Page 59 of The Tiger in the Sack

Luckily, I got a text. Saved by the buzz.

Except shit. It was a text from Tiki.

A photo loaded and I frantically tried to delete it but my phone apparently hated me and instead made the photo bigger. Tiki was squish kissing a Chihuahua puppy, impossibly small, wearing a tiny orange striped jersey, with my number on the front.

Tiki

Meet King Man(icotti)!!! Get it? He’s named after you!

Jesus Donkey. “Hey Coach, I think I need a cookie.”

WHAT, LIKE IT'S HARD?

CLOVER

The application portal had stopped being a number and started being a weather system.

I had it open on one monitor and the audition-block spreadsheet on the other, and I was trying to fit almost hundred women into a gym that comfortably held sixty at a time, which is the kind of math I actually like, the kind with a right answer at the end of it.

Load in, load out. Group sizes. Judge rotations. I’d built a color-coded grid that was, I will say it, beautiful, and I was three cells into making it more beautiful when the atmosphere changed.

I felt it before I looked up.

Warner.

My whole spreadsheet went out of my head like someone had pulled the drain.

He was leaning on the frame of my office door like someone who had never once wondered whether he was wanted there.

Tigers polo. Tigers lanyard. A Tigers lanyard, on Warner, in my doorway, in Cincinnati, and my brain refused to believe it.

“Hey, Clo.”

“What are you—” I stopped. Started over. My mouth was working independently of my brain, but somebody needed to do the work. “What are you doing here? Are you—” and here it came out before I could stop it, small and stupid and nineteen, “—are you here to see me?”

Warner smiled. He came into my office without being asked, the way he came into everything.

“No, silly.” He said it gently. Fondly. Like I was adorable for asking. “I play here.”

I looked at him. My whole sense of time and space tried to reorganize itself around the sentence and could not find a place to put it. “You play where?”

“Here. The Tigers. Cincinnati.” He spread his hands like the room agreed with him.

He watched it land on me, and he liked it, I could tell. He’d always liked being the one holding the new information.

I still couldn’t believe it. This was a bad dream, right?

My ex-boyfriend, who I dumped, even though nobody I knew understood why, couldn’t possibly be playing for the team I worked for.

“You play for the Tigers?” It was more of a statement than a question. I could see that he did.

“What? Like it was hard to get traded here?” He tipped his head like he was being helpful and I was being obtuse. “The Tigers need all the help they can get.”

“Warner, why would you leave the Chicago Bruins? You loved it there. They loved having you.” He wasn’t the only one who loved having him in Chicago. He had dinner with my parents at least once a month. My mom never shut up about what a nice young man he was. I think my dad was more bummed about the break up than anyone else.

“I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it secondhand, but you’ve been—” he tipped his head at my monitors, fond, “—busy. Look at you. Cheer director. Your own office.”

“Warner. What is going on here?” This was seriously like… nice guy stalking behavior.