Out of Position (54 page)

I spread my paws. “I’m here now.”

He sighs and gets up. “Yeah. Want a beer?”

“No,” I say, but when he comes back from the kitchen he has two bottles. He holds one out to me. “I said, no, thanks.”

“It’s non-alcoholic.” He keeps it extended toward me even when I wave it away.

“Then what’s the point?” But I take it, mostly so he’ll go sit down again. It’s not bad; cold, at least, and not too foul-tasting. Kind of watery, more than anything else, like it’s mostly meant to remind me of what beer is.

“Point is to feel cool without losing control, right?” He sits in the middle of the couch again, turning to face me as he hefts the bottle.

“If you say so.” I take another drink. “So, look, can you just drop it with Dev?”

He shakes his head. “You don’t see how it all connects, do you?”

“Enlighten me.”

“I’ve been trying.” He takes a drink himself. “I’m just a symptom. The isolation here, it’s all because of the barriers in our society. If I can knock down those barriers, then maybe I have a chance to find some companionship.”

Underneath, you know, people don’t really change that much. To Brian, life’s just a morality play, with him at center stage. “It’s not society that’s keeping you alone,” I say. “It’s your sparkling personality.”

He takes another drink and gives me a baleful look. “That hurts.”

“Really. How many friends did you have in college, besides me?” He opens his muzzle. “Not counting your one-night-stands.”

He sniffs. “You, Liz, Allen, Jake.” He thinks. “Randy, I guess.”

“Everyone from FLAG.”

“Exactly.” He points a finger at me. “Exactly.”

I swig the non-beer again. “Brian, it’s only because you never really made an effort to hang out with anyone else. Nobody from the theater outside the shows. Nobody from your classes.”

“Beatrice called me a couple times.”

“Who was she, your acting coach?”

“So I don’t always have a lot of friends.” He looks at the bottle in his paws. “I always really cared about the ones I had.”

Did you? I wonder. But I keep quiet. After a moment, he goes on. “It just sucks down here. I mean, I know I’m a big ol’ fag and all, but sometimes I just want that contact. I can curl up in bed, I can jerk off, but it’s…”

He sighs. And even though part of me recognizes that it’s manipulative, the weight of all our years behind us and his vulnerability now push me out of the chair. I can’t just sit next to him, though. I have to accompany it with a smart-ass remark. “Gee, don’t they have male prostitutes down here?” I say, as I plop down next to him, sweeping my tail around to the other side.

On the screen, a somewhat grainy hunk and hunkette are singing a duet. Brian relaxes and leans toward me, watching them with me for a moment before he responds. “Yeah, but they’re all these intimidating bodybuilders. More your type, really.”

“You never did figure out what my type is.”

“Neither did you.”

Our shoulders bump and press together. Even with my winter fur starting to come in, just the feel of being next to someone is nice. It’s so hard to spend weeks away from Dev, and I imagine that stretching on into months, years. “I know my type. He’s smart, funny, and cares about me. And,” I say as Brian opens his muzzle, “he listens to me.”

“Ah,” he says. “So close.”

“Not really,” I say lightly.

“Really?” He sounds far unhappier than I would’ve thought. “Why not?”

My ears flick back. I try to process the question, and the question behind the question. “I dunno, it just never really would’ve worked, would it? We’re both too similar, isn’t that what we always said?”

“That ‘opposites attract’ bullshit is just—bullshit.” He finishes off his bottle and puts it down. “We had such great talks.”

“Yeah. Corrigan Hall, second-floor lounge.”

“The roof of my apartment building.”

“The dining hall.”

“Where we figured out how people would never have to worry about sex again.”

“Not meaning it would go away,” I echo Jake’s comment when we’d said that at lunch, and Brian chimes in with the rest of the response, “just that we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

I laugh. He leans against me a little. “How did that work, again?” he says.

I shake my head. “Can’t remember. Something about safe sex and college dorms and…” His paw brushes my wrist. I move my arm, but then his fingers drop to my leg. He doesn’t seem to be making a move or anything, so I let it go. After all, in our talks in college, in our dorm rooms, we’d brush each other’s legs and not think anything of it.

And that’s when it hits me, why this room is familiar. The smell is different, the TV is bigger and shinier, the coffee table newer, but the same style, but as soon as I realize it, my ears flick back. It’s not just that the posters are the same ones that were in Brian’s dorm room. From this angle, sitting on the sofa with him leaning against me, I can see that the posters are set up in exactly the same configuration around the TV. The couch is the same size, the coffee table the same size, the beer bottle just where Brian used to put his bottles back in college. And the armchair, now that I’m not sitting in it, looks almost exactly the same.

I guess it’s not so strange for someone to keep going with a room that works for them. But the memory of Brian’s college room comes back so vividly that I start to feel a little unnerved by it. It’s like he wants to go back to his college days.

“It’s a good theory.”

I’ve forgotten what we were talking about. “What?”

He laughs. “Not worrying about sex. What the hell do you think?”

“Oh.” I try to recapture the thread of the conversation. “Couldn’t get anyone to buy into it,” I say.

“How is it with your guy?”

“Jesus, Brian.” I shift, start to get up.

“Oh, don’t be like that.” He presses on my leg, trying to pull me back down. “We used to talk about boyfriends all the time. Does he play rough? Does
he
like it rough?”

I stay halfway between sitting and standing. “We never threatened to publish things in our blogs, back in college.”

His paw rests on my leg, but he stops the pressure. “I wouldn’t do that,” he says.

“I didn’t think you’d publish info about his date with Caroll, either.”

“I never promised not to do that.” He grins. “Besides, I’m an activist. Like you used to be.”

I sit back down. “Does that mean you’re promising not to post anything we talk about tonight?”

“Cross my heart.” And he does. “Come on. If I’m not getting any, at least I want to hear about someone who is.”

I lean back into the couch. The truth is, I don’t really have anyone else I can talk to about Dev. I call Salim every now and then, but it’s not the same. “It’s really great,” I say. “I mean, you know how I used to say Micha knew just what to do?”

He gets comfortable against me. I don’t stop him. “Yeah.”

“Well, Micha only had, like, three moves.”

“So this guy’s a real freak?”

I grin. “No. He’s got about four moves, but they’re good ones.”

“Uh-huh.” His short muzzle dips a bit, showing me his ears, a habit he picked up from me. “Is it the muscles?”

“Part of it.” I chuckle. “You remember the guy you went out with?”

“Ken.”

“Yup.”

“Mmmm. But he was just a one-night thing.”

“Okay.” I stretch my arm back over the back of the couch, and he kind of settles against me. I’m not really paying attention to the TV any more, barely hearing the song the lead female is singing with her younger sister. “So imagine Ken’s body and, like, Allen’s mind.”

“He’s that smart?”

I flip my tail against the side of the couch. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“He’s a football player. You know what they’re—”

“Like I keep telling you, he’s different.”

“Right.” His paw rests on my leg again. I know I should have him move it, but there’s no harm in leaving it there. He’s not gonna do anything, and we’ve cuddled this close before without doing anything. “So whose sense of morality and relationships does he have?”

I flick my ears, leaving my arm on the sofa rather than putting it around his shoulder. “Mine.”

He sighs against me. “Sounds pretty good.”

“It is.”

We sit like that. He moves his fingers up and down along my leg, making it tingle. I’m about to tell him to stop when he says, “So why don’t you want to be able to be with him in public?”

I lean my head back to stare at the ceiling. “It’s not that easy.”

“You wanna know one of the things I learned?”

“You mean there’s something you haven’t already told me?” I lift my right leg a bit, trying to gently dislodge his paw, but it stays where it is.

“In the whole thing,” he says, head against my shoulder, his voice vibrating against my chest, “with me leaving Forester and moving down here, I learned that I… that we… overthink things.”

I let out a bark of a laugh, bringing my head down. “You
think?
”

He grins. “I know, I know. I mean, I shoulda stayed at Forester. I wanted to. But I kept thinking about what it was gonna be like there, with the whole victim thing, and the FLAG people and the theater and the football, and it just freaked me out.”

He sounds small. I drop my paw to his shoulder. “It was a freaky thing to go through.”

“And I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it.”

I don’t say anything to that. His paw tightens on my leg, then lifts. “We just talked about revenge,” he says. “We never really talked about what happened. What it meant.”

“I guess,” I say. His scent is a little stronger in my nostrils. “I mean, you didn’t seem to want to. And then…”

“I ran out,” he says.

I’d never heard him admit it before. I pull him a little closer. “Yeah, well…”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he says.

“I tried to get revenge for you,” I say.

He turns his head, looking up with one shiny eye. “Is that what you call it?”

“Yeah.” I grin. “Worked pretty good, too.”

“I’m touched,” he says. “What’d you do?”

I start to tell him, tail wagging against the couch, but just then his paw strays a little further in, brushing the crease of my jeans where my sheath is. “Hey,” I say. “I thought you were the one who was touched.”

I reach down to move his paw, but he’s quicker, pressing it against me. “Figured I’d even things up,” he says. “Anyway, feels like you don’t mind.”

I’m half-hard, sure, but just from sitting so close to someone and thinking about Dev in the bargain. I grab his paw and lift it away. “I didn’t come down here to…”

“To what?” He lifts his head and looks at me.

“To do that.” I take my arm from around his shoulder.

He sighs, leaning against my shoulder. “It’s just been so freakin’ long.”

“We saw friendships get ruined by relationships. We promised that’d never happen, right?”

“Hasn’t it?” He looks grim and forlorn all at once. I want to reassure him, to tell him that those days in the dorm lounge can come back again, but the truth is, I’ve moved on and he hasn’t. “Come on,” he says. “Where’s our friendship now?”

“I’m not leaving Dev.”

“I’m not asking you to.” He grabs my paw and presses it right to his pants. “I’m just asking you to help me out. Just a little bit.”

He’s hard and warm through his slacks. I don’t rub or anything, just try to pull away. “Jesus, Brian, if you wanted a quick paw job you could just go down to whatever Chevali’s version of Nineteenth Street is.”

“I don’t want it from just anyone.” He’s pretty insistent, keeping my paw there. “You know, if I felt less lonely…”

I yank my paw free and stare down at him, our muzzles a couple inches apart. From this distance, the gleam in his eye is unmistakable. So this was all an act, all of it. The remorse, the vulnerability. The friendship? “If you want me to jerk you off,” I say, “just come out and say it.”

“Aw, Tip,” he says, “I kinda thought sticking your paw on my dick said it for me.”

“And if I do…”

He takes hold of my paw again. “I’ll feel a lot better about our relationship.”

Dammit. I wouldn’t consider it normally, but if it’d get him off Dev’s case… I pull my paw out of his. “You wanna do it here on the couch?”

He turns off the TV and gets up, grinning over his shoulder as he walks into the bedroom. I sit on the couch and stare at the blank screen, thinking, do I really want to do this? What would Dev think? We are pretty exclusive, but a hand job doesn’t count, does it? If it would make Brian keep out of our business? I press my paws to my eyes. All I can think is that if I don’t, it’ll definitely make things worse. I shouldn’t have come down here at all. But it’s too late for that.

By the time I sit down next to him on the bed, he’s already got his pants down. I’ve seen him naked before, a couple times, but I’ve never seen him out of his sheath. I try not to look, try to treat it like a job. Quick strokes, like you’re jerking yourself off, don’t think. He arches his back and squirms and moans, and tries to grab me back through my jeans, but I angle my hips away from him. He doesn’t insist.

For someone who hasn’t had any in a while, it’s sure taking him a long time to come. I slide my paw up and down while the smell of skunk gets stronger. “You got a nice paw,” he says, and when I don’t respond, he says, “last guy to jerk me off had sharp claws.”

“Shut up,” I say, without breaking my rhythm, and he does.

I’m a little aroused just from jerking off someone, and the smells of fox and skunk are pretty strong, even to my accustomed nose. My paw’s starting to get stiff, and so I speed up a little. He bucks into the stroking, and ten short minutes later, he finally shudders, gasps, and spurts warmth all over his stomach and my paw.

As soon as I feel it’s okay, I take my paw away. Holding it awkwardly in front of me, trying not to smell the mess all over it, I avoid looking at Brian. “I’m gonna clean up,” I say.

His paw reaches out for me. “What’s your hurry?”

I hesitate. But only for a second. Even if I wanted to, I’ve made a promise to Dev about not coming ’til he did, an explicit promise as opposed to the implicit one I just broke. “I’m gonna clean up,” I say again, and get up before he can do anything else. Without looking back, I walk to the bathroom and close the door.