Page 78 of The Tiger in the Sack

Shayla and Izzy were on my couch. Two of the new girls were on my floor. Maya was at my stove like she’d been born at it, stirring something that smelled like the inside of a good Saturday, and Tig Bitties was sitting in my kitchen window with the bearing of a tiny landlord.

Beside him, in a black dinner jacket and a bow tie the color of a maraschino cherry, sat a tuxedo cat conducting himself with the grave dignity of a small mafioso who had simply decided this was his table now.

“Vito,” Isak said, in the voice of a parent who had found the toddler on top of the refrigerator.

Vito looked at him. Vito looked at Tig. Vito did not move, which in cat is an entire sentence, and the sentence was no.

“He likes it here,” Maya said from the stove, not turning around. “He supervised the shredding of the cheese.”

“He’s a known supervisor,” Isak said weakly.

There were squad members cooking in my kitchen, two more on my floor, a quarterback in my doorway holding a cat harness leash he had no cat attached to, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a list with my own rule two on it: It does not exist when it’s just us. Except this wasn’t just us, this was a room full of witnesses, which meant by my own terms the thing was allowed to be real right now, and I hated that my brain had found the loophole that fast.

“Come in and sit down already,” I told Isak, because it was the only instruction I had that I was sure of. “We’re not trying to air condition the whole building.”

Oh my god, I was turning into my father. Partly because anything else I could say to him felt super weird now that we were fake dating in front of other people. Was I supposed to call him honey or sweetie or hold his hand?

This was ridiculous. The whole plan was. Or maybe it was just me.

Isak strolled in as comfortably as a tomcat and sat down on the couch. He wasn’t freaking out. In fact, he downright looked like he belonged in my living room. Like he’d been here all along.

On my floor next to the couch was a nineteen-year-old newly minted cheerleader who immediately showed him something on her phone.

And he stayed.

For me.

And apparently for dinner.

The thing I hadn’t planned for was how bad we’d both be at this whole fake dating thing.

We’d agreed to this, well, not agreed, I’d listed and he’d said fine, approximately ninety minutes ago, and neither of us had the first idea how to do it in a room full of people we knew.

I caught him looking at me across the couch and he didn’t look away fast enough, and I didn’t either, and then we both did, at the same time, like two kids caught passing notes. When I brought the bowl of cheese back from the kitchen I handed it to him and our fingers did a whole clumsy negotiation about whose hand went where.

At one point he reached up from the floor and tucked a braid back off my shoulder, just did it, no reason for it that the room required, and I felt the back of my neck go hot, and across the couch Izzy’s eyebrows climbed clean off her face.

The real problem with all of this landed on me sideways while I was holding a bowl of shredded cheddar. We had an audience. The whole room was the audience, which was the entire point of rule two, the arrangement was supposed to be exactly this, performed, for exactly these people. So we were inside the rules. We were rule-compliant.

We were also overshooting it by a mile, and I knew the difference, because performed didn’t make your neck go hot. Performed didn’t make you forget you were holding a bowl. A touch was not supposed to make me forget my own name.

Shayla brought out a tray with bowls of spaghetti for everyone. But she also brought…sides? There was a bowl of chopped onions and another of finely shredded cheddar cheese.

Everyone else grabbed a bowl and loaded up with the toppings. I wasn’t sure about cheese on spaghetti, so I just took a bowl and a fork. It smelled a little different than a good old marinara. But then again, Chicago had great Italian food, so maybe I was biased. I couldn’t expect the same in Ohio.

I took some noodles and a couple spoons of sauce, then had a tentative taste. Umm, weird.

Why did my spaghetti taste like Christmas?

Izzy said, to Shayla, completely casually, “I’m a four-way girl, always have been.”

My brain screeched to a halt. I’d had plenty of girls’ nights living in the sorority house in college, and some sex talk too. But this seemed a bit out of the blue.

“Three-way all the way,” Shayla said. “You don’t mess with a good thing.”

“Three-way’s lazy.”

“Three-way is elegant.”