Page 79 of The Tiger in the Sack

I glanced over at Isak to see if his ghasts were as flabbered as mine. But he was just nodding along to the conversation and shoving bites of cheesy spaghetti into his mouth.

“You at least do a three-way,” Izzy said, turning to one of the new girls, who nodded vigorously. “Right? Anything less is boring.”

“Some people can’t handle that much,” Shayla said, shaking her head.

I set the bowl down. I was a grown woman and my face was on fire like I was a cute inexperienced virgin discovering porn for the first time. In front of my fake boyfriend. And in a room full of my own cheerleaders.

In the strangled voice of the deeply confused, I squeaked out, “I’m sorry. How many people are we talking about?”

None of them were having a menage a trois in my house. I was cool. I wasn’t that cool.

The room went quiet.

Then Maya, sweet Maya, gentle Maya, turned from the stove with the spoon still in her hand and said, “...for the chili?”

“The chili?” What was she on about? What was happening here?

“Sunshine chili,” Izzy said, like that explained anything. “You know, one of our sponsors?”

Isak literally snort-laughed so hard I thought spaghetti was going to come out of his nose. “You are eating Cincinnati chili. Three-way is spaghetti noodles, this chili, cheese. Four-way you add onions or beans. Five-way you do both. What did you think?”

He looked at my face and grinned. The entire room stared at me in various states of understanding what I thought they were talking about. There was a beat of the purest silence, and then the apartment came down around my ears in joyful noise.

Shayla was wheezing into a couch cushion, Izzy pointing at me unable to speak, one of the new girls screeched “Oh my GOD she thought it was SEX!” and from the floor, from the quarterback I was supposed to be fake dating for strategic purposes only, a laugh I hadn’t heard from him before, full and helpless, his head tipped back against my couch.

“It’s a Cincinnati thing,” he managed. “Clover. It’s a regional specialty.”

“I understand that. Now.” But I wish I’d known eleven seconds earlier. “Maya, is there more cheese?”

“So much cheese,” Maya said, and the warmth in the room was palpable, and I sat in the middle of my living room being laughed at by people who a month ago I’d worried would never even exist.

The night wound down the way the good ones do, in stages nobody announces. The new girls peeled off in a giggling clump, with “Thank you Clover, Night Clover.” Shayla stacked my dishwasher with bossy precision because apparently my loading method was a personal failure, kissed the top of Maya’s head, and headed for the door.

Izzy was last out besides Maya, and she leaned in close as she passed me, her voice dropped low, just for me.

“Hey. You and Kingman?” Not unkind. Not gossip. A captain checking in because she’s too damn observant. “Are you two a thing?”

And there it was. The first real test of the whole stupid beautiful scaffolding, and it wasn’t Tiki and it wasn’t Warner. It was a twenty-three-year-old I was about to trust with my squad, looking at me with open, curious eyes, and I had a half-second to choose.

“Yeah,” I said. “We are. It’s new.”

The word yeah cost more than I expected. It was the first time I’d said it to someone who mattered, someone who wasn’t the target of the lie, and saying it to Izzy made it a fact in the world in a way that saying it to Warner never could.

Izzy grinned like she’d won something. “Knew it. The way he’s been looking at you since the video… I could just tell, you know? You two are cute together.” She squeezed my arm. “Night, Coach.”

And then it really was just Maya at the door. She gave me a small wave and a smile that saw more than she said, and the door clicked, and the apartment exhaled.

It was just us, and rule two cleared its throat in the back of my mind. It does not exist when it’s just us. The audience had walked out the door in a giggling clump and taken the whole point of the arrangement with it, and Isak hadn’t moved off my floor, and I hadn’t gone looking for a reason for him to leave.

He was leaned back against my couch with Vito finally, grudgingly, draped over one knee. Watching me with an unhurried look. The one that made me feel like the most interesting thing in a city he’d lived in for years.

“Your friends like you,” he said.

“They’re my team.”

“They like you.” He scratched Vito under the chin. “There’s a difference between people who play for you and people who let themselves into your apartment to make you dinner. You’ve got the second kind. That’s rare.” He looked up at me. “You know that’s rare, right?”

I opened my mouth to say something deflecting and engineer-shaped about staff morale, and my phone buzzed.