exactly what he was.

It was enough. It was always enough.

Vito had redistributed himself across my ribs. I sat there with the weight of him and the city outside and the phone face-down on the table and after a while Jules tucked her feet up under her on the couch.

”I don’t know how to fix this for you...yet. But Clover is good at her job and she’s not going anywhere, which means the next time you’re together on or off the field, at work or whatever, isn’t about fixing what happened tonight.”

I didn’t like where this was headed. How could it not be about fixing what happened tonight, and why did my little sister think it was her responsibility to fix it for me? She was sweet, and smart, and the best of us all, but I had to fucking fix my own damn problems.

But then she reached out and pressed her hand over my heart. “It’s about figuring out who Isak is in a room with her when he’s not hiding anything anymore.”

Jesus Hudson Christ. Why and how did the women in my life all decide to slice me open and pour salt, lime, and tequila in the wound?

“I think I’ve had more than enough personal growth for the evening. I’m going to bed.”

I picked up the phone and took Vito down the hall to my room without looking back at either of them and their faces of pity for me.

Vito jumped onto the bed immediately and began his pre-sleep audit of the duvet situation. I sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark and looked at the phone.

Through the wall I could hear them. Not words. Just voices, low and easy, Fox’s and Jules’s, the cadence of two people finding a rhythm. It shouldn’t have been as comfortable a sound as it was.

I put the phone on the nightstand. Not because I wasn’t going to text her. I was. I just needed to know what to say first, and right now the only thing I had was sorry, and sorry without the rest of it wasn’t enough. I knew better than to lead with the thing that wasn’t enough yet.

Monday was coming. She would be there. I would be there. The whole thing would be there, Monty Whyte and Theo and Gabrielle and all of it, and I needed to figure out who showed up to that.

Not Kingman. Not Cat Daddy.

Just me, whoever the hell that turned out to be.

Vito walked up my legs, across my stomach, and settled on my chest with the authority of someone who had assessed the situation and determined his presence was required. He pushed one small paw against my collarbone, deliberate, like a period at the end of a sentence. Then tucked it back under himself and purred.