16. Clover
CLOVER
Ihad a system for hard conversations, and the system was to have rules and a list.
Lists held still. Lists did not have a hand with a flame tattoo or a mouth that said when I saw the broken glass in a voice that went straight through the back of my sternum.
So I picked up my little wooden spoon, took a bite of Flying Pig Fudge Ripple to buy myself three seconds, and laid the first item on the table between us like a card.
"Rule one. There's an end date." I'd decided this on the back of the bike, somewhere around the second stoplight. "End of season. It runs through the playoffs if you make them, and then it's over, clean, no debris."
"Through the Big Bowl," Isak said.
"Through the playoffs."
"We're making the Big Bowl." He said it the way other people said the sky was up. Not a brag. A weather report. "So if we're putting an end date on the calendar, that's the date."
I wrote Big Bowl in my head, in pencil, and hated how much I liked that he'd argued the timeline longer instead of shorter.
"Rule two. It's public-facing only. The arrangement exists where Tiki can see it and where Warner can see it. It does not exist when it's just us, because when it's just us there's no audience, and no audience means no point." I pointed the spoon at him. "Agreed?"
"Sure." He'd already eaten half of whatever the usual was and was watching me like the menu had nothing on the wall behind him as good as this. "Except the cats."
"The cats are not an audience."
"The cats are a very demanding audience."
"Rule three." This was the one I'd been circling since the parking lot, the one that mattered, so I said it fast and flat the way you rip tape off skin.
"No real feelings. This is a structure. It is scaffolding.
We both know what it's holding up and we both know it comes down at the end, and nobody catches anything they're not supposed to catch. "
He didn't say sure to that one.
He set his spoon down, which from a man who treated dessert like a contact sport was its own kind of statement, and he looked at me for a second too long, and I watched him decide not to argue the thing he wanted to argue, which was worse than if he'd argued it.
"Fine," he said.
It should have felt like winning. I'd gotten the terms I came for. I smashed the not-winning feeling somewhere I wouldn't have to look at it, and that was when both our phones went off at once.
Mine was Shayla. His was, by the way, his whole face changed, not good.
Shayla: Um. so your cat and a cat that is not your cat are both sitting in your kitchen window and the not-your-cat is WEARING A TINY JACKET AND BOW TIE. we let ourselves in for girls night in, but you aren't here. Who is the tuxedo?
"Clover." Isak was staring at his screen. "Do you happen to know where Vito is right now?"
"In your apartment?"
"Nope. But close. Thank you for playing. Vito's collar app says he is," He turned the phone around, and there was a little map, and there was a little dot, and it was sitting in my fourth floor apartment. I was guessing Isak didn't also live on the fourth floor. "at your place."
"How is your cat at my place?"
"He's a bit of an escape artist. He's got a whole thing he does with the door handles and also air vents." Isak was already standing, and threw a hundred on the table. "He went looking for Tig."
Of course he did. The cats had been carrying on an Instasnap courtship for weeks while their respective humans pretended to be strangers who occasionally negotiated treaties over frozen dairy. Vito simply hadn't waited for us to catch up and had shown up for a date of his own.
We rode the four blocks back. My hands around his waist, and I did not think about rule three even once, which is to say I thought about almost nothing else.
In the few days since we announced this year's Tigerettes squad members, my apartment had become a place that things happened in.
That was still new enough to knock the wind out of me a little.
Shayla and Izzy were on my couch. Two of the new girls were on my floor. Maya was at my stove like she'd been born at it, stirring something that smelled like the inside of a good Saturday, and Tig Bitties was sitting in my kitchen window with the bearing of a tiny landlord.
Beside him, in a black dinner jacket and a bow tie the color of a maraschino cherry, sat a tuxedo cat conducting himself with the grave dignity of a small mafioso who had simply decided this was his table now.
"Vito," Isak said, in the voice of a parent who had found the toddler on top of the refrigerator.
Vito looked at him. Vito looked at Tig. Vito did not move, which in cat is an entire sentence, and the sentence was no.
"He likes it here," Maya said from the stove, not turning around. "He supervised the shredding of the cheese."
"He's a known supervisor," Isak said weakly.
There were squad members cooking in my kitchen, two more on my floor, a quarterback in my doorway holding a cat harness leash he had no cat attached to, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a list with my own rule two on it: It does not exist when it's just us.
Except this wasn't just us, this was a room full of witnesses, which meant by my own terms the thing was allowed to be real right now, and I hated that my brain had found the loophole that fast.
"Come in and sit down already," I told Isak, because it was the only instruction I had that I was sure of. "We're not trying to air condition the whole building."
Oh my god, I was turning into my father. Partly because anything else I could say to him felt super weird now that we were fake dating in front of other people. Was I supposed to call him honey or sweetie or hold his hand?
This was ridiculous. The whole plan was. Or maybe it was just me.
Isak strolled in as comfortably as a tomcat and sat down on the couch. He wasn't freaking out. In fact, he downright looked like he belonged in my living room. Like he'd been here all along.
On my floor next to the couch was a nineteen-year-old newly minted cheerleader who immediately showed him something on her phone.
And he stayed.
For me.
And apparently for dinner.
The thing I hadn't planned for was how bad we'd both be at this whole fake dating thing.
We'd agreed to this, well, not agreed, I'd listed and he'd said fine, approximately ninety minutes ago, and neither of us had the first idea how to do it in a room full of people we knew.
I caught him looking at me across the couch and he didn't look away fast enough, and I didn't either, and then we both did, at the same time, like two kids caught passing notes.
When I brought the bowl of cheese back from the kitchen I handed it to him and our fingers did a whole clumsy negotiation about whose hand went where.
At one point he reached up from the floor and tucked a braid back off my shoulder, just did it, no reason for it that the room required, and I felt the back of my neck go hot, and across the couch Izzy's eyebrows climbed clean off her face.
The real problem with all of this landed on me sideways while I was holding a bowl of shredded cheddar.
We had an audience. The whole room was the audience, which was the entire point of rule two, the arrangement was supposed to be exactly this, performed, for exactly these people.
So we were inside the rules. We were rule-compliant.
We were also overshooting it by a mile, and I knew the difference, because performed didn't make your neck go hot. Performed didn't make you forget you were holding a bowl. A touch was not supposed to make me forget my own name.
Shayla brought out a tray with bowls of spaghetti for everyone. But she also brought…sides? There was a bowl of chopped onions and another of finely shredded cheddar cheese.
Everyone else grabbed a bowl and loaded up with the toppings. I wasn't sure about cheese on spaghetti, so I just took a bowl and a fork. It smelled a little different than a good old marinara. But then again, Chicago had great Italian food, so maybe I was biased. I couldn't expect the same in Ohio.
I took some noodles and a couple spoons of sauce, then had a tentative taste. Umm, weird.
Why did my spaghetti taste like Christmas?
Izzy said, to Shayla, completely casually, "I'm a four-way girl, always have been."
My brain screeched to a halt. I'd had plenty of girls' nights living in the sorority house in college, and some sex talk too. But this seemed a bit out of the blue.
"Three-way all the way," Shayla said. "You don't mess with a good thing."
"Three-way's lazy."
"Three-way is elegant."
I glanced over at Isak to see if his ghasts were as flabbered as mine. But he was just nodding along to the conversation and shoving bites of cheesy spaghetti into his mouth.
"You at least do a three-way," Izzy said, turning to one of the new girls, who nodded vigorously. "Right? Anything less is boring."
"Some people can't handle that much," Shayla said, shaking her head.
I set the bowl down. I was a grown woman and my face was on fire like I was a cute inexperienced virgin discovering porn for the first time. In front of my fake boyfriend. And in a room full of my own cheerleaders.
In the strangled voice of the deeply confused, I squeaked out, "I'm sorry. How many people are we talking about?"
None of them were having a menage a trois in my house. I was cool. I wasn't that cool.
The room went quiet.
Then Maya, sweet Maya, gentle Maya, turned from the stove with the spoon still in her hand and said, "...for the chili?"
"The chili?" What was she on about? What was happening here?
"Sunshine chili," Izzy said, like that explained anything. "You know, one of our sponsors?"
Isak literally snort-laughed so hard I thought spaghetti was going to come out of his nose. "You are eating Cincinnati chili. Three-way is spaghetti noodles, this chili, cheese. Four-way you add onions or beans. Five-way you do both. What did you think?"