Page 99 of The Tiger in the Sack

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said.

The room leaned in for the denial, the distancing, the QB stepping back from the conflict of interest, the headline that would’ve helped Monty more than any photo.

“She’s the woman I’m in love with,” I said. “Clover Freeman is a person I’d quit this game for and I’m in a contract year, so write that down.”

The silence crashed over the room like a wave. It was the sound of forty people simultaneously realizing they had the lead of their entire week, and it lasted about one full second, and then it was the loudest the room had ever been.

I stood up. I knocked the chair over. I did not pick it up. I walked out through a wall of my own name being shouted and I got exactly to the tunnel before my brain caught up to my mouth and informed me calmly, that I had just confirmed the relationship was real, on camera, in the middle of a conflict-of-interest scandal whose entire premise was that the relationship was fake.

I’d defended her. I’d planted my flag. And in doing so I had handed the scandal the one fact it had been missing, which was a starting quarterback confirming, with his whole chest, into every camera in the league, that yes, it was real. Every photo. Every implication. All of it, true.

I’d made it so much worse. The governance story had needed me to say that Tiki’s chair-cart photo was now redundant. I’d done her job for her at a podium, for free, because I could not stand to hear a man call the woman I loved trouble for the length of one more sentence.

QB MELTDOWN, the alerts said, before I’d reached the parking lot.

Fox was waiting by my bike. He’d seen it on the locker room TV.

“Well,” he said. “That was the most honest thing you’ve ever done and possibly the dumbest.”

“Both can be true.”

“Both are extremely true.” He clapped me on the shoulder, hard. “Your family’s already on flights. Jules called it. The whole circus is descending on the Broasis tonight, and not because anybody’s mad. Go home, dummy. You’re not alone in this. You decided to stop being alone in things, remember? At a podium. On purpose. To four million people.”

They came because it was falling apart, which is the opposite of why they’d come for the Mustangs game, and that’s how I learned the difference between the two kinds of full house.

The first kind, two weeks ago, was joy. Catan and wheat-hoarding and Clover forgetting to guard the door. The second kind, tonight, was a war room that loved me. Declan reading every alert out loud and getting angrier. Penelope already drafting a statement for her own platform and Kesley’s because a pop star’s reach is a weapon. Willa and Hayes at the kitchen island building a timeline. Jules running it all like a field general who happened to be the youngest person there.

My family, the loud beautiful disaster I’d moved eleven hundred miles away to prove I didn’t need, packed into a home I’d bought in secret, because the second it looked like the world was coming for me they’d dropped everything and come for me first.

My father found me on the balcony. Late. Quiet. The way he does.

He didn’t say anything for a while. We looked at the river.

“I knew about the gaming company,” he said. “Signed off when you were sixteen. Alexis called and needed a parent on the contracts and you thought having your cousin as your agent she handled it without me. I let you think that, because you wanted it to be yours so bad I didn’t have the heart to be in it.” He kept looking at the water. “I knew about the motorcycle. Knew about this building the week you bought it, because I’m your father and I pay attention. I have been paying attention to you your whole life, son, even when you decided I wasn’t.”

I couldn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything in my fast mouth.

“You think you’re sneaky,” my father said. “You’re not. You’re brave in quiet ways, and you’ve spent twenty-five years building things in the dark because somewhere along the line you decided the only love that’s safe is the kind nobody can see to take away.” He finally looked at me, and the full weight of the attention I’d spent my whole life certain didn’t land on me, landed. “Your mother would be so proud of you. She’d be proud of all of it. The building and the cat and the boy who couldn’t sit at a podium and let somebody call his girl trouble. That last one most of all.”

I was not going to cry on a balcony in front of my father.

Okay maybe a couple of tears slid down my face.

I’m not crying. You’re crying.

He let me. He’s not a man who fills a silence. He just put one heavy hand on the back of my neck, the way you’d steady something you built and intend to keep, and we looked at the river.

Somewhere behind us my entire family was assembling the weapon that was going to take Monty Whyte apart, and for the first time in my life I was not standing slightly outside the noise.

I was the reason they’d come.

“Tell Clover everything,” my father said, into the quiet. “The building. The fake dating that wasn’t fake for you, the love. All of it. Before this gets solved, not after. A man who saves the day and then admits he was keeping a secret the whole time isn’t a hero. He’s just a man who got caught at a better moment.” He squeezed once and let go. “Do it tomorrow.”

“I keep saying tomorrow,” I said.

“Then stop saying it,” said the man who’d waited twenty-five years for me to be ready to hear that he’d seen me the whole time, “and pick a day, and let it be a real one.”

There was no day like today. Carpe the fucking Diem.