Page 94 of The Tiger in the Sack

It was elegant. I’ll give them that. I had built routines my whole career and I know elegant construction when I’m sitting inside it, and what they’d built was elegant the way a trap is elegant, every piece doing two jobs.

“We have a perception issue,” Monty said. “Not a real issue. A perception one. Which, in this business, is the only kind that matters.” He slid a tablet across the desk. “The fan engagement around the squad has been extraordinary. The pig business especially. But extraordinary attention is a magnifying glass, and it’s started landing on some, let’s say, optics.”

The tablet showed two photos side by side.

The first was the sidewalk. Me, on my toes, both hands in Isak Kingman’s hair, kissing him like he was the love of my life. Somebody had been across the street with a phone. The angle was bad and the moment was unmistakable and my whole face was doing something I never let it do in public, which was mean it.

The second was the team social after our second pre-season game. The back hallway. Me and Isak leaning on opposite chair carts, three feet apart, mid-sentence about who knows what, the body language of two people who carpool.

Tiki’s angle. Tiki’s phone. Tiki, who had stood in that service doorway and understood exactly what she was looking at, which was the most private thing about us, the part that didn’t perform, the part that was so real it looked like nothing.

“Interesting, isn’t it,” Tiki said, speaking for the first time, examining her nails like the photos bored her. “How different the same couple can look?”

“So? It’s not like we have to have our hands all over each other every second of the day.”

But I was remembering what, in fact, we had been talking about.

“No, but it becomes more interesting when you see the recording that goes with the picture.”

She’d fucking recorded us?

Tiki played just ten little seconds of a video on her phone. My voice was the one that came out clear as a bell. “Rule number two, Kingman. We have no audience.”

Then Isak replied. “I know, I know. We don’t have to pretend to be dating when there is no audience.”

And there it was. The list in my head reshuffled itself so fast it hurt. I’d named the danger to Isak in that hallway, said it out loud, the public-passion-private-pretending, said anybody who wanted to call us out that we were faking a relationship had everything they needed, they just had to show people this video.

She’d shown people. People named Montgomery.

“The narrative writes itself,” Monty went on, gentle, helpful, a man laying out a problem he was pretending not to have built. “Cheer director and starting quarterback, publicly performing a relationship for the cameras while the season’s signature initiative just happens to be her project, greenlit by a president who just happens to be her sorority sister, sponsored by a company owned by one of her father’s old friends. Conflict of interest. Three ways. And now there’s a fan vote on whether the whole thing stays, and people are going to ask whether that vote is about cheerleading or about a girl who slept her way into a budget line.”

“That’s not⁠—”

“I know it’s not.” He held up a hand, the worst thing he could have done, the reasonable hand. “I’m on your side, Clover. I’m telling you what they’ll say so we can get ahead of it. The kiss photo’s already out there. The chair cart photo is the part that turns it from a cute couple into a calculated one. Someone could pair them. I’d hate for someone to pair them.”

He would not hate for someone to pair them. He had the pairing open on the tablet

The thing I understood, sitting in that office, was that Tiki and Monty had not so much made an alliance as discovered they wanted the same woman destroyed for opposite reasons, and decided to carpool.

Monty wanted the squad gone because the squad was Gabrielle’s flag planted on his franchise, and a man like Monty cannot abide a flag he didn’t plant. The squad failing the fan vote was his whole project. Discrediting me discredited the squad, and discrediting me through Isak discredited Gabrielle, and it was three birds, one elegantly thrown stone.

Tiki wanted me destroyed because I had the quarterback she’d decided was her next husband, and because two nights ago she’d had to watch the most private real thing about me lean on a chair cart. Because some freshly divorced part of her had been so sure that what she’d seen on the sidewalk was love that finding out it might be a performance had not relieved her, it had insulted her.

She’d been a WAG for five years. No, she’d been THE WAG. She’d even been on Real Football Wives of New York, the reality TV show. She knew the difference between performed and real. The idea that I’d faked something she’d traded her whole Manhattan life trying to find, and gotten it, and that it might not even be real, and that it had landed on the QB she wanted anyway, was the kind of injury that needs another woman to bleed for it.

Two completely different reasons. One chair.

I folded my arms and sat back. Not because I was comfortable negotiating with terrorists, but because I wanted to be as far away from them as possible. “What do you want?”

“I want you to be careful,” Monty said, which meant he wanted me afraid.

“I want you to remember whose building you stand in,” Tiki said.

I stood up. I smoothed my skirt, the gesture I made when the nine-year-old in me wants to fold up small and I won’t let her.

“Was there a real budget item,” I said, “or was the budget the wrapping paper.”

Monty’s smile didn’t move. Tiki’s did, a little, almost like respect, which from her was worse than contempt.