14. Clover #2
And here was the disaster, the actual one, dressed up in pink leather and standing too close to my cameras. I could not win this contest the normal way.
Tiki Jackson owned a piece of the building we were standing in.
I could correct her on the word directing once, lightly, with a smile, and I had.
But I could not tell an owner to take her eye and her rebrand and her flying-monkey Chihuahuas back up the tunnel, not in front of four thousand people and three cameras, not without it becoming the story instead of Maya, instead of Deja, instead of the girl in a shirt branded with my personal hero and… friend’s mother.
She had me. She didn't even know she had me. She thought she was helping.
As Tiki moved closer, Isak relocated.
I don't have a more accurate verb. One moment he was at my left, the next he'd performed some piece of footwork that put me physically between himself and Tiki, his hand landing light at the small of my back like punctuation.
Tiki's gaze dropped to the hand and climbed back up and recalculated, and the headset she wasn't using became a thing she suddenly had to adjust, and for the first time all day Tiki Jackson was on the back foot.
I told myself I let it work because it got her off the rebrand. I told myself a number of things.
Tiki marched off toward her sister, and Isak blew out a relieved breath.
I didn’t get to address that we were once again doing the thing he’d instantly said yes to in my office the other day because someone in the crowd was cackling, and not in the joyful way.
I'd half-clocked them earlier and filed them under every event has a few, a knot of maybe five men not cheering for anybody, who'd come to a free public event specifically to not enjoy it, the way some men will.
Into a lull, one stood and cupped his hands. "You're taking the whole Cincinnati flying pigs thing too far, Tigers!"
It carried. Stadiums are built to carry.
A pocket around him did the ugly thing, the laugh that isn't about funny, the laugh that's about permission, and I watched it travel maybe four rows before it ran out of fuel and died, because the other three thousand nine hundred and ninety people did not think it was funny.
But the four rows had laughed.
Heat climbed my neck. Not embarrassment. The other thing. The thing that's followed me since the seventh-grade dance, dressed up as concern, dressed up as a joke, dressed up as just being honest. Beside me Isak had gone a different kind of still, the kind that builds toward an explosion.
I put two fingers on his forearm without looking at him. "Don't. That's what it's for. Don't give it the day."
His jaw worked. He didn't move. Score one for me.
Gabrielle was already on her phone, already half-risen, and within ninety seconds two stadium security officers made their polite, enormous way up the steps, and the five men were escorted out with a minimum of drama and a maximum of announcing their rights to anyone who'd listen, which was no one.
Clean. Fast. The institution closing ranks around the women, easy as anything, because right now it was five guys and a free Tuesday.
And down the table, Monty stood, capped his pen, and tucked the clipboard under his arm.
"Shame about that. But you saw it." He nodded up at the emptying rows like exhibit A, voice pitched just for our end of the table, a man being so very reasonable. "Not everyone's on board for whatever this is. Something to be honest about, going forward. For the brand."
Then he left. Walked up the tunnel the same direction security had taken the men, like the part of the day he'd come for was over and there was no reason to stay for the part where everyone was happy.
I didn't have a free brain cell to deal with what that meant.
When I sat back down, rattled and working hard to keep it off my face, I turned to Venus. "What is it with the pigs? Is that a Cincinnati thing, or me thing?"
Venus Fever had done mornings in this city eleven years and could fill a room without raising her voice.
She didn't raise it. "Oh, it's a Cincinnati thing.
Porkopolis. We were the pork capital of the whole country, back when.
Pigs built this town." She tilted her head.
"And then somebody decided to celebrate that by making 'em fly.
Flying pigs everywhere you look. You know why? "
"Why?"
"Because a flying pig's the thing that's not supposed to be possible." She looked at me, something underneath the radio voice, something handed over on purpose. "You see a pig fly, it means a thing that shouldn't exist does. After all."
When pigs fly, huh?
We ran the afternoon block. Callbacks. Venus had specific, correct opinions about technique.
Rich relitigated a close call and Rutherford fell in love approximately nine times.
The squad was being born in front of me and it was, despite the hecklers, despite the splinter, despite all of it, extraordinary.
Up in the bowl, thirty rows of empty seats away, I caught the last thing the day had for me.
Jules had gone back up into the seats and found Fox, and the two of them had their heads bent together, deep in conference, and as I watched, Jules said something and pointed at me, at Isak, at the small-of-the-back distance between us that had closed and not reopened.
Fox said something back, and Jules's eyebrows went up, and Fox's eyebrows went up, and they both turned and looked straight down at the two of us with the synchronized delight of people assembling a puzzle whose picture they'd just realized they recognized.
I could not hear a single word of it. I could read every one off their faces.
Isak followed my gaze. Found them. Watched his best friend and his little sister put their heads back together and laugh. "That can't be good."
"No."
The last auditioner left at six-forty. Dev was still rolling on an empty floor because Dev never stopped.
I stood at the rail of my stadium with my clipboard full of yeses and let the dilemma I'd been collecting pieces of all day finally assemble itself, because I was too tired to keep holding it in parts.
Here was the reaction, the true one, under the joy, the day had been everything.
Tiki Jackson had stood in front of four thousand people and called my squad we, and meant it, and had the ownership stake to make we real whenever she decided to. I'd corrected her once with a smile. I would not get to correct her a second time without it being a thing.
So. The dilemma.
I could let her have it. Let Tiki co-pilot, nod along to the rebrand, lose the orange, share the eye, keep the peace.
She was an owner. She was Gabrielle's sister.
Fighting her was the kind of fight an employee loses even when she wins, and if I lost it loud enough…
I lost the whole job, and then there was no squad to protect at all.
The safe move was to bend. Bend a little now, keep the chair, fight smaller fights later.
Or.
I could hold the line. Run it like it was mine, because it was mine. Gabrielle hired me to have a vision and not to borrow one and risk a rift between two sisters and possibly my own career on the bet that I was right.
I turned the idea of the flying pig over in my head. The impossible thing that existed right here in Cincinnati.
The decision came the way they always came for me, all at once, after the engineering brain finished bluffing that it needed more data.
It was my team. I was going to risk pissing Tiki off.
Because here was the thing I'd filed away all day and finally assembled.
Tiki Jackson did not care about cheerleading. She'd never cared about cheerleading. She'd retreated the instant she thought Isak was taken. Tiki wasn't here for a squad.
She was here for a husband, and the squad was just the room the husband happened to be standing in, and the second her potential new partner looked spoken for, her whole proprietary interest in my life's work was going to evaporate like a flying pig in a stiff wind.
Which meant I didn't have to beat Tiki.
I just had to make Isak look spoken for.
And there was a man with a cat and a motorcycle and a sister who'd already figured out the shape of this before I'd let myself say it.
A man who'd put his hand on the small of my back and it had felt good. Twice now my fake boyfriend by accident, and who'd said yes to something in my office before I'd even finished proposing it.
The pieces fit. God help me, they fit.
"Kingman," I said, without turning around, because I could feel him still standing there, because he was always still standing there. "Remember that yes from the other day?”
“You know I do,” he said, and I could hear the grin in it.
I let him have the grin. I'd rather risk everything holding onto what was mine than keep it safe by handing it to someone who didn't even want it.
“It’s on. It’s on like Donkey Kong.”