Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (69 page)

At that, he lets my ear go to meet my eyes. I know he’s thinking about my mother. I am, too. But he reads me as well as I read him, and knows this isn’t the time to bring her up. So he smiles. “Hmm. Maybe. You want him to come along?”

“
Yeah.” I don’t really have to think about it much. “Kinda.”

“
Even if he finds out you’re gay?”

“
Well, I mean. He did come all the way up here to bail me out of jail.”

“
Oh, yeah, I want to hear all about jail. You weren’t in there with some big punk tiger who wanted you to be his bitch, were you?”

“
No, that’s who I’m in here with,” I say.

He giggles again and bites my ear. “Damn right.”

“
Come on, I got enough scars from your family,” I say, squirming.

He knows me too well to think I’m really objecting, but he lets go anyway, letting me flick the damp ear around against his muzzle. “All right. Let’s grab the others and go.”

He starts to let me go, but I hold on to him. “Hey.” He raises his eyebrows. I push my nose up to his, standing on tiptoe to give him a fierce glare. “You’re not allowed to go nowhere, either.”

“
Oh, foxy,” he says, and hugs me. “Not even to the playoffs?”

I squeeze him as best I can with my flimsy fox muscles. I guess not that flimsy. I did beat up his dad, after all. “Not unless I come with ya.”

“
That mean you’re gonna come live in Chevali?”

I hesitate. Right now I don’t want to be apart from him ever again. But as nice as this moment is, it can’t last forever. “You know,” he presses, “just because you can take care of yourself doesn’t mean you always have to. I like taking care of you once in a while, too.”

“
My winter coat’s already coming in.”

“
I’ll brush it out.”

“
My apartment is—”

“
I’ll pay for it.”

I kiss his nose, and then lower, and that turns into another world-stopping moment, the two of us locked together with the rest of the world locked out. When I can talk again, I do. “I’ll need a week to pack.”

He perks up like a little cub. “Really?”

“
Yeah. You are more persuasive in person.” He laughs and hugs me. “Just for the season,” I say, “and I’m gonna call around about jobs.”

“
Sure, sure.” He nods, but his tail is lashing happily, and hell, mine’s wagging pretty hard too. “Now can we go outside?”

Hal’s alone in the hallway. His ears perk up as we walk out, and he jerks a thumb toward Mickey’s door, in response to my unasked question. “Your dad went in.”

“
In...there? Why?”

He shrugs. “Said he didn’t know when he’d get to meet his son’s boyfriend’s parents again.”

“
How long’s he been in there?” Dev, behind me, speaks up.

“
Not quite as long as you two been in there.” He eyes us both and pulls his notebook out. “You got things sorted out?”

“
I think so.” Dev’s large paw pulls me back against him by my shoulder.

I curl my tail back around his legs and ask Kinnel, “Did you get your quote?”

He flips the notebook to a blank page. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I can use ‘Get out.’ So how’d you land him in the hospital? Police report just said it was a ‘fight.’”

“
Oh, I know aikido,” I say, and glance up at Dev. “But it was nothing, really. I mean...”

Kinnel snorts, at the same time as Dev squeezes my shoulder. “S’okay,” my tiger says. “I think it’s better to say that you used martial arts than to say he just fell.”

“
Yeah.” The swift fox’s ears flick up and back as he jots down some notes. “Aikido, huh? Took that myself back in college. Never thought it’d be any good at all. Sure’s hell wouldn’t bet my hide on it in a fight against a tiger twice my size. Damn fool idea.”

I lean back against Dev. “It seems to have worked out okay.” I curl my tail back around his leg. One of the nurses frowns, looking at us as he walks by, but I don’t give a damn.

Dev’s grip tightens on me. His tail brushes the back of my leg. “Yeah,” he says, his voice husky. “Pretty okay.”

“
Lucky,” the swift fox says.

“
I used to think that.” Dev nuzzles between my ears briefly. “But after he gets lucky a bunch of times—”

“
Ahem,” I say.

“—
you have to—what? Oh.” He snorts against my ears. “I didn’t mean it like that. Jeez.” Kinnel’s smirking too, scribbling on his notepad. “I mean, after a bunch of times, you can’t really say it’s luck anymore, can you? It’s gotta be him.”

I duck my head, pretending to brush something out of my face to cover up the emotion that I’m sure Kinnel could see if I let him, and will likely be able to catch in my scent if Dev keeps this up.

The swift fox has paused when I look up, his pen idle on the pad. He’s not smirking, looking at us. “I think maybe you’re both lucky,” he says.

I want to say something, but I don’t trust my voice. I nod. Dev says, “Yeah,” and I turn my head and nuzzle his paw.

“
So did they take you back?” Kinnel’s looking up at Dev now.

I feel Dev’s nod, and then the door opens and my father walks out with Duscha behind him. “Mik wants something to drink,” she says. “I was just going to go down to the cafeteria.” She looks around at all of us, as though we had stopped her. “Thank you all for coming,” she says finally.

“
I didn’t—” I break off the rest of the sentence, which was going to be ‘really have a choice,’ and reconsider my words. This might be one of those times when I don’t have to be sarcastic. “Mean for this to happen,” I finish.

She steps forward. She’s not quite as tall as her husband, but she’s still taller than me. I feel rather trapped here between the two tigers. Then I look to my left, where my father, who’s my height, is leaning against the wall. He smiles and turns his head, flicking his eyes up. I know he gets what I’m feeling. So I smile up at Duscha as she looks down and says, “I know you meant well. I know you care about Devlin.”

“
Uh, Mom, we need to get going. I have to get back for practice.” Dev speaks over my head.

I nudge backwards. “Aw, you can let your mom talk,” I say.

“
We really have to get going.” He growls softly, but his tail curls around mine.

Duscha extends her paw to me. “I hope to see you again,” she says, clipping off a word that might have been ‘soon.’

“
Same here.” I grasp and shake it. “But I understand if it takes a while.”

Unexpectedly, she smiles. “Mik is stubborn. But so are you. Both. I will walk downstairs with you.”

My father joins us, two short foxes under two tall tigers walking toward the elevator, with Kinnel the swift fox chaperoning. We all crowd into the elevator, which lets me press back against Dev semi-discreetly until we get to the ground floor. His tail curls around mine all the way down.

There’s something about hospitals, a kind of desperation that disposes one kindly toward whomever you happen to be with, at least when out in the public areas. We step into the waiting room and meet the gaze of a polar bear whose white fur is stained with blood. He watches us leave with tired, envious eyes. Next to him, a pine marten with crusty, yellowed eyes scratches at his patchy fur; across from him, a female wolverine tries in vain to stop her two babies from screeching. We all hang together, looking around, thinking,
I’m glad that’s not me
. Dev reaches for my paw and squeezes it. I squeeze back.

At the exit, Duscha steps away to go to the cafeteria. Dev leans over me to kiss her muzzle. “Bye, Mom.”

She reaches up. “I love you, Devlin.”

“
Uh, me too,” he says.

I step out from between them. “Oh, don’t let me get in the way,” I say, moving toward my father.

Dev and his mother hesitate, and then hug. “So,” I ask in my quietest voice, aware that Kinnel is right beside us and can also hear, “what did you talk to Mickey about?”

“
Oh,” he says, “I just said I wanted to meet him. He asked if you were as much a disappointment as his son was. I said much more. I mean, you don’t even have a job now.”

“
Thanks,” I say.

“
Then I said that maybe neither of you was living the life we’d chosen for you, but you were both pretty fine people.”

“
Ma-e
,” Kinnel says, quietly.

“
That took twenty minutes?”

Father smiles and adjusts his glasses. “After that we got distracted talking football. He thinks the Firebirds can win it all.”

“
He’s a little biased.” I grin at Dev, who’s waving good-bye as his mother walks away. I think again about my own mother. I don’t think that what’s going on with her would be solved by Dev going to talk to her, confronting her as I did with his father. I want to ask my father whether he told her where he is today, but I already know the answer. And that is not, I think, about me—at least, not completely. There’s a conversation coming, not too far off.

There’s a lot coming. Thanksgiving, of course, but a host of smaller conversations to be had with his family and mine. There’s Dev’s team, his football career, my football career. Life, basically. I feel more ready for it now than I was a month ago, or hell, even a day ago.

We walk outside into the bright sun, the four of us, across to a waiting taxi. Kinnel asks my father a football question, walking in front. They don’t notice when Dev pauses, staring back at the hospital behind us.

I stop with him, just standing next to him on the snow-covered lawn, breathing in the fresh, sweet air. The sun’s at our backs, warm even in the chill November morning. I wait, but he doesn’t say anything, and finally I say, “What?”

He’s panting, just a little, as if he’s been doing his workout already. He puts an arm around my shoulder, his paw strong and sure, pulling me close. I fit nicely there, against his side. A smile as bright as the sun grows on his muzzle as he looks down at me. “Sweet Lion Jesus, I’m glad that’s over.”

My tail swings over to hang next to his. His scent fills my nostrils as I smile up into his beautiful golden eyes, with the blue sky beyond. “Over?” I reach up to grasp his paw. “Tiger, it’s only just beginning.”

Though I have tried to show a fair representation of the game of football in these pages, I know that there are a number of areas in which the depiction falls short. This is not a book about football, after all; it’s a book about a tiger and fox struggling to find their place in each other’s lives. Those lives just happen to include a great deal of football.

In the interests of the story, practices have been somewhat simplified; a player in our real world football league will undergo a number of different drills, exhaustive film of the opponent, new plays, old plays, trick plays. The “week off” between games is anything but (though the day of rest after a win is not unheard of, and five to six days off during a bye week is common).

By contrast, linebackers often do not play every down of a game. Teams have different formations on rushing downs (first down, short yardage) versus passing downs (third down, longer yardage), with specialists in coverage, rushing the passer, blitzing, etc. Dev’s team plays, for a record, a conservative 4-3 defense, with four defensive linemen and three linebackers behind them, and for simplicity, Dev is on the field for all important plays. In the Forester Universe, because I did not wish to clutter the book too much with mechanics, the offense and defense have been simplified.

As is interaction with the media. In our current society, the media come into locker rooms to talk to players, and there’s a lot of exposure—in many senses of the word—that I have closed off in this book. Again, this is more for the sake of the narrative than for anything else; many sections take place in the immediate aftermath of games, and the players needed quiet time together. It just proved easier to move all media interactions outside the locker room into a more formal environment.

Where I could, I used books and articles about sports to create the background. Where I could not, I guessed based on what made sense to me. I have a feeling that there are as many locker room cultures as there are locker rooms—some players talk about going out together, playing video games, going to movies. Other players treat the locker room as an office where they come in, do their work, and go home. On some teams, there are cliques and divisions. Losing teams have tension and aggression; winning teams have jokes and camaraderie. Whether the emotion comes from the record, or the record from the emotion, is a subject of constant debate on the sports pages.

Chevali Firebirds (* = starters)

Gerrard coyote middle linebacker (Mike)*

Carson leopard strong-side linebacker (Sam)*

Fisher tiger defensive end*

“
Brick” black bear defensive tackle*

Colin fox cornerback*

Ty (“Fish”) fox wide receiver/kick returner*

Aston wolf quarterback*

“
Jaws” wolverine running back*

Norton cheetah cornerback*

Vonni fox cornerback*

Pace jaguar safety*

Charm stallion kicker*