Page 70 of The Tiger in the Sack

Venus Fever had done mornings in this city eleven years and could fill a room without raising her voice. She didn’t raise it. “Oh, it’s a Cincinnati thing. Porkopolis. We were the pork capital of the whole country, back when. Pigs built this town.” She tilted her head. “And then somebody decided to celebrate that by making ‘em fly. Flying pigs everywhere you look. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because a flying pig’s the thing that’s not supposed to be possible.” She looked at me, something underneath the radio voice, something handed over on purpose. “You see a pig fly, it means a thing that shouldn’t exist does. After all.”

When pigs fly, huh?

We ran the afternoon block. Callbacks. Venus had specific, correct opinions about technique. Rich relitigated a close call and Rutherford fell in love approximately nine times. The squad was being born in front of me and it was, despite the hecklers, despite the splinter, despite all of it, extraordinary.

Up in the bowl, thirty rows of empty seats away, I caught the last thing the day had for me.

Jules had gone back up into the seats and found Fox, and the two of them had their heads bent together, deep in conference, and as I watched, Jules said something and pointed at me, at Isak, at the small-of-the-back distance between us that had closed and not reopened. Fox said something back, and Jules’s eyebrows went up, and Fox’s eyebrows went up, and they both turned and looked straight down at the two of us with the synchronized delight of people assembling a puzzle whose picture they’d just realized they recognized.

I could not hear a single word of it. I could read every one off their faces.

Isak followed my gaze. Found them. Watched his best friend and his little sister put their heads back together and laugh. “That can’t be good.”

“No.”

The last auditioner left at six-forty. Dev was still rolling on an empty floor because Dev never stopped. I stood at the rail of my stadium with my clipboard full of yeses and let the dilemma I’d been collecting pieces of all day finally assemble itself, because I was too tired to keep holding it in parts.

Here was the reaction, the true one, under the joy, the day had been everything.

Tiki Jackson had stood in front of four thousand people and called my squad we, and meant it, and had the ownership stake to make we real whenever she decided to. I’d corrected her once with a smile. I would not get to correct her a second time without it being a thing.

So. The dilemma.

I could let her have it. Let Tiki co-pilot, nod along to the rebrand, lose the orange, share the eye, keep the peace. She was an owner. She was Gabrielle’s sister. Fighting her was the kind of fight an employee loses even when she wins, and if I lost it loud enough… I lost the whole job, and then there was no squad to protect at all.

The safe move was to bend. Bend a little now, keep the chair, fight smaller fights later.

Or.

I could hold the line. Run it like it was mine, because it was mine. Gabrielle hired me to have a vision and not to borrow one and risk a rift between two sisters and possibly my own career on the bet that I was right.

I turned the idea of the flying pig over in my head. The impossible thing that existed right here in Cincinnati.

The decision came the way they always came for me, all at once, after the engineering brain finished bluffing that it needed more data.

It was my team. I was going to risk pissing Tiki off.

Because here was the thing I’d filed away all day and finally assembled.

Tiki Jackson did not care about cheerleading. She’d never cared about cheerleading. She’d retreated the instant she thought Isak was taken. Tiki wasn’t here for a squad.

She was here for a husband, and the squad was just the room the husband happened to be standing in, and the second her potential new partner looked spoken for, her whole proprietary interest in my life’s work was going to evaporate like a flying pig in a stiff wind.

Which meant I didn’t have to beat Tiki.

I just had to make Isak look spoken for.

And there was a man with a cat and a motorcycle and a sister who’d already figured out the shape of this before I’d let myself say it.

A man who’d put his hand on the small of my back and it had felt good. Twice now my fake boyfriend by accident, and who’d said yes to something in my office before I’d even finished proposing it.

The pieces fit. God help me, they fit.

“Kingman,” I said, without turning around, because I could feel him still standing there, because he was always still standing there. “Remember that yes from the other day?”