Out of Position (46 page)

The flight to Aventira that night is an interesting experience. Brick and Colin and their friends do their best to keep their distance without appearing like they’re keeping their distance. If I had more energy, I’d walk close to them on purpose just to mess with them. But I’m tired, as most of us are, and I prefer to just slump down in the seat next to Charm.

“Hey,” he says, nudging me, “how does a bunny turn on the light after sex?”

I look sideways at him. He’s leaning toward me, grinning and eager. “I dunno,” I say.

“She opens the car door!” He hoots, and then stops. “Sorry — or
he
opens the car door.”

“Charm…”

“No, no,” he insists, “it still works, see? Cause the funny part is it’s a bunny.”

“I get it,” I growl.

Now he just looks like he’s trying to work out long division in his head. “Are guy bunnies the same as girl bunnies?”

“I don’t know.”

“You never picked up a bunny?”

I can see the ears in front of us swiveling back. “No.” I turn away from him, looking across the aisle at Carson, who’s got his iPod in and his eyes closed. On the charter flight, they don’t make us turn off our electronics during takeoff.

Charm doesn’t need to see my face to talk to me. “How did you start picking up guys?”

I rummage in my bag for my iPod. “You got any new music?”

“No, really. I mean, did you just wake up one day, and…”

“Shut up!” I snap, loudly enough that the guys who weren’t looking at us turn around.

He whuffs. “Jus’ wonderin’,” he says.

“Talk to me when we get to the room,” I mutter. I find the iPod and hold the earbuds in one paw. My ears feel hot enough to melt them. I put them in anyway, turn on something mindless and loud, and close my eyes.

By the time we get to the hotel, of course, Charm’s got his mind set on what the best strip clubs in Aventira are. He can’t go out Saturday night, the night before a game, so he’s got to get his thrills in tonight. I sit in the room and check my messages. Ogleby, passing on more interview requests and telling me that I’m going to need to call a press conference to deny the allegations. My father, telling me he’s going to watch Sunday’s game with the guys from the shop, so he can show them I’m a real man. Lee, telling me he’s working late so he can have tomorrow night free. Telling me he loves me.

I hold on to that last one, but the echoes of the others keep bouncing around as I sit alone in the hotel room that feels too small. I pace back and forth from bed to window to door, unable to shake the feeling that the other guys are talking about me. So I go down to the lobby and pace around there, where it’s almost as quiet as my room, so quiet I can hear my claws clicking on the marble with every step. None of the people sitting under the fashionable modern green-shaded lights are on the team; in fact, they all seem to be small species: ferrets and mice, one bobcat typing on a laptop and a rat reading a book.

Some of my teammates are in the bar, sitting back and relaxing. I watch them through the window, half-hidden by a large bush. They’re smiling and laughing, drinking beers and pointing at the TV, where there’s a basketball game going on. I picture myself walking in and joining them, the smiles fading, the laughter dying out — not completely, because they wouldn’t want to make me uncomfortable, but they wouldn’t be able not to.

I stick my paws in my pockets. The marble is cold on the top of my tail as I drag it back along the floor of the lobby to the elevators. How much longer will Coach let an outsider, like I’ve become, stick with the team? I want to call Lee, but the last thing he needs is to hear from me in this state of mind. I can wait until tomorrow night. In the meantime, I try my best to go to sleep, knowing that tomorrow in practice, and Sunday in the game, I’ll have football to focus on, with no room for wondering about anything further in the future than the next play. That’s the beauty of football: you can be a hero at any moment, but the moments are fleeting, so you have to keep chasing them. It’d be nice if life could be like that, if I could go to sleep knowing that in the morning we’d be starting from scratch, 0-0, a new game or a new season.

That night, I have the dream again, about not being drafted. This time, Lee’s not with me on the couch. It’s just me, sitting with the certainty gnawing at my insides that my name will never be called by the voices on the TV. I don’t know where Lee is, in the dream. In the twisted consistent logic of the dream world, he never even enters my mind. The dream keeps a long, torturous grip on me: for some reason, partway through, the media arrive. Frank Evien, an ESPN reporter, starts to report on me as though it’s a live show. I wake up before he can mention that I’m naked.

For a moment I lie there, still in the world of the dream, head buzzing with it. The room is dark, I tell myself. Frank is not standing here telling the world how sad it is that the naked gay tiger will not get to play in the UFL. I have a practice to go to, and a game to play in, and as far as I know, my name is still in the starting lineup. On the other paw, I did just come out to all my teammates yesterday, a decision that in the cold isolation of morning seems downright moronic.

Charm snores across from me. I take heart in his boyish curiosity, as clumsy as it was. He doesn’t hate me. Neither does Fisher. I build a ladder out of the names I can add to that list, until I can pull myself out of bed.

Charm and I get breakfast in the room, two huge bowls of oatmeal for him, a stack of sausages and eggs for me. Normally, I just pick up the sausages and eat ’em in two bites. This morning, every time I do that, his grin gets bigger and wider, until I glare at him and start cutting them up.

“Hey,” he says, as though it’s just occurred to him, “how do you just wake up one day and decide you like dick?”

I would love to continue to avoid the question, but I hear Lee in my head saying the best way to get people on your side is to be open and frank. So I say, “It wasn’t like that. It’s just this one guy.”

“Whoo!” he says, and punches me in the shoulder hard enough to bruise it. “Gramps has a steady boyfriend!”

Christ, I don’t know what to do with that. It makes me cringe, it makes me happy. I want to snap in his face and I want to laugh and punch him back and part of me wants to hug him for being so normal, so blase, so Charm-ing about it. I mutter, “Yeah.”

He hoots some more. “Whatever cranks your motor, Gramps. Me, I love a good pair of titties. Can’t get up without that, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I know. You only told me every other night.”

He shovels down a mouthful of oatmeal. “You get off on looking at dicks?”

“Not yours, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

He shrugs. “You ain’t the only guy I caught staring in the shower.”

I stop with a forkful of eggs halfway to my muzzle. “On this team?”

He nods, stacking the second bowl of oatmeal in the empty first one. “Ain’t sayin’ who.”

“No, course not.” I don’t press, but I wonder, now, if there is someone else on the team who’s gay. Lee would tell me that statistically it is likely. There are a bunch of guys I don’t know so well. Maybe if things go okay for me…

For the rest of breakfast, I imagine myself as some kind of hero for gay athletes. I come crashing back to earth as practice starts, when everything’s the same as the previous day. Nobody else comes out, the guys who were avoiding me still avoid me, the guys who just care about whether I can play yell at me when I take my mind off the game. During the afternoon session, Steez walks us one last time through the plays we’re expecting to see from Aventira and how we respond to them. Nobody mentions the fact that I have a boyfriend or that I like dick (at least, I like his).

Then it’s time for the showers, again. I head for my locker and then, feeling eyes on me from around the room, swerve over to Gerrard’s. “Hey,” I say, loudly enough for the whole room to hear, “I’m going to go over the playbook one more time for about twenty minutes. I’ll shower after.”

The coyote seems surprised, but says only, “Sounds good,” and strips his shirt off. I walk back out of the locker room with the playbook and grab a seat on the bench. I’m just flipping through the first plays when I hear

Charm’s booming voice. “Hey, that sounds like a good idea. I’m gonna go wait with Gramps. I mean, study.”

Clomping hooves echo through the tunnel. The bench lets out a creak as he sits next to me. I raise an eyebrow. “What plays do you have to study? You come out, you line up, you kick the ball.”

He grins. “Well,” he says, “I just didn’t want’cha to have nothin’ to look at in the shower.”

“Room for one more?”

I turn and see Fisher, holding his playbook, standing on my other side. “It’s a long bench,” I say.

He sits on my other side, holding the playbook closed in his lap. Charm leans across to see him. “Hey, Fish. Solid.” He holds out a fist to bump.

Fisher doesn’t look at it. “Takes an old man time to do the right thing,” he says.

Charm withdraws his fist. “You ain’t that old.”

I look back toward the locker room. “How long is this gonna last?”

“Long as you keep playin’,” Charm says.

Gerrard and Carson come out of the locker room. They look at the three of us, at the open playbook in my lap. Gerrard sits cross-legged on the ground in front of me and opens his book. “What play were you at?” he says.

“Dippin Dots 88,” I say. Carson nods, sits next to Gerrard, and opens his own book.

Lee thinks this is a good sign. He tells me this later, after he greets me wearing nothing but a smile and some kind of scent that yanks me into his hotel room as forcefully as if he’d grabbed me by the paw. “Funny,” I breathe, crushing him to me and sliding my paws down the right hard curves of his back, “I look at naked foxes every day and nothing. One glance at you and I’m sporting more wood than This Old House. ‘”

He laughs and rubs his own against me. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he murmurs, his paws looking for the proof of my words and finding it quickly.

“You must have something pretty bad to tell me.” I’m half-joking. I slide my own paw around to his front, curling fingers around the familiar heft of his sheath. He’s as hard as I am, if not harder.

He’s already undoing my pants. “You want to hear it now, or after?”

By way of answer, I push down on his shoulders. He chuckles and takes my pants with him as he drops to his knees, rubbing the soft fur of his muzzle against my erection. I brace myself against the wall when he starts using his tongue. Just watching his naked body on its knees, the tongue washing up me over and over again, would be almost enough to make me come.

But of course, there are other things to consider, like his needs, and my other needs, and the carpeting in the room, so we adjourn to the bed, shedding my clothes along the way. I take him from the top, his muzzle in the pillow, tail between us like a pillow itself. My arms enfold him through both climaxes, squeezing his ribcage. I mouth his ear, coming down, and then brace myself on my elbows so my weight isn’t all on him.

“So,” he mumbles into the pillow, “you liked that.”

“I like
you
,” I say.

“Just ‘like’?”

I kiss the base of his ear. “Depends what you’re going to tell me.”

He goes quiet. I nudge his ear. “I was joking,” I say.

Slowly, he works his rear free of my erection. I pull back to my knees and he rolls over, looking up at me. “Let me get cleaned up,” he says. “Want to shower?”

“After you.” Now I’m worrying, wondering what it is. Lee sometimes overthinks things, so he might be making a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be. But he might not.

The shower is strange in those little ways that tell you that you’re not at home. The hot water turns on the other way. The shampoo shelf is narrow, and I keep knocking the bottle over with my elbow. The hotel shampoo smells funny. It’s not Lee’s home, either, I remind myself.

That just makes me think of football games played on a neutral site, so neither side has an advantage. Did he plan to be in an Aventira hotel just so I wouldn’t feel at a disadvantage when he tells me whatever it was? No, if it was a breakup, something bad, if we just had good-bye sex without him telling me, he’d have done that in his apartment, in a safe setting, right? But maybe he didn’t want me to have to drive back all those hours to the game after he’d told me his news.

Lion Christ, talk about overdrinking. I squeeze my aching head in my paws and get soap in my eyes. The stinging distracts me, lets me curse at myself. I rinse off quickly.

When I get out of the shower, he’s still naked, sitting on the edge of his bed. So I don’t put clothes on either, I just sit next to him. “All right,” I say. “How bad is it?”

He stares at his knees. “It’s about Brian.”

I almost say, what, are you leaving me for him? Then I get the bizarre thought that if I say it, it’ll become true. I look at the neutral white walls, the bland paintings of landscapes and flowers, the dark wood dresser with the television on top of it. I keep emotion out of my voice. “What about him?”

He sighs. “I’ve… well… I’ve been seeing a lot of him this fall. More than I’ve told you.”

I feel cold all through my ribcage, ice creeping toward my heart. “Doing what?”

He shakes his head. “I haven’t slept with him.”

“That’s a relief.” I say it with some sarcasm, but to my surprise I find that it is. Did I really think he would’ve?

Lee takes a breath. His paws sit neatly in his lap, opening and closing as he talks, but he doesn’t use his arms at all. “He moved down to Chevali over the summer. His dad bought him a condo there, there was a theater group he wanted to be a part of. But he couldn’t stick with it. They wouldn’t produce the plays he wanted, or give him the roles he wanted. He was used to being a big wheel at his college group. That’s why he left Hilltown, too.”

“Some of us managed to adapt,” I say. I can’t help it. Just the mention of Brian reminded me of the blog he wrote, the lies he told, the smug satisfaction I saw in his eyes when he snapped that picture of me with Carroll.

He looks at me along his long vulpine muzzle. “You heard the part about his father buying him a condo, right? He doesn’t adapt well like we do. Never had to before. Anyway. This isn’t about him. Well, it is, but…” He takes a breath. “So Brian’s all miserable, and you’re in Chevali. You should’ve seen some of the e-mails I got from him when Chevali drafted Colin. ‘How’s it going to feel to be dating an ex-jock?’ ‘I get hard every day scanning the cut lists.’ Shit like that.”