17. Isak #2
"Actually, I've got her tonight. We made plans before the table-for-four happened." My voice came out easy, came out like I did this daily. "Mr. Freeman, Mrs. Freeman, this was the best night I've had in a while, and I'm counting games."
They'd find out soon enough that I'd called ahead and had the restaurant put everything on my card.
Tory made a small sound into her napkin.
"Bishop, see you at the facility." I held my hand out to Clover, palm up, no rule two within fifty miles. "Come on. Vito and Tig probably want a romantic dinner of their own."
She looked at my open hand a half-second too long, the engineer pricing the risk, and I braced for the polite managed exit, the thank-you-for-dinner, the I'll-call-you. I'd have taken it. I'd have ridden home and said nothing to Fox and eaten cereal at midnight like a grown man.
Then she put her hand in mine and stood, and she didn't let go in the doorway, and she didn't let go in the lobby, and out on the sidewalk under a streetlight buzzing about nothing, she turned and looked up at me wearing a face I'd never once seen her give another living person, no smooth, no managed, no list, only her, wide open and a little frightened of it.
"There's no audience out here, Kingman," she said.
"I know."
"Rule two says we don't exist when nobody's watching."
"I know what rule two says. I was there. You had a spoon."
She was still holding my hand. She hadn't let go even for a second. "So what are we doing?" she whispered.
I could've been smart. I'm good at it. I had three jokes loaded and a fourth about the cats. Instead the truest sentence I owned came straight up out of me with no lie in front of it to slow it down.
"I think rule two is dumb. I think you wrote it so that if I ever stopped showing up you could tell yourself none of it was real anyway.
I think you've been writing rules like that your whole life.
And I think the same thing about your no dating football players rule too.
I've been working around it like a blitz because… "
"Isak," she said.
"What?"
"Stop talking," Clover said, and reached up with her free hand, and pulled my face down to hers, and kissed me.
Her mouth was soft and she tasted like the two sips of dessert wine she'd allowed herself. Her hand came to the side of my neck and her thumb traced my jaw in a slow drag I was going to be thinking about for the rest of my natural life.
I'd wanted this since roughly the moment I saw her barefoot in a tree.
I slid my hands to her waist and she made a small sound into my mouth that rearranged my whole skeleton.
It was real. This kiss, this feeling, this was everything. One hundred and one percent genuine. No part of this was scaffolding. Scaffolding doesn't make you forget your name on a public sidewalk. Scaffolding doesn't taste like dessert wine.
And I knew right then, my jaw under her hands and streetlights buzzing, the fake was finished and the real had started, and I was happy, so stupidly happy.
But then I opened my eyes.
And saw Tiki Barbra Jackson.
Staring at us like a stick of dynamite.
She stood maybe twenty feet back in pink leather, a designer dog carrier on one shoulder, with her phone in her free hand, and her face had gone carefully blank while it caught up to what it was looking at.
Because here's what I'd forgotten in the smoothie and the bread and the blazer and the kiss.
Tiki Jackson had decided, with zero input from me, that she and I had a Friday date.
She'd invented it. Announced it as fact.
I'd never agreed to one second, but Tiki didn't require agreement, Tiki required a restaurant and apparently a quarterback, and tonight was Friday, and she'd come to claim it.
Instead she'd found me on a sidewalk kissing Clover like the building was burning.
Good. This was why we'd created the fake dating pact.
Not the kissing part. That was just for us. But Tiki seeing it? Chef's kiss.
She took us in. One of the Chihuahuas poked its head out of the carrier and stared at me too.
Clover hadn't seen her yet, still tipped up toward me with that open frightened glad face, and I had about one second to do something with mine, and I did the worst available option, which was nothing, which was stand there guilty as a man caught exactly mid-crime.
Tiki's chin came up.
"Well," she said, every degree of warmth removed. Clover spun around. "Don't let me interrupt."
Behind her eyes she wrote me off somewhere I was never getting un-written from. "And to think I named my new puppy after you." A short, terrible laugh. "If I didn't know you were actually a good quarterback, I'd have my sister trade you."
She looked at Clover for exactly long enough to prove she wouldn't bother with the name. "Enjoy your quarterback."
She turned on her heel and left like she was walking down a runway, the Chihuahua still watching me over her shoulder like a tiny disappointed jury.
And the crazy thing was that she walked off certain she'd witnessed two people in love. What she'd actually clocked, down to the exact second, was the first real moment of a romance that had spent weeks insisting it was everything but. She had the timing perfectly, ruinously backward.
Clover's hand found mine again.
"Well," she said, very quietly, watching the empty spot where Tiki had stood. "I guess we had an audience after all."
Damn it.