Out of Position (11 page)

I open my muzzle to say something, and he squeezes my sides. “Let’s finish getting the clothes off, doc,” he says, edging his boxers all the way off. “Think the shower’s big enough for two?”

I do, and it is.

 
It’s a stereotype to say that gay people mostly just talk about sex. Certainly Brian and I talked about a lot of other things, as I’ve said, but honestly, sex came up a lot. In the small amount of gay studies I’ve done (and how dry does that make it sound?), I know that you can say that gay people focus on sex because that’s what makes them different, that’s what defines them as a group. But I’ve been around groups of straight guys, and they talk about sex a lot, too. It’s more a guy thing than a gay thing.

Brian and I went one better than technique and size. We were all into the philosophy of sex. As confirmed non-interested partners, we were free to talk about what it meant without either one worrying that we were talking about something the other had done. And boy, did we. Sometimes ’til 3 am in our dorm lounge, the box of donut holes long since empty, coffee cups cold and dry.

Brian was an actor, as I’ve said, and his philosophy could be distilled down to its core as “people are always acting.” Even during sex, he maintained, he was always thinking about how he should act, what pitch of moan would give the best effect, when would be the dramatic moment to finish. I didn’t believe he had that level of control, but he assured me he did. I asked Allen about it once. He said, “I don’t know, but every time we finished, I wanted to applaud.”

So Brian believed that everyone acted that way, or aspired to. He had an actor’s appreciation for love; that is to say, he knew exactly how someone in love acted. I don’t think he ever felt love himself, which is not a condemnation; at the time of our discussions, neither had I. The difference was that I thought I had, and he knew he hadn’t.

See, I was a romantic. Still am. I love reading any book that has a sniff of romance in it, from the old Shakespeare plays to trashy modern fantasy. And because I was just immersed in the stories, rather than trying to figure out how to convey the emotions the characters were feeling, I believed in love. I had a crush in high school, but the less said about that, the better. I thought Micha and I were in love, but really it was just friendship, with sex.

To Brian, that was all love was: a way you agreed to act in public with a certain good friend, and if you acted well together, you formalized it. Or, in our case, just carried on doing it, since at the time marriage didn’t really enter into our thinking except as a political crusade.

But I thought that love was the opposite of acting. Sex is the physical act of putting yourself in a position where you can’t help but be honest, where your body flails about and your tongue hangs out and you make crazy noises and that’s all you. And you choose the person you love to do it with, and they do the same thing, and you’ve seen—maybe not each others’ souls, but a little glimpse into what you both are, sharing a private part of yourselves. Love is the natural extension of that, allowing you to relax and be yourself with someone. Dropping the act we put on every day. Because Brian was right in that regard: we’re always acting, one way or another. It’s just that for most of us, it’s tiring. At the end of the day, we want to go home and relax with someone who doesn’t need us to be anyone other than who we are. And finding that person is hard. It’s really, really hard.

I don’t think Brian ever did.

 
It takes me longer to dry my fur, and when I come out of the shower, he’s half-dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed, shirtless. He smiles as I walk out, and the look in his eyes is appreciative of my naked body, but not lustful, not now. It’s also a little distant. He’s been thinking.

“It is weird,” he starts. “Being here, like this.”

I nod, selecting a loose pair of shorts, and then I set them aside. I’m not intending to go out again. “I like it, though.”

“Me too,” he says quickly, and then tilts his muzzle. “It’s just sinking in that football’s over. I mean, over. I guess I’ll spend the spring working out and maybe see if I can get invited to the combine, but… I might never put on a uniform again.”

I sit beside him and rest a paw on his. “You will, you dope,” I say. “You’re too good. There were scouts there today, you know.”

His ears perk up. “I figured there would be. But they were probably all here to see Seito.”

His hopeful eyes and twitching tail belie his attempts to be humble. “Probably,” I say lightly.

“Was that Dragons scout there again?” He flicks his tail across mine.

“Which one?” I affect ignorance, and he slips a paw up to my sheath. “You know the one,” he says, squeezing.

I squirm, wagging my tail, thinking of a time when he wouldn’t even be comfortable sitting next to me when I’m naked. “Oh, that one. Yes, he was there.”

“Did you talk to him?” His paw remains where it is.

“What would I have to say to him?” I yelp theatrically as he squeezes again. “Okay, okay, maybe I might’ve exchanged a couple words with him.”

He grins and lets me go. I lean against him and he slides his arm around me. “So?”

“So he says we had some nice weather today.”

Dev sighs and shakes his head. “Foxes,” he grumbles.

I tell him, eventually, and we share some more time affirming our relationship in this new environment before he has to get back to the team. He leaves me with a kiss and a sigh, and a promise to meet for lunch again.

I’m exhausted from the day, so I fall asleep before Salim gets back and we don’t really talk until we’re on the way home again. I’m staring out the window, only half listening to the music, and his laughter snaps me out of it. I glance back over at him without saying anything, and I see his grin.

“I’ve never seen you this quiet before,” he says.

“I’m a little tired.”

He nods. “I think I have changed my mind.” I flick my ears curiously to him. “About what?”

“I was going to say you should give up the football player. When you first told me about him, I thought it was just a temporary, a what does Allen call it? A fling. You know, a thrill. Then I thought you were just carrying it a little far, because it was dangerous. You told me there was more, but… I did not see it.”

“I like the danger,” I chuckle.

“But there is more. That is obvious.”

“Yeah.” I rest my muzzle on one paw. “Salim?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think that sex is really essential to love? I mean, can you survive a relationship if the sex goes through dry spells?”

He peers across the car. “Forgive me, but the room did not smell like a dry spell.”

My ears flush a bit, but I grin. “No, I… I was just wondering. What you think, I mean.”

He shrugs. “There is little to be gained from planning for drought during a monsoon.”

My tail twitches behind me. “I’m just wondering, you know.”

“I have never had the problem.”

“Me neither.” But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk about it. I love Salim, and he’s a great friend, but it’s hard to engage him in academic discussions. He’s a mechanical engineer, very concrete. Sometimes he’s so cultured, I forget that.

I’m quiet for a little while longer, thinking about Dev and his future and me and my future and us and our future, and when Salim breaks the silence again, what he says isn’t a surprise because the spotted skunk has been in the back of my mind all day.

“I still think you should tell Brian.”

 
It was over a year ago, back in Patty’s just off Forester U. campus. Patty’s is a gay-friendly bar, but not a gay bar, where Brian and I used to have some of our late night conversations. One Sunday, our sophomore year, we asked the bartender to turn on the football games, and eventually that became our hangout to watch football.

On this particular Sunday night, I was studying and Brian was more than a little tipsy. He’d kissed the guy he was seeing at the time right there in the bar, and the guy got a little miffed at the PDA and left. That’s Public Display of Affection, one of the things we talked about a lot in FLAG. I got that much from him, and the rest from Brian, later.

A couple linebackers from the football team had decided to stop in to watch the rest of the Sunday night game over a beer. Talk in the bar turned to the predictably dismal performance of the Forester team the previous year, and because Brian was involved, the discussion was both well-informed and merciless.

Brian claims he didn’t start it. He said the two football players were boasting that they were better than the Dragons (who are bad, but not that bad). They say he started ragging on the Forester football team, and when one of them said, “Do you know who we are?” he said, “Sure, I’d know that ass anywhere.” Brian officially denies he said that, but to me, he said, “I dunno. I was pretty wasted. Sounds like something I’d say, doesn’t it?”

There were a lot of things he’d said in the past about Forester’s football team. Thinking about him saying them in a bar to a couple of Forester’s football players still makes me wince.

They say he hit on them despite numerous firm rebuffs. He’s pretty sure he didn’t. I trust him on that one. It sounds more likely that they saw him with his date and decided that this uppity faggot who thought he knew about football needed a lesson.

Whatever the motivation, they waited until the game was over, then followed him out of the bar. I don’t know what happened next, because neither does he. He remembers a little about exchanging jabs with the football players. Then he woke up in the hospital with a broken jaw, two broken ribs, and a concussion.

The players claim they just followed him for a little while and then walked off without any more contact. Nobody believed them, but it was just enough to keep them from being charged with assault. Brian’s blood-alcohol was about .14 when he was brought in, so his testimony wasn’t going to be reliable. The players were kicked off the football team because of the bad publicity and because they weren’t starting anyway, so the coach could afford to make the gesture. And once they’d lost their football status, the word spread through campus, in the way that things spread through a community, that they were pretty proud of having beaten up Brian and gotten away with it.

While Brian was in the hospital, I visited him two or three nights a week, as often as I could, and we hatched out various revenge plots, the more ludicrous, the better. What he hadn’t told me was that his parents were facilitating paperwork to get him transferred to another school to start the spring semester. He told me right before we left for Christmas break.

I was crushed. He said his parents insisted, wouldn’t listen to him, that he’d tried to talk them out of it until the last minute. I almost believed him, the great actor.

Salim’s right, I know. So I call Brian on Sunday night, when he’d told me he’d be home from his trip.

 
He picks up on the second ring. “Hi, Wiley.” The sound of his voice, the reality of our contact, takes me back in time a year or more. That only underscores how much things have changed.

“Hey, Brian.”

He never lets a silence become awkward. “Glad you finally caught up with me.”

“Thanks for leaving such detailed instructions.”

“They seemed necessary.”

Parry. Dodge. Riposte. “So when are you back in town?”

“Week before Christmas. I have finals ’til the 19th, coming back the 20th. When do you leave?”

“Twenty-second.”

Brian leaves just enough of a pause for me to offer to meet him. When I don’t, he presumes. “So it looks like we might actually get together. Dinner on the 21st?”

“I have a final at one. I could meet you around four.”

“That’s an early dinner.”

“I have dinner plans.”

He knows immediately what that means. “Your last night on campus? Oh, Wiley, why not invite me along? I’d love to meet him.”

He’s daring me to contradict him, to tell me it’s not a boyfriend I haven’t told him about, and I’m almost ready to lie, but I can’t. Not to him. He’d know.

“Sorry,” I say. “Three’s a crowd, remember?”

He’s sent me home with that line on more than one occasion. “Touché,” he says. “So now I know why you’ve been avoiding me.”

“I wasn’t lying about being out of town this weekend,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “I checked.”

“I knew you would.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Salim and I just took a little road trip.”

“You’re dating Salim?”

“I didn’t say that.” There’s something invigorating about circling around and around like this. I know eventually he’ll get to the truth, but he enjoys this as much as I do. Probably more.

“So where’d you go?”

“Chikewa Falls.”

He’s been following Forester, of course. “Sucky game,” he says. “But we looked okay.”

“Better than we’ve looked in years.”

“That Seito is going to the pros.”

“He looked like a pro. He demolished us.”

“We’ve got a pretty good DB, though. That tiger, Miski. He’s really come on this year.”

My throat is dry. “Yeah,” I manage.

“Darron is pretty good, too. He might end up in the Arena League. And that kid at wideout, the fox. He’s gonna be good too.”

“No doubt,” I say, feeling a little smug that he didn’t notice our left guard.

“So what’s going on, Wiley? Who are you seeing? Why are you avoiding me?”

He’s trying to catch me off guard. It’s so childish it annoys me. “Why,” I say tartly, “do you assume it’s all about you?”

“Because it usually is.”

“You still acting there at East Bumfuck?”

“That’s East Dumbfuck, and yes, of course I’m still acting. An actor doesn’t abandon his craft because of a minor setback.”

“Couple more ‘minor setbacks’ could kill you, Spotty.”

He gives me a throaty laugh. “Always watching out for me. Don’t worry, I watch myself now. I only act appropriately gay.”

“You’re the ‘gay best friend’?”

“Absolutely. I just need a gorgeous lady to give relationship advice to. How about you? How’s everyone at FLAG?”

“They’re fine. Keith is still a tool.”