17. Isak
ISAK
Fox had three smoothies going when I came out of my room in the second shirt, and none of them were for me.
"You changed," he said, not looking up from the blender.
"I did not."
"You had on the gray one. Now it's blue.
By my count that's a change." He thumbed the blender off and the kitchen went quiet enough that I could hear my own heart doing a drumline solo over a dinner.
"In a dinner eating contest between you and Bishop, you'd win every time.
So why the blue shirt that you know damn well brings out your pretty green eyes? "
"Because tonight I'm sitting next to Clover's father with a reservation he made for four."
Fox set the blender down. "Four."
"Brick booked it. Him, Tory, Clover." I checked my phone. I'd checked it in my room ninety seconds ago and nothing had changed, which I knew, and I checked it anyway. "And for Warner Bishop. Her dad invited him. Like he's still the one."
Here was the problem that had been plaguing me since Clover sent me the details of the restaurant. Warner Bishop had requested the trade to Cincinnati himself.
He took a smaller contract to do it. Moved two states to play middle linebacker for a team that already had a defensive captain, and everybody in the building thought it was about football. But I'd seen him watch her across the practice facility.
He hadn't come for the Tigers. He'd come for her, and he was playing a long patient game, and tonight her own father had handed him a chair at the table.
Across the line of scrimmage every day this week Bishop and I beat the daylights out of each other and shook hands after.
He was good. He read plays a half-second early.
He ran the defensive meeting like he'd been born holding a clipboard, and the worst part about Warner Bishop was that I couldn't even hate him properly, because he was decent in every direction, and decent was so much harder to play against than a jerk.
He probably even texted his grandmother every Sunday.
"You're doing the face," Fox said.
"What face?"
"The one where you're chewing on a thought you've already decided not to say.
" He poured one smoothie into a to-go cup and pushed it across the counter, which was Fox for I love you and good luck and if you blow this I'm telling Jules.
"Drink. You skipped lunch. You go a little feral goblin when your blood sugar drops and tonight is not the night. "
"I'm just going to be honest." Except for the part where my entire relationship with Clover was flim-flam.
"That's the whole problem. Brick Freeman's going to ask your intentions over fancy salad and a normal man fibs a little, but you'll tell him the truth, and the truth's going to come out of your mouth sounding like you want to marry his daughter at midfield."
I drank the smoothie so I wouldn't have to answer.
The restaurant was one I had been to before, and they were pee their pants excited to have me standing in their lobby again. Which is exactly how I was about to get a fifth chair at a table set for four.
Celebrity had to have some advantages.
Clover was already there. She wore a dress the color of the inside of a fig, deep and warm, and she'd swept her braids up off her neck, and she was standing beside a man who could only be her father, built like a door, holding himself with her exact stillness while he read the room.
She saw me. For half a second her whole face opened, unguarded, the way she never let it go in front of anyone.
And that was the moment the entire evening stopped being a problem I could solve and turned into me meeting her parents.
We hadn't even been fake dating for a whole week and I was meeting the Freemans. In person. There would be handshakes, and questions, and Spanish Inquisitions.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
But I did.
Then I watched the fact that we had an audience arrive behind her eyes and the openness smoothed over into bright and managed.
"There he is," Clover said. "Dad, this is Isak. Isak, my dad and my mom."
"Mr. Freeman." I put my hand out. He took it. His grip closed like a car door and held one second past comfortable, which I respected, because I'd have done the same to me.
"The Kingman kid." He said it the way the whole world said my name, the cat and the press conferences and the contract year all loaded into two words. "Morgan Freeman, not the actor. But you can call me Brick. Bishop speaks highly. Says you've got a quick release and a quicker mouth."
"Bishop hits like a dropped piano. I'd trust his scouting report on anything but me." I let the kid go past. I wasn't winning that one and I knew it.
Tory Freeman laughed before she'd decided whether to, which told me where Clover learned it, and instead of a handshake she pulled me into a quick warm hug that smelled like good perfume, and over her shoulder I caught Clover's eyes going a little wild, because moms had not been in the strategic plan.
"Hello Isak, I'm Tory. It's nice to meet you."
Then the fourth chair scraped back and Warner stood to do the standing-up version of a greeting, and even braced for it I felt the floor tilt. Out of pads he looked like a recruiting poster. Navy blazer with opinions. He clasped my hand in both of his, friendly, the genuine kind, which was worse.
"Kingman." A nod, easy, teammate-easy. "Saw the film from Wednesday's scrimmage. You got me twice on the play-action. I owe you one Sunday."
"You'll get it back. You always do."
"Truth," he agreed, and turned that same warm decency on Clover, and Clover picked up her water and drank from it like a job she'd been hired to perform well.
The hostess brought over a chair and another place setting for me. It didn't make anyone at the table awkward or weird even a little bit.
And that wasn't the only lie I told myself this evening.
This kind of refined party crashing was not in my playbook. All I had to do now was make sure everyone here thought I was the adoring new boyfriend at a table where the old one is also seated because the father reserved him a chair.
I sat there while a six-three linebacker who texts his grandmother every week asked my girlfriend whether she still did the lemon in her water, and she said yes, and he said he remembered, and I ate bread.
I ate a lot of bread.
"So." Brick turned the full weight of his attention on me around the time the appetizers landed, and the table tipped my way like a field when the play's coming. "Contract year."
"Yes sir."
"Tigers haven't made a real run since before you could drive."
"We're making one this fall."
He studied me. He had Clover's stillness and used it as a trap, waiting to see if I'd blink, and I didn't, because I'd meant it.
"That's a lot of mouth for a club who finished second to last in the conference last year," he said.
"Dad," Clover said.
"Yeah, but we weren't last again." I wouldn't make her referee something I could carry. "But now we've got a defense that just found its captain and a receiver about to have the year of his life. Watch Fox Daws against the Pets this weekend. Then we'll discuss the mouth."
Brick Freeman, host of The Brick House, a man who ate quarterbacks for a living, looked at me a long moment, and the corner of his jaw loosened into something in the family of a smile.
"We'll discuss the mouth," he said.
Warner laughed, easy, a man who'd never once had a losing season in his life. "Confidence is the whole game. I used to tell Clo that. Remember, Clo."
"I remember a lot you used to tell me," Clover said, light as air, and reached for the water again, and her hand held steady through sheer engineering.
Tory was brilliant and beautiful, especially when she rescued us all from the weird pause in the conversation.
"Clover, tell your father about the squad," she said. "The new girls. She sent me video, Brick, you should see these young women, the captains especially, the way they move." Tory's palm pressed flat to her own chest, holding something in. "I haven't watched cheering look like that since my days."
Brick laid his big hand over hers on the tablecloth, no words, and I looked away, because it felt like reading somebody's mail.
"Mom cheered," Clover said to me, quiet, like it surprised her to be telling it. "Bruins. That's how they met. Dad played, she was on the squad."
"I was the body that fit the uniform they handed out," Tory said, and laughed, but there was an undertow in it. "Different era."
"It's getting less different. That's the whole point of what we're building. Sizes that have never stood on a sideline before. Mom, we've got grandmothers. I ran a community workshop last week and six of them in the back row would not leave. They want a squad. They've already named themselves."
"Named themselves what?" Brick asked.
"The Tiger Grannies."
The whole table laughed, the real kind, even Warner, and for one breath the dinner was only a family delighted by something, and Tory's face had gone open and young, and she said, "Oh, I want to meet them," in a voice that had nothing to do with grandmothers, and Clover looked at her mother like a door she hadn't known was in the wall.
I didn't speak. I watched Clover smile at her mom, and my chest did the falling-elevator drop, and I thought I felt lightning in my soul. A hot, brilliant strike.
Warner worked an angle all through the back half, leaning in when she talked, finding the old shorthand, building a private two-person room out of references I wasn't allowed into, and around dessert he made his move.
"Take a walk with me, Clo. Just a walk. Catch up." He glanced at me, friendly, the same decency he showed across the line. "Kingman won't mind. I am sure he understands how important you are to me."
I watched the carefully grown light in Clover's smile fade as she opened her mouth to make some gentle excuse.
I stood. I hadn't decided to until I was on my feet.