Out of Position (47 page)

I feel my fists clench. “Sorry to have disappointed him.”

Lee’s tail swings around across one of his knees. “I felt bad for him, okay? I mean, not when he sent me crap like that, but he used to be my best friend.”

“I used to be straight,” I say. “Get over it.”

His head jerks up, ears flat. “I’m trying to explain to you what the fuck has been going on!”

We stare into each other’s eyes. “I’m trying to understand why you kept going to see this guy who wants to see me out of the league.”

“We have a history. I can’t — I couldn’t just drop him like that.” I must have some kind of look that clues him in to how I’m feeling, because he gets snarly. “Yeah, I know it’s easy for you going from college to one team to another. I forgot, you don’t keep friends, you just make new ones.”

“I kept you,” I snap.

His fur smooths down. His voice, when he continues, is lower, though there’s still a flash in his eyes. “I tried to make him see how good a thing we have. But he has… well, you know why it’s hard for him to accept that.”

In that moment, I wish I’d been one of the players who’d beaten him up, so I could have the satisfaction of looking back on the memory. Just for that moment, though. “Yeah. So what
have
you been doing with him?”

He’s avoiding my eyes again. I can’t figure out what could be worse than sleeping with Brian. “We’ve mostly just been talking.”

“About me.”

“No!” Now he looks up, glaring at me. “About me.”

Our muzzles are an inch apart. I back away from his intensity. “Okay, about you. About…” I realize I only know what Brian had to say about me. I have no idea what he would’ve said about Lee.

“About what I’m doing with my life. About what we used to talk about, back in college.”

I can’t let the pause go on too long. “The cabin in Freestone? The cockatoos?”

“Not just that.” He pauses, his voice less sharp when he goes on. “Yes. But more. We were gonna change the world. He’s still trying. I’m…”

“Sorry,” I say. “But are you counting his writing lies about me on the Internet as ‘trying’?”

“I’m not saying he’s going about it right.” He pulls himself up on the bed and crosses his legs, curling his tail around his lap. His ears are still back, not a good sign. But he’s still naked. You don’t break up with someone naked; you’d get dressed.

I lean back to face him. “How would you be doing it?”

His blue eyes flash. “You gonna let me talk, stud?”

I hold up a paw, splayed. “Not stopping you.”

His ears come up, partway. He takes a breath. “When I met you, you know, I was in FLAG. I was all set to go into my senior year in English. I was probably going to live with my parents until I found somewhere to live. Well, let me back up. Originally, Brian and I planned to find a place together and be starving artists.” I have to bite back the comment. I promised to let him talk. “Then… well, you know what happened to Brian. So that was gone, and I didn’t really have anyone to pal around with anymore. I was kinda taking that frustration out in a lot of ways.”

He checks me. I nod to show him I get what he means. “But I was still in line to get my degree, and I had… a new hobby.”

I can’t keep the words in. “That’s all I was?”

“Was I more to you, back then?” I lower my head. “Yeah. Then it got more serious. And I wanted that.” I catch the past tense and it makes my ears go down. “And then the whole thing with Morty and the Dragons came up, and poof, my degree was gone. I barely talk to my parents anymore.”

“You wanted the job with the Dragons,” I point out.

“Of course I did. I still do. But you know how hard that was for me.”

I force sympathy into my voice. “Yeah.”

“I’m just saying… in two years I went from gay rights activist and English major to a football scout who’s… who’s in the closet.” His look defies me to contradict him. I resist. “If you’d told me back in ’05 that I’d be closeted, that I’d be sharing my boyfriend with a fake girlfriend, or, what, fiancée now, that I wouldn’t have finished my degree…”

“Do you want to quit your job?”

“Of course not!” He wrings his tail. “That’s the problem. I want this, too.” He looks right at me. “I love you.”

My heart skips. “Love you, too.” Some of the anger at Brian melts away, but I can still feel it simmering inside me.

“Brian reminded me of who Wiley Farrel used to be. And could be again, sort of. We talked about old times, we talked about the political stuff that’s going on now.”

“I’ll talk about politics with you if you want.”

He keeps playing with his tail. “It’s not about that. It’s just… it’s been really hard this year, being apart from you so much. I feel like I’m going through all this and I’m not getting any benefits.” He holds up a paw as my mouth opens to speak. “And then I see you, and I feel like it’s all worth it. I know you can’t get yourself traded back to Hilltown. I can’t get a job in Chevali. So I just have to come to grips with how to deal with that. Talking to Brian, hanging out with him, was one way of doing that.”

Now he pauses. Even though he’s still looking at his tail, I feel like he’s waiting for me to say something. “So… what? You want my permission to keep seeing him? You didn’t ask before.”

“No.”

Silence again. “Then what? Come on, doc, you’re scaring me.”

“I told you all that so you’d have a sense of what I’m going through — what I’ve been going through this year.”

“I know it’s been hard,” I say. “I haven’t made it any easier.” I’ve had the thundercloud feeling ever since getting out of the shower, but now it feels more like sitting in my basement, back when I was nine, with the sirens blaring and my mother trembling as she holds me, all of us straining to hear the train-whistle shriek of the tornado. That time, it passed us by. But I’m all alone with the vast expanse of the bed between us, nobody to hold me and tell me it’ll be all right. That, I get with a flash, is what Lee’s supposed to be doing.

“That doesn’t excuse…” His voice trails to a whisper.

“What?” He flexes his paws, doesn’t answer. “You already said you didn’t sleep with him. So, what, just hand jobs?” I say it lightly, but the look he gives me, ears back and looking miserable, shocks me to seriousness. “Jesus Lion Christ, really?”

“Just once. And it’s not what you think. I didn’t want to…”

I thought I’d been able to put aside the worry that he’d slept with Brian. This feels just as bad, worse because I wasn’t expecting it. How could he lie to me about that and then drop that bomb? I get up from the bed and look for my boxers. Suddenly I don’t want to hear anything else. “I’m sure. It was all an accident, right? You were just over talking gay politics and then oops, your paw’s in his lap.”

“It was for you.”

My boxers are half under the bed. I grab them and yank them on, folding my arms to glare down at him. “For future reference, if you’re going to get me a present, I prefer video games.”

He gets up from the bed. He still can’t look me in the eye, but he’s closer. “Will you stop being an ass and let me explain?”

I don’t want to, but I can’t leave yet, not in my boxers. If he were going to break up with me, I tell myself, he’d have done it already. I manage to keep the sharpness from my voice, but I can’t stop my tail from lashing. “The guy hated me!” He looks at me, still miserable. I fold my arms. “Okay. Why?”

He looks away, out the window where you can see the top of some red brick building on the Aventira College campus. “I think he started to obsess about me because it was after he left Forester that everything went downhill. He never found another community, never felt at home again. So he… he came on to me a couple times.”

“I knew it.”

“Not until this fall,” he snaps. “I told you, we never did anything in college. I wasn’t lying about that.”

“No, I mean, I knew he was hot for you,” I say. “I believed you. Then.”

“You think this is easy for me?” I notice his fists are clenched, too. He relaxes them, slowly. “Well. I told him I wasn’t interested. He kept on about how he’d be better for me. Said you’d never give me what he said I deserve.”

“Yeah, yeah, the cabin and the cockatoos.”

“Openness. Security.” He holds up a paw before I can say anything. “I told him those things weren’t so important to me. He said I was blind. Christ, Dev, he was ranting on about it this one night, almost scaring me, and then he just broke down crying.”

“And then you gave him a pity jack-off.”

“I jacked him off because he threatened to out you.”

My jaw drops, just a bit. He waits for me to collect myself. “Well,” I say, “it doesn’t seem to have worked. Maybe you should’ve blown him.”

“You think I enjoyed it?”

“I don’t know! For the love of God, don’t tell me.”

“Really?” His tail swishes back and forth.

The gnawing in my stomach is either anger or jealousy. Probably both. “No,” I say. “Is that why you didn’t want to see me for a while?”

“No,” he says. “I already told you about that. He was threatening to take pictures of us. The pic of you and Caroll didn’t break us up, so he figured he’d get you kicked out of the league one way or another.”

“And then you’d leave me?”

His eyes slide away from mine. “That’s what he thought.”

“Would you?”

“Not for that.” The implication of those words hangs in the air, shutting me up. Lee goes on. “He flew me down a couple times to see him. I told him we’d taken a break. I hoped it’d cool him off or something. I thought if you got a starting job, that then you’d be safer, that whatever he did wouldn’t matter as much.”

“You were in Chevali and didn’t come see me?”

His ears flatten. “He knows where you live!”

“So you just let him dictate the terms of our relationship.”

“To save you from getting outed.”

I hold up one finger. “I hate to keep bringing this up…”

“I’m getting to that,” he snaps back. “And I was right, wasn’t I? What if this had happened while you were still a backup?”

I don’t have much response to that. I just glare at him and let him go on. “Anyway,” he says, “it’s started a discussion about gay players in football, and the more times that discussion comes up, the better it is overall. Eventually, someone’s going to — “

“Whoa, whoa,” I say. I think I’ve just figured out what’s worse than sleeping with Brian. “Hang on a minute. You told him it was okay to make that announcement?”

“What?” He stops in mid-pace, staring.

“Oh,” I say, “all that stuff about how some player’s got to be the first to come out, and about how it’s the best thing for the league, that had nothing to do with it?”

His tail is more lashing than swishing now. “You think I’d do that to you without asking?”

I shrug. “You and Brian were in that activist group for three years, four years. You can’t let go of him, and you’ve just told me how much you missed being that activist fox. So maybe you’re trying to have it both ways, keep your football job and your football boyfriend and still do something for the cause, right?”

The room is silent. I can see his back in the closet mirror. Even his tail isn’t moving. I can still smell the faint echoes of sex from the bed. “
And
you jacked him off.”

His voice is more anguished even than it was when he told me about losing his identity. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know!” I shoot back. “I just can’t let go of it.”

“What, ever?”

I stand really still. “You couldn’t have just hugged him or something?”

He searches my eyes. His nostrils flare, his eyes narrow, anger failing to hide the pain in them. He turns and walks to the closet. “I’ve told you everything now,” he says, pulling out a robe. “Maybe you should go.”

I find my pants and shirt and get dressed. Lee’s standing in his robe at the window, looking out at the college. I can hear the shriek of the tornado siren in my mind, dying out. I pick my way through the wreckage left behind, and leave the room without saying another word.

It’d be better if I didn’t have to drive to the hotel alone in the car, but even the radio turned up all the way can’t drown out the thoughts. He jacked off that skunk? I didn’t smell anything on him. Does skunk spunk leave a smell on your paws? How long did he have to wash before it came out? And he knew all that stuff that was going on with Brian and didn’t tell me about it?

Sure, but would I really have wanted to know? I had enough going on with trying to stay on the team, true, but there was just as much stress trying to figure out what he was doing, and suspecting him of God-knows-what.

And under all of this is the thing I don’t want to think about, the fact that I can’t offer him the life he really wants. It’s not the cabin in Freestone; even I am smart enough to realize that. It’s a life where we can introduce ourselves to friends as a couple, where we can maybe go to a gay pride festival and hold paws, where we can live together and share this life that we really do believe is ours.

Well, I thought it was ours. Now I’m not so sure. He seems to have been doing quite a bit of living on his own, without talking to me about it. Anger starts to fade to unease. It’s all well and good to think about how he betrayed me with Brian, and maybe with outing me…

No. I can’t really believe that of him. I was angry, and it fit, but though he didn’t deny it in as many words, his reaction, the hurt in his eyes and voice, told me more than any denial would have.

Probably the best thing for me to do is just stop thinking about it. Focus on tomorrow’s game. I’ll go to sleep, and in the morning I’ll be focused on football. Then after the game, I can worry about Lee, and Brian, and the rest of the complications in my life. As much as part of me wishes things could be easier, there’s a deeper part of me that knows that nothing worthwhile is easy. So when I do go to sleep that night, I try not to think about Lee too much. I fail, miserably.

 
Sunday morning, I get up feeling like not just my stomach, but my whole body is made up of butterflies or bees, frantic activity locked under my stripes. I’m consciously pushing away the drama with Lee. We’ve fought before, made up before. Now I have a game to focus on. So before our breakfast arrives, I go for a run, several laps around the hotel. The roller coaster of a week melts away until all that’s left is the navy blue and grey of Aventira. Charm doesn’t ask where I’ve been when I get back. We eat our breakfast in silence and head to the field together.