Page 81 of The Tiger in the Sack

Fox had three smoothies going when I came out of my room in the second shirt, and none of them were for me.

“You changed,” he said, not looking up from the blender.

“I did not.”

“You had on the gray one. Now it’s blue. By my count that’s a change.” He thumbed the blender off and the kitchen went quiet enough that I could hear my own heart doing a drumline solo over a dinner. “In a dinner eating contest between you and Bishop, you’d win every time. So why the blue shirt that you know damn well brings out your pretty green eyes?”

“Because tonight I’m sitting next to Clover’s father with a reservation he made for four.”

Fox set the blender down. “Four.”

“Brick booked it. Him, Tory, Clover.” I checked my phone. I’d checked it in my room ninety seconds ago and nothing had changed, which I knew, and I checked it anyway. “And for Warner Bishop. Her dad invited him. Like he’s still the one.”

Here was the problem that had been plaguing me since Clover sent me the details of the restaurant. Warner Bishop had requested the trade to Cincinnati himself.

He took a smaller contract to do it. Moved two states to play middle linebacker for a team that already had a defensive captain, and everybody in the building thought it was about football. But I’d seen him watch her across the practice facility.

He hadn’t come for the Tigers. He’d come for her, and he was playing a long patient game, and tonight her own father had handed him a chair at the table.

Across the line of scrimmage every day this week Bishop and I beat the daylights out of each other and shook hands after. He was good. He read plays a half-second early. He ran the defensive meeting like he’d been born holding a clipboard, and the worst part about Warner Bishop was that I couldn’t even hate him properly, because he was decent in every direction, and decent was so much harder to play against than a jerk.

He probably even texted his grandmother every Sunday.

“You’re doing the face,” Fox said.

“What face?”

“The one where you’re chewing on a thought you’ve already decided not to say.” He poured one smoothie into a to-go cup and pushed it across the counter, which was Fox for I love you and good luck and if you blow this I’m telling Jules. “Drink. You skipped lunch. You go a little feral goblin when your blood sugar drops and tonight is not the night.”

“I’m just going to be honest.” Except for the part where my entire relationship with Clover was flim-flam.

“That’s the whole problem. Brick Freeman’s going to ask your intentions over fancy salad and a normal man fibs a little, but you’ll tell him the truth, and the truth’s going to come out of your mouth sounding like you want to marry his daughter at midfield.”

I drank the smoothie so I wouldn’t have to answer.

The restaurant was one I had been to before, and they were pee their pants excited to have me standing in their lobby again. Which is exactly how I was about to get a fifth chair at a table set for four.

Celebrity had to have some advantages.

Clover was already there. She wore a dress the color of the inside of a fig, deep and warm, and she’d swept her braids up off her neck, and she was standing beside a man who could only be her father, built like a door, holding himself with her exact stillness while he read the room. She saw me. For half a second her whole face opened, unguarded, the way she never let it go in front of anyone.

And that was the moment the entire evening stopped being a problem I could solve and turned into me meeting her parents.

We hadn’t even been fake dating for a whole week and I was meeting the Freemans. In person. There would be handshakes, and questions, and Spanish Inquisitions.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

But I did.

Then I watched the fact that we had an audience arrive behind her eyes and the openness smoothed over into bright and managed.

“There he is,” Clover said. “Dad, this is Isak. Isak, my dad and my mom.”

“Mr. Freeman.” I put my hand out. He took it. His grip closed like a car door and held one second past comfortable, which I respected, because I’d have done the same to me.

“The Kingman kid.” He said it the way the whole world said my name, the cat and the press conferences and the contract year all loaded into two words. “Morgan Freeman, not the actor. But you can call me Brick. Bishop speaks highly. Says you’ve got a quick release and a quicker mouth.”

“Bishop hits like a dropped piano. I’d trust his scouting report on anything but me.” I let the kid go past. I wasn’t winning that one and I knew it.