Out of Position (36 page)

This, of course, is not a good idea. I get his voicemail, because it’s an hour later where he is and he’s probably sleeping. But I start with, “So you don’t pick up the phone when I call,” and go on to tell him that I don’t want him to talk to me, that he can solve his own damn problems, and that if he doesn’t want to talk to me that I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t remember hanging up, but I must have at some point, because the phone is off when I wake up.

I’m on my way to the stadium when the phone rings, and it’s only then that I remember calling the night before. Ah, jeez. I hold the phone without looking at it, afraid to see Lee’s name on the caller ID. But I can’t not answer it, so I pick it up and thank God, it’s Ogleby.

“What?” I snap.

“It’s working!” he chirps gleefully. “Listen: At the Firebirds’ team dinner last night…”

“It wasn’t last night,” I cut in.

“This is from yesterday. Listen: At the Firebirds’ team dinner last night, there might have been the stirrings of romance in the air as backup cornerback-turned-backup-linebacker Devlin Miski was spotted with gorgeous starlet—gorgeous, did you hear that—Caroll Chavon, of “Panther House.” Miski, a second-year tiger, looked especially good alongside Chavon. This could be serious, as Miski has never been spotted dating a woman before.”

Something about that is making my whiskers tingle. “Where did that come from?”

“Did you hear that? ‘Looked especially good.’ You gotta keep seeing her, kid. It’s doing wonders.”

“Was that the pronghorn guy, whatsisname?”

“The photo doesn’t look half bad too, it’s from a cell phone, but still, you should dress up more often. I never seen that tux on you before. Did she pick it out?”

“Ogleby, where are you reading that from?”

“It’s some blog online, but don’t worry, blogs are as good as the major media these days, that’s what I hear.”

“Whose blog?”

“What does it matter? Listen, kid, I’m gonna call Caroll’s agent and show her this and set up some more places for you to be seen. Love ya.”

“Ogleby!” I almost drive through a red light. He’s already gone.

For the rest of the drive, I hold the phone like a raw egg, waiting for Lee to get my message and call. I want to call him, to ask him to look up this blog, but of course I can’t do that, can’t just follow up a drunken rant with a favor to ask. When I get to the stadium, I throw the phone in my locker and leave it there, take nothing but football out onto the field with me, and have a great practice.

That afternoon we’re free to work in the weight room. Here, I can let all the anger and worries about Lee come flooding back. I might’ve really done it this time, I realize. He was trying to work through problems and didn’t want to bother me with them, and I called up and shouted at him, drunk. Not like he hasn’t done his share of stupid things while drunk, but at least in his case he was trying to blow me, which isn’t something I can hold against him. So I punish myself in the weight room, stack on the plates and strain until my muscles are screaming at me that whatever I did, they still need to haul my sorry ass around and could I lay off just a bit? I let the barbell clatter back onto the rack and lie there breathing hard.

“Good workout,” I hear Fisher say.

I grunt a reply. All my anger at Lee gets shifted to him almost immediately. If I had time to think about it, I’d think it was weird how that happened. I have enough self-control to not start something in the middle of the weight room with who knows who else around and in earshot, but I don’t want to push my luck. I just hope my disinterested reply is enough to get him to go the hell away.

“Last time I pushed myself like that was before I met Gena,” he goes on. “Got dumped by a cute little tigress. Can’t even remember her name.”

“Dixie.” I get up and walk away from him, toward the dumbbells.

He follows me. “Oh yeah. I guess what I’m sayin’ is, I get how you’re feelin’, but you made the right choice.”

It’s the unfortunate timing of that remark, coming when I’m able to spin around and see that there’s nobody else in the weight room, that spurs me to finally reply. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He blinks. Facing me now, he puts his paws up. “Easy,” he says. “I just figured you told your friend… I figure you ended it, or somethin’. I might be wrong, but I never seen you as worked up as you been this week. Between moonin’ in the first practice and goin’ lights-out since then, that’s the way I figure.”

“Is that the way you figure?” I say.

Now he narrows his eyes. I see his shoulders bunch up and tense. He’s shorter than me, but more muscular, and in our sleeveless tops, the difference is obvious. For all that matters. “Don’t go off on me, rook.” A snarl creeps into his voice. “I ain’t gonna take the fall for your fucked-up state of mind.”

“Fucked up?” I get up in his face and shove him in the chest. “That’s what you think of me?”

He staggers back, recovers fast, and shoves me right back, harder. “You weren’t nothin’ like this last year.”

“Maybe I’m just getting tired of hiding it. Like Tony whatsisname.” I reach out to shove him again. He grabs my wrist. I twist it away and try again, more like a punch than a shove this time. He only partially deflects it.

“What?” I can’t tell if he’s startled at my comment or at the deflected punch. He doesn’t return the shove this time, but he doesn’t have to. I’m fired up enough.

“You know, just take your fucking holier-than-thou attitude and fuck off.” I want him to throw a punch at this point, so I can stop holding back.

He growls. “Fucked if you catch me bein’ understanding again.” He turns and stalks away.

Standing watching him, my fists clench. All the anger that’s been simmering in me for the last day boils up, and he’s still in the room, a convenient target. I stride toward him and grab his shoulder, spinning him around. “Understanding?” I yell.

He’s got football reflexes. He shoves me while I’m still yelling. “Fuck your understanding!” I push him into a weight bench, where he staggers and nearly falls. I run at him again, but he’s ready with a quick punch to the gut, which hurts even though I partially block it. He throws me sideways into the wall, and I come right back at him, landing one on his jaw and another in his upper chest.

He closes and we grapple, where he has the advantage because of his heavier frame and lower center of gravity. But I hold my own, which I think later is because he’s holding back and I’m not. We both get slammed into the wall a couple times, then he trips against a weight bench and I throw him to the floor.

My heart pounds as I stare down, panting. He stares back up, his tail lashing in time with mine. I want to say something devastating, something to hurt him in a way that our fight didn’t, but I can’t think of anything. What’s more, he doesn’t look angry at me any more, just kind of stunned, and now I feel worse because I let out all this anger and it isn’t helping anything. So I stalk out of the room, slamming my fist against one of the lockers in the hall outside as I pass it.

Logic filters slowly back into my head as I shower. There are lots of penalties for fighting with a teammate, up to suspension for a game. Water trickles between my ears and down the bridge of my nose. Fisher wouldn’t hesitate to have me suspended. Well, maybe he’d hesitate. Hopefully. But I’m not banking on it. And I’m not sure I don’t deserve a suspension, the way I’m feeling and the way I just acted. At the very least, I think he’ll report it and recommend a fine or something. Which is okay. Fines are a joke among the team. Twenty grand, thirty grand? Oh, man, I can’t buy that second car now. Even for someone like me, making league minimum, twenty grand would hurt but not a lot.

The one thing I resolve not to do is apologize. He deserved to get knocked around, and I’ll take the penalty for it. That, of course, reminds me of the thing I do need to apologize for. I figure it’s probably time I give Lee a call. The silence from him has been, what’s the word? Ominous?

When I take out the phone, I see I’ve missed a couple calls during practice and weight training, both from my parents. A little worried, I call back right away and get my mom on the line. I ask her what’s going on, and she says she was just going to ask me that, because they got this voicemail from me…

I have one of those moments when my fur feels like it’s going to crawl right off me. Of course the speed dial for Lee is right next to the one for home, and of course I didn’t listen very closely to the voicemail before I started talking, did I? Mom wants to know who I was talking to, because I haven’t really mentioned Lee around them at all, only once or twice hinted that I was seeing someone. I say something vaguely about blowing things out of proportion, but she keeps at me with the questions: Who won’t talk to me? Who did I used to trust? What did they do? Why did I say my bed smelted like them? Hookers, Mom, I say, which she doesn’t believe, but she finally gets tired of asking. Then I get questions about when I’m going to be in the starting lineup, which isn’t any easier. I’m finally rescued by the call waiting beep of my phone.

“That’s her, Mom, I gotta go,” I say. She says to call her if I’m having girl trouble. I finally get a good-bye out of her and switch lines with a breathless “hi.”

“Hey, kid, great news, I got hold of Caroll’s agent and you’re on for Saturday night. Saturday’s okay, right?”

“What?” It takes me a second to register the squeaky ferret voice.

“Saturday night, you’re not doing anything, right?”

Jesus. “Yeah, I guess… I mean…” I look around the locker room. A couple of the guys are in, joking around. “I need to check.”

“You need to check? What do you need to check, this is a no-brainer, you guys are getting along, you’re getting good press…”

“I need to check, okay? Talk to you later.”

I race home and flop down on the bed, now armed with a legitimate excuse to call Lee beyond apologizing for the drunken voicemail he never heard. I try to calm the flood of emotions in my head before I do. Fortunately, Ogleby has distracted me with a problem to be tackled, and the rest of it is all busy wondering what Fisher’s going to do about our fight. But there’s nothing I can do about that, and I do have to call Lee, so I take a breath and dial his number.

“Hi,” he says, answering on the first ring.

Just hearing his voice again gives me a wave of relief. A small one, but enough that I retract my claws from the sheet and feel the tension unwind from my shoulders and tail. “You feeling any better?”

“Somewhat. How about you?”

It takes me a little while to sort through the emotions of the last twenty-four hours. “Uh, fine. Hey, I guess Brian posted that picture of me.”

“You saw that?”

“Not yet. Ogleby did. He loved it.”

“What did you think?” He’s quiet, reserved in asking that question.

“Sounded like there was more to the post than Ogleby was seeing.”

“Mm. He’s a good writer when he puts his mind to it.”

“Can you send me the link so I can see it?”

“There’s not much… yeah, sure, I’ll do it.” I hear the beep of a laptop and typing sounds.

“What’s your schedule for this weekend?” I ask.

More typing. “I’m actually gonna be kind of busy.”

I wait for him to tell me with what, but it’s probably just more football games. Still, it takes me a second to remember to do the right thing. “Ogleby wants me to go out with Caroll again.”

“I figured it wasn’t a one-time thing.”

“So it’s okay?”

“Sure, I told you that.” He adds, after a pause and with less sharpness, “Thanks for letting me know.”

It’s almost like there’s nothing wrong. I let my tail hang over the side of the bed and put one paw behind my head. “So the weekend after? We’ve got New Kestle coming in, should be a good game.”

“Um… I’m going out to Freestone and Port that weekend.”

Something’s crept into his voice. My tail curls back up onto the bed. “The whole weekend?”

“It’s a long trip.”

“Fox?”

He sighs. “Look, I was thinking… you might need to focus on football ’til you win the starting job.”

“Of course I do,” I say. “So?”

“Soooo… I think I’m a distraction.”

I snort. “You’re just realizing that now?”

“I just mean that you need to have all your focus.”

“So I can only focus on one thing at a time?”

“Dev…”

I’m snagging the sheets with a claw. I retract it. “Sorry. So you don’t want to see me again until I’m a starter?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s what I heard.”

The sharp edge creeps back into his voice. “Then listen again. I just said I don’t think we should see each other until you crack the starting lineup.”

I stare across the room, out the window, and watch the lights on the office buildings downtown. I wonder if anyone in there is looking through their window at me. “You’ve seen Killer play, right?”

“Let me spell this out for you, stud. I have so much confidence in you that I know this isn’t going to be a long time off.”

“So, what then? You think I just need some extra motivation?”

“I don’t really want to do this either.” He sounds pained, or annoyed. Or both.

I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again to look at the light patterns. They are fixed, unmoving. I go to the window just to see the people on the street below. “Then if you don’t want to do this, and I don’t want to do it…”

“I know how hard it is to learn a new position. And I know what kind of opportunity you have there, and how important it is.”

“Jesus, Lee, why do we have to do this over the phone?” I put a paw against the glass. My reflection looks exhausted.

He chuckles, dryly. “Give yourself a minute. You’ll figure it out.”

“You know what I mean.” I do realize what I’ve said after that. I look at the tiger in the glass and smile. Before he has a chance to reply, I keep going. “You really think so?”

“I’ll see you within a month, I bet.”

I think about a month of nothing but my own paw. I think of Charm and his strip clubs. I can see flashing neon a couple streets over: a club that he says he went to, once. “You bet?”