Page 7 of The Tiger in the Sack

She could have called the fire department all on her own, all along. But she hadn’t.

“That’s a conditional maybe,” she said. “Give me your number. I’ll think about it.”

I gave her my number.

I didn’t give anyone but my family, my agent, and my coach my number.

She typed it in. She was close enough, the angle was right, and I had approximately two seconds of visibility before she turned the screen away.

She saved my contact as Cat Daddy.

My heart did a little twitter-pate, and my cock responded. Jesus this girl had my number, figuratively and literally.

She put the phone away and looked back up at me. “I’m going to go figure out how Tig got that balcony door open, because apparently I’ve been severely underestimating him.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks for the rescue.” She turned toward the building, Tig riding her shoulder like he’d always intended to be there, bare feet quiet on the warm sidewalk. Then she stopped. Looked back. “Your cat. What’s his name?”

Vito looked up at her.

“Vito,” I said.

“Full name?”

She’d been paying attention to everything even in her greatest moments of distress. And I was loving her sass.

“Vito Catleone,” I said.

The smile that broke across her face was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in my twenty-five years on earth. Including the championship bowl games, and getting drafted in the first round. Including the night Alexis called me, barely holding together her professional calm, to say the sponsorship offers had just multiplied by a factor of eleventy-hundred and I should probably sit down because I was about to make enough money to Scrooge McDuck dive into pools of it.

None of it had landed like this.

“Oh, we’re going to be friends,” she said, not to me specifically, maybe to herself, maybe to both cats, maybe to the general universe, and went inside.

The building door swung shut behind her.

I stood on the sidewalk and adjusted my pants.

Vito walked back to the bike, stepped up to his platform, and sat there waiting for me to get my shit together.

“Don’t even.” I grabbed his little helmet from the ground at my feet.

He said nothing. He was a cat.

Bare feet. Canon Mandalorian lore. Called me Cat Daddy. And then there was the beauty and sass that had me all kinds of revved up.

I’d known her for fifteen minutes.

Her name was Clover.

I was in trouble.

Vito was going to be insufferable about this.

FRONT ROW SEAT

CLOVER