Out of Position (51 page)

I wait for him to set me down, or get up on all fours, but at the bed, he presses against me and kisses me again, and I lose track of time. I’ve got one paw across his back, the other cupping his rear, while his paws are just linked behind my tail.

“Whew,” I pant as our muzzles part. I glance down at the bed, and back at him with eyebrows raised.

He gives me a quirky smile, and says, “You wanna sit down?”

I tease a fingerpad up his erect shaft, to watch him shiver. He does, but his smile doesn’t waver. Neither does mine. “What’cha got in mind, doc?”

He brings a paw up to my chest, but he doesn’t push, just brushes the fur up and down. “Something a little different.”

So I sit on the bed, back to the headboard. He gets up and straddles my legs, scooting up until his shaft rests beside mine against my stomach fur. Teasing mine lightly with a fingerpad, he says, “I did some more thinking, after the other night.”

I look down between us, deliberately. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

He nods. “It won’t take long, I promise. I just want to clear up something.”

Guilt seizes my chest, at what I never apologized for. “I never thought you agreed to that,” I blurt out, bringing my paws around to his hips as much to steady myself against his teasing as to feel him. “The stuff he posted, I mean, I know you wouldn’t.”

“I know,” he said. “But that’s not what I mean.”

“And whatever you did with him…”

He lifts his paw away. “Dev.”

I shake my head. “No, listen. I don’t like it, but I know…” I inhale. “I know you didn’t, uh, mean it. I just wanna ask you one favor.”

He looks amused. “Anything.”

“Don’t ever tell me which paw it was.”

It feels so good to hear his laugh. “And then you’ll forgive me?”

“I already have,” I say.

He leans forward and kisses me softly. When the softness threatens to turn more passionate, he pulls back. “Thank you. But what I was talking about was the whole Wiley Farrel the activist thing.”

“Oh.” I cup my ears forward.

He rests his paws on my arms. “That’s a part of me I won’t get rid of. I can’t. But I don’t have to let it rule my life, either. It’s hard to let go of childhood dreams.”

“For both of us,” I murmur, slipping a paw between us to squeeze his cock against mine.

He grins at me, ears cupping forward. “But I got the best reason in the world to be grateful for where I am and where I’m going. Sometimes I just get greedy and want to have it all.”

Since he didn’t tell me to stop, I let go of myself and stroke him gently up and down. His tail swishes back and forth over my legs. “I want you to have it all,” I say.

He kisses my nose. “I’m okay with not. After you left, I thought, would I be happy if I could have my English degree and my activist friends and not have you any more? Well,” his grin gets sly and wide, “it turns out that’s one of the easiest questions I’ve ever been asked. It’s no contest.”

That warm feeling in my chest spreads all through me. “You can still do some activist stuff,” I say.

He nods. “I will. But I’ll talk to you about it. Maybe we can think of some stuff to do together, anonymously.”

I spread my paw, hold my cock against his again. “I can think of some stuff to do together right now.”

“Yeah.” He presses into the grip. “That’s all I wanted to say. Still got your lube in the side drawer there?”

By way of answer, I reach out and open the drawer, taking out the little bottle. I hand it to him, but he shakes his head. “You wanna do it?”

“Me?” He nods. “Sure, I guess.” I dump out some into my paw and reach around behind him, without looking away from his muzzle. I hold his rear with my dry paw, feeling the muscles all tight for my benefit, while I tease the fur away from his tailhole and press the small pool of wet up into it. As my fingers rub around and then inside, he sighs, his eyes half-closing.

I rub probably longer than I need to, claws carefully sheathed, until he says, “I think I’m okay.”

“I know. I’m enjoying it.” I am, but I’m also feeling the more and more urgent need to have something else in there. So I squeeze some more lube onto my paw and rub myself up and down until I’m super-slick and gasping.

“Ready?” he says softly, and I don’t need to answer. He lifts his hips, moving forward, and even in the unfamiliar position, I have no trouble situating my cock under him. He’s at my eye level, leaning forward for another kiss, then sinking slowly down.

Every nerve in my body comes alive. “Oh, foxy,” I gasp. I take hold of his shaft with my slickened paw and hear nothing else in the room but his high moan, echoing in my ears. He’s got hold of my shoulders, I’m holding his hips with one paw and stroking him with the other, and he’s moving up and down slowly. I want to ask why we never did this before, this position, I mean, but the word “Why” comes out as a throaty moan, so I stop trying to form words.

His muzzle curves into a warm smile, a smile that goes all the way up to his eyes. I can feel the beginning of his knot under my fingers, hot and hard. He leans forward, I lean forward to meet him, and our muzzles meet in the middle, parting to allow our tongues to move together as our lips press close.

I kiss him, holding him, thrusting up into him as he moves his hips up and down atop me. His slender body and warm chest writhe against mine, our noises growing more urgent as our movements quicken. I try not to stroke him too quickly, but he’s riding me up and down and my tongue’s in his muzzle, my head filled with the scent of fox. Together we move, together we moan, and as I feel my climax tingle and build in my body, surging in my shaft, I squeeze him and stroke faster. His body tenses, his breath as hard across my muzzle as mine is across his.

And when we come, we come within a few seconds of each other, first me thrusting hard up into him, holding him down atop me as my body explodes into him. Then him, his long groan of pleasure echoing into my muzzle, his passion spurting out over my paw. We squirm against each other, panting, moaning, sharing each other. We come down together, too, our muzzles parting. We keep our noses together, blue eyes meeting gold, and smile goofily like a couple teenagers in love.

 
In my bed, later, I lie on my back and he lies on top of me. I run my paws down his naked back to his rear, squeezing it and feeling the warmth of my hips still there. His tail swishes back and forth over me. The muted noises of the city outside surround us. A plane rumbles past. I don’t want to talk, and he doesn’t seem to either, but after a while, he props himself up on his elbows, paws behind my head, and looks down at me.

“So you’re going to go to the conference tomorrow?”

I raise my eyebrows. “With all this practice at being straight, how can I not?”

He touches his nose to mine. “I know I said I’m not giving up my activism. But I don’t want to lose you, either.”

I hold his sides. “You don’t want to lose Devlin Miski the UFL player?”

He flashes a smirk, then gets serious. “I don’t want to lose my boyfriend. All those signs, the abuse at Aventira, they were scary. I thought for the first time that someone might actually hurt you.”

“They’re just all talk.”

“Hon.” My ears perk up. “All it takes is one who’s not. Some drunk guy with a bottle, some religious fanatic, anything like that. Not to mention the team. I mean, even if they know, it’ll be such a huge deal that it’s out, it’ll take over everything. When Corey gets better, they’ll cut you just to let the team focus on football. Not to mention that your friends might support you in private, but if you’re publicly out, it’d hurt their image to be seen with you.”

“Didn’t you used to talk about endorsements? The first gay player would clean up on gay endorsements?”

He exhales. I love the smell of his breath across my muzzle. “You have to be playing, though. And it’s not worth your life.”

I kiss him. We lie in the bed quietly after that. I feel his vibrant, lovely body against mine, and curl my tail up to touch his. It’s easy for me to relax now. He’s given me everything I wanted: I can keep football and boyfriend, have my public life and my secret life. Better than Tony Calhoun, better than that other player who came out after retiring, as good as all those other guys who play football and hide secrets in their closets. Everything’s going to be okay. I can relax.

I lie awake thinking for nearly an hour after he’s gone to sleep.

I kiss him good-bye in the morning when he goes off to see Brian, and I go to pick up Caroll at the airport to take her to lunch. The first thing she says when she gets in the car is, “This story had better go away, or I need to find some better use of my time. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“All right then. Just so we’re on the same page.” She’s been thinking about it on the plane, I guess, because she launches right into a bunch of different ways I could handle it, how to deny things flat out without equivocating (her word) so it doesn’t look like I’m lying or making excuses. She also says we should announce our engagement at the conference.

“You’re pretty good at lying,” I tell her.

“Image maintenance,” she says with a wink.

I raise my glass to her just as I see, out of the corner of my eye, a blur of motion, a little jumping up and down brown blur in a shiny grey suit. It homes in on our table and I recognize Ogleby. We’ve only met a couple times, but there’s no mistaking his voice, and besides, he recognizes me.

“Dev, baby, there you are!” He pulls up a chair to the table without asking. “Caroll, darling, you look marvelous. Louise says your career is taking off. Congratulations! She’s great. Dev, listen, I got a script for you to follow at the conference today. It’s very simple, you can memorize it, but if you can’t, I got it written down here.” He pulls a sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket and slides it across the table, snapping his fingers for the waiter with his other paw.

We rehearse the speech while Ogleby eats, which doesn’t take very long. He eats pretty much the way he talks. We add some of Caroll’s suggestions, and the engagement announcement, until it meets with her approval. They ask me what I think of it and I say it’s fine. It all sounds okay, but it doesn’t sound like me. That’s all right; it doesn’t have to. I just have to say the words.

Ogleby lets me pick up the check, and laughs when I say I’ll take it out of his commission. Then he wants to ride over with us, but I tell him I don’t want to drive back to the restaurant to pick up his car when the conference is over. I also want to talk to Caroll about Brian and I don’t want Ogleby to hear.

“Maybe he won’t even be there,” I say. “Maybe Lee will have stopped him.”

She shakes her head. “He’ll be there.”

“How do you know?”

Her face is set, steely-eyed. “Because if it were me, I’d be there.”

She’s dead right. When we get to the media room at the stadium, there’s a small knot of reporters outside in the hallway. In the center, holding court, is Brian.

He raises a paw as we approach. “Well, if it isn’t my big gay friend,” he drawls.

Caroll murmurs, “Just keep walking,” but I don’t need her to tell me that. I stride past into the media room itself.

“When you’re done hearing his denial, come back out here for the truth,” Brian says loudly as the reporters fall in behind us.

A few of them try to get questions in. “Dev, how long have you known Brian?” “Dev, when did you realize you were gay?” I ignore them.

Vince appears at my elbow. He waves the reporters to their chairs and me up to the platform. The reporters quiet down when they see him. “Please hold your questions for just a few minutes,” he says. “Hey, Frank.”

The otter waves back, pausing on his way to his seat. “Hey, Vince. Anything new gonna happen?”

Vince looks at me and I shake my head. “Nah,” he says. “You want to just write up the standard denial?”

“Oh, no, I just got a three o’clock tee time. Wanted to know when I was gonna get out of here.”

“Where you playing?”

I miss the rest of the discussion about golf courses. Caroll and I step up to the podium, where Ogleby is already waiting. He stands behind me, bouncing from foot to foot while the reporters settle in. I see Coach walk in, too, but he stands to one side of the room, just leaning against a wall. When I catch his eye, he nods.

It’s intimidating. At least here, all the people focused on me are polite, waiting for me to talk. I don’t get the feeling of being in a tank full of sharks, like I did in Veterans Field. But still, the largest crowd of reporters I’ve ever been in front of alone was three student reporters after we made the playoffs my last year at Forester. It’s even a larger crowd than yesterday, when I was sharing the spotlight with Gerrard and Coach.

Brian lounges in the doorway, watching me with a smirk. I wonder fleetingly what happened to Lee. Well, in a few minutes, Brian will be the center of attention again, I guess. After my denial, he can keep telling his story. I feel a little bit queasy.

Vince raises his paws. “Thanks for coming, everyone. This’ll be quick. We really don’t like to address rumors and hearsay, but after the nasty demonstrations at the game yesterday, Devlin felt he needed to set the record straight. He’s going to read a prepared statement, we’ll take a few questions, and we’ll get you out of here pretty fast.” The crowd murmurs.

Vince turns to me. “All yours,” he says.

I look out at the sea of faces. I know what I’m supposed to say, but it’s difficult to make the words come out. My nerve is failing me, here when it comes right down to it. Ogleby hisses behind me, “Regarding the allegations,” and I wave him off. This whole room full of reporters hanging on my every word feels unreal, like I’m an impostor, and as soon as I open my mouth, they’ll realize I’m not the one they’re waiting for. I’m used to pressure on the field, but this is a whole different ballgame. Caroll sitting beside me, quietly supportive of the tableau (her word), just underscores the phoniness. Brian, just outside the room in the hallway, is surrounded by a small gaggle of reporters nominally watching me, with their ears perked toward him.