Page 63 of The Tiger in the Sack

It had nothing in it about what to do with a man who made Warner leave.

My phone lit up on the desk.

I should not have answered. I answered.

“Kidlet,” My mother’s voice was what you would call… thrilled. The voice she uses for grandbabies and vintage thrift store finds. “Your father saw the trades roster this morning. Warner’s a Tiger! Traded right to my baby’s city. Now isn’t that something.”

I’d said the exact words forty minutes ago, but with a very different meaning.

A warmth came into her voice that I knew too well, the one she’d never quite retired no matter how the thing had ended. “He sounded so good when your father talked to him, Clover. So settled. Asked after you, first thing.”

“Mom.” I couldn’t do this with her right now. Not just because we’d already hashed through why I broke up with Warner in the first place a ba-zillion times, but also because Isak Kingman was staring at me. And eating my popcorn.

I loved my mother. She was one of my best friends. She thought she was helping. “I know how it ended, sweetheart. I do. But he is such a nice, not to mention successful, young man, and people grow up, they change. Sometimes the timing just isn’t⁠—”

I put my forehead down on the desk, gently, next to the barge-sized bag of Garrett’s, and let it rest there against the cool faux wood.

The popcorn crunched somewhere above my head.

“Don’t eat all of it,” I said into the laminate. “And why are you back? Don’t you have a football to go throw around?”

“I’m invested now,” he said. “Also this is really good popcorn.”

I did not lift my head. I did not tell him to go. I did grab a handful of popcorn and crunched it very, very loudly directly into the phone.

UNDER THE DESK NEWS

ISAK

Alocker room ten minutes after a long, hot, muggy Ohio afternoon practice is probably the most naked room in America. Strip clubs got nothin’ on professional football locker rooms.

A few dozen grown men walked around in various stages of toweling off, the showers still going in the back, somebody’s speaker playing something with too much bass, Rutherford doing the thing where he narrates his own stretches like a nature documentary.

I had a towel in one hand, drying my nuts and the other hand on my locker while I was thinking about exactly nothing, which after a good practice is the closest thing to heaven I get.

Then the room went quiet in a wave, front to back, the way it does when a coach walks in. Except it wasn’t a coach

“There he is.”

I knew the voice before I turned around, the way you know a smoke alarm before you’re fully awake. I turned around anyway, because the alternative was presenting Tiki Jackson with my bare ass, which I was afraid she’d smack if given the chance.

In one swift move, I wrapped that towel so tight around my waist I was going to have marks in my skin for a week.

Tiki stood in the doorway of the men’s locker room — the men’s locker room, a room with a sign on it, a room with a clear and federally implied dress code — in head-to-toe pink leather and heels that could core an apple, with the dog purse on her shoulder and three…three small heads sticking out of it like a hydra that shopped at Nordstrom. She was not looking at any of the twenty some odd other half-dressed men.

She was looking at me.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” she said, interrupting, walking in, stilettos clacking on the tile. The room pulled its towels a little tighter as one organism. “I’ll only be a minute.”

I became extremely aware of the towel. It was a good towel. It was not armor.

“Tiki, this is—” I gestured at the room, the steam, the federally implied dress code. “You can’t really be in⁠—”

“What time should I be ready Friday?”

The music cut out. I don’t know if somebody turned it off or if I just stopped being able to hear anything except the question, which she had asked at full volume, in front of Coach, who had walked in two seconds earlier with his clipboard and looked around like he was checking to make sure he was in the right place.

“Ready for—” I said.