Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (17 page)

“
Football weather. Can’t win in the rain, you got no business being out there.”

“
We beat Aventira in the rain.”

“
Two weeks ago? It was clear.”

“
Last year,” I mutter. “When I was with Hilltown.”

Dad observes that I didn’t even play in that game. I did, on special teams, but I don’t correct him. Lee knows I did too, but doesn’t say anything. Not until Dad finishes his steak and decides to talk about the Dragons’ draft again.

“
So what was with the fuckup in the third round?” Dad puts down his fork, though he doesn’t look at Lee. “Johns over Katt?”

“
I don’t really get that either,” Lee says. “I wasn’t there, so I don’t know why they went with Johns. Our reports had Katt higher. I think it was going to be a sign-and-trade, but the other team backed out.”

I watch them go from guarded jabs to guarded banter, talking esoteric Dragons trivia. I thought I knew all Dad’s trivia, but I can only about three-quarters follow them. Dad doesn’t drop his belligerent tone, but Lee holds his own, from this year’s draft to last year’s games to the all-time greats. By the time Mom gets up to clear the plates, I’m not worrying about Lee being murdered in his sleep anymore.

We eat dessert in the living room, Dad in his chair and Lee and I on the couch, with Mom between us. Mom brings the bottle of wine in from the dining room after cleaning up, but only she takes a glass. The silence around the dessert is so awkward that when Mom says brightly, “How about a movie?” I leap at the offer as though she’d offered me a seven-year contract from the Firebirds.

Dad puts in a guy comedy called “Oh, Brother,” about identical twin rabbits who take each other’s place at work, in bed, and so on. We all kind of laugh at the same places, but for me, at least, there’s an undercurrent of tension. Lee seems relaxed, but I can’t always tell, not when he’s focused his ears on the movie and his tail is curled carefully to one side. Dad sometimes looks like he’s just staring through the TV, joining in the laughter late several times. When the movie’s over, he stands up right away, before the credits are even done, waves curtly to us, and goes off to bed.

Lee and I are still wide awake, and so is Mom. She glances after Dad, but doesn’t follow him upstairs. Instead, she turns to Lee and asks him about his work for the Dragons. So he tells her the story of Morty the scout, going to the combine with me, and getting the internship. When he talks about dropping out of school, I see his ears fold back, but his voice stays even.

“
His parents did not like him dropping out at all,” I tell Mom. “But he’s done really well in his job.” I leave out the part where they tried to coerce him into not taking the Dragons job by threatening to not pay for his education. My salary gave him the freedom to defy them. Most days, I think that was good.

“
What do your parents do?” Mom asks Lee.

“
Father’s a financial advisor,” he says. “Mother...I’m not sure.”

“
Is she a housewife?” Mom would like that; it would give her something in common.

“
Sort of.” Lee sighs. “She doesn’t have to work, but she used to make crafts, and she wrote articles for women’s magazines sometimes.”

There’s a pause. Mom says, finally, “And now?”

Lee shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“
Don’t you talk to her?”

He shakes his head, slowly. “Small talk at holidays. Nothing serious since...”

“
Not since they met me,” I say.

His blue eyes meet mine. “That’s not why.”

Mom frowns, and says softly, “That must be hard on you.”

“
I get by.” He clears his throat. “Having Dev around helps a lot.”

I still get a twinge when I think about Lee cut off from his family. I can’t imagine how he’s okay with being so unrooted. But he’s an independent fox, and it really doesn’t seem to bother him much. So I grin, to take some of the heaviness out of the room, and say, “I hate when he makes me wear his mom’s clothes.”

Lee makes some kind of strangled noise between a cough and a laugh. Mom stares at me with eyes so wide the white is bigger than the iris. I hold up my paws. “I’m kidding! Kidding!”

Mom’s eyes go back to normal, slowly. She shakes her head. “Devlin,” she says. “Honestly.”

“
Sorry,” I mumble, but I see Lee’s tail twitching and I know that at least he found it funny.

“
That’s why I love him,” Lee says. “Always saying the wrong thing.”

Mom’s ears flick, accepting Lee’s words as casually as he delivered them. “He always has. This one time—”

I groan. “Not the airplane story.”

Lee’s eyes sparkle. “Oh, I haven’t heard this one.”

“
I didn’t know what it meant!” I curl my tail around myself.

Mom laughs, leaning forward. “He was six, I think, because Gregory was nine that year. And we were flying with them for the first time in years.”

“
It’s the first time I remember flying,” I say. “I didn’t know what it was about.”

“
And the stewardess asked if he wanted to come up to the cockpit to see how the pilots flew the plane. But Devlin was afraid to leave us. She tried again, and he yelled, ‘No!’”

“
You didn’t make her go away,” I grumble.

Mom laughs. “She was a young tiger. I thought it was funny. She put her paws on her hips and told Devlin he was a rude little boy.” She turns to me. “And he called her a very bad name.”

Lee arches an eyebrow. “What did you call her?”

I say the word, because I know Mom won’t. “
??????
.”

Mom blushes, but doesn’t lose her smile. Lee tilts his ears. “Khooe-sos?”

“
He’d heard his father say it,” Mom says.

“
It’s something Dad used to yell at the TV when one of the Dragons turned the ball over.” I wonder if Dad said it, privately, during my press conference. It’s hard to imagine him saying it without yelling. “I’ll tell you later,” I say, seeing the question in Lee’s eyes.

“
I scolded him, of course.” Mom looks at me fondly. “I was mortified, even though nobody spoke Siberian around here.”

“
So you thought.” I have a funny flush in my ears, still. I was six years old and I’m still embarrassed about it, eighteen years later.

“
The
stewardess
spoke it.” Mom has a paw to her mouth, smiling. She loves this story; it’s the only time I’ve ever heard her acknowledge Dad’s foul language. She also loves movies where grey-muzzled old ladies use modern slang and bad words. Also greeting cards with cubs dressed as adults. My first birthday after I was drafted, she sent me a card with a little tiger cub in a Dragons football helmet.

“
She knew more Siberian than I did,” I say. “She rattled off some long harangue at me.”

“
She said several things that were not ladylike,” Mom says.

Lee laughs, his tail swishing behind him. “That’s absolutely adorable.” He looks fondly at me, and I can’t help but smile.

Mom looks between us. She hesitates, then says, “Betty Harnby’s son brought home his friend last year.”

We both look at her. “You remember Mike? The armadillo?”

I shake my head. “He was your brother’s best friend in third grade for about a month. Until another boy got a Nintendo. Well, Betty didn’t know what to do, but his friend, I think his name was Kevin. No, wait, it was Kiran. At any rate, he’s a possum, and Betty said he was terribly polite. Well, none of us knew what to expect.”

“
Dressing in women’s clothes?” Lee says. “Or in leather straps?”

Mom laughs, but a little nervously, I think. “Betty was just so surprised. She said she’d never seen Mike so happy, and that’s what really decided it for her.” And she smiles at me.

I try to cover up that I only just realized that she’s talking about another gay kid in town bringing his boyfriend home. Fortunately, my cell phone goes off, giving me an excuse to be distracted. I expect to see Ogleby’s number, but it’s not one I recognize. “Sorry,” I say, and walk out of the room to take the call.

It’s Gerrard, oddly enough. “Listen,” he says, “did you get my message about the ten K fine for the fight.”

“
No,” I say. “But my dad told me.”

“
I just talked to Coach. The team’s going to pay it,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“
Really?” I exhale, and not about the money. “Didn’t know they were allowed to do that.”

“
Coach went and talked to the front office. Officially, you’re paying it, and in a separate unrelated event, the team is giving you a ten K bonus for extra media time.”

“
Media time. Got it.” I grin. “Thanks.”

“
One more thing. I know it’s the week off, but can you be at practice tomorrow?”

“
Oh,” I say. “I’m, uh, visiting my family.”

“
Til when? How about Wednesday?”

“
I’m doing The Today Show Thursday morning. I guess I could be back Friday.” He doesn’t answer right away. “Why?”

“
We need to practice,” he says. “With Fisher out, Pike doesn’t give us as much mobility on that side of the line. We’re gonna need to bring you up more to hit the running plays. We need more speed on your side of the ball and it has to come from you.”

“
Oh.” I try to remember the timing of the show. “How about Thursday evening? I’ll look at flights.”

“
You figure out your priorities,” he says, and hangs up.

That’s as much anger as I’ve ever heard from Gerrard. I realize it doesn’t sound good, this whole skipping practice to do interviews and TV shows. But come on, it’s only gonna be for a few weeks, that’s what Ogleby and Lee and Coach all say. By the time Corey comes back, it’ll all have blown over, and I’ll be able to focus full-time on keeping my job. It’ll be fine.

But somehow, I don’t believe that enough to tell Lee when I go back in. He asks if it was Ogleby, and I tell him it was Gerrard just calling to ask when I’d be back at practice, which is technically true. I tell him about the team paying the fine. He just grins and says, “I thought they might.”

It leaves me thinking about Fisher and his abrupt injury. How quickly could things end for me, if I get something similar? I go out for the season, lose my job to the returning Corey, and next year, who cares about me? I fidget while Lee talks to Mom. I’ll look for a flight that’ll get me back to Chevali Thursday afternoon, early. Make an effort to make it for practice.

We stay up a bit longer chatting with Mom about family: who’s had cubs, who’s got new jobs, who thought of moving to Chevali but it was too hot so they didn’t (my aunt Stephanie and her third husband). By the time she goes up to bed, I feel at least a little more connected to the family again.

“
You boys just turn out the light when you come up,” she says from the stairs. “Your father and I will be up early, but don’t let us wake you. I’ll have breakfast ready when you come down, and then I thought we could go ’round to Baker’s for lunch.”

“
Sure,” I say. We wave goodnight to her, and then it’s just me and my fox, alone in my parents’ living room.

“
So how you doing?” he asks.

I glance at the stairs. “Good,” I say. “For now. Maybe you could avoid antagonizing Dad for the rest of the visit, though.”

He narrows his eyes. “He started it.”

“
For God’s sake,” I grumble.

“
All right, all right.” He holds up a paw. “I promise to try. But if he starts something again...”

“
He’s always starting something. Just ignore it, let him think he’s right.”

“
Is that what you want?” His blue eyes are dark with the living room lamp behind him.

“
I just want to get out of here Wednesday without anyone going to the hospital,” I say.

“
Hey.” Lee spreads his paws. “If he provokes me...” He holds his arms up in a kung-fu pose.

I stare at him and stand, looming over him. He shifts his paws to face me. “That goes for you too,” he says, poking his paws and swiping the air between us.

I reach down and grab him under his arms, lifting him off the couch. “Oh yeah?” I say.

He play-karate chops my shoulders. His tail curls around to brush my rear. “Don’t strain your back,” he says.

“
Lifting you?” I snort a breath onto his chest ruff and resituate my paws, one around his back, one under his rear. He fits in nicely against me. “Maybe if you started eating more of those Jeffrey’s burgers.”

He sticks his stomach out. “You want me to get fat?”

“
No.”

His breath and then his tongue are warm on my ears. “Good.”

I lick the underside of his muzzle and carry him up the stairs, all the way to the bed in my room. There, I drop him onto the sheets and lean down to kiss his muzzle. He presses up into the kiss as I pull back. We look at each other, and then he pats the bed next to him. I shake my head. “Gotta get ready for bed.”

“
Okay,” he says, leaning back on his arms.

I smile. “I’ll see ya later. Thanks for being here with me.”

There’s a hint of disappointment in his eyes, which makes me hesitate. I could close the door, I think, and Mom and Dad are pretty definitely asleep. The sound of their breathing has only gotten louder since my childhood, when Gregory and I listened for it before sneaking out. We could maybe be quiet. But it’s my room, and I never even had sex in it when I was dating in high school. Plus, with my parents just down the hall...I try to imagine holding him against me, thrusting under his tail. I can’t pretend I don’t get hard from it, but then part of me says, what if Mom and Dad wake up?