Out of Position (37 page)

“Sure.”

“All right, then.” Several people turn down the street with the neon. I wonder how many of them are going to the club. “How about this for a bet? You can’t jerk off ’til you see me again.”

That gets a startled laugh out of him. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” I say. “You really have confidence in me? Prove it.”

“All right,” he says, “but you have to play, too.”

I look out at my reflection. “No jerking off?”

“No coming of any kind, by any means.”

“For either of us.”

He sounds more relaxed than at any other point during the call as he says, “Deal. And Dev?”

“Hm?”

“That includes Caroll.”

I laugh. “I’ll be sure to tell her. Can we still talk on the phone? You and me, I mean.”

He returns my laugh and says the next thing in his Lauren Bacollie voice. “Just try and stop me, handsome.”

So I go back to the bed and tell him about the message I left for my parents. “I was drunk,” I say, “and you were acting weird. Thank goodness my mom got it first.”

“Yeah. Sorry,” he said. “The shock of seeing your apartment. I didn’t expect it to hit me like that.”

“I thought it was the dinner. Hey, had you seen Brian’s post about it?”

He hesitates. “No. I would’ve told you.”

Of course he would have. So why do I feel a weird twinge, an urge to press him further? “I should have pointed my mom to it,” I say. “I told her I’m dating a hooker, but she didn’t buy that.”

He laughs. “How long before she asked when you were going to be starting?”

“Oh, that’s second on the list. After girlfriends for her, and after the auto shop for my dad.”

“Well,” he says, “you’ll have an answer for them pretty soon.”

“I’d better,” I say, “or my balls will explode.”

I call Ogleby back after that and tell him that Saturday night is free. I’m feeling good, lying back in bed again, about ready to go out on the town for a nice dinner. Or at least, you know, Mick’s fried chicken and cheese fries. And then, in the middle of the conversation, Ogleby squeaks out, “Great, oh, and I’ll let you know about the timing on the engagement.”

“Okay,” I say. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, her agent and mine got to talking and her agent said there’s nothing to generate press like an engagement, so we were thinking that when there’s been a little more exposure and a little more press out there, it’d be a real plus for you guys to announce an engagement. Then you could spend a few months planning the wedding and being seen together and then maybe with other people, and then the engagement gets broken off, unless you really do like each other in which case there’s a wedding before you split up. Or maybe we can do the wedding anyway, I dunno, if you’re more traditional we don’t have to do that.”

“Ogleby, what the fuck… ?”

“Okay, so you’re more traditional, no problem, just the engagement, then. Tell your parents beforehand so they don’t freak out. Listen, it’s cool, I’ll handle all the press writing. You don’t have to do anything except go on dates, and you’re cool with that, right? So listen, Saturday you’re going to Pinchot’s, you know where that is?”

“Jesus, we’re in Crystal City next weekend and I can’t go out the night before a game and I can’t get engaged!”

“You just said you could go Saturday night. Pinchot’s is one of the best restaurants in Crystal City and Caroll lives there and I told you not to worry about the engagement, I’ll handle all of it. Come on, kid, nobody takes engagements seriously these days.”

“I can’t get engaged. I’ll do Saturday night, but I can’t get engaged, so just — “

“I hear you, kid, but look, no offense, you need to focus on football and let me handle your personal life, okay? You want to be making rookie pay the rest of your career or you want some endorsement packages?”

I sit up in bed and shout into the phone. “No engagement. Listen to me. No engagement.”

“We’ll talk about it,” he says. “Go settle your midwestern tail and have tun Saturday night.” And then he hangs up on me.

I know I ought to call Lee back, but we ended the last conversation on such a nice note that I don’t want to ruin it. So I just go down to Mick’s, order a plate of grease, and call Caroll. It’s an hour earlier in Crystal City, she’ll be up.

“Engagement?” she says. “Sure, makes sense.”

“I can’t do it,” I tell her, spooning congealed cheese off the plate with the last of the fries.

“Why not?”

Because I just made up with my boyfriend who’s worried that me moving into a loft is pulling me away from him, and if he was worried about
that… “
I just can’t.”

Between the noise where she is and the noise of Mick’s, I can barely hear her. “Okay, I’m sort of at a thing here. We’re going out Saturday, right? Let’s talk about it then.”

“All right.” I hang up and sit at Mick’s drinking beers for another hour until curfew. The coaches sometimes call to make sure we’re home, and I need to be rested anyway. Lee and Ogleby are right. I need to focus on football.

The next day, I show up apprehensive, waiting for Coach to tell me I’m suspended or fined or both. I wait through morning practice, and nothing happens. Steez doesn’t come over to me at lunch. Afternoon practice with the whole defense goes without a hitch, a fine, or a suspension. Coach’s post-practice speech ends without him asking me to stay behind. In the locker room, I finally catch Fisher’s eye.

He gives me a surprising look, a little guilty and a little angry, not what I’d expected from him. I try to corner him afterwards, but he puts me off, saying he’ll talk to me later and then disappearing. I’ve got his cell phone number, but I’m not about to chase him. Instead, I call Lee and tell him about the fight. “Leave it,” he says. “If he wants to talk to you, he’ll find you.”

It’s good advice, but I keep trying to corner Fisher anyway. He dodges me during the all-defense practices, and disappears at the end of the day before I finish dressing. Friday, he gets on the plane to Crystal City late, sitting at the other end from where I am, and everyone’s so jazzed about our first game that I barely notice. The practice Friday afternoon at the stadium is by group, so I don’t see him then; the one Saturday morning is all-defense but he skips it with some kind of minor injury, and Saturday afternoon and evening we’re supposed to study film, which doesn’t lend itself to conversation. The evening film session is optional, and of course, I have other plans.

Pinchot’s is one of those places that makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong, only nobody will tell me what. The pangolin in the tux who greets us gives a little sniff when I don’t give him my coat. The grey fox who takes our order takes the menus back fast, with a flip, the way I’d grab a football away from a rookie who was holding it wrong. I don’t say anything to Caroll, because I don’t want to sound like a rookie myself, but it makes me self-conscious, hunching slightly over the table.

I order chardonnay out of habit, and because I don’t really know anything else. We’re into the appetizer, or rather, I’m into the appetizer and she’s watching me eat a skewered shrimp, when she brings up the engagement. “Why does it bother you?”

She’s got on a formal red dress, which looked strapless until she sat down and I saw the thin lines through parts in her fur. It accentuates her chest, not that it needed it, and she’s run a few matching red highlights through her head fur. There’s also a pretty orange pendant she’s wearing, part of a set with her earrings. I spent the first few minutes of the meal just staring at her, wondering how she manages to look so good and make it seem so effortless. Lee can do that too. I don’t know anyone on the team who can. Aston, maybe.

“I don’t know.” I turn my fork over and over in my paw. “It’s a lie. I don’t want to do that.”

Caroll smiles. “That’s sweet, really it is, but you do understand that you’re lying all the time, right? To your friends, your family, your teammates. When you don’t tell the truth, that’s a lie. Going out with me is a lie. Yes, it’s okay, I’m lying too.”

“But it’s…” I try to come up with the right words. “It’s a big public lie.”

She shrugs. “When you’re a public figure, your whole ‘image’ is a lie.”

I stab the last shrimp and swipe it through the cocktail sauce. “Can you believe this is a twenty-dollar appetizer?” I say. “There were, what, five shrimp?”

“Six, I think.” She grins. “But they came in a cut crystal goblet.”

I slide my finger along its edge. “And look at the tablecloth, and they gave me a special fork just to eat the shrimp with. I don’t need a special fork. I have claws.”

“Some people want the special fork,” she says, picking it up and looking at her reflection in its shiny-clean surface. “They want the tablecloth and the snooty waiter and the expensive-looking paintings on the walls and all of it.”

The chardonnay, I have to admit, is good. Better than the first time I had it, at that dinner out with Lee the night Brian came to my apartment to try to scare me off, or something, and that was the best chardonnay I’d had until tonight. I’ll have to take Lee here, I think. He’d enjoy it.

“You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you? Someone for real.”

I jerk back to meet her eyes. “Wha—I mean, I…”

She laughs. “Calm down. I know that look. It’s sweet, really. So what, someone your agent doesn’t feel is appropriate for you? Not a cat, or doesn’t know how to behave in public? Something like that?”

“Um. Something like that.” I fiddle with my silverware, looking down. 

“My mother loves the fact that I’m dating a football player,” she says. “I haven’t had the heart to tell her it’s fake. I think she knows, on one level, but she doesn’t expect it to work out with any of my boyfriends anymore, so I’ll just let it go until we officially break it off.”

“I hope we can still be friends,” I say as lightly as I can manage.

Her eyes sparkle in the light of the chandelier. “I don’t imagine that’ll be a problem. You’ve already got my personal cell phone number.”

“You have more than one cell phone?”

“I have a business line, which is what I give out to most people. That was the first number I gave you. Remember when I gave you the other number, after the dinner?”

I feel like an idiot. “I thought… jeez, I thought you’d just changed phone numbers.”

Her laughter makes the leopard at the next table turn and gawk at her. When he turns back, his wife (or girlfriend) gives him a nasty glare. Caroll sees the look and whispers, as we turn our attention back to each other, “Someone’s not gettin’ any tonight.”

“I dunno,” I say. “If he just apologizes…”

She chuckles. “My next to last boyfriend used to look at other femmes constantly. I made him buy me a rose for every time he looked at someone else. I had a bedroom full before too long.”

“Was that the cokehead or the cheater? Wait, I think I can guess.”

“No, that was the trophy hunter. He dumped me when he saw a chance to trade up to Tawny Blackfoot.”

“It’s natural for guys to look, though. A rose every time?”

She sips her own glass of wine, which I think is a rosé or something. It’s pink, at any rate. “It was a game. After the first time, he used to look at another femme every time he wanted to give me a rose. He could afford it. Daddy was a studio exec.”

“Is that why you were dating him?” I regret the question as soon as I ask it; it sounds mean. But she just shrugs.

“Of course. He was a nice guy, too. That makes a difference.”

“I’d hope so.”

The main course arrives, her halibut and spaghetti (it was called something fancier on the menu) and my lobster and steak (she grimaced when I called it “surf’n’turf”). It might not be worth fifty bucks, but I gotta admit, it’s damn good.

I order a chocolate cake for dessert, and it’s this tiny round thing smaller than my paw, so I order another one.

“We don’t have to do it if you’re really not comfortable with it,” she says while we’re waiting.

I look at her and think through it. Admittedly, it’d make things a little easier with the team, wouldn’t it? And I really don’t think Lee would mind. But each time I get close to that place, thinking about announcing my intention to marry the beautiful panther across the table from me, something goes cold at the back of my neck, and I get that feeling like when I look across the field and see the ball flying to an open receiver. “I don’t know why, but it bothers me.” I keep my voice down. “I feel like a total tool. I know you’re right, I know this goes on all the time, but… but it was always
them
doing it. Not me.”

“Them?” She flicks an ear. “You mean us?”

The second chocolate cake arrives then, and I dig in because I don’t know whether she’s including me in that “us” or not, and I don’t want to answer one way or the other. “You going to talk to your real S.O. about it?” she asks as I finish off the cake, adding, “No thanks” to the last bite I offer her.

“I’ve been putting it off,” I say. “I thought I could get out of it, and then I wouldn’t have to even bring it up.”

“And you’d never say anything about it at all?”

“Sure,” I say, “but then it would be in a “can you believe what they wanted me to do?” story.” I run my finger down the dessert menu without seeing it.

“And you could say how you stood up and said This Will Not Stand, right?”

I grin. “Something like that.”

“And then what would she say?”

The question catches me off guard. I stare up at the painting above Caroll’s head, some kind of fuzzy abstract of fruit, and imagine how the conversation would go. “I think,” I say slowly, “I think, that it was very nice of me, but really she didn’t mind, or wouldn’t have minded, or something to that effect.”

“It doesn’t make it less valid that it’s just for you,” she says. “You want coffee?”

“Not for twenty bucks,” I say. “Isn’t there a Starbucks around here?”

She rolls her eyes, but takes me to a nice little shop called the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, which she prefers because it has lots better tea than Starbucks. The lattes are good, too, not that I can really tell the difference. Our pronghorn reporter doesn’t follow us past the restaurant, so when we leave the coffee shop, we’re on our own. Caroll seems a bit disappointed, but I like the solitude. By the time we part, I’m feeling better about the engagement. I feel like I can use a lot of her words to explain it to Lee, and it’ll be okay. So I tell her I’ll do it, and she promises to tell her agent so I don’t have to talk to Ogleby.