Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (40 page)

“
They teach you this word, ‘bigot,’ and you do not even know what it means.” He tries to say it casually, but his paws are fists, and he’s got the tension of a lineman waiting for the snap.

“
Will you stop with the fucking ‘they’? I know what it means. It means that you can’t open your eyes far enough to see someone I care about, to treat him like a person, to feel any sort of responsibility for breaking his thumb. If it was Gregory coming home gay—”

Now he comes out of his chair again. “You will not come home again with that fox!”

“
What are you going to do, break his arm next? You can’t stop me.” Reflexively I’m tensed as well, gripping the table, my hackles raised.

Movement next to us, and the smell of food. A young desert rat holding two plates stares between us.

My father glances at him and then stands all the way up. “I can stop you. You are not to come home again until you give up this stupidity.”

“
You’re going to lock me out? What will the guys at the auto shop say to that?”

He steps away from the table and gives me a look that would chill what’s left of my margarita to ice. “They do not need to know our family’s business.”

“
I’ll call them. Ivan remembers me.”

His look doesn’t change. “Then I will tell them that I have no son who is a
??????
.”

Just like that, he walks away. It takes me a second to regain enough composure to turn and call after him, but all I can think to yell at his twitching tail is, “Oh yeah? Well, I’ll tell people I don’t have a father who’s...”

He vanishes out the door. Our waiter’s come up to stand behind the rat, who is still holding the carne and the taco salad, his eyes wide.

“
Is there a problem?” the weasel says quietly, and then adds, “Er, with the food?”

I look around the room. The diners who aren’t staring openly at me are just as obviously not staring. “No,” I say. I sit down and motion the rat to put the food down. “I’m sorry about that. Just a second,” I add as he starts to leave. With a nod to my margarita glass, I pull out my wallet and hand him a pair of hundreds. “Another one of those, please.”

He holds the money. The rat stares at it. “Mister Miski,” the weasel says, “you don’t have to...”

“
I’m not going to cause any more trouble,” I say. “I just want one more drink to calm me down. And I want to apologize for the disturbance.”

He nods, quickly, and pockets the money. “Very well.” He motions the rat away and then leans over. The other diners have more or less gone back to minding their own business. “I hope everything is...”

“
It’ll be fine.” I already feel like a heel for yelling in the middle of the restaurant. I don’t need his sympathy to make me feel even worse. What I do need, I take out my phone and ask for.

“
I’m at the La Quinta,” Lee says. “Saguaro and 14
^th
, room 22.”

“
I’ll be there as soon as I’m done with dinner.” The waiter brings my margarita and sets it down. I avoid his sympathetic eyes.

“
Did everything...go okay?”

“
No.”

He’s quiet. I feel the stirrings of resentment; the anger at my father spilling over into the rest of my life. “I’ll tell you about it later,” I growl. “Dinner just got here.”

“
Okay,” he says, still soft. “I’ll be up.”

I hang up and raise the margarita glass to my lips again. The salt stings; the tequila numbs. I swallow.

It’s a good thing I was worried by Dev’s phone call, because my ears are perked even as I go through e-mail in the room. So I’m alert enough to hear Dev outside banging on the door next to mine and calling, “Lee. Lee!”

I kept my pants on, because I didn’t want to come off too flirty if he was going to be depressed and want to talk. Or if he was going to be drunk and want to crash. Or if I had to go out into the hall to wave at him and hiss. “Psst! Dev!”

He looks up from the door. I wave him over hurriedly. He looks bemusedly at me, then squints at the number on the door. “I thought you said twenty-three,” he says, loudly, without moving.

“
C’mere!” I wave him over again.

He stabs his finger at the number on the door next to him. “This is twenty-three.”

“
I’m in twenty-two.”

He frowns, and then, just as he lurches toward me, the door beside him opens. “What the hell...”

I see only the sharp muzzle of a rat, his words dying out as he adjusts his gaze upwards about a foot to look at the mountain of tiger in front of his door. I say, “Sorry, sorry, he had the wrong room.”

The rat pokes his head out at just the moment I realize that I shouldn’t be visible in a hotel with Dev, who is waving his paw back at the rat as he walks quickly toward me. So I duck back inside and wait for Dev.

He trots in and stops, looking dazed. I have to reach past him to close the door, and he doesn’t move out of my way as I throw the deadbolts clumsily. He turns to face me, and I get a whiff of lime and tequila. “This is a nice place,” he enunciates.

“
Hoo boy.” I reach out to put my arms around him.

He pats between my shoulder blades, without hugging back all the way. “This is home,” he says.

I try to step back, but his arm tightens. I have to crane my muzzle up. “Do you want to go back to your apartment?”

He scratches his cheek with his free paw. “I want to stay here. I have to stay with you. I don’t have anyone else.”

That’s about the worst I’d imagined this night could go. I eventually get him to the bed, only because it’s the only place where we can both sit down in the whole room. There’s a desk with a solid wooden chair, but no armchair, no couch, and even the bed is about a foot from the TV table.

He sits down heavily and almost falls backwards before catching himself. I don’t know what to say to him, but he’s not saying anything. In the light from my computer screen, he looks stark and a bit unreal, his white shirt blue, his orange fur murky brown. After a minute I lean against him and say, “What happened?”

He shrugs. I press a bit closer. “You okay?”

“
Fine,” he growls. He doesn’t sound drunk, now, and he’s focusing very sharply on me. Before I can say anything in response, he turns, pushing me down on my back. His paws yank my pants down my hips without bothering with the fasteners.

Fur rips out and my sheath snags on the pants. I yelp and grab at his paws, but he doesn’t stop. “Hey, hang on.”

He fumbles at his own pants. I try to sit up; he grabs my right arm and spins me around, pushing me down onto my stomach. “Dev,” I say, struggling, “don’t—”

He’s on top of me in a moment, breathing hard in my ear, two hundred twenty pounds of drunk tiger pressing me into the hard mattress. I feel his shirt on my back, his pants against my legs, his hardness against my bare rear. “Where’s your lube?”

“
I didn’t bring it. I didn’t think...”

“
We did it without before.”

He reeks of tequila, but he sounds cold sober now. I don’t know what to think. My heart’s beating faster, and not the way it usually does around him. I feel him shift, hear him spitting in his paw. My fur prickles. “Listen, wait...”

His muzzle comes up close to my ear. “You’re all I got left. My dad hates me because of you.”

I say something just to say something, because I need to talk him down from this. “Dev, he doesn’t hate you.”

“
He walked out of the restaurant. Without eating dinner.” His voice is unsteady, growling but also wavering. Not with liquor; with emotion.

“
He doesn’t hate you,” I repeat, trying to turn my head to see him. I get close enough to see one eye. “He’s angry because he doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

“
He said he has no son. He called me a
??????
.” He turns, one arm pressed across my back, driving me further into the mattress. His hips lift from mine; a slick finger rubs saliva under my tail. “So I’m gonna be a faggot.”

I squirm below him, letting him have his way without struggling. “Dev, listen, we can make love if you want. I love you. That’s okay. But don’t do it because you’re mad.”

He’s breathing harder. He brings his paw back to his muzzle. “I want to...” He spits again. “I have to...”

“
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

His chest is still crushing my torso down. I could probably squirm away from him. But at least he stopped to lubricate himself, and despite my racing heartbeat—or possibly at least partly because of it—I’m kind of turned on by this. The heat, the weight, the urgency in his need, all those are fighting with my keen awareness of his emotional state, his need for some kind of sympathy and closure.

I’m not sure that sex is the right thing to happen right at this point. But I’m not sure it’d be good for me to stop it, either.

“
Fox,” he growls in my ear, and the word is angry, and pleading, all in one.

It stops me. Okay, he’s drunk—I hope he didn’t drive—but he’s asking, not taking. I hate feeling like I’m not in control, but being in a relationship is like that; sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow. I know he’s just been through a wrenching experience. I
know
this. Dev knows where he wants to go, and his need for me is greater than my need for control.

My train of thought is cut short by the almost-slick-enough length pressing against my rear, finding the right spot on the third jab, and pushing in. I inhale, hold my breath, and steady myself so he can thrust forward.

He’s not waiting for me to be set. His first thrust unbalances me as I was trying to lift myself up, toppling me awkwardly onto my broken paw. I bite back a yelp, more of surprise than pain, and steady myself on my elbows. When I’m stable, I close my eyes and lift my nose.

His scent is easy to pick out through the alcohol. The rich feline aroma obscures the worry, lets me relax around him, makes the fucking more enjoyable for me. There’s no way I’m getting a paw down to my cock now, pressed hard into the bed, so I’ll just ride it out and finish myself later.

With my elbows planted in the bed, I can protect my paw and brace my hips at the same time. He’s drunk, yeah, and his hips are thrusting pretty hard against mine, but he’s being careful. His rough familiar hardness sinks all the way in as his arm slides under me and he grips my chest. And then I feel hot breath on my scruff, and he grabs it in his teeth.

He’s done that before, when we played rough, but in this context it feels more serious. I bristle instinctively, then relax under the force of his desire. Whatever he needs from me, whatever I can do for him. So I let my head go limp, keeping my body tight as he drives under my tail.

His body is shuddering already from the need for release. His pants through my fur become moans, higher than normal. Whines, almost, as if the pressure inside him is escaping in short bursts. But it’s building faster than it escapes. It bunches the muscles in his arm, around my chest. It drives me into the mattress with the force of his thrusts. The breath from his nose is like steam on my neck; his legs a vise around mine; his fingers clamps on my fur.

I don’t try to think about what’s driving him. I just keep my eyes shut and lose myself in his desire, his urgency, his passion. He needs this release, yes, but more, he needs it with me. So I brace myself, I take his weight, I take him in.

He huffs more urgently into my fur. His chest vibrates against my back with growls. His cock sinks in, pulls out, sinks in, faster, faster, harder, deeper. I grasp the wrist of the arm that’s holding me. Hot breath soaks my neck fur. It’s a little hard to breathe now, between his shuddering body and the hard bed. But he’s close, he’s close, he’s close...

He’s close for a long time. Frustration creeps into his tone; he changes his rhythm slightly. I try to help, angling my hips, clenching around him. He brings his other paw to his muzzle, lets go of my scruff to spit in it again, takes hold of my neck as he slickens himself.

That does it. When he fills me again, slick and hard, his moans get deeper, his hips slam faster into me. I feel it too, hard and rubbing into the mattress, but I’m focused on him, letting him go, letting him take me.

He does. The growl builds in his chest, a living thing coiling to spring, rattling his body around me, leaping at his throat with a moan, driving his hips under my tail, tensing his muscles. I can feel it trying to get out, can feel a similar beast stirring in me in response. Mine is just waking; Dev’s is fully animated, slamming at the prison of his body until it breaks out, through his throat, through his shaft, in moans so loud he has to let go of me to give voice to them, in a spasming, jerking release that drives his hardness deep inside me.