Page 40 of The Tiger in the Sack

“That’s not the⁠—”

“You really like her.” Now she was full on smiling and I think she was possibly planning my engagement and wedding in her head.

“I’m going to tell her tonight⁠—”

“You’ve been texting her until midnight every night for a week,” Jules said, “as a person she doesn’t have the full picture on. She doesn’t know your name. She doesn’t know you’re a Kingman. She doesn’t know you’re her landlord. She doesn’t know you work for the same organization.”

She looked at Fox. “Is there anything else?”

Fox considered. “She has an orange cat named Tig Bitties.”

Jules closed her eyes and nodded while taking a deep breath. “Of course she does.”

Then she leaned forward, and everything in her demeanor changed. This was no longer my bratty little sister. She’d just become the one and only woman of the house, the one who counseled the Kingman men when we were being stupid.

And we listened.

“You’ve been texting her all week as someone she doesn’t fully know you are,” she said. “She lives in a building she doesn’t know you own. She works for your team and in a vulnerable position that could be scrutinized in a way no quarterback ever has been.” She paused. “She doesn’t have enough information to choose this, Isak. You’re making choices for both of you and she only knows about half of them. In this family that’s not how we operate.”

She didn’t say it like a lecture. She said it the way we’d all learned to say it, the way our dad had built into us so deep it was just part of how we thought. This was about consent. Enthusiastically, explicitly, like it mattered, because it did.

It landed the way it always did when Jules deployed the family language. Below the defenses.

“I’m going to tell her tonight,” I said. “On the ride. I’m going to tell her everything.”

Jules looked at me for a long moment with twenty-three years of knowing exactly when I meant something and when I was hoping saying it out loud would make it true.

“If you don’t tell her on that ride,” she said, “I’m going to find her, introduce myself. And then I’m going to tell her.”

She meant it. I knew she meant it.

Fox nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“The side of you not destroying this before it starts.” He sat back down and jerked his chin toward my sister. “Also Jules makes an excellent point.”

I looked between them and I didn’t like this alliance one bit. “Why are you two now BFFs?” I held up a hand. “No, don’t answer that.

“I’m going to get ready.”

Nobody stopped me. But I felt both of them watching me walk down the hall and I knew with complete certainty that the moment I was out of earshot they were going to keep talking, and I knew with equal certainty that I was not going to examine what that meant for my immediate future.

My helmet collection lived on the wall of my bedroom. Twelve helmets, different styles, different years, some with history and some just because I liked the way they looked.

It was not serial killery.

I stood in front of it and picked up the brand new pink spare I’d bought for Clover to wear.

It was a good helmet. Solid. Clean. I’d checked the fit mechanism twice this week to make sure it was working right.

Vito jumped up on the bed and sat there watching me with his green eyes and his complete absence of judgment, which I appreciated.

“I’m going to tell her tonight,” I told him.

He blinked.

“I know how that sounds.”