Page 56 of The Tiger in the Sack

Telling people. For weeks. About me.

Don’t be furniture, I told myself. Don’t be furniture and don’t be a jackass. Find the third door.

There wasn’t one. There was the door where I corrected her in front of the owner and her sister and made a scene, and there was the door where I let it stand and let it sit in the room and let it sit in front of the one person at that table who’d already decided I was a man who let things sit.

“That’s a front-office conversation,” I said. Even. Friendly. The clean smile, the one off the building. “You’d want Gabi in the room for anything about the campaign. She runs football ops.”

The temperature at Tiki’s end of the table dropped about nine degrees.

“I know what my sister runs,” Tiki said, still smiling.

“Just keeping the chain of command straight, ma’am. Coach is real big on it.”

Across the table, Clover did not look up from her laptop. She typed something. I had no idea what. I had spent six nights learning the inside of this woman’s brain through a phone screen and right now I could not read a single thing on her face, and that was the most expensive part of the whole morning.

Coach, from his seat, mild as a Sunday said, “We are big on it.”

A weird little dog head popped up out of Tiki’s bag and made a sound that was half bark and half car horn.

“Princess Cheeseburger, it is not your turn to talk right now, shmoochy poo. Mommy’s working, yes she is.” She pushed the teensy-tiny dog back down into her purse, and smiled at all of us as if she expected us to ooh and ahh over her display of affection.

Tiki recalibrated. and then she turned the full wattage back to Gabrielle.

“We’ll talk,” she said, not a question. “I’ll have my assistant send some thoughts. This is going to be so good. I’m thrilled.”

She stood, gathered the doggy bag, from which some yips and yaps sounded within. I think there was more than one dog in there and also had clearly cost more than my first car, and swept toward the door. “Don’t change anything until you hear from me.”

The door did not close fully behind her. Nobody moved to fix it.

For a second the room just sat in the wake of her, the way a beach sits there after a wave pulls back and takes some of the sand with it.

“Well,” Fox said.

“Don’t,” Gabrielle said, but there was no heat in it. She was already somewhere else, doing major coping skills behind her eyes.

Clover closed her laptop. Said something to Gabrielle about the audition timeline, quiet, professional, the two of them leaning in. Then she stood and walked out without looking at me once.

Not pointedly. Just cleanly. A woman with a full afternoon ahead of her.

Monty stood too. He went around the table, gave or rather took a handshake from Coach, both hands, we’re-in-this-together. He gave another handshake to me, firm, held a half second too long, eye contact that was almost a challenge. He’d said maybe four words the entire meeting. He’d watched the whole thing happen with patience, like he had nowhere he needed to be and nothing he needed to do, because it was all going exactly the way he wanted.

“Great energy in here today,” Monty said. “Really great. This is the kind of thing that gets organizations through a transition. Love that Tiki is here to help. Can’t wait to see what her fingers in the pot can do.” And he left, looking extremely satisfied for a man who had contributed nothing.

Coach didn’t move toward the door.

He sat at the head of the table after Gabrielle left and looked at the door Monty had gone through. Just stared at it for a second.

Then he looked at me. Then Fox. Then Rutherford.

“How long has Tiki Jackson cared about cheer marketing?”

Fox and I looked at each other.

“She doesn’t,” Rutherford said. “My guess is she’s looking for something to do after her big divorce.”

“And she walks in two days after a video goes viral, with a vision and contacts and an assistant who’s going to send thoughts.” Coach picked up his legal pad. “People don’t develop a passion for a thing on a Tuesday and storm a meeting about it on a Wednesday. Somebody pointed her at this.” He made a few faces, each one telling a whole ass story. “My office. Now.”

Coach’s office smelled like whiteboard markers and ambition. There was a framed photo on the wall I recognized after a second as his Washington D.C. Women’s Football League team. Twenty-two women in burgundy, gold, and white, mid-celebration, Gatorade going everywhere, specifically over Coach Roper’s head.