Page 77 of The Tiger in the Sack

THREE WAY???

CLOVER

Ihad a system for hard conversations, and the system was to have rules and a list.

Lists held still. Lists did not have a hand with a flame tattoo or a mouth that said when I saw the broken glass in a voice that went straight through the back of my sternum. So I picked up my little wooden spoon, took a bite of Flying Pig Fudge Ripple to buy myself three seconds, and laid the first item on the table between us like a card.

“Rule one. There’s an end date.” I’d decided this on the back of the bike, somewhere around the second stoplight. “End of season. It runs through the playoffs if you make them, and then it’s over, clean, no debris.”

“Through the Big Bowl,” Isak said.

“Through the playoffs.”

“We’re making the Big Bowl.” He said it the way other people said the sky was up. Not a brag. A weather report. “So if we’re putting an end date on the calendar, that’s the date.”

I wrote Big Bowl in my head, in pencil, and hated how much I liked that he’d argued the timeline longer instead of shorter.

“Rule two. It’s public-facing only. The arrangement exists where Tiki can see it and where Warner can see it. It does not exist when it’s just us, because when it’s just us there’s no audience, and no audience means no point.” I pointed the spoon at him. “Agreed?”

“Sure.” He’d already eaten half of whatever the usual was and was watching me like the menu had nothing on the wall behind him as good as this. “Except the cats.”

“The cats are not an audience.”

“The cats are a very demanding audience.”

“Rule three.” This was the one I’d been circling since the parking lot, the one that mattered, so I said it fast and flat the way you rip tape off skin. “No real feelings. This is a structure. It is scaffolding. We both know what it’s holding up and we both know it comes down at the end, and nobody catches anything they’re not supposed to catch.”

He didn’t say sure to that one.

He set his spoon down, which from a man who treated dessert like a contact sport was its own kind of statement, and he looked at me for a second too long, and I watched him decide not to argue the thing he wanted to argue, which was worse than if he’d argued it.

“Fine,” he said.

It should have felt like winning. I’d gotten the terms I came for. I smashed the not-winning feeling somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it, and that was when both our phones went off at once.

Mine was Shayla. His was, by the way his whole face changed, not good.

Shayla

Um. so your cat and a cat that is not your cat are both sitting in your kitchen window and the not-your-cat is WEARING A TINY JACKET AND BOW TIE. we let ourselves in for girls night in, but you aren’t here. Who is the tuxedo?

“Clover.” Isak was staring at his screen. “Do you happen to know where Vito is right now?”

“In your apartment?”

“Nope. But close. Thank you for playing. Vito’s collar app says he is,” He turned the phone around, and there was a little map, and there was a little dot, and it was sitting in my fourth floor apartment. I was guessing Isak didn’t also live on the fourth floor. “at your place.”

“How is your cat at my place?”

“He’s a bit of an escape artist. He’s got a whole thing he does with the door handles and also air vents.” Isak was already standing, and threw a hundred on the table. “He went looking for Tig.”

Of course he did. The cats had been carrying on an Instasnap courtship for weeks while their respective humans pretended to be strangers who occasionally negotiated treaties over frozen dairy. Vito simply hadn’t waited for us to catch up and had shown up for a date of his own.

We rode the four blocks back. My hands around his waist, and I did not think about rule three even once, which is to say I thought about almost nothing else.

In the few days since we announced this year’s Tigerettes squad members, my apartment had become a place that things happened in.

That was still new enough to knock the wind out of me a little.