Page 49 of The Tiger in the Sack

Through the wall, Fox laughed at something. Jules said something back that I couldn’t hear.

The problem wasn’t tonight and my sad sack sorry ass. Tonight I’d handled badly and I could live with that, or I’d have to.

The problem was Monday. Monday and every day after it, sixty feet from her locker room, knowing exactly what her face looked like when she’d already decided something.

Behind door number one was to respect the rules she made for herself and be the professional colleague she needed me to be and watch something that might have been something become nothing from a very short distance.

Unacceptable.

But door two wasn’t good either. Because behind that one, I don’t respect them. I push. Become the exact category of person she’d probably built those rules to keep out. Become a douchepotato.

Equally as unacceptable.

Vito purred against my sternum and I stared at the ceiling and waited for a third door to show up.

It didn’t.

But I was fucking going to find that door if I had to build it myself.

Time to find my axe and get it sharpened up. Tomorrow I was metaphorically chopping down some damn trees.

THANKS FOR NOTHING, KINGMAN

CLOVER

Sunday was a perfectly reasonable day.

Tig sat on my chest and purred. He had decided this was where he lived now and had no further notes on the situation. I ate leftover pad thai directly from the container, and I made a decision.

I didn’t have to like it. I just had to stick to it.

Isak Kingman was my colleague. The mission to get this body diverse cheer team up and running was the mission. Tomorrow I was going to walk into the Tigers facility and be so professionally excellent that there would be physically no room in my brain for anything else.

This was a very good plan.

I was not avoiding the practice fields. I was simply going to my office, which was located in a direction that did not require passing the practice fields, and I was going to do my job.

I was a little bit avoiding the practice fields.

I drove across West Mehring Way at seven forty-eight Monday morning, which was early enough to get coffee before the nine o’clock I’d put on my own calendar to go over the audition timeline. We already had fourteen applications from the women who’d attended the workshop at Loretta’s Dance Studio, and even a few who hadn’t been there. The community was spreading the news by word of mouth and that was exactly what we wanted.

The stadium was already lit up gold in the morning light the way it always was at this hour, white concrete, silver metal of the upper stands glinting, and the bright orange signage signaling Tiger pride to the world. The whole thing sat against the sky like it had always been there and planned to stay.

But that wasn’t the only thing on the building. I saw it before I was fully out of the car.

Block letters. Bright green spray paint. Right across the top of the box office where West Mehring Way traffic could read it without slowing down. Someone had taken their time with it. The letters were even. Deliberate. Artistic even.

GET LOST GABI!

I stood on the sidewalk for a second.

Then I closed the car door and walked toward it.

Gabrielle was already there. She was standing with her arms crossed and her phone in one hand. She’d already moved past the part where you react. She was in the part where you handle it. Next to her, in a jacket that probably cost more than my first car, was Monty Whyte.

He was shaking his head.

“Clover.” Gabrielle clocked me coming without turning around. I had no idea how she did that.