Chapter 12
CLOVER
The application portal had stopped being a number and started being a weather system.
I had it open on one monitor and the audition-block spreadsheet on the other, and I was trying to fit almost hundred women into a gym that comfortably held sixty at a time, which is the kind of math I actually like, the kind with a right answer at the end of it.
Load in, load out. Group sizes. Judge rotations. I'd built a color-coded grid that was, I will say it, beautiful, and I was three cells into making it more beautiful when the atmosphere changed.
I felt it before I looked up.
Warner.
My whole spreadsheet went out of my head like someone had pulled the drain.
He was leaning on the frame of my office door like someone who had never once wondered whether he was wanted there.
Tigers polo. Tigers lanyard. A Tigers lanyard, on Warner, in my doorway, in Cincinnati, and my brain refused to believe it.
"Hey, Clo."
"What are you—" I stopped. Started over. My mouth was working independently of my brain, but somebody needed to do the work. "What are you doing here? Are you—" and here it came out before I could stop it, small and stupid and nineteen, "—are you here to see me?"
Warner smiled. He came into my office without being asked, the way he came into everything.
"No, silly." He said it gently. Fondly. Like I was adorable for asking. "I play here."
I looked at him. My whole sense of time and space tried to reorganize itself around the sentence and could not find a place to put it. "You play where?"
"Here. The Tigers. Cincinnati." He spread his hands like the room agreed with him.
He watched it land on me, and he liked it, I could tell. He'd always liked being the one holding the new information.
I still couldn’t believe it. This was a bad dream, right?
My ex-boyfriend, who I dumped, even though nobody I knew understood why, couldn’t possibly be playing for the team I worked for.
“You play for the Tigers?” It was more of a statement than a question. I could see that he did.
“What? Like it was hard to get traded here?” He tipped his head like he was being helpful and I was being obtuse. “The Tigers need all the help they can get.”
“Warner, why would you leave the Chicago Bruins? You loved it there. They loved having you.” He wasn’t the only one who loved having him in Chicago.
He had dinner with my parents at least once a month.
My mom never shut up about what a nice young man he was.
I think my dad was more bummed about the break up than anyone else.
"I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it secondhand, but you've been—" he tipped his head at my monitors, fond, "—busy. Look at you. Cheer director. Your own office."
"Warner. What is going on here?" This was seriously like… nice guy stalking behavior.
"It's a great job." He picked up the stress ball off my desk, a freebie from a vendor, shaped like a tiny football, which I was suddenly furious about, and turned it over in his hand. "I've thought about you. A lot. Being back in the same city, it feels like—"
"Don't."
"—like a second look at something." He set the football down. Right where it had been. He was good at that, putting things back exactly, so you couldn't point to anything he'd disturbed. "I'm not the same guy, Clo. I did a lot of thinking after you left."
After you left. Like I'd wandered off. Like the leaving hadn't been a thing I built over four years of every small redirection, every gentle this-might-not-be-your-scene, every time he'd looked at me across a room full of his teammates' girlfriends and then suggested we go on a diet together or work out together the next day.
And here was the part I hated, the part that made my skin go hot with something that wasn't flattery and wasn't quite shame.
Some animal layer of me, some nineteen-year-old still living in the basement of my nervous system, leaned toward him like a plant toward a window.
Toward being known. Toward someone who remembered my coffee order and my birthday and exactly which version of myself made him comfortable in a room.
I knew exactly what that was. I could name it.
"Warner, I'm working."
"I can see that." He sat. On the edge of my desk. On the corner of my beautiful grid, metaphorically, and very nearly literally. "I just think we owe it to ourselves to—"
A knock sounded at my door. Two knuckles on the doorframe, and a face peered in.
Saved by the Kingman.
"Hey, hope I’m not interrupting anything." Isak Kingman came through my door holding a bag of Garrett's popcorn roughly the size of a barge, talking before he was fully inside. "I came to—"
He saw Warner. Stopped. Recalibrated with a smooth half-second delay of a man who'd walked into more loaded rooms than this one. "Oh. Hey.”
Yes. God, yes. He was a six-foot-three interruption holding a comically large bag of popcorn and I had never in my life been so glad to be interrupted.
The nineteen-year-old inside of me stood up, dusted herself off, and flipped Warner the finger.
The more grown up me who lived in the real world stood up and crossed my office toward my frenemy. I walked right up to Isak Kingman, put my hand flat on his absurd chest like I'd done it four hundred times, and said, "You're early."
I watched him not understand. For one beautiful half-second, Isak Kingman wasn’t the master of his domain.
Then I watched him get there, watched the read happen behind his eyes, the same way he read a blitz, and I saw him decide to come with me wherever this was going without yet knowing where that was.
"Yep." he said. Short and sweet and practically begging me to continue to take charge.
I liked him, I mean it. I like that he was ready to play along without knowing what I was up to.
Yeah. That was it. He slid his free arm around my shoulders like it lived there.
"Babe, you ready for a break? I just got that weird cheddar and caramel popcorn mix you love. "
"Warner, meet Isak." I did not take my hand off his chest. "Isak, this is Warner. We dated. In college." I looked up at Isak, and I let everything I needed him to be live in my face. "Warner just got traded in. Isn't that something?"
There was a pause where an entire future hung in the balance and a professional quarterback decided to throw the ball I'd called instead of the one in the playbook.
"Something," Isak agreed warmly, and he held his hand out to Warner, friendly, enormous, the clean smile, the one off the building. "Isak Kingman. Good to meet you, man. You’re one of the FNGs, huh?"
I had not told him to say babe. I had not told him about the mix. He'd built both out of nothing in real time and handed them to me like he'd been studying for the role for weeks, and I made a note, somewhere underneath the panic, that Isak Kingman was a dangerously fast study.
I watched Isak's name go into Warner and rearrange the furniture.
Because Warner knew exactly who Isak Kingman was.
Everyone who'd ever touched a football knew who Isak Kingman was.
And here he was, arm around me, remembering a popcorn order I'd never given him, and the game Warner had walked in doing, the second-chance game, the she'll-still-respond to my charm and good looks game, was being redone in front of me, badly, with all the work showing.
"Got myself traded in from the Bruins. Thought you boys could use a strong middle line backer," Warner said. "Looking forward to bringing in some new leadership skills to the defense."
"Love that," Isak said, with bottomless sincerity. He could not be insulted because it would never occur to him to look for the insult. "Always good to have depth."
He said depth like it was a compliment. It was not a compliment, and the fact that Isak delivered it like one, with his whole open face, was the most devastating thing that could have happened to it. “Guess we’ll be across the line from each other quite a bit.”
Warner's jaw did a small tick. Like a muscle deciding whether to be a problem and then figuring out, in front of Isak Kingman's legendary shoulders, not to be.
"I gotta go meet up with Coach," Warner said.
He looked at me. Tried to find the door back into the conversation we'd been having, the one where he was the one holding all the new information, and couldn't, because I'd handed all the new information to a quarterback who was now eating my popcorn in my doorway. "Clo. We'll talk."
"Sure," I said, in the tone you use for sure that means the opposite.
He went. He didn't slam anything. Warner never slammed anything. He just took his recalibrated world-view and his too-cool face that was not, in fact, cool, and left.
And I stood there under Isak Kingman's arm and listened to my ex-boyfriend’s footsteps go down the hall and turn the corner and get swallowed by the building.
The arm came off my shoulders the second Warner was out of sight. Careful. Like it had been a tool and the job was done.
The popcorn crunched.
Isak had eaten a handful. He was looking at the door Warner had gone through with an expression I couldn't immediately classify, and then he looked at me, and the easy boyfriend was gone, folded back up and put away, and it was just him.
"So," he said. "We're dating."
"We are not dating."
"We're a little bit dating. I called you babe. I know your popcorn order." He made eyes at the bag of Garrett’s. Which was not available in Cincinnati, or anywhere in Ohio for that matter.
"Yeah, how did you know what kind of popcorn I like?” I was hands down my favorite Chicago-only snack.
He set the bag down on the desk between us slowly, and the joke went out of him like he'd decided he'd used enough of it to get us both to solid ground.
"Sorry. The babe was a lot. You looked like you needed him gone, so I—" He gestured at himself, at the popcorn, at the whole improvised production. "I had props."
"It worked."
"Yeah, it—" He stopped. "It worked?"