16. Clover #2
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.
Dad: Your mother and I land Thursday before the first preseason game. Dinner Friday — booked us a table for FOUR. ;) Proud of you, kid.
A table for four. The winking emoji. I knew what the fourth chair was before the next one came in, which it did, eleven seconds later, from a number I'd deleted and apparently should have blocked.
Warner: Your dad invited me to dinner on Friday. I hope that's ok. It would be good to talk, Clo. for real this time. I've been thinking a lot about what I want.
The warmth went out of the room like someone had opened a window in January.
There it was. The whole reason for fake dating my new frenemy. Rule one through three, the scaffolding, the structure, built especially for this.
A table for four and a man who'd told me once, in a voice I could still hear, that all he wanted was for me to be Pro Football League WAG material, now thinking a lot about what he wanted, as if what he wanted had ever been the question.
Isak watched my face do whatever it did. He'd gotten good at reading it somewhere along the way, which I hadn't authorized. "What happened? Something happened."
"My parents are coming to town for the first pre-season game. They booked a dinner." I hadn't meant to say it. "Friday. A table for four."
He figured it out without me even saying why that was a problem. His jaw did that same pulsing tic it had done in the parking lot, the one that felt protective. "Warner's the fourth."
"Yep. My parents already invited him."
I waited for him to make it light. To shrug it into a joke, the way he made everything into a joke, great, free dinner, I love being a human shield. I'd have let him. I'd half-wanted him to, so I could keep this in the strategic-arrangement drawer where it was safe.
He didn't.
He set Vito gently off his knee and stood up, and the easy went out of him, and what was left was something steadier I hadn't seen on him before.
"Tell me about Warner," he said. "Not the part where he's a lineman.
The part where your dad's got a chair set for him and you've got your I've-got-rules face on. "
So I told him a version of it. The short version, that included that Warner and I had been dating for the last four years, that my parents thought he was the best thing since sliced sourdough, and that I'd broken up with him. I abbreviated the why.
He listened the way he did everything, completely, no looking away, listening with driven intent. When I finished he was quiet for a second.
"Friday," he said. "What time?"
He couldn't just show up to dinner. "Isak—"
"What time, Clover?" Gentle. Immovable. "Because I'm going to be there.
I'm going to be so obviously, sickeningly, devotedly your guy that your dad forgets there was ever an invite for your ex-boyfriend.
" He picked up the cat, and Vito went, finally, for him.
"That's the deal. That's what I signed up for.
You don't do the Friday show for your parents alone. "
And that, not the texts, not Warner, not the dinner, that was the thing that should have scared me, and did.
Because I'd built this whole structure to keep from catching any feelings I wasn't supposed to.
And here was Isak Kingman holding up his end of a fake arrangement like it was the realest thing he'd agreed to all year, and I understood, standing in my emptied-out apartment with the warmth still in the walls, that the danger was never Warner.
The danger was going to be exactly how good Isak Kingman was at pretending to be mine.
"Friday at seven," I said. "Don't be early. Early is weird."
"I'm going to be a little early."
"Kingman."
"A little."
He left with his cat. Tig and I stood in my quiet apartment and I wasn't sure who made the little sad, horny moan. Me or my cat.