Out of Position (15 page)

My mother sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t be like that,” she says.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say, “but I’ll figure something out. Okay?”

“Are you enjoying it?” I can see her eyeshine again.

“Yes, Mother. I love it. Can we talk about something else now?”

I’m ready to discuss anything else except for one area, which might as well have a homing device in it for as fast as Mother zeros in on it. “When are you going to bring home a nice vixen?” she says.

My watch reads 7:56. Close enough. “I have to make a phone call,” I say, and get up, my shadow briefly obscuring my image on the wall before I move away, out of the living room.

Dev answers the phone on the third ring. I grasp at his deep, husky voice as if it were an airline seat cushion in an unplanned water landing. “Hi, handsome,” I say in that Lauren Bacollie voice he loves.

“Having a good visit?” he asks after a pause during which I imagine him adjusting his pants. The thought makes me adjust mine.

“Oh, it’s a blast.” I keep my voice down, even though the parents are still watching their memories downstairs on the other side of the house. The study is unsettlingly quiet. “We’re playing all kinds of Christmas games.”

“Like Monopoly?”

“Like ‘Get Wiley To Admit That Every Decision He’s Made Since Leaving Home Has Been An Irreparable Disaster.’ So far, I’m winning. Two days ’til Christmas, though. It’s still anybody’s game.”

“Even with your cousins there?”

“They cancelled. Someone had pox or fleas or… something, I didn’t really get the whole story.” Mom told me, I just didn’t listen.

I hear him sigh. “My dad offered to get me a job with his friend Jake who runs a garage downtown.”

This surprises me. “After your great season?”

“We lost in the quarters.”

“I was there.”

He chuckles, softly. “Mmm. No, they think I had a great senior season and they’re trying to talk me out of joining the Arena League or going overseas.”

“Right, because what parent wants their kid to play in an exotic foreign country?”

“For pennies on the UFL dollar?”

“And a garage is such a better use of your economics degree.”

“It’d be in the front office. Accounting, books, stuff like that.”

I curl up in the armchair and take a sip of water. “You’re not really considering it?”

“No,” he said. “I’m goin’ to the UFL combine. And so are you.”

“That’s my tiger.” I glance to the stairs. The home movies are still going strong. “I miss you,” I say softy.

“Miss you too,” he says.

No hesitation, so I know he’s alone. “I miss your cock,” I say, going back to the Lauren Bacollie.

“Lee!” The half-strangled exclamation is perfectly Dev, caught between what he wants and what he thinks is right.

“Really,” I purr. “I’d love to feel it sliding up inside me right now. All big, and hard…”

“Lee, cut it out.”

“I’m naked right now,” I lie. “Think of it, my body pressed back against you, your cock deep inside…”

“I can’t…”

“Lock the door,” I suggest in my normal voice.

He sighs. “Hang on.”

I grin, and slide my paw inside my pants.

 
Twenty very satisfying minutes later, I feel mellow enough to return to the Inquisition. The movie we have on now is our family trip to Lake Callahee. I’ve switched occupation from fireman to navigator, a proud nine-year-old cub trusted with the family map. This isn’t my favorite trip, though. My favorite is the one four years later, when I managed to guide the family car to both the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame and the White Island Amusement Park, the latter having been expressly forbidden by my father. At nine, I’m still too proud at having control over the map to twist it to my own ends, but I can see the seeds of later rebellion in the intensity with which I study the map. And there’s one moment, when Mother says into the microphone softy, “Look how hard he’s trying to memorize the route,” when I see the flick of my ears and I distinctly remember what I was thinking at that moment. I wasn’t memorizing the route. I was nerving myself up to ask whether we could take a diversion to see the Boliat Boxers’ practice facility, only an hour out of the way. I heard my mother’s remark and squelched the question. A couple years later, I wouldn’t be so timid. By the time I was fifteen, I’d lost my navigational privileges.

It’s funny. I remember everything about that single moment: the smell of stale cookies in the car, my father’s beer, my mother’s scent mask back when she was still using sage, the peculiar tinting of the light hitting the map through the window, and even being thirsty for a Coke. But not two minutes later, I watch myself put the map down, and now I have no idea what I was thinking. The cub on the screen is watching trees go past, resting his muzzle on a skinny arm, lost in his own world, as he often was. And that world is lost to me.

“Were you talking to that Brian?” Mother doesn’t look at me.

I curl my tail more tightly into my lap. “No.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“I can handle my own business.”

My father interrupts. “We’ve asked you several times to tell him to stop leaving messages for you here.”

I sink further into the couch. “How many times has he called?”

“Not many,” Mother says, as Father says, “Seven.”

I close my eyes, trying not to imagine the snide messages. I wonder if he mentioned Dev in any of the messages. I wonder how I could possibly ask.

“I don’t want him calling here any more,” Father says.

I fold my ears back. “I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“All right,” Father says. “If you need more incentive, here you go. If we get another message from him after the holidays, you won’t be getting your monthly stipend.”

That makes me sit up straight. “I told him. What do you want me to do, erase the number from his memory?”

“You’re smart. You can figure something out.”

“Why don’t you meet a nice girl?” Mother inserts into the silence. “Don’t tell me there aren’t any nice vixens there at Forester.”

“Only naughty ones,” I say automatically, still stewing over the threat. “The nice ones go to Heaven.” Something we kid about in my little circle within the Forester Lesbians And Gays.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Father says. For some reason,
that
set him off.

“Can’t help it,” I say, “it’s how I was raised.”

“I never raised you to talk back,” he says.

“Monkey see, monkey do.” The repartee is almost automatic for me, but it seems to throw him. I don’t have a history of engaging him in this kind of back-and-forth, but I’m trying anything to delay the ‘vixen’ conversation.

“Maybe I should call Brian, then.”

“Look,” I say, pointing at the screen. “Isn’t this where Father almost gets pulled into the water by that fish?”

 
Brian leaves two more messages the next day. I know because I check the answering machine when we get back from the movie (“A Christmas Parable,” which we’re obviously seeing to please Mother). I get as far as “I’m calling for Wiley” before I delete both messages. Mother, standing nearby, declares loudly that she’s going to start dinner, and bustles off to the kitchen. Father doesn’t look at me or say anything. But it seems clear that their gift to me of a new cell phone is at least somewhat related.

While Mother’s prepping Christmas dinner, Father suggests a game of pool down in the game room. I agree, feeling generous. After he wins the first game, he says, “
Are
you seeing anyone?” All nonchalant, his ears up, tail neutral, but carefully avoiding looking at me.

I line up the balls for him and step away while he sets up the break. “I thought you didn’t want to hear about that part of my life.”

Snap! The balls scatter. He drops the 2. “I don’t want to hear about your mother’s fur treatment appointments, either, but I listen to that and pay for it. At least your…” He pauses, sizing up the table, and moves to a clean shot on the 4. “… lifestyle doesn’t cost me anything. Unlike your education.”

“Nice break,” I comment as he sinks the 4. “And nice shot.”

“I just want to make sure you’re being careful,” he says, stepping in front of me. His tail nearly brushes my legs. I step back to give him room. “I gather you and Brian used to go out and now you don’t. That bothers your mother. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“By ‘hurt,’ you mean ‘sick,’ right?” He drops the 6-ball, but it leaves him in a tough position now. He doesn’t answer, so I go on. “Brian was my best friend. We never dated.”

“You never brought your best friend home?”

I watch him make the 3. The cue ball doesn’t quite roll far enough to make the easy shot on the 7. “We never managed to coordinate it.”

“Does he not like football?” He’s going to try for the 7 anyway. Tricky shot. He misses it.

I see my best shot and line up to drop the 12. “It’s more like we disagreed on one specific aspect of football.” I pocket the 12 and circle the table, looking for another opening. “What did he say?”

He watches me. “He seems worried about you.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” I line up for the 14. He waits until I shoot. The ball crawls toward the hole and drops in with a thump. “I’ll give him the cell phone number if you want. Then you won’t have to talk to him.”

“Wiley,” Father says, backing out of my way as I set up the 10, “is this football player setting you up with drugs?”

I laugh, and lift the cue. “It’s always drugs, isn’t it?”

“So there is a football player.”

“Yes,” I say, and knock the 10 across the table, slamming it into the corner. “He’s a cornerback for Forester and he’s really good.”

“Good at football, or good in general?”

I stop at that one and raise an eyebrow. My father flicks an ear. “Both,” I say finally.

“All right,” he says. “Your mother’s already got her Grandparents Are For Spoiling mug. I’m not in any rush, myself.” He points one claw at the table. “You’ve got a better shot on the 15.”

About pool, he’s always right. I line up the shot and drop it clean, and then of course the cue ball spins away into the side pocket.

I can already see from the lay of the table that he’s got the game won. “That’s what I get for taking your advice,” I say lightly as he makes the first of his four shots. The 5 drops.

“It was good advice,” he said. “You just went for too much.” Thunk. The 1 is gone.

“How’m I ever going to learn, if I don’t?”

He sinks the 6, bringing the cue ball back to rest six inches from the 8, clear space between it and the side pocket. “Side pocket,” he says, and then, as he’s lining it up, “I just don’t know why you don’t apply that to your career.”

Tap. Thunk. Game over.

 
I get another, shorter, phone call with my tiger on Christmas Day itself, a nervous affair because both of our families are going to wonder what we’re doing on the phone that day, but it’s worth it to be able to exchange that, “Merry Christmas” and for just a moment share the special day. At least, it is for me, and it sounds like it is for him, too.

Less fun is the call with Brian. As much as I hate for Father’s threat to force my actions, I can’t really afford to lose the stipend. So I call, the day after Christmas Day. “Oh, hi, Tip,” he says.

“Oh, hi, Brian,” I reply.

“How’s your Christmas been?” he asks, just as though everything is normal between us.

“Gee, it’s been just swell. How is yours?”

“Are you spending it with him?”

“With whom?”

“You know who I mean. The football player.”

“Which one? Fisher Kingston?”

He snorts. “You wish.”

I look around. My parents are downstairs, well out of earshot. “Of course,” I say. “He’s sucking me off right now.”

He makes a choked noise. “When are you going to wake up?”

I thought it would be fun to tease him, but I’m just tired of him. “Leave us alone.”

“I’m telling you—”

“No, I’m telling you. If you want to get back at the football team, maybe you shouldn’t have run off to the middle of nowhere. If you cared…”

I’m not sure what I was going to say. He jumps into the gap. “I wouldn’t be calling if I didn’t care about you.”

“Save it for the audition,” I say. “Look, stop calling my parents. And don’t call my room. My parents gave me a cell phone.”

“You’re going to need someone to talk to one day.”

“I’m not giving you the number.”

“Tip—”

“Stop trying to pretend that you care!” I’m almost shouting into the phone. “Stop pretending you didn’t just give up!”

He absorbs that for a moment. “Don’t expect me to visit you in the hospital.” He hangs up before I can respond.

I hang up the phone and just sit there until my mother calls up, “Wiley? Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” I tell her, and I go downstairs. “I don’t think Brian will be bothering you guys any more.”

They don’t ask any further, but they at least refrain from asking questions about my love life or career that evening. I badly want to call Dev, just to hear his voice, but I know he’s busy with his own family stuff. And we’ll be back at school in another week.

 
Whether from the pre-Christmas tension or from the phone call with Brian, my parents lay off for the rest of the week and let me have time to myself. I call Dev twice more, but don’t get through, so by the time I’m back in my old apartment, I can’t keep my paws or tail still from the anticipation of seeing him again. I’m already achingly hard by the time he walks through my door. Judging by the speed with which our clothes hit the floor, he feels the same way.

“What were you doing on Christmas, when I called you?” I ask him, afterwards.

He trails his claws through the fur on my chest, down to my stomach, tail draped proprietarily over my hip. “Watching a movie.”

“A Christmas Story?”

“The Ten Commandments.”

“Yikes.”

He chuckles, the soft whuff of breath tickling my whiskers. He smells of my shampoo, but his breath is meaty from his dinner. “It’s a family tradition. Though with that new nativity movie coming out, I bet we’ll switch to that.”