Page 87 of The Tiger in the Sack

His dad. In the box. Wanting to meet me.

And the reflex that reads a room for its edges, the one I’d told to calm down twice already today, stood right back up and reminded me, gently, lovingly, in a voice that sounded an awful lot like every voice that had ever redirected me toward small, that there was a difference between being the woman who built the room and being the woman who got invited up into somebody else’s.

I typed back that I’d be right up before I could talk myself into the stairs being too far.

Two days ago I kissed him with no audience.

This was the part I didn’t have a rule for. The part with an audience that wasn’t a strategy. The part where the legendary Bridger Kingman already knew my name.

I went up, and I went smiling.

LITTLE SISTERS AND BIG BROTHERS

ISAK

Ithrew a sixty-yard touchdown in the second quarter and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it, but the truth is I spent most of that game watching the wrong part of the field.

I’d come off a series, helmet off, chest heaving, and before I found Coach or the bench or the headset, my eyes went to the sideline thirty yards down where a woman with her hands locked behind her back was running the best debut this franchise had ever seen and pretending her whole soul wasn’t standing out in front of her in pom-poms and glitter.

I saw the pigs before she did.

I was on the bench, defense out there, and I watched them come over the railing in that ugly pink arc, and I was up and three steps toward the wall before Fox grabbed the back of my jersey and hauled me down like I weighed nothing, which, to him, I roughly do.

“Sit,” Fox said.

“They’re throwing things at her squad.”

“They’re throwing rubber pigs at the squad and if you go vault the wall on national television you become the story and she becomes the girl the QB defended, which is the one thing she would rather die than be.” He didn’t let go of my jersey. Fox reads defenses upside down and he reads me right side up and I hate it. “Watch. Give her ten seconds before you decide she needs you.”

I gave her ten seconds because Fox had my jersey.

And in ten seconds a sixty-two-year-old woman picked a pig up off the turf and held it over her head like she was lighting an Olympic torch, and the whole crazy thing turned.

The whole stadium turned, and the whole Tigerettes squad caught flying pigs out of the air to a Kelsey Best beat, and I stood there with Fox’s fist still in my jersey and understood that I had been about to rob her of the single best moment of her professional life because I couldn’t sit still while she was uncomfortable for ten seconds.

“Yeah,” Fox said, letting go. “She’s good. Sit down, dummy.”

I sat down. My hands were shaking. I made them stop.

This was a problem I was not going to be able to keep ignoring, the size of what I felt every time something happened to her. It had blown clean past the size that a fake relationship was supposed to come in.

We won by seventeen. Fox had nine catches and a hundred and forty yards and did a celebration in the end zone that I am contractually obligated to never describe. The locker room was loud in the best way.

I’d almost gotten my head back into being a quarterback who’d just won a game instead of a man who’d watched a woman conquer a stadium, when I came around the equipment cage and heard Monty Whyte’s voice in the hall doing that alpha business man thing it does, which is sound reasonable while it ruins something.

“Just saying, Gabrielle, the engagement numbers are extraordinary. People are talking. So let’s allow the people decide.”

I stopped behind the cage. I was very careful not to be suspicious. Which was a well-worn skill of the youngest brother of seven.

Gabrielle’s voice, careful, stated more than asked, “Decide what, Monty?”

“The squad. The whole new direction. You’ve made it the franchise’s signature this season, and that’s bold, that’s a real swing.” He paused and I could practically hear him smile. “So put it to a fan vote. Beginning of the regulation season. Let the fans say whether the new Tigerettes are the direction they want the brand to go. If you’re right about how much they love it, you’ve got nothing to worry about. The numbers will back you, won’t they?”

The best traps are ones built so the person walking into them thinks the door was their idea.

But Gabrielle was no caged Tiger.

Of course she couldn’t say no to that. Saying no meant she didn’t trust the fans, meant she didn’t believe in the thing she’d staked her whole presidency on, meant she was protecting it because secretly she knew it was weak.