Page 61 of The Tiger in the Sack

And I stood there under Isak Kingman’s arm and listened to my ex-boyfriend’s footsteps go down the hall and turn the corner and get swallowed by the building.

The arm came off my shoulders the second Warner was out of sight. Careful. Like it had been a tool and the job was done.

The popcorn crunched.

Isak had eaten a handful. He was looking at the door Warner had gone through with an expression I couldn’t immediately classify, and then he looked at me, and the easy boyfriend was gone, folded back up and put away, and it was just him.

“So,” he said. “We’re dating.”

“We are not dating.”

“We’re a little bit dating. I called you babe. I know your popcorn order.” He made eyes at the bag of Garrett’s. Which was not available in Cincinnati, or anywhere in Ohio for that matter.

“Yeah, how did you know what kind of popcorn I like?” I was hands down my favorite Chicago-only snack.

He set the bag down on the desk between us slowly, and the joke went out of him like he’d decided he’d used enough of it to get us both to solid ground. “Sorry. The babe was a lot. You looked like you needed him gone, so I—” He gestured at himself, at the popcorn, at the whole improvised production. “I had props.”

“It worked.”

“Yeah, it—” He stopped. “It worked?”

“It worked.” I made myself unclench my hands from the arms of my chair, one finger at a time. “He’s been telling himself a story about showing up here and reminding me what I’m missing. I handed you the ball and you took off running.” I heard myself and added, because precision matters, “Thank you.”

Something moved across his face. He glanced at the popcorn between us like it had asked him a question.

“I actually came here to do something completely different,” he said. “And then there was a guy on your desk, so.”

“What did you come to do?”

He pushed his hands into his pockets. I had never once seen this man not know where to put his hands. He always knew. He was the most physically certain person I’d ever met and he was standing in my office not knowing what to do with his arms.

“Apologize,” he said. “For real this time.”

And then Isak Kingman — six foot three, starting quarterback, forty-foot face on the side of a building — came around the side of my desk, which I had not given him permission to do, went down on one knee, and held the Garrett’s bag up with both hands like an offering at an altar he had no business being at.

“Peace offering,” he said.

I looked at the bag. I looked at him. I looked back at the bag.

“No,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“I know what you’re doing and the answer is no.”

“Clover—”

“Get up.”

“I’m not getting up until you hear me out. I practiced this.”

I crossed my arms. He stayed on his knee. He had the expression of a man who had decided on a strategy and would not be moved from it by reasonable objections, which was, deeply and irritatingly, a very Isak Kingman thing to do.

“Where did you even get that? You can’t buy Garrett’s in Ohio.”

“My little sister Jules may have been involved.”

He said it so matter-of-factly it took me a second. Jules. His little sister. Who I had never met. Had done a deep dive on my snack preferences on his behalf.