Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (50 page)

“
You don’t.” I take a breath. “You don’t see why you wouldn’t ask Gregory to divorce Marta just to make Dad happy.”

“
They’re
married
.” She sounds bewildered.

“
I’ve been dating Lee for almost three years. He’s as important to me as Marta is to Gregory.”

That doesn’t sound like it clarifies anything for her. “But they’re married. And you’re just... Devlin, if you want to date...him...then I understand, even if your father doesn’t, but it’s not serious.”

“
Not serious. You know, when Dad walked out on me, when he fu—fucking abandoned me,” I growl the f-word defiantly, to her scolding tch, “I went to Lee. And he listened to me and he made me feel better and he told me to call you.”

“
I know he’s a nice person, but—”

“
He’s more than a nice person. He’s part of my life. And you and Dad need to accept that, or, or...”

Lee’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom, holding a towel in front of himself. He has both ears up and his eyes are wide. He shakes his head minutely from side to side.

Mom isn’t talking. I meet Lee’s eyes. I think about Mom and Dad, how I called them when I got a starting spot at Forester, how I hugged them after high school graduation, how proud Dad was when we won our eighth game in high school my senior year. I think about the birthday parties, the afternoons at the auto shop, road trips and Christmasses. Thanksgiving. Easter. Church picnics and bake sales, dinners at Guiseppe’s.

I think about Dad’s expression when Lee came back into the house with a broken paw. I think about Mom’s weakness. I think about the back of Dad’s head disappearing out the door of the Sonoran restaurant. “Well, Dad said it,” I say. “I won’t come home.”

Lee sags against the doorframe and holds the towel to his face. Mom doesn’t say anything. I can’t stand the silence, so I break it. “So are you going to put Dad on the phone?”

“
I don’t think that would help.” Her voice is hollow. She sounds like she’s about to burst into tears. I fight the urge to take it all back.

“
I love you, Mom,” I say. “Good-bye.”

I wait for her to answer. The line goes dead. Lee lifts his muzzle and looks at me.

I take the phone from my ear and toss it to him before I realize what I’m doing. He grabs it out of the air and sets it down on the chair by the doorway. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“
I’m sorry I threw the phone at you,” I say. “I broke it.”

“
Give it another week,” he says. “Let your Dad calm down a bit.”

“
Focus on football, right? That’ll solve all my problems.”

He walks over and puts a paw on my arm. I can smell the fur shampoo, stronger even than his musk on my matted, sticky stomach. I try to push him away. “You’re clean.”

“
Yeah, well. I’ll wash again.” He presses closer, his other paw undoing my robe. He tries to hug me.

“
You don’t have to.” I take a step back.

His eyes gleam reflected light at me. “I helped make the mess. Come on, I’ll help clean it up.”

I stand still while he gently drops my robe to the floor, pressing his clean fur close to me and wrapping his arms around me. I feel close to tears again, but at his tenderness, after I threw a phone at him, after I yelled at him and let him walk out, after I fucked him while drunk to make myself feel better. He’s telling me that none of that matters, that he’s mine. And I’m his, just as much.

When I pull back from the hug and kiss him, already feeling better, he smiles and drags me to the shower. We order dinner in when we’re clean, eat in our robe (me) and boxers (him), and curl up together. I lie awake for a long time, holding Lee against me, thinking about my life. It’s only taken a month for everything to be turned upside down. I still get a crawling feeling under my fur if I think too hard that I will never be able to go home again. That word, never, is big and scary and sits on my chest more heavily than Lee ever could.

My arm tightens around him. A small part of me wants to push him away, to be alone and deal with my problems all by myself. That’s nothing to do with him, though. I’ve always been that way, as long as I can remember. And yet I keep going back to him. I introduced him to my team. I introduced him to my family. I gave him plenty of reasons to leave, tonight, but he stayed. Well, he hesitated long enough that I could catch him.

At the end of the day—figuratively and literally—I want to be with him. I’ve long since given up trying to understand why that is; it just
is
. Some days it makes me angry, some days it makes me ache. It’s given me moments of pure hell, like earlier tonight. But being with him always feels better than being without him. Even when he does stupid stuff.

I kiss his ears gently. They flick as he settles against me. I breathe in his scent and smile. This moment right here, this is heaven.

Monday morning is silent, a little awkward, but I keep my ears back and look sorry until he growls and says he forgives me. And says, actually, that he forgave me last night, and then I say, I know, you forgave me really hard, and he shoots me one of those looks. If we weren’t in the car on the way to the airport, I think he’d end up being late for practice.

I haven’t been home on a Monday in a while, so for the heck of it, I go to the office directly from the airport. The Dragons lost again. This gets me and Alex a little nervous, so we walk around the stadium looking at old trophies. If the team has a crappy enough season, the GM might get fired. And if he gets fired, any of us in the scouting department could lose our jobs too.

“
Morty and Paul will be okay,” Alex says.

“
You’ll be fine, too.” I touch one of the championship pictures. I’d wanted to be part of that, but to be honest, I was happy just working in football. And today, I’m still thinking about Dev. I wonder if it would impress his father if I could show up wearing a championship ring. Probably not. He’d just complain about all the faggots in football these days.

“
I dunno, might get bumped back down to assistant.” He leans against the wall, long ears pressed against it. “How was your weekend? You weren’t at the game.”

“
Crazy.” I scan the faces of the players in the photo. “Family drama. You went, I guess. Sorry.” The Dragons lost. Again.

He nods. “We’re really not that bad. Just a couple pieces away, you know.”

Listening to his rundown of the game, I get absorbed in my job. We walk back to our office, where I stop in with Morty and catch up, and he hints that I might want to be around the office more. I tell him I will be.

He stops me from taking off after that. “Firebirds defense is still playing well.”

“
I thought so. Couldn’t get the offense going.”

“
That’s going to stop them in the playoffs. They could use a playmaker.”

“
Couldn’t we all?”

He snorts. “
We
could use about four. But they’ll get one. Corcoran runs a good team over there.”

I looked up the big article Kinnel wrote about the Firebirds, a few years back, where he praised the front office. But I’d heard something else about the Firebirds that he didn’t mention. “Didn’t he have money problems for a while?”

Morty laughs. “Got rid of his money problems when he fired his son-in-law.”

“
I thought he was a big family guy.”

“
That’s why the kid got the job in the first place. Campbell met him once at one of the summer meetings. Said the kid was the dumbest fox he’d ever met. ‘Ninety-eight watts short of a hundred-watt bulb.’ But Jennie Corcoran hung on his arm the whole weekend.”

“
And Corcoran just fired him?” I bet he didn’t kick his daughter out of his house for marrying an idiot, even if he fired the idiot.

Morty waves a paw. “Set him up with something else. Managing a furniture store or warehouse or somethin’. Wish our problems were that easy to solve. You see anyone good in your games this weekend?”

I give him the rundown of what I saw and then we talk about the current state of his rocky marriage until he has to run off to another meeting. I go back to my desk in the office I share with Alex. Entering the data doesn’t take my mind off Dev and his family.

My phone, lying on the desk, suggests something I could do. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I have his parents’ number in the phone now, in my history. I could talk to his mom—she’s home during the day when his dad’s at work. She’d at least hear me out, could maybe help me think of somewhere to go from here, some way to make this all work. I’m just worried I’d alienate her, too, and then where would I be?

“
Something ain’t working.” Paul’s leaning against the door frame of our office, rubbing his horns against the wood. “Our fucking defense couldn’t stop a blind mouse.”

“
The Devils played a mouse back in the fifties,” Alex says mildly.

“
Hergest Thockton,” I chime in. “Scored two touchdowns on kick returns.”

Paul scowls. “Whatever. Did you see that third quarter? They adjusted and we did nothing different. I’m telling you, Ferguson just stands there on the sidelines like a corpse.”

I agree with him, but I don’t want to agree out loud. Neither, apparently, does Alex. “He’s getting a lot out of those players.”

Neither one of us has been with the Dragons as long as Paul; neither one of us has as much invested in the current team. He scowls again, leans against the other side of the doorframe so he can rub the other half of his antlers there. I fold my ears down against the scraping sound. Paul goes on to talk about the players we have who did a good job, and there we agree with him. His presence becomes moderately bearable until he starts talking about commercials.

“
Oh, and did you see that faggot pushing Ultimate Fit?”

“
Christ, Paul,” Alex says.

“
What? He told the world he’s a faggot. I can call him that.”

“
Hey, Paul,” I say.

He doesn’t hear me, or pretends. “I mean, whatever, but the way he was shaking his ass for the camera.” He squinches his eyes and sticks his tongue out.

“
Hey, Paul?” Louder. He opens his eyes and focuses on me, still rubbing his antler against the doorframe. “What bugs you about him?” I say.

Lines crease between his eyes. “What do you mean?”

I shrug. “You call people ‘faggots’ when you don’t like ’em. So here’s this guy who’s gay, and you call him a ‘faggot’ too. So I’m just wondering.”

“
Is this some kind of HR bullshit?” He frowns and folds his arms.

“
No, I’m serious. I just, personally, I don’t get it. I mean, he likes guys, you like girls, who gives a fuck, right?”

Paul looks at Alex with a half-grin, like, seriously? Alex just shrugs. Paul says to me, “You really don’t see anything wrong with having a cock in your mouth? Getting it up the ass?”

“
I just don’t see why it matters what the guy does in his bedroom.”

He waves a hand. “He made it everyone’s business.”

I lean back in my chair. “He had to. Look at the guys who keep calling conferences to tell the world they’re
not
gay. It obviously matters. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

Alex is keeping an ear pointed at me, but watching Paul, whose eyes flick back and forth. He stands upright, his antlers now grazing the top of the door. “You really don’t...” He shakes his head so his antlers rap the wood. “He doesn’t get it,” he says to Alex, and laughs.

I’ve no idea what Alex is going to say. Usually he just keeps his head down. But addressing him directly spurs him to talk. “I’m not sure I do, either, to be honest.”

Paul’s nostrils flare. He looks back to me, and then throws up his hands. “Maybe I am crazy,” he says. “We got dicks. That means we fuck other things. We don’t let them fuck us. It’s...” He gropes for words. We both wait patiently. “Just ain’t the way things are s’posed to be.”

“
Makes a guy weak,” I say. “Letting another guy do that.” I see Vince King, a savage on the field.

“
Do we have to talk about this?” he says. His antlers rap the door frame again. “Fuck. Let’s talk about the fucking Dragons. There’s a bunch of faggots.”

Alex laughs, but not for the reason Paul thinks. Paul chuckles along with him. I don’t. I feel every second tick by. “Sorry,” I say, “I still don’t understand why your choice of sexual partner makes you weak.”