Out of Position (23 page)

So when I pass the lab, and I think of him, I feel like complete shit. Look at me: raised in the lap of luxury, never really had to work or want for much, and I can’t even finish a goddamn liberal arts degree. I want to rip out clumps of fur as I turn onto the street where my apartment is.

Without seeing them, I get through the doors and into my room. The bookshelves look dusty in the afternoon light. I start toward them and then veer off to sit by the bed, just staring at the titles. No matter how rocky my relationship with each one might have been at the start, by the time our classes were done they’d become old friends. Now they scorn me silently from their corner, telling me they have no more use for me.

I have two messages on the machine and nobody I want to talk to. I have to get ready to go to work in half an hour.

 
Not wanting to weigh him down with my self-indulgent guilt, nor wanting to hear his excuses for me, I avoid Dev for a few days. The combination of his growing insistence plus my waning guilt finally leads to a Saturday night at my apartment, where despite all my best efforts just to get his clothes off, he insists on talking first.

“How’s the job going?” he wants to know.

“Fine.” I pull his boxers down, but he play-growls and pushes me down.

“Just ‘fine’?”

I stare up at him, meeting his golden eyes. “Yeah, we look at film. I take notes on players.”

He grins. “Been taking notes on me?”

“I know everything I need to know about you.” I slide my arm under his and cup his balls, pressing the heel of my paw into his sheath.

“Mmmf. I’m serious.”

“Me too.” To prove it, I start rubbing, hard, getting him to respond.

He twists, landing on his side beside me and trapping me against him. “You’re acting funny, Lee,” he says. “What’s goin’ on?”

“This is acting funny?” I squeeze his sheath. “I’m not even wearing a dress.”

“Doc,” he says, “I won’t outtalk ya. So I won’t even try. But I know when somethin’s wrong. It’s like when I line up and the guy I’m covering is two feet inside where he usually is. It don’t look right.”

“Seems to me I’m right under center,” I say. He’s getting pretty hard. Another couple minutes and he’ll give in, just let me let him fuck me, and after that he’ll be sleepy and I’ll leave early.

“Now I’m just more worried ’cause you won’t tell me what it is.” He’s resting his free paw, the arm that’s not wrapped around my chest, on my hip.

“Look, it’s nothing you can do anything about,” I say. My paw keeps working.

He nudges my ear. “So there is something.”

Dammit. “It’s nothing.”

He purrs against me. “You just said it was something.”

“I said it was nothing.”

“Nothing I could do anything about. That’s not the same as just nothing.”

“That what they’re teaching you in those gender studies classes, stud?” I find him mostly erect, tease my fingers along his shaft. Just forget about this, I mentally project at him.

Gently, he takes my paw from his sheath and holds it. “That’s what you taught me.”

It’s not fair. He’s supposed to get the physical dominance and I get the verbal dominance. I feel petulant and put-upon. “I don’t want to talk,” I say tightly. “I just wanna fuck.” I spit the word out as a challenge.

He looks at me for a long moment and then rolls away from me on the bed. “I’m kinda tired.”

I lie there, absorbing his words and considering the possibilities. Part of me aches to roll over and curl up against him and tell him how scared I am of what I’m doing. But I can’t do that, because I’m not even sure what the hell is going on, and he’ll just reassure me that when he gets drafted, he’ll help me out financially. I won’t be able to convey to him what’s bothering me, because mostly it has nothing to do with him. It’s all about me, how I took the easy path and what that makes me. He’ll look at me and say,
I don’t understand,
and I can already feel the surge of frustration at him. So I cut to the chase and say, “Fine.” I sit up on the bed, gather my clothes. He doesn’t say a word the whole time I’m getting dressed, not even when I pause at the door and look back at the bed. I catch a muffled sniffing noise, that’s all. Then again, that might just be snoring.

I walk around the city for half an hour. The all-night coffee shop is closed. The only thing open is a 24-hour convenience store, empty except for a porcupine behind the register, looking half-stoned. So I get some terrible coffee and linger by the magazine rack until the porcupine gets nervous, staring openly at me. Fine, I think, fuck you too. If I were going to rob this shithole, I’d have done it already.

Dev’s car is gone from the street when I get back. I’d worked myself up to confront him, or maybe apologize, and I’m mad at him for taking the choice away from me, and also relieved that I won’t have to deal with it tonight. I’m still replaying the last half hour in my head, walking around my room, so I’m already undressed and ready for bed when I notice the blinking light on my answering machine. Because I’m still worked up (in a different way), my first thought is that it’s Dev calling to apologize and ask me to come back over. So I play the message.

Hi, Wiley. Just wanted to let you know that Dad and I booked our flight to come see your graduation.
She follows with details of the arrival times and where they’re going to stay, but the words just roll over and around me. They’ve already bought their tickets. Why on earth are they flying? It’s only a four hour drive.

I feel like calling them up right now, even though it’s past midnight, to say, “Sorry, you’d better cancel those tickets. Just put the couple hundred dollars on my tab. I’ll never notice it.” But they’re asleep, and if I call tonight I will have to talk to them again tomorrow, and I’m not going to let myself in for that. I have to work tomorrow. I pull the sheets over my head and try, unsuccessfully, to sleep.

Dev doesn’t call, that night or the next, which is perfectly normal for him. He knows me well enough to let me alone when I’m grouchy. Still, because I’m grouchy, I
want
him to call me so I can tell him I don’t want to talk to him. It’s not a good thing that I don’t have classes in the morning anymore. I have breakfast, mope, have lunch, mope, and then go to work, where Morty doesn’t say anything about my attitude but I’m painfully aware of it and can’t do anything about it.

By the third day, it’s dawned on me that if I continue to be grumpy at the Dragons’ office, I might well ruin my chance to make that work, too. I’m not sure what to do about that, but “something other than what I’m currently doing” seems to be in order. Going to see Dev would entail facing a lot of crap I’m still not in the mood to face, so that leaves going out. Alone, because I don’t want to inflict my state of mind on any unsuspecting friends, especially ones I haven’t seen in weeks or months.

It’s not pure happenstance that I run into Salim that evening. I’ve deliberately gone out, leaving the cell phone in my room, to a place where Dev and I don’t usually go. My paws, diverted from those familiar haunts, wandered back in my memory to Kitteridge’s Cafe, where I order the plate of meatloaf and think sourly as it lies in my stomach that whoever called it ‘comfort food’ had never had it here. Then again, you go to Goose’s for the meatloaf. You come to Kitteridge’s for the coffee, the company, or the ambiance. It’s dimly lit, but those of us with a
tapetum lucidum
can still read the postcards papering the walls, sent back by students and alumni alike. Everyone loves to test their “we’ll put up anything” policy, sometimes by sending profanity-laced postcards of Forester’s own campus. Haley, the owner, puts them all up and even dedicated a small panel to them, which he calls “Cussin’ Corner.”

Kitteridge’s is an old FLAG hangout. Even though it’s not a meeting night, I should have known—maybe I did—that I’d run into one of them here. Of all of them, I’m glad it’s Salim.

He comes up behind me and says in that polite, accented voice, “Wiley. It’s nice to see you.”

I twist to see him, and smile. “Hi, Salim. How’ve you been?”

He shrugs. “Senior year. And yourself?”

My gut twists, with some difficulty, around the meatloaf. “Not so much.”

He cocks his head. “No?”

I open my muzzle, shut it again, then consider him. It’s been over half a year since we had a real talk, probably two months since I saw him at a casual, boisterous dinner. I remember how comfortable I was talking to him now, and marvel that I could’ve forgotten it. “You have anywhere you need to be?”

He sits across from me while I give him the nutshell. He congratulates me on the Dragons job, then listens quietly as I tell him about Schruft and quitting school. “So,” I say, “that’s it. I quit. School’s done.”

“They let you use the computer labs?”

I grin. It’s such an inane question, but it’s so Salim. “I guess they haven’t been told to kick me out yet.”

“What did your parents say?”

I shrug. “Nothing they can do about it now.”

He inclines his head. “Worried your boyfriend will not be selected to play?”

“A little,” I admit. “But he’s got a good chance.”

He nods. “There are many things to be worrying about, but it’s nice that school isn’t one of them, at least. I have to complete this factory design by next week and the rest of my group seem to think some magical spirit is going to come do the work for us.”

Talking to him about his school issues, marvellously, eases my tension. I promise to call him more often, since he is the only one of my friends to have met Dev. We share a piece of butterscotch apple tart a la mode while he asks me more about the Dragons job, and then about what it’s like to be done with school.

“It doesn’t feel complete,” I admit. “I still walk around feeling like I should have schoolwork.”

“Like a phantom limb,” he says.

I chuckle. “Yeah. Kind of like that.” A lot like that, now that I think about it.

“Well,” he says, “one treatment that has proven effective is a mirror box.”

“A what?”

He tucks one paw under his arm and holds up both arms. “It is a box that tricks the patient with mirrors. It appears to him as though his left arm is his right, and right is left. So when he moves both arms, he thinks he sees the phantom limb moving.”

I raise an eyebrow. “And that helps?”

His little shoulders shrug as he unfolds his arms. “It appears so.”

“The mind is a tricky thing.” I sip what’s left of my water.

“Never underestimate the power of the mind.”

I chuckle and nod. “What is mind?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he flips back immediately. “What is matter?”

“Never mind.” We share a chuckle at our TV quote, but in the back of my head I’m thinking about what he said. It sounds silly. Doesn’t it?

Unburdened by schoolwork, I stay after he has to leave to work on his project. The coffee is terrific here, especially the house specialty, a cinnamon soy latte with a dark Mediterranean espresso shot. They make a canid version, with less of the sharp cinnamon powder for our sensitive noses, which is what I nurse as I look around the postcards. The further you get from the coffee counter, the sparser the postcards become. It looks like Haley put up a new batch since the last time I was here, six months or so ago, so I wander over to look at them.

Someone went on a South Seas cruise. I can’t read the name. A “Hirosaki” (first or last name?) sent a postcard from overseas. The description says, “The beautiful and majestic. Futaki is mountain of strength, signifying life.” I turn it over, and the mountain lives up to its billing. Nice. There’s another card from Josie in New South Upper Something. She shouts out to “the gals in block D.” Another, of red outback dust dunes, has smudges of the real stuff on the back, turning the signature under the cheerful “A friendly native promised to deliver this!” into an unreadable blotch. Then I spot familiar handwriting, and crouch to read the card.

“I miss all you guys. The coffee here sucks. Shoot an espresso for me, and be nice.” It’s signed, “B. D.” That’s Brian, his little nickname for himself that nobody else ever used, after a famous comic strip character. I touch the postcard, catching a faint trace of skunk scent. It was posted nine months ago, the start of Brian’s first year in his new college, and sure enough, that’s what’s pictured on the other side: a red brick building with “Stubbaker Hall” in yellow floofy script slapped over the image.

I drop the card and straighten. “Be nice,” something the FLAG group used to say to each other, from the little sticker that says “Mean people suck; nice people swallow.” An inside joke, a desperate attempt to tell us he’s still part of our group even though he’s miles away, even though he ran from his problems here and left us to face them.

Sort of the same way I’m running, I think, but of course it’s not like that at all, is it? He was running away; I’m running toward. At least, I think I am. I sit back down and sip at my latte, looking around at all the postcards. I hate holding Brian up as a yardstick, but if I think of it, we were so similar, up until that night he got himself beaten up. He quit after that, ran off to a safe place and only came back to stalk me when he was afraid I wasn’t carrying on his legacy for him.

I take the latte out to the sidewalks, heading home, but the memories follow me. Was that all there was to it? Did Brian really care about me, and I was so wrapped up in Dev and my life here that I just kicked him to the side? I think of the easy nights we shared, the good times and the conversations, and I wonder if maybe he would understand what I’m going through right now. I know I shouldn’t call him, but staring at his handwriting took me back forcefully. Even talking to Salim, who never knew Brian well, reminds me of the skunk.

When we talked over Christmas, I remember being angry, but he’s respected my privacy since then. I want to spend more time with Salim, but he’s busy, and I can’t call my tiger, not yet, not while I still might blow up because I’m not sure what the hell I’m feeling. Brian’s an expert at that. He always used to tell me what I’m feeling.

So I look up his number when I get home and call, though I dial from the room phone, not the cell. I tell myself it’s about minutes and cost, but really it’s because I don’t want him to have that number. It makes my fur prickle, to want to talk but to maintain that distance, but I put it out of my head. Brian always did say I thought too much.