Page 88 of The Tiger in the Sack

And saying yes handed Monty a deadline, a number, a finish line he could spend the next two pre-season games quietly poisoning. A funded section of pig-throwers here. A cooled-off sponsor there. A few writers asking weird questions. Tilt the field a degree at a time and then point at the scoreboard he rigged and say, well, the fans have spoken.

“Set it up,” Gabrielle said, and I heard in two words that she heard the trap and stepped into it anyway because there was no version where she didn’t. “End of season. A clean fan vote.”

“Wonderful,” Monty said, like a man who’d just been handed exactly what he came for, which he had.

I stood behind the equipment cage holding a win that had gone hollow in my hands. Clover had thirty-one women out there who’d just turned an insult into the best moment of their lives, and Monty Whyte had just turned that same triumph into a noose with a date on it, and there was not one thing I could do about it from behind a cage in a towel.

I’m a quarterback. My entire job is doing something about it. Reading the field, finding the answer, getting the ball where it needs to go. And I stood there knowing this was a field I couldn’t read and a ball I wasn’t allowed to touch, because the second I touched it I became the story and she became the girl who needed rescuing, and Fox was right, that was the one thing she’d rather die than be.

Powerless is a word for guys who’ve never been good at anything. I’d never had to learn it.

What I had learned was how to be a fucking tattle tell. And I was definitely telling on Monty to Clover.

Just because I didn’t have the power and didn’t play the game, didn’t mean Clover couldn’t be the star player with a secret weapon in her pocket.

Jules was waiting outside the locker room with Fox, because my baby sister had driven up from KNU for the debut and was not going to be told the family box was a more appropriate place to wait than the players’ hallway. She had on a Tigers shirt she’d cut up herself and an expression I’ve been afraid of since she was six.

“You’re doing a face,” she said.

“Everybody keeps saying that.”

“Because you keep doing it.” She fell into step with me, Fox on my other side, the two of them boxing me in the way they do when they’ve already had a conversation about me that I wasn’t invited to. “Fox and I figured something out.”

This wasn’t good, whatever it was.

“When and why have you and Fox been talking? What are you teenagers in love? Can’t go a minute without being on the phone with each other?” I knew that would stop her in her tracks.

It did not.

She hit me in the arm. Hard. “We figured out the dating’s fake.”

I was the one who stopped in my tracks. The hallway kept going around me, guys in towels, an equipment kid with a cart, the whole loud aftermath, and I stood in the middle of it and tried to find the lie and could not, because Jules had said it flat the way you say what you’re certain of, and certainty from Jules is a closed door.

“It’s not…” I started, and didn’t finish, because I didn’t have the end of the sentence.

“Don’t.” She wasn’t unkind about it. That’s the thing about Jules. She does the family stuff, the kind that gets in under everything because it’s ours, because Mom raised us on it. “We’re not busting you. I don’t care that it’s fake. Fox doesn’t care that it’s fake.”

She looked at me, and her voice dropped into the register that has out-stubborned me my whole life. “Here’s what we figured out, and it’s the part you’re not going to like. It is not fake for you, Isak.”

Fox put a hand on my shoulder, gentle, like he was defusing something. “You vaulted half a wall over rubber pigs, brother.”

“I sat back down.”

“I sat you back down.”

I didn’t have anything.

Maybe a fast mouth, but right now there was nothing in it. Because they were right, and the worst part of being right about someone is that they get to see your face tell before your mouth catches up.

Jules had watched my face since before I could talk.

“She doesn’t know,” Jules said. “She’s running around with half the information, thinking this is a clean little arrangement, and you’re standing here in love.”

“Jules. Shut up.”

She did not in fact shut up. I wasn’t even sure she knew what that phrase meant. “You’d hate it if she was doing it to you. It’s the whole reason you’ve got a secret gaming empire, and a secret building you own, and a cat with an Instasnap, because people make choices about who you are and what they think you should want without asking you. You’d cut off your arm before you did that to somebody. “

“Jules.”