Out of Position (55 page)

To my surprise, my paw doesn’t smell all that strongly of skunk. And Brian has lots of strong soaps to cover the scent. After a couple washes, I can’t even tell he came on my paw, which is pretty impressive. I do, however, smell like I stuck my paw into a jar of orange cardamom.

I’m not only taking my time to try to get rid of the smell. I’m also trying to figure out what I just did, how it affects my relationship with Brian, and with Dev. I’d really be happy if Dev never found out about that. He might ask why Brian’s easing up on him, but I can hopefully tell him Brian did it out of respect for our friendship. He’ll be suspicious, but Brian and I never did anything sexual before. There’s no reason this should’ve been different.

Except it was. And no matter what Brian says about feeling a little less lonely, about that being all it is, I am starting to feel that there’s more. I think he wants a relationship, wants me to leave Dev and come live with him. And all his posturing this evening, all the little things he did to get me to feel bad for him, all that was just acting. Wasn’t it?

By the time I get my paws clean, my erection’s gone down, too. That temptation won’t be a problem. I’m annoyed enough that I hesitated when he reached for me. And now I’m starting to think about it more. Just a paw job, right? No big deal. I pawed off probably fifty guys through my college years. Never meant anything.

So then why didn’t Brian and I ever do it? And what will Dev think of it if he finds out? When he finds out?

I shove aside the growing nausea of guilt in my stomach and chest. I can’t even think about Dev this soon. It’s either thinking about him finding out, or about me hiding it from him, and neither alternative is more palatable than the other. So I just think about Brian. Nothing really has to have changed, right? Not unless he wants it to.

He’s still lying on the bed with his pants down when I walk out. I can’t really obviously avoid looking at him, but he knows me well enough that I don’t need to. “Something wrong?” he says.

“I’m kinda tired.” I stand awkwardly between the bathroom and the bed.

“It’s not even ten.”

“It’s eleven where I live.”

“Still.” He swings his legs off the bed and looks up at me. “Sure, whatever. I’ll clean up and we can go to bed.”

I jerk my head toward the living room. “I’m sleeping on the couch, right?”

He doesn’t reply right away. His eyes glitter with reflected light. “You don’t have to,” he says softly.

“I think I do,” I say, and just then my phone rings.

His eyes narrow. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

I don’t have to look at the number, but I do anyway. “Yeah. Be right back.”

“Tip—”

But I’m already out in the living room, hitting the green Accept button, making my way out the front door to the hallway. “Hi,” I say.

“Monday practice sucks,” Dev grumbles.

“So win next time.”

“Like I can do anything about it, stuck on backup.”

“You’ll be starting soon. Right?”

“I’d better,” he grumbles. “Already starting to get uncomfortable around Caroll.”

“Uncomfortable like…”

“Ah, I’m just teasing.” He sighs. “Don’t know how I’m going to beat out Killer.”

“People are noticing,” I tell him. It’s so refreshing to be able to talk to him. The air’s cooled down with the evening and the night is cool. I can’t see Chevali from here, but it helps to know he’s close. Faintly, I hear the rumble of an airplane getting closer, and it reminds me I have to go home tomorrow.

“Did you see this thing ESPN wrote about me?”

“You got half a paragraph there. The guys at High and Bright did a whole paragraph.” I printed both out, stuck them on the wall over my loft so I can look at them when I wake up in the morning.

“Brian wrote nearly a whole article.”

My jaw snaps shut in surprise. I think about Brian, back in the apartment. It is pretty rude of me to be out here talking to Dev, no matter how good it feels. I say, “Yeah,” and then, “Look, Dev, this isn’t a really good time…”

He goes on about the article and I put him off again, telling him I’ll call him tomorrow, that I have a big meeting at work that got moved up. The plane is closer by that point, a droning reminder, and finally I get him off the phone. I stand there on the balcony, holding the phone, missing him. And just to be spiteful, I don’t go back in for another five minutes.

He’s cleaned up by then, sitting on the couch in his boxers, not watching TV. The images just flicker over the white spot on his nose, there in the center of black, as if I can see his thoughts flickering out from his eyes. I walk to the kitchen and get one of the diets he bought me.

“How’s he doing?” he says, without turning.

“Good. He liked the bit you wrote about him.”

He raises a fist. “Tree Pride.”

“Yeah.” Nobody except the team and announcers called the Forester team the Rangers. The logo is a big pine tree, so the student body all calls them the “Trees.” “Dumb as a plank and twice as thick,” Brian used to say. Okay, I did, too.

I stand behind the sofa, watching Brian not watch the TV. The diet soda is cold in my paw, cold against my tongue, leaving the artificial sweetener taste after it goes down. “So,” Brian says, “you sleeping out here?”

“Are you feeling less lonely?” I ask. I need to know if what I’ve done is worth it. “Or do you need someone to tuck you in?”

He half-turns then, with a smirk. “I think I’m feeling even more lonely now.”

I fold my arms. “Just because I have a boyfriend doesn’t mean I’m not still your friend.”

“Are you?” He turns back to the TV.

“I dunno,” I say. “How are you defining friendship? Is a friend someone who’d screw over his boyfriend for you? Someone who places you above everyone else?”

“Used to be that way.”

I look down at his small black ears, the white patches on them and on his face. It feels as though I’ve stepped back in time to our dorm, with a nicer couch and TV. The easy, the kind thing would be to acknowledge the bond that’s still there. After all I’ve done already, I only have a few hours left to spend with him.

I’m just about to say something nice when he gives a little sigh. And it’s that little dramatic touch, so perfectly Brian, that irritates the hell out of me. He was lonely and wanted a paw job; I gave it to him. He’s still lonely and wants me to curl up with him. And there’ll be more advances then, more hurt when I reject him, maybe another paw job in the morning. After I leave, he’ll be pestering me for another visit, the way he did when I started going out with Dev.

College is his Golden Age. He’s wandered down a dead end in the maze of life, only he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. He wants to go back to where he made that turn, or else get an airlift out by doing something striking like outing Dev. So he’s trying to get me to go back with him. And he’ll keep trying.

Thing is, I think I made some good turns. I like where I am. There were good things about college, but the phone call from Dev reminded me that there are lots better things now. I don’t pretend to understand how this works, how two people so different can share a point of view, can depend on each other, can make each other’s lives so much better. So I can’t really begrudge Brian his lack of understanding.

But I can begrudge him his stubborn refusal to accept it, his manipulative acting all night to get what he wants out of me. Some of it I resisted, some of it I didn’t. But it’s not going to stop, not unless I stop it.

“It was never like that.” I say it quietly, with my own sense of drama.

“Don’t be sour,” he says. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I never had a real boyfriend in college,” I say. “There were guys I went steady with, but I didn’t know how to be serious with them. We didn’t have a life together. We just agreed not to date other people. Sure, my best friend comes before those guys.”

Now, now he turns. Watches me. “But Dev’s different.” I look back down at him. “He’s different. He makes me…”

“Complete?” He smirks.

“Happy.”

“You were happy all the time, back in college.”

I shake my head. “He cares about my life. All of it. I care about his. He listens to me, he likes that I care. He accepts what I am, and he is what he is, and when we’re together, I feel like we can do anything.”

“You were an English major?” He sniffs, but the facade is cracking. “That’s terrible. Give me Keats, give me Wordsworth.”

I take a breath. “I sail’d in darkness, blind ’til the false dawn/ Reveal’d her beacon, shin’d in the distance/ Believ’d I, foolish, ’twas my ain true guide/ Until your sunrise show’d true light, true love.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Donnigan?”

“Stuart. Not very well known.”

“I can see why. ’Ain’?”

“It’s archaic.”

“So is true love.”

I stare back at him, levelly. “If you really think that, and you can’t be happy for me, then I guess we don’t have much to talk about after all.”

“Come on,” he says. “I was joking.”

I flick my ears back and take another drink of the diet soda. It’s warm, not as refreshing, and the artificial sweetener is losing what charm it had. “You wanna put a movie on or something, or you ready to go to bed?”

“Are you ready to go to bed?” He tries to make it into a leer, but I just walk over and sit in the armchair.

He watches me and then gets up. “I’ll let you get some rest, then. Night.”

“Night,” I say.

For a moment, we look at each other. Then he walks into his bedroom.

No sheets for the couch, no blanket, no pillow. I turn off the TV and the lights, and that’s when I notice that Brian’s left his bedroom door open, a soft light on inside. I close my eyes and lie down on the couch. This could be Brian’s old dorm room, just fancier: nicer couch, framed posters. The smell of skunk is the only thing that’s close to the same, and even that is subtly different. People’s scent changes with them over the years, and while Brian’s is as strong and as defiant as ever, there’s a bitter tinge to it that wasn’t there before. I’ve got some NeutraScent in my bag, but that doesn’t seem fair, somehow.

So I breathe in fox and skunk, modern day, and let my mind wander back, just for tonight, to the fox and skunk that used to be. Just because they’re gone doesn’t mean they weren’t important, but it’s a mistake to try too hard to hold onto them. Brian’s got to be who he’s going to be, and I’ve got to be who I am. And I wonder, staring at the ceiling, if this is how all friendships go. I’ve had relationships come and go, high school best friends fade into the past like ripples in a pond, slowly receding until they’re gone. But Brian and I were close for a long time. When we’re apart, the distance between us isn’t as noticeable. Here in the next room, it feels greater, an unmanageable chasm.

Is this where Dev and I will be in a few years? Will he lose himself in his professional world, will I grow apart from him the way I’ve grown apart from Brian? Will there be some kind of incident that will pin him in one place while I move on, or something I won’t be able to get past while he moves farther and farther away?

If you’d asked me, sitting in the lounge of the dorm in college with Brian, I would have told you that we’d withstand anything. Getting sent to the hospital, sent to another college—we’d always be together, brothers in arms in the war on injustice. My attempt to take revenge for Brian’s pain now, in retrospect, seems to me an attempt to accomplish a feat he couldn’t ignore, that would rekindle our friendship. I never considered that the war might change, that the people we saw as targets would become real to me, that I would find someone who wrapped himself in the core of me so much better than Brian did.

That thought, the memory of Dev’s voice on the phone, his paw on my chest, relaxes me. Love can fade, love can turn, but you can’t shy away from it because you’re afraid it will become something else. Brian’s lesson to me, here today, is not that all things wither and die, but that all relationships are even more valuable because they are impermanent. Perhaps one day I will be able to lie on a couch anywhere in the world and not be wishing with an ache like a vise that Dev were here with me. Perhaps. But I can do my best to make sure that that doesn’t happen. And in the meantime, I can enjoy this feeling, this closeness, and be happy every day I have it with Dev.

I feel sorry for Brian, and I think I feel some of his pain in his attempt to twist what Dev and I have. I know why he wants me back as more than a friend, and is willing to gamble away our friendship on the chance that I’ll go with him. If I didn’t have Dev…

The air circulation carries away the scents of the room, Brian’s noticeably fainter now. I breathe in again, his current scent melding with the one from my memory. No matter what, the friends we were are a part of who we are, and always will be.

It’s important that I remember that. If I don’t, I’m just going to walk into his bedroom and punch him in the face.

 
About the Author

Kyell Gold took up furry erotica writing after high school, making the team at his small liberal arts college as a walk-on. He was drafted late by Sofawolf and blossomed in the professional league, earning four Ursa Major awards in his first three years as a pro for his novels
Volle
and
Pendant of Fortune,
and for his stories “Jacks to Open” and “Don’t Blink.” He was also nominated in three Ursa Major categories and for a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for his collection
The Prisoner’s Release and Other Stories
and the stories in it.