Page 84 of The Tiger in the Sack

Staring at us like a stick of dynamite.

She stood maybe twenty feet back in pink leather, a designer dog carrier on one shoulder, with her phone in her free hand, and her face had gone carefully blank while it caught up to what it was looking at.

Because here’s what I’d forgotten in the smoothie and the bread and the blazer and the kiss. Tiki Jackson had decided, with zero input from me, that she and I had a Friday date. She’d invented it. Announced it as fact. I’d never agreed to one second, but Tiki didn’t require agreement, Tiki required a restaurant and apparently a quarterback, and tonight was Friday, and she’d come to claim it.

Instead she’d found me on a sidewalk kissing Clover like the building was burning.

Good. This was why we’d created the fake dating pact.

Not the kissing part. That was just for us. But Tiki seeing it? Chef’s kiss.

She took us in. One of the Chihuahuas poked its head out of the carrier and stared at me too.

Clover hadn’t seen her yet, still tipped up toward me with that open frightened glad face, and I had about one second to do something with mine, and I did the worst available option, which was nothing, which was stand there guilty as a man caught exactly mid-crime.

Tiki’s chin came up.

“Well,” she said, every degree of warmth removed. Clover spun around. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

Behind her eyes she wrote me off somewhere I was never getting un-written from. “And to think I named my new puppy after you.” A short, terrible laugh. “If I didn’t know you were actually a good quarterback, I’d have my sister trade you.”

She looked at Clover for exactly long enough to prove she wouldn’t bother with the name. “Enjoy your quarterback.”

She turned on her heel and left like she was walking down a runway, the Chihuahua still watching me over her shoulder like a tiny disappointed jury.

And the crazy thing was that she walked off certain she’d witnessed two people in love. What she’d actually clocked, down to the exact second, was the first real moment of a romance that had spent weeks insisting it was everything but. She had the timing perfectly, ruinously backward.

Clover’s hand found mine again.

“Well,” she said, very quietly, watching the empty spot where Tiki had stood. “I guess we had an audience after all.”

Damn it.

WHEN PIGS FLY

CLOVER

Ihad a pre-game checklist forty-one items long and I had run it three times and I was on a fourth when Zahra took the clipboard out of my hands.

“You laminated it,” she said.

“It’s going to be on a field. Fields have weather.”

“You laminated the backup too. There are two laminated copies.” She held them up like evidence in a trial I was losing. “Clover. We’re ready. The girls are ready. You did a great job, you picked the right girls for the squad. We can handle it now. Go stand on the sideline and let it happen.”

Right. I’d spent fifteen years and one engineering degree and a lifetime of being told to sit down building toward this day, and it was happening in eleven minutes in front of sixty-four thousand people at PlayCore, and somewhere in the home tunnel my squad was holding hands in a circle being exactly as terrified as I’d told them not to be.

I took the clipboard back. I am not made of stone.

“One look,” I said. “I get one look and then I’ll release it.”

Zahra let me have my one look.

And here is the part I had not laminated a contingency for, the part that had no item number, that had been sitting in my chest since a really weird but also nice dinner two nights ago like a second heartbeat I couldn’t schedule around.

I had kissed Isak Kingman.

I had started it. Me. Reached up with my own traitorous hands and pulled his face down and kissed him on a public street with no audience anywhere, which by my own rule meant it didn’t count.