Waterways (31 page)

“You kidding? They’re mature, they’re hot, they’ve got a nice rack on em… they know how to bump and grind and p-play the game. Ahhhh.”

“It’s sure a different game. I guess I never really learned…” The slow rasp of a zipper interrupted him. He turned to look at Sal. “What… ?”

His friend was leaning into the angle of the driver’s seat and the driver’s door, his right arm across the back of the seat while his left sat in his lap, lazily stroking his unzipped erection. “That c-cock tease… fucker, I’m all worked up. Just got to take care of some business.”

Kory’s mouth hung open. The scene was so surreal: the steamed car windows, the glow of the “D NUT” sign through the windshield playing over the hard pink length under his best friend’s paw. He’d seen Sal naked before, but never hard. The self-indulgent grin was familiar, the same expression he’d worn when he’d suggested cheating on a test in ninth grade, or when he talked about not working at his father’s company. “You can whip it out too, if you want,” Sal said. “Or, wait, you get to see your boyfriend tomorrow, right? Better save it.” He continued to stroke himself. “Christ, that feels good.”

Kory couldn’t shake the dreamlike feeling. He reached for the door handle and even started to open it.

“Hey, don’t go,” Sal said. “S-sorry if I surprised you.”

“Yeah,” Kory said. “You want to wait ’til we get home?”

Up and down, stroking. He tried not to look, but it was impossible to avoid in the small confines of the car. “I was gonna,” Sal said, “but you s-said I can’t drive yet.”

“Well, go in the bathroom in there, or something.” Kory let the door handle go to gesture at the donut shop.

“It’s warm in here,” Sal said. “Whassa matter? I thought you liked to look at cock. Go ahead, look. You seen it before.”

“That’s not the point.” Kory said.

“Ain’t we friends?”

“Sal…”

“Ain’t we?” Sal persisted. Kory couldn’t keep the motion of his paw completely out of his vision. He wished Sal would finish already.

“Yeah, but…”

“And ain’t I lettin you s-stay at my house?”

“Yeah…”

Sal shrugged and leaned back again. “So just settle down. Free show.” He grunted and worked himself a little harder.

Should he stay? Should he leave? Drunk, Sal might drive home without him if he left the car now. He stared straight ahead through the windshield and curled his tail under the seat. If Sal drove home without him, still drunk, he might get in an accident.
Is that your responsibility? He’s probably driven drunk before.
Before doesn’t matter, Kory thought. I’m here now. Just wait ’til it’s over and then never talk about it again.

“Damn it,” Sal said softly. Kory didn’t respond. “Spike,” Sal said. “Hey. You’re good at this. Give me a paw.”

Kory ignored him. Sal raised his voice. “Come on, I’m fuckin’ serious here. I can’t… my fingers aren’t doing this right.”

“What? You forgot how to jerk off?”

“Not forgot, just… c-can’t make myself come. Come on, gay boy, I know you jerk off your fox enough times, right?”

Now Kory turned to him, ears flushed and folding down. “That’s not…”

Sal grinned. “How m-many other boys you done? Like at c-camp, that time you were trying to get me to strip. Did you do that with all the boys?”

Kory froze.
He remembers that?
There was no reason he shouldn’t, of course, but they’d never discussed it after, and Kory had come to regard it as his private memory. “Hey,” he started weakly, “let’s go home.”

“C-come on.” Before Kory could react, Sal grabbed his paw and brought it to his groin.

Hot flesh, not as hard as Kory would have thought, but getting harder. He jerked his paw back. “Jesus, Sal.” The impact of using Jesus’s name made barely a blip.

“You ruin my night and n-now you want to go home and s-sleep in my house and you won’t even help me out?”

“Ruin your night?”

“You were s-supposed to keep her friend happy.”

“I talked to her for three freakin’ hours!”

Sal kept stroking himself mechanically as he talked. “Divinity took off, just like that, she must have seen that you weren’t interested. Couldn’t pretend to be interested in a girl, could you? Not even for me?”

Kory sorted through the pronouns and shook his head. “She was an idiot!” he said. “And her friend wasn’t any better! If you couldn’t get into her pants in three hours… let go of me!”

Sal had grabbed his paw and wrapped it around his erection again. “Come on,” he said as Kory yanked his arm back. “You’ll do it for him but not for me? How long we been friends? Just this once.”

Samaki. Kory thought about the gentle fox and how he would handle this situation. He’d make a joke, laugh, put everyone at ease, and in a few minutes they’d all be driving home, this whole tableau just an embarrassing blot on their memories. “Sal,” he said, trying to calm himself down, “you know, if you wanna be gay, there’s a whole list of forms you have to fill out.”

His friend’s eyes narrowed. “
I’m
not gay,” he said. “Just askin’ for a favor from a friend. Least, I thought you were a friend.”

So much for the joke. Maybe he should just close his eyes and do it. What harm would it do? Sal was probably drunk enough that he wouldn’t remember too much later. Kory could get him off and they could go home and forget about it.

Except that Kory had a boyfriend.

He wasn’t sure what was considered “cheating” in gay relationships, but jerking off someone else was probably on the list. What would he tell Samaki?

“I am your friend,” he said. “Not your experiment. I’m sorry.” He put his paw on the door handle, and again imagined Sal, drunk and angry, careening home in his coupe, wrecking the car, or killing himself or someone else.

“Some friend,” Sal said. His paw jerked up and down, now matched with little grunts. Kory pressed his gaze to the passenger window and tried not to look, listen, or smell.

The inside of the car became stifling. Sal’s grunting was punctuated with pants now, and little mutters. “There we go,” he said, and “oh yeah,” and, once, “who needs you.”

“At least,” he rasped, panting harder, “get me… tissues… glove box.”

Kory popped the small compartment open and found a flat box of tissues. He grabbed four and held them out. Sal took them without another word. Kory fixed his attention on the patterns of steam his breath made on the chilly window, ignoring the louder and louder grunts and the final “Uhhhhhhhhh,” which he was sure was exaggerated for his benefit. He put a paw to his nose to cover up the sudden sharp musky odor that overwhelmed the cofFee smell, with only partial success.

A zipper, Sal clearing his throat and repositioning himself, and the prolonged, “Ahhh,” all went ignored. What got Kory to turn around was the rumble of the engine starting.

“You sober now?”

Sal rolled the car forward. “Enough to get back to my house.”

Kory resumed his study of his window, fighting a growing frustration. It felt as though his relationship with Samaki was slowly bubbling through the rest of his life, tearing it down, washing old friendships and family relationships away, leaving him with nothing. At each turn, he was faced with the question of whether he would give up the fox for his mother, for his house, for his best friend. Each time, the answer was no, but if he looked at all of those things together, would he have made the same decision?

Sal would be okay when he sobered up. Kory didn’t know if things would ever be the same between them, though.

Indeed, when he got back from Samaki’s on Sunday, Sal came into his room without knocking. “Hey,” he said, leaning against the doorframe.

Kory looked up and waited. Sal looked away. “My mom says, uh, you should probably move out next weekend.”

“Okay,” Kory said evenly.

They looked at each other, and then Sal turned and left.

If that had been the end of it, that would have been bad enough, plunging Kory back into the turbulent issue of where he might possibly live. With his mother? Absolutely not. With his aunt Tilly? Even if she didn’t live further from school than Samaki did, she was if anything more religious than his mother, and would have been filled in on all of his sins by now. With another relative in another city? The only one he might look up was his father, somewhere on the West Coast, the father he hadn’t spoken to in almost eight years. He didn’t have any other friends close enough to impose upon. That left Samaki’s house, or the Rainbow Center. He settled on the Rainbow Center, at least temporarily, because he knew that the aquatic room was still vacant.

Tuesday morning homeroom brought more turmoil to his life. As he and Sal spent the second morning in uncomfortable adjacent silence, Geoff Hill cooed nastily behind them, “Oooh, trouble in paradise? Lovers’ quarrel?”

“Screw off,” Sal said.

“Come on now, ladies,” the raccoon said, chortling. “Kiss and make up.”

“I said, screw off,” Sal said, turning to face Geoff.

Clearly delighted to have provoked a reaction, the raccoon flipped his wrist limply forward. “How butch! Way to defend your boyfriend.”

Sal got half out of his seat. Their teacher snapped his name sharply.

Kory turned as he sat back down. He gave Kory a sideways look and said, “He’s not
my
boyfriend.”

Kory could have punched him, and if he hadn’t known that the homeroom teacher was looking right at them, he might have. His only hope, that Geoff hadn’t heard him, was dashed a moment later.

“Oh, it’s like Romeo and Juliet, but with faggots!” he whispered just before the homeroom bell rang.

At least he could ignore Geoff, Kory thought. But on Wednesday, he noticed some other kids staring at him. After English class, Perry scooted quickly from the class, where he usually hung back to chat with Kory. The otter didn’t want to think it was related, but sitting in the silent car with Sal on the way home, he couldn’t come to any other conclusion. His relationship with Samaki was spreading, rippling out further, out into the light.

“You told someone about me, didn’t you?” he said to Sal.

His friend didn’t immediately answer. When he did say, “Why would you assume it was me?” the pause was so long that Kory knew he’d had to think of what to say. “Maybe it was your friend the feeb,” Sal added.

“It wasn’t Perry,” Kory said. “He didn’t know anything. You did. Nobody else at school did.”

Sal paused again. “I don’t see why it matters,” he said. “You’re an English major, and everyone kinda half-thought you were gay anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

Sal went on as though Kory hadn’t spoken. “But my friends… I got a reputation to protect.”

“So you sold me out.”

“I didn’t get any money for it, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just had to set the record straight. Well,” he added, smirking, “at least set
my
record straight.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Kory said.

“Fuck you too.”

He didn’t talk to Sal again that night.

Nick noticed right away that something was wrong, of course, even before Kory’d gotten out the money to pay for the pizza. “What’s going on?” he said as they sat down to wait.

The thought of denying it flickered only briefly across his mind. “School,” he said. “You haven’t heard?”

Nick inclined his head. “Nah.”

Kory summed up the rumors and the way he was being looked at, and, he suspected, talked about. Nick listened, leaning forward on the table. “I dunno,” he said. “It’s just not that big a deal in my class. Maybe they’re just wondering why you didn’t want to tell anyone.”

“It doesn’t feel like that.”

“I told you about the gay kid in my class, right?” Kory nodded. “So why should it be a big deal for you?”

“It’s just… why does everyone have to know? It’s my business.” He bit down hard on a breadstick.

Nick laughed. “Everyone’s in everyone’s business. My friends get on my case if I’m not on IM every night. They think I’m grounded or something.”

Kory shrugged. “It’s not like I have a lot of friends.” He watched Nick devour another breadstick and took a small bite of his own. There were probably about twenty kids he could list who Nick considered ‘friends.’

“What about, um, what’s-their-names, Jamie, Jason?”

“Jason and Dev? I haven’t played online with them in ages.”

“Oh.” Nick leaned back to let the weasel drop the pizza on their table. He had two slices on plates and was back behind the counter almost before they could say “thank you.”

Kory took a bite, while Nick kept rubbing his muzzle. “Well, what about Griff and Heko?”

“They were Jenny’s friends more than mine.”

Nick flicked his ears and his grin angled up at one corner. “So who do you talk to at school? You’ve still got Sal, right?”

Kory chewed his pizza and didn’t answer. “Hoo boy,” Nick said. “You and Sal had a fight?”

“I think he was the one who told people about me,” Kory said.

Nick took a bite, considering that. “Why would he do that?”

“We had a fight. Friday night. I’m moving out this weekend.”

Nick paused with the slice halfway to his mouth, his ears straight up. His eyes widened, and the fur around them creased with worry. “Where are you gonna go?”

“To the Rainbow Center,” Kory said. “At least for now.”

“Still not movin’ in with Samaki, huh?”

Kory took a bite, chewed, and swallowed before answering. “Rainbow Center’s more convenient to school, and they’re set up to help people. Plus Margo has connections to help me get a job, which I’m gonna have to do.”

“I don’t like the idea of you living at a homeless shelter.”

Kory grinned. “Come visit sometime. It’s a pretty nice house.”

“Oh, I will.”

Watching his brother gulp down his third slice of pizza, Kory felt the urge to hug him. Even if everyone else in school despised him, even if Sal was afraid of being turned gay or whatever it was that was going through his head, at least Kory still had Nick. “Thanks,” he said.

Nick looked up. “Mmf?” He swallowed. “For what?”

“Just… for being there.”

The young otter grinned, his ears flipping back bashfully. “Ah, well, someone’s gotta look out for ya, right?”