Out of Position (45 page)

I can’t come up with any words. I’m trying to make a sound, but my throat seems to have closed up. Lee says, “You didn’t, did you?”

“No!” It explodes out of me as I jump to my feet. “Christ, what do you think… how would I… I don’t even have…”

“Settle down,” he says. “I didn’t think you did.”

“What am I supposed to have said?” I pace back and forth, looking out of the window. “And what else do you know? Is what you’re going to tell me part of all this somehow?”

“Let me talk,” he says.

I can’t stop the growling, but I can at least stop the words from coming. “All right. Go.”

“He says you offered to blow him.”

“
What?
” I stand stock-still. I’m imagining my teammates reading the blog, my friends, my parents.

Lee’s staying calm on the other end of the call. “It’s a lie, of course it is. The people in the comments are already kinda calling bullshit on him.”

“But it’s still out there! People are reading it!”

“I sent a message to the site admin. I hope we can get it taken down.”

I stare out the window into the fading light. “But it’s still up now?”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking hell.” I kick the sofa and march into the bedroom. “Did anyone else pick it up yet? How does that work?”

“It’s only been up for a bit.” He doesn’t sound particularly hopeful.

“Lion Christ, Lee, what do I do?”

“If I don’t hear from them in the next hour, I’ll call.”

“And what if it doesn’t come down? What if the other blogs pick it up? What if the
networks
pick it up?”

“Stay calm. He wants to rile you up.”

“It’s working,” I snarl.

“I know it’s working,” he says. “That’s why I’m trying to get you to settle down.”

I breathe. I go to the window and press my paw against it, staring into the evening without seeing anything. “All right,” I say finally. “I’m calm.”

“Don’t say anything publicly,” he says. “Just ignore him. Did you talk to the team?”

“Coach did.” I tell him about it.

“All right.” He taps the table again. “I’m gonna call Brian. I’ll try to get him to take it down.”

Now I look at the houses spread out beneath me. I wish I knew where Brian lives. “Tell him if it’s still up tomorrow morning, I’ll be at his front door to be more persuasive.”

“I have a better idea. Why don’t you come to my front door?”

“If I could, foxy,” I say.

He hangs up to call Brian, and I pace back and forth. I want to believe this will all blow over, that my life will go back to being simple and normal, but I don’t feel it. The light outside has faded quickly to darkness, so that when I look at the window again, there’s a tiger staring back at me. He doesn’t think this will go away soon, either.

Thursday is no worse than Wednesday, except that Lee hasn’t called me back by the time we start practice, so I have to wait until lunch to check my phone. He’s left me a voicemail, sounding tired. “The site admin said he’d look into it.” Nothing about whether it got picked up elsewhere, but as it turns out, he didn’t need to tell me. As I flip the phone closed, Coach calls my name. Barks it, more like. His ears are flat and his eyes narrow.

“We’re focusing on preparing for Aventira until Sunday,” he says. “After that I’ll see you in my office.”

“Yes, sir,” I say to his retreating tail. Steez hasn’t said anything to me beyond our normal practice talk, and neither has Gerrard. But I notice that there’s still a bunch of guys who won’t shower with me. Maybe more than yesterday.

Lee doesn’t answer his phone Thursday night. Or Friday morning. I know that he hasn’t abandoned me, but it’s hard to convince myself to feel that. My mood leads to slipping up in practice, until Steez yells at me, and then I focus again.

By the end of the day, I’m exhausted and my black mood hasn’t worked itself out. I feel like I can’t keep this up any more, and if I’m not going to be part of the team, then fuck it, I should just quit this whole thing. That comes into sharp focus as I walk in to shower. In my mind, I see the guys waiting for me to be done, silent and judging.

I happen to be passing Colin on the way in. He isn’t walking with anyone, but he doesn’t turn to talk to me. Fuck him. I say, “You can tell Brick and the others to go ahead and shower.”

He snaps his head around, then his ears fold back as if I’d said something distasteful. “Uh, what?”

I wave a paw at him and head to my locker. “I’m gonna make a phone call or something. You go take your shower. I’ll wait ’til all you assholes are done.”

“Hey,” he says, “if you’re refusing to face the consequences of your behavior, that’s your problem, but don’t take it out on me.”

“The consequences…” I turn and step in toward him. He’s almost as tall as I am, but I outweigh him. Considerably. “What behavior are you talking about?”

He straightens up. “I think you know.”

“Tackling running backs? Intercepting passes? Running shuttle sprints?”

His eyes narrow and his ears flatten further. I catch a scent of anger from him, with a surprising undertone of fear. “You may think it’s a joking matter, but your soul is going to suffer for it.”

“Don’t worry about my soul,” I say. “It’s tough.”

A little crowd has gathered around us, among them Ty, Brick and Gerrard. “Hey,” Ty says, “Lay off him.”

We both look to see who he’s talking to. He’s staring at Colin. The two foxes glare at each other. “Did you even see what was on the blogs yesterday?” Colin says, finally.

Ty throws up his paws. “Who cares? You got shit written about you, too.”

Colin takes a second to process that. I remember now, Penny talking at the dinner about the things “those writers” had written about Colin taking money. Colin jabs a finger at the other fox’s chest. “That was different.”

“How?” I step to one side, so I can get between them if there’s a fight. Carson, on the other side, does the same.

“Because all that was was about money,” he says, half-turning to face me. “It’s just some stupid rule that colleges made up to screw the student athletes.”

His eyes are wide, nostrils flared. Ty and I come to the same realization a second apart.

“Oh my God,” he says.

“You
did
take the money,” I echo.

“Hypocrite.” Ty folds his arms.

Colin opens his mouth to defend himself, but I get my words out first. “No, it makes perfect sense,” I say. “What they wrote about him was true, so he believes whatever he reads.”

“I don’t hear you denying it,” he says.

By this time, a good chunk of the team and several of the coaches are clustered around, listening. Strangely, the fact that Colin is on the spot with me makes me feel better, even if I kind of despise him right now.

“I haven’t read the whole thing that was posted yesterday,” I say, “but I absolutely did not call Brian or threaten him or offer to do anything to him.”

“So ya know him.” That’s Brick.

“Met him a couple times,” I say. “Let me tell you, I never had the urge to put his dick in my mouth or anywhere else.”

Colin folds his arms. “Why would he lie?”

“Why would you take money illegally?” His eyes narrow further. “Because he got something from it. He wants attention.”

“So he jus’ made the whole thing up?” Brick, again. “That other stuff, you and that fox, and Fish?”

Colin’s watching me, a team full of eyes behind him. I look across them and see Fisher, near the back. He shakes his head, minutely, just enough to let me know he’ll back me, whatever I say. I take a deep breath to say, yeah, he made the whole thing up. But I can’t look away from Fisher, and I can’t stop thinking about Lee.

Our life together. For him, for Colin, maybe it’s not that hard to hide the parts you’re ashamed of, the parts you don’t want people to see. But for me, the people I’m close to, I have a hard time keeping parts of my life away from them. I’ve almost come out to my parents a dozen times, and I only see them on holidays. If I lie to the team now, it just increases that separation I’ve been feeling. In a way, Brian’s made-up story has given me a chance to take the high road.

Colin says, “Well?” I look at Fisher again, raise my eyebrows slightly in a question. A couple of the guys look back at him.

“Fish,” Brick rumbles. “’Zit true?”

Fisher looks at me, only at me. I can’t tell from here what his expression means. But it’s not his decision to make, it’s mine. I’m sure he’d lie for me if I didn’t say anything.

“It’s true,” I say.

All the eyes come back to me, like I’m staring across at the biggest offensive line in history. “I didn’t want it to come out. Not really anyone else’s business. But this guy, Brian, he has a grudge against me. I wasn’t good enough at keeping it secret.” I look around at the interest, disapproval, flattened and perked ears, narrowed and wide eyes, nostrils flaring. Nobody’s taken a step back yet. “Trust me,” I say, “I don’t give a shit what the rest of you do on your time off, and I sure as hell hoped you didn’t care what I did. I leave it all out on the field, like we all do.”

“Hear, hear,” Gerrard says.

“Pretty speech.” Brick rumbles. “I don’t want you checkin’ me out in the shower.”

“Hell, Brick,” Charm booms from his locker. He towers over the crowd, his wide grin bright white. “I do that m’self.”

A couple guys chuckle. Brick squints. “Figures,” he says. “Roommate.”

Charm shrugs. “Gramps is too flat. I like your tits, though.”

More chuckles. Colin glares in their direction. “This isn’t funny,” he says. “Sodomy is no joke.”

“Listen,” Gerrard says. “Dev’s gonna keep his life to himself. Might be a good idea if you do the same. When we’re in this room, we’re a football team.”

“Hear, hear.” In a near-perfect imitation of Gerrard’s words, Coach Samuelson steps past the coyote and through the crowd. He glances at Gerrard as he passes. “You wanna coach this team?”

The players make way for him. He faces me. “My office, five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

To the rest of the team he says, “Marvel’s got it dead on. In this building, out on that field, we are a team. We have to be able to trust each other out there.” He points the other way, to the exit. “Out there, I don’t care. But I’ll tell you, I’ve played on a couple championship teams, and what they had in common was a group of guys who believed in themselves, believed in each other, and played together, as a team. I’ve told you that before, but you haven’t been tested. This’ll show what kind of character you have.” He crooks a finger at me. “Now, the rest of you, hit the showers. See you in a couple hours at the airport.”

He closes the office door behind me. I fidget as he stares at me without saying anything. Finally, he shakes his head. “Fuckin’ hell, Miski, I am runnin’ out of linebackers.”

“Yes, sir.” My heart sinks.

He chews on a pencil. “I don’t like it that you lied to me, but I get why. Better not happen again. What I need to know is: Can you play Sunday?”

“Hell, yes!” It explodes out of me. I hadn’t realized until I feel the wash of relief how deeply I’d been sure that that scene was the end of my career, or at least the end of my starting gig.

Coach grins, the first time I’ve seen a real grin from him this week. “Hell, yes you can,” he says. “We’ll deal with this other crap after the game.”

It feels more like a stay of execution than a reprieve, but I’ll take it. I want to kiss him, but that probably wouldn’t be the greatest idea. Still, I feel terrific until I get in my SUV and wonder exactly what Coach meant by “deal with this other crap.”

“Probably,” Lee says, sensibly, when I call him, “he means, ‘deal with this other crap.’”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Any other reaction from the team?”

“Not really.” I keep my speed down on the surface streets now, with an eye out for cops. “They were mostly gone when I left, except for Fisher.”

“He’s still feeling guilty,” Lee says. “Oh, that reminds me. Guess who else was on that team with Calhoun.”

“Huh? Someone I know?”

“Samuelson.”

“Coach?” It seems bizarre, but then I remember the way he looked at me, making me feel like I was an old problem come back again. I think about how hard he hit the point that playing the game was all that mattered to him. I try not to think about his “livestock” comment. “Jesus, that figures.”

“Did he say something?”

“Nah, just the way he acted. I think he knew about Fisher, too.” I tell him Fish’s confession, briefly. “So where have you been? Or is this one of the things you’ll tell me tomorrow?”

“Just working,” he says. “I talked to Brian. He’s not going to take it down. The site admins aren’t moving fast on it either. I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

“Fucking piece of shit.”

“Quite.” He coughs. “On the positive side, it doesn’t look like the post is getting much traction anywhere else that I can see. It’s hit a couple other sports blogs. Your old roommate piped up on your behalf to testify that you’re straight as an arrow. Some random guy claims he saw you going into a hotel with a male prostitute, but someone else pointed out that you played in a preseason game on the other side of the country later that day and that it probably wasn’t you. Also, uh, someone quoted a maid from a hotel who says she saw a naked male fox in a room where a tiger was staying at the combine a couple years ago.”

“That could be anyone!” He doesn’t say anything. “Lee?”

“You’re right,” he says. “It could be anyone, so it doesn’t matter who it was, right?”

I shake my head even though he can’t see me. “You owe me a story, mister.”

I keep talking to him all the way home, about how the team will react, how I should act, and so on. He thinks I’ll be able to keep playing as long as it doesn’t make it out into the mainstream media. I’m not so sure, but I am pretty motivated to prove my case on Sunday. What it all comes down to, as far as the coaches and Gerrard are concerned, is whether I can play. If I haven’t proven that in six weeks when Corey comes back from his goring, I’ll be benched, and then traded, if not outright cut. After we hang up, I look down and realize I’m going fast again. I ease up on the pedal. I feel a lot better knowing he was just working, though I’m not sure what I was thinking he might have been doing. I’ve got too much stuff I’m trying to keep in my head now to be able to sort that out.