Page 41 of Rent a Bad Boy

“The board has been reviewing this matter,” she says slowly. “In light of the community feedback we’ve received, we’ve decided to table the issue.”

“Table it?” Isla leans forward next to me. “What does that mean?”

Christine’s jaw works. “It means we’re dropping it. The complaints, the notices, the enforcement actions. All of it.” She looks and sounds as if she just swallowed something extremely bitter, which I guess she has in a way.

The room reacts. Not in some big, dramatic movie way. Nobody stands up and slow-claps or anything like that. But there’s a ripple of noise. Chairs creaking, a few of the guys clapping each other on the shoulder. From the back, Grandma shouts, “Well, it’s about damn time.”

Isla doesn’t make any noise at all. She sits next to me with her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead before she turns to look up at me. Her eyes are full of tears when she whispers, “You did this.”

“We did this.”

“You brought the whole team.”

“They wanted to come.”

She leans into me, presses her face against my shoulder, and I put an arm around her because I don’t give a shit who’s watching. None of it matters. Not even when Grandma asks David Roberts for his business card.

Christine and her husband leave first. She doesn’t look at anyone on the way out, and he walks fast enough that she has to speed up to keep pace with him. The rest of the board follows. The guys start filtering out in twos and threes, slapping my shoulder on the way past, with a couple of them stopping to tell Isla they’re glad it worked out.

David does a brief interview with Isla in the hallway. She’s nervous, but she talks about the chickens with the kind of quiet fierceness she gets, the thing that made me want to help her in the first place. Then they leave, too. Grandma follows David to the parking lot, talking the whole time.

And then it’s just us. Standing in an empty meeting room with bad lighting, surrounded by metal chairs pushed back at crooked angles.

“Hey,” I murmur.

She looks up at me with tear tracks on both cheeks. “I love you,” I tell her.

I didn’t expect it to come out that easy. Easier than anything I’ve ever said in my life, actually, and I’ve spent twenty years making sure nothing comes easy. Easy means vulnerable, and vulnerable means somebody can take it away.

But this doesn’t feel like giving something up. It feels like finally saying something that’s been sitting in my chest for days, taking up the space that used to belong to the noise and the anger, and the shit I’ve been carrying around since I was old enough to understand that nobody was going to carry it for me.

“What?” she whispers.

“I love you.” I take her hands in mine, engulfing them. “And I’m done fighting. Not football, but the other shit. The warehouses and all of it. I’m done.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“Yeah, I do. I’ll get a regular job. I don’t care what it is. I’m not going to do anything that puts you in danger ever again.” My throat is tight, which is not a thing that usually happens to me, but I’m starting to get used to the changes she’s made in my life. “You’re too important. You and your chickens, and your insane grandmother. I’m not losing any of it.”

She stares at me, and I watch as she processes this before she says, “I love you, too.”

The world is getting brighter when she adds, “But maybe you don’t have to, like, completely suppress every part of yourself all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

Her cheeks go pink. “I mean... it’s kind of hot when you lose it. A little bit.”

“You’re saying you like it when I get mad?”

“I’m saying it’s not... unattractive,” she murmurs as her face gets redder. “When it’s aimed at the right people. Like guys who make fun of my glasses or HOA presidents who mess with my chickens.”

She pushes her glasses up and adds, “I’m just saying, I didn’t fall for the calm, well-adjusted version of you.”

She’s right. That version of me doesn’t exist. It never has, and she knows it, and she’s still here with me. She still loves me.

“On the field,” I tell her. “That’s where it stays.”

She smiles. “On the field.”