Page 60 of The Tiger in the Sack

“It’s a great job.” He picked up the stress ball off my desk, a freebie from a vendor, shaped like a tiny football, which I was suddenly furious about, and turned it over in his hand. “I’ve thought about you. A lot. Being back in the same city, it feels like⁠—”

“Don’t.”

“—like a second look at something.” He set the football down. Right where it had been. He was good at that, putting things back exactly, so you couldn’t point to anything he’d disturbed. “I’m not the same guy, Clo. I did a lot of thinking after you left.”

After you left. Like I’d wandered off. Like the leaving hadn’t been a thing I built over four years of every small redirection, every gentle this-might-not-be-your-scene, every time he’d looked at me across a room full of his teammates’ girlfriends and then suggested we go on a diet together or work out together the next day.

And here was the part I hated, the part that made my skin go hot with something that wasn’t flattery and wasn’t quite shame. Some animal layer of me, some nineteen-year-old still living in the basement of my nervous system, leaned toward him like a plant toward a window. Toward being known. Toward someone who remembered my coffee order and my birthday and exactly which version of myself made him comfortable in a room.

I knew exactly what that was. I could name it.

“Warner, I’m working.”

“I can see that.” He sat. On the edge of my desk. On the corner of my beautiful grid, metaphorically, and very nearly literally. “I just think we owe it to ourselves to⁠—”

A knock sounded at my door. Two knuckles on the doorframe, and a face peered in.

Saved by the Kingman.

“Hey, hope I’m not interrupting anything.” Isak Kingman came through my door holding a bag of Garrett’s popcorn roughly the size of a barge, talking before he was fully inside. “I came to⁠—”

He saw Warner. Stopped. Recalibrated with a smooth half-second delay of a man who’d walked into more loaded rooms than this one. “Oh. Hey.”

Yes. God, yes. He was a six-foot-three interruption holding a comically large bag of popcorn and I had never in my life been so glad to be interrupted.

The nineteen-year-old inside of me stood up, dusted herself off, and flipped Warner the finger.

The more grown up me who lived in the real world stood up and crossed my office toward my frenemy. I walked right up to Isak Kingman, put my hand flat on his absurd chest like I’d done it four hundred times, and said, “You’re early.”

I watched him not understand. For one beautiful half-second, Isak Kingman wasn’t the master of his domain. Then I watched him get there, watched the read happen behind his eyes, the same way he read a blitz, and I saw him decide to come with me wherever this was going without yet knowing where that was.

“Yep.” he said. Short and sweet and practically begging me to continue to take charge. I liked him, I mean it. I like that he was ready to play along without knowing what I was up to. Yeah. That was it. He slid his free arm around my shoulders like it lived there. “Babe, you ready for a break? I just got that weird cheddar and caramel popcorn mix you love.”

“Warner, meet Isak.” I did not take my hand off his chest. “Isak, this is Warner. We dated. In college.” I looked up at Isak, and I let everything I needed him to be live in my face. “Warner just got traded in. Isn’t that something?”

There was a pause where an entire future hung in the balance and a professional quarterback decided to throw the ball I’d called instead of the one in the playbook.

“Something,” Isak agreed warmly, and he held his hand out to Warner, friendly, enormous, the clean smile, the one off the building. “Isak Kingman. Good to meet you, man. You’re one of the FNGs, huh?”

I had not told him to say babe. I had not told him about the mix. He’d built both out of nothing in real time and handed them to me like he’d been studying for the role for weeks, and I made a note, somewhere underneath the panic, that Isak Kingman was a dangerously fast study.

I watched Isak’s name go into Warner and rearrange the furniture.

Because Warner knew exactly who Isak Kingman was. Everyone who’d ever touched a football knew who Isak Kingman was. And here he was, arm around me, remembering a popcorn order I’d never given him, and the game Warner had walked in doing, the second-chance game, the she’ll-still-respond to my charm and good looks game, was being redone in front of me, badly, with all the work showing.

“Got myself traded in from the Bruins. Thought you boys could use a strong middle line backer,” Warner said. “Looking forward to bringing in some new leadership skills to the defense.”

“Love that,” Isak said, with bottomless sincerity. He could not be insulted because it would never occur to him to look for the insult. “Always good to have depth.”

He said depth like it was a compliment. It was not a compliment, and the fact that Isak delivered it like one, with his whole open face, was the most devastating thing that could have happened to it. “Guess we’ll be across the line from each other quite a bit.”

Warner’s jaw did a small tick. Like a muscle deciding whether to be a problem and then figuring out, in front of Isak Kingman’s legendary shoulders, not to be.

“I gotta go meet up with Coach,” Warner said. He looked at me. Tried to find the door back into the conversation we’d been having, the one where he was the one holding all the new information, and couldn’t, because I’d handed all the new information to a quarterback who was now eating my popcorn in my doorway. “Clo. We’ll talk.”

“Sure,” I said, in the tone you use for sure that means the opposite.

He went. He didn’t slam anything. Warner never slammed anything. He just took his recalibrated world-view and his too-cool face that was not, in fact, cool, and left.