Page 80 of The Tiger in the Sack

Dad

Your mother and I land Thursday before the first preseason game. Dinner Friday — booked us a table for FOUR. ;) Proud of you, kid.

A table for four. The winking emoji. I knew what the fourth chair was before the next one came in, which it did, eleven seconds later, from a number I’d deleted and apparently should have blocked.

Warner

Your dad invited me to dinner on Friday. I hope that’s ok. It would be good to talk, Clo. for real this time. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want.

The warmth went out of the room like someone had opened a window in January.

There it was. The whole reason for fake dating my new frenemy. Rule one through three, the scaffolding, the structure, built especially for this.

A table for four and a man who’d told me once, in a voice I could still hear, that all he wanted was for me to be Pro Football League WAG material, now thinking a lot about what he wanted, as if what he wanted had ever been the question.

Isak watched my face do whatever it did. He’d gotten good at reading it somewhere along the way, which I hadn’t authorized. “What happened? Something happened.”

“My parents are coming to town for the first pre-season game. They booked a dinner.” I hadn’t meant to say it. “Friday. A table for four.”

He figured it out without me even saying why that was a problem. His jaw did that same pulsing tic it had done in the parking lot, the one that felt protective. “Warner’s the fourth.”

“Yep. My parents already invited him.”

I waited for him to make it light. To shrug it into a joke, the way he made everything into a joke, great, free dinner, I love being a human shield. I’d have let him. I’d half-wanted him to, so I could keep this in the strategic-arrangement drawer where it was safe.

He didn’t.

He set Vito gently off his knee and stood up, and the easy went out of him, and what was left was something steadier I hadn’t seen on him before. “Tell me about Warner,” he said. “Not the part where he’s a lineman. The part where your dad’s got a chair set for him and you’ve got your I’ve-got-rules face on.”

So I told him a version of it. The short version, that included that Warner and I had been dating for the last four years, that my parents thought he was the best thing since sliced sourdough, and that I’d broken up with him. I abbreviated the why.

He listened the way he did everything, completely, no looking away, listening with driven intent. When I finished he was quiet for a second.

“Friday,” he said. “What time?”

He couldn’t just show up to dinner. “Isak⁠—”

“What time, Clover?” Gentle. Immovable. “Because I’m going to be there. I’m going to be so obviously, sickeningly, devotedly your guy that your dad forgets there was ever an invite for your ex-boyfriend.” He picked up the cat, and Vito went, finally, for him. “That’s the deal. That’s what I signed up for. You don’t do the Friday show for your parents alone.”

And that, not the texts, not Warner, not the dinner, that was the thing that should have scared me, and did.

Because I’d built this whole structure to keep from catching any feelings I wasn’t supposed to. And here was Isak Kingman holding up his end of a fake arrangement like it was the realest thing he’d agreed to all year, and I understood, standing in my emptied-out apartment with the warmth still in the walls, that the danger was never Warner.

The danger was going to be exactly how good Isak Kingman was at pretending to be mine.

“Friday at seven,” I said. “Don’t be early. Early is weird.”

“I’m going to be a little early.”

“Kingman.”

“A little.”

He left with his cat. Tig and I stood in my quiet apartment and I wasn’t sure who made the little sad, horny moan. Me or my cat.

TABLE FOR FOUR

ISAK