Chapter 7 #2
"Someone who climbed a tree for her cat and didn't make me feel like a Kingman for five minutes and I would like those five minutes to continue existing without commentary from my family, thanks."
Jules ate a piece of popcorn. "She's your neighbor?"
"She just moved here."
"For work?"
I should have seen it coming. I'd known Jules my entire life. I knew exactly how she moved through a conversation. The questions that seemed like small talk and were actually load-bearing walls. I should have seen it coming.
"Yeah," I said.
"Where does she work?"
"Not far from here."
"Doing what?" She absolutely was not letting me off the hook. Brat. I expected no less, but it had been a while since I'd been under Jules's scrutiny.
The pause before I answered was too long. I knew it was too long. Jules knew it was too long. Fox was watching the pause like it was a sporting event.
"Dance director." I had no idea if that was a real title or something I pulled out of my ass. It was vague enough to be any sort of job.
"What's her name?"
Dammit. This was a losing battle. I could either give in now or await her revenge. Nobody wanted a repeat of the great Cheerios incident of our youth.
"Clover," I said.
Fox snorted and some half-eaten popcorn flew in my direction. He stared at me, with his mouth hanging open and that WTF look on his face. Jules glanced at Fox, then narrowed her eyes at me and the room went very quiet.
Not Fox-loud quiet. The other kind. Jules had gone still the way she did when she was connecting things, her brain doing the work behind her eyes at a speed that had always been unnerving to watch up close.
She set the popcorn bowl down on the coffee table. That was how I knew it was serious. Jules only put the snacks down when she was serious.
"Clover Freeman," she said.
Not a question.
I stared at her. "How do you—"
"Check your phone." She looked at Fox. "Three weeks ago I sent him an article."
Fox looked at me wide-eyed, fifty-two emotions passing through them as he searched for something to say.
Dude better have my back. He processed. I watched him connect the dots, the building, the team, the texts all week, the content shoot, the dropped snaps, all of it, and I watched the moment it finished calculating. "Dude."
I shot a raised eyebrow of death at him.
"Uh...did you read it?"
Okay, better than blurting out that I'd been keeping one hell of a secret about who Cheerleader in a Tree girl was. I shrugged. "I hearted it."
Jules closed her eyes for exactly one second. When she opened them again she had the patient expression of a woman who had grown up with seven brothers and the selective attention that produced.
"Gabrielle Jackson hired a plus-size dance coordinator two weeks ago," Jules said.
"Former captain of the Chadwick University cheer team.
Engineering degree." She looked at me steadily.
"She's been running body positivity workshops at cheer camps and dance studios for years, Isak.
It was in three different sports media outlets.
It was a big deal. I sent you the article. You hearted it."
"I was going to re—"
Fox looked like a little kid about to burst, and couldn't hold it all back any longer "You've been — she's been — they've been in the same building all week—"
Jules was the one with the eyebrow that could kill this time, and it was aimed right at me.
Fox stood up and started pacing, his mouth on a real roll now. I must remind myself never to keep a secret like this from him again. He could have been my ally here and instead he was a walking time bomb of hot tea. "And she works for the team—"
Jules gave him a cute little grin, like she approved of his mental breakdown.
"And they aren't just neighbors, no... HE OWNS THE BUILDING SHE LIVES IN—" Fox turned to me with the expression of a man for whom three hours of dropped snaps and one Roper intervention had just become completely explained. "That's why you were a disaster at practice."
Jules held up a hand. "Back up. How long has this been going on?"
"It's not—"
"Fox," Jules said.
Fox, without a flicker of hesitation let more tea flow. "He met her last Sunday. Rescued her cat from a tree outside the building. Kept the helmet on the whole time. She saved his number as Cat Daddy."
Jules blinked. "Cat Daddy?"
"She has no idea who he is," Fox continued, with the energy of waiting days to debrief someone about this. "He's been texting her all week. Every night. Goes pretty late."
Jules looked at me. "How late?"
"That's not—"
"Midnight," Fox said. "At least."
"Fox." I was going to pee in his Cheerios.
"He named her contact Cheerleader in a Tree," Fox said to Jules, like he was reading from a report. "He hasn't told anyone her name. He told me to mind my business when I asked."
Jules's eyebrows went up. "And she still doesn't know who he is."
"She knows him only as Cat Daddy," Fox said. "Man on motorcycle, helmet always on, cat in a leather jacket."
"And she agreed to go on a ride with this person?" She waved her hand in my general direction as if I was a dog or a rat.
"Tonight," Fox confirmed. "She also," he added, because apparently he'd decided to be completely thorough about this, "had a full debate with him about whether a hot dog is a sandwich."
Jules stared at me but this time I could see my utter doom in those eyes. "You like her."
"That's not the—"
"You really like her." Now she was full on smiling and I think she was possibly planning my engagement and wedding in her head.
"I'm going to tell her tonight—"
"You've been texting her until midnight every night for a week," Jules said, "as a person she doesn't have the full picture on. She doesn't know your name. She doesn't know you're a Kingman. She doesn't know you're her landlord. She doesn't know you work for the same organization."
She looked at Fox. "Is there anything else?"
Fox considered. "She has an orange cat named Tig Bitties."
Jules closed her eyes and nodded while taking a deep breath. "Of course she does."
Then she leaned forward, and everything in her demeanor changed. This was no longer my bratty little sister. She'd just become the one and only woman of the house, the one who counseled the Kingman men when we were being stupid.
And we listened.
"You've been texting her all week as someone she doesn't fully know you are," she said.
"She lives in a building she doesn't know you own.
She works for your team and in a vulnerable position that could be scrutinized in a way no quarterback ever has been.
" She paused. "She doesn't have enough information to choose this, Isak.
You're making choices for both of you and she only knows about half of them.
In this family that's not how we operate. "
She didn't say it like a lecture. She said it the way we'd all learned to say it, the way our dad had built into us so deep it was just part of how we thought. This was about consent. Enthusiastically, explicitly, like it mattered, because it did.
It landed the way it always did when Jules deployed the family language. Below the defenses.
"I'm going to tell her tonight," I said. "On the ride. I'm going to tell her everything."
Jules looked at me for a long moment with twenty-three years of knowing exactly when I meant something and when I was hoping saying it out loud would make it true.
"If you don't tell her on that ride," she said, "I'm going to find her, introduce myself. And then I'm going to tell her."
She meant it. I knew she meant it.
Fox nodded. "That's fair."
"Whose side are you on?"
"The side of you not destroying this before it starts." He sat back down and jerked his chin toward my sister. "Also Jules makes an excellent point."
I looked between them and I didn't like this alliance one bit. "Why are you two now BFFs?" I held up a hand. "No, don't answer that.
"I'm going to get ready."
Nobody stopped me. But I felt both of them watching me walk down the hall and I knew with complete certainty that the moment I was out of earshot they were going to keep talking, and I knew with equal certainty that I was not going to examine what that meant for my immediate future.
My helmet collection lived on the wall of my bedroom. Twelve helmets, different styles, different years, some with history and some just because I liked the way they looked.
It was not serial killery.
I stood in front of it and picked up the brand new pink spare I'd bought for Clover to wear.
It was a good helmet. Solid. Clean. I'd checked the fit mechanism twice this week to make sure it was working right.
Vito jumped up on the bed and sat there watching me with his green eyes and his complete absence of judgment, which I appreciated.
"I'm going to tell her tonight," I told him.
He blinked.
"I know how that sounds."
He began grooming his left paw.
"I mean it this time."
He switched to the right paw.
I set down the helmet. Picked up my own. Checked the time.
I was going to have to take an extra long shower, and take my sweet time getting ready if I was going to avoid the tea party going on in my living room until my date.
I mean my ride.
With Clover Freeman.
Fuck, I hope she didn't murder me when she found out I was "Cheerleaders with junk in their trunk are really hot" guy.
The Rhinehaus looked the way it always looked in the early evening, the old brick going warm gold in the last of the light, the kind of building that looked like it had always been there and always would be.
She was already outside, right by the tree where we'd met.
Jacket, boots, arms loosely crossed, standing on the sidewalk looking like a snack I wanted to eat right up. She was watching me pull up with an expression I couldn't read through my visor, which was the same problem I'd had all afternoon and apparently wasn't going away.
There was something about how she was standing.
I couldn't name it. It wasn't the nerves I'd expected, the first-ride energy that most people had when they were about to get on a motorcycle for the first time with someone they'd only known from a tree.
It was something more settled than that.
Considered. Like she'd already made a decision and was watching to see if what happened next confirmed it.
I really hoped whatever it was included me and her on a bike, her arms around my waist, her thighs against mine.
I pulled up. Cut the engine. Got off the bike with her helmet in my hand.
She looked at it.
I held it out.
She took it, both hands, and glanced down at it for a second before she looked back up at me, at my helmet, at where my face wasn't. I thought about Jules on the couch and the consent speech and the introduction threat and the fact that I was going to tell her tonight, I was going to tell her, I just needed to find the right moment on the ride and I was going to.
"Ready?" I said.
She looked at me for one more beat with that expression I couldn't read, and smiled.