Waterways (33 page)

“Money?” Samaki sounded incredulous. “This is about money?” He reached out and grabbed Kory’s shoulder. “I don’t believe you.”

Kory turned. “I’ve never lied to you.”

Violet eyes widened, ears folded back. “I’m not accusing you of lying. Is that really it? That’s all there is?”

“I told you, I don’t know! It’s not simple! It just doesn’t feel… it doesn’t feel right!”

The paw dropped away from Kory’s shoulder. Samaki’s eyes narrowed. He studied Kory, searching the otter’s face. Finally, he uncurled his tail and got to his feet. “It feels right to me,” he said. “Maybe I’m just imagining things, then. Maybe you’d rather be with Hazel the squirrel?”

Kory jerked his head up. “Why would you even think that?”

“I don’t know. What am I supposed to think? You don’t want to be seen with me in public, you still haven’t answered about the prom, you don’t want to be close unless you can leave. Am I just an experiment?” Samaki’s tail lashed against the bed. He wasn’t looking at Kory. “I know you don’t like it here, but you’d rather be here than with me? Tell me what that means.”

“I like it fine here.” After all they’d been through, Samaki would really think he was just an experiment? He wanted Kory to protest that, was manipulating him into a corner where Kory would have to confess his feelings and that he was the one being irrational. He splashed a paw in the water.

Samaki got up from the bed and paced back and forth. “I really do care for you, Kory. I know you’ve gone through a lot with being kicked out of your house, and I tried to be patient. I just can’t understand why you keep me at arm’s length. I’ve been waiting for you to let me get closer, but I don’t want to wait around forever if it’s never going to happen. Is it? If this isn’t going anywhere, maybe we should just…”

“Closer? Do I have to move in with you to be your boyfriend now?”

Samaki’s ears flicked. “Of course not. And you should know better than to think that.”

“I should know a lot of things I don’t. Like why I’m going through all this for you if you’re not going to help me.”

“For me?” The fox raised his voice. “I didn’t ask you to curse at your mother.”

“I wouldn’t have been kicked out of home if not for you,” he snapped.

The fox stared at him, moisture gathering in the corners of his violet eyes. “So you want to go back home.” His tail was curled tightly underneath him, his ears flat. “Is that what you really want?”

His whole body felt hot. He stared down at his paws. “No,” he said, but his voice was shaky. He curled his own tail around his legs and squeezed the tip.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be seeing each other. Then you could go home, and I could find someone…” Kory didn’t have to look up to see the tears in the black fur of Samaki’s muzzle. This was going all wrong. But maybe Samaki had a point. If they couldn’t be together, what was the point of fooling themselves any longer?

“Kory?”

He looked up reflexively at the sound of his name. Samaki was leaning against the doorframe, his head angled forward into the room. The large black ears had come up. “Am I wasting my time?”

Why did he have to make all the decisions? “I don’t know! Give me a little space!” As soon as he said it, he knew it was the wrong thing to say, but he couldn’t take the words back.

Samaki sagged against the frame. He wiped his muzzle, and then spoke in an oddly calm voice. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you do need some space. I’m sorry I thought differently.”

He was gone before Kory could think of anything to say.

His first reaction was anger. After the week he’d had, getting kicked out of Sal’s house—the second house in as many months—and after the issue with Sal himself and the kids at school, what he needed was a sympathetic boyfriend, someone who’d hold him and say everything was going to be all right because they were together. He didn’t need to have his faults pointed out, or the decisions that even he didn’t quite understand second-guessed.

He slipped back into the water and lay there looking at the ceiling, brooding and hurting. How much easier it would be if he weren’t really gay after all. What if it had just been Samaki who’d entranced him? He still thought girls were pretty. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right one. It occurred to him that perhaps his reluctance to move in with Samaki was due to his not being comfortable with the relationship, that that was a sign that he wasn’t really gay. And if he wasn’t really gay, then Samaki would be right, and he had no business being at Rainbow Center. That would just be perfect. His stuff was already packed to move. He could go home.

What happens to foxes who fall in the water? Looking up at the ceiling with the water flowing around him reminded him of the afternoon Malaya had left, when he and Samaki had done it here in the room, partly in the water. His body tingled with just the memory of the sensations, from his sheath down to the tip of his tail and up to the tips of his ears, settling in his heart. The smell of Samaki still lingered in the air, or was it just his memory? Kory remembered their caresses, how bad he’d felt about Malaya and how Samaki was able to take that all away and make it better. He wanted that, he did, but he didn’t want anyone else to have to know about it.

So why did it feel so good when Malaya called Samaki his boyfriend? Was it the danger, the thrill? Was it that it was safe for her to acknowledge their relationship? And why couldn’t he talk to Samaki about this?

All the things he’d gone through were no excuse. Why couldn’t he just let Samaki make him feel better? Why did things have to spiral out of control like that? Maybe it wasn’t that he wasn’t gay; maybe it was that he wasn’t suitable to be with anyone. Maybe he needed to find someone else like himself, someone content to keep their relationship in the shadows, out of the light.

Someone else who was as ashamed of him as he was of them. The throbbing in his heart moved up into his throat, closing it off and squeezing his eyes shut. He turned over out of habit so his tears would leak into the water, pressing his paws to his eyes and shaking with quiet sobs.

Maybe Malaya was right after all, and the world was not a nice place. It had taken a remarkably short time for Kory to lose everything: home, friends, boyfriend. He envisioned Margo’s smiling face telling him it was going to be all right, and for a moment, he understood Malaya’s running away perfectly.

Long after the sobs had drained from him, leaving him weak, he lay in the water. Eventually he pulled himself up and rested his elbows on the mat, laying his head on his forearm. He was hungry, too, but had no desire to leave the room. Upstairs, they were serving lunch, or would be soon, but even through his hunger, the thought of food made him nauseous. All he could see was Samaki cheerfully slicing a sandwich, making one for Kory just the way Kory liked it, laughing at him for choosing the American cheese over Swiss.

If he didn’t go upstairs, he’d never have to face that memory. And Samaki might still be up there, and what would he say then? Better to wait until dinner. Or breakfast tomorrow. Or dinner tomorrow. Dully, he tried to make himself focus on the ache inside his stomach, but he suspected that it was an emptiness that couldn’t be filled by food.

Steps clicked at his door, but the smell was cigarette smoke, not fox. “Welcome back,” Malaya’s husky voice said.

He lifted his head. She’d gotten some of her wardrobe back: the black leather vest and mini-skirt, and the piercings in her left ear. The right bore ragged scars along its edge, and no silver at all. On the cast on her arm, he recognized the signatures of the kids from the center, around which she’d drawn skulls and daggers in thick black marker. The other wing was stretched to its fullest across the span of the doorway, as though compensating for the broken one.

“Same to you,” Kory said.

“What’d you say to Blackie?” she asked, staying in the doorway. “He sulked around upstairs not saying two words to anyone and then he took off.”

Kory closed his eyes. “We had a fight, I guess.”

“You guess?” She chuckled. “If you don’t know, then it wasn’t a fight.” When he didn’t answer, she walked in and stood over him. “So? Was it a fight?”

He lay back, glaring up. “I never had a fight in a relationship before.”

“Then you were never in a real relationship. Didn’t you date anyone before Samaki?”

He closed his eyes. “Go away.”

She laughed and sat on the bed. “Dream on. Are you mad at him but mad at yourself, too? Wish you could take back some stuff and wish you’d said more?”

Now he opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her. “Kind of.”

“Okay. Congratulations, you’ve had your first fight. If you stay together, you get to have make-up sex, which is pretty awesome if you don’t ruin it by having another fight in the middle of it.”

“I dunno,” Kory said. “Maybe this whole ‘gay’ thing was just a mistake.”

She just stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“It would make things so much easier. Maybe this isn’t what God wants for me. Maybe this was just a test.”

Malaya opened her good wing. “What God wants? You wanna talk about what God wants? Look at this.” The leathery skin rustled as she shook the wing. “I got wings. Can I fly? Can I glide more than twenty feet? This is some kind of joke. What does God want me to do with these wings? Fuck what God wants. What do
you
want?”

His depression withered under her vehemence. “I don’t know. That’s part of the problem.”

“Okay, then, here.” She pulled a rolled-up magazine from inside her vest and tossed it onto the nearby mat. “Take a look at that.”

B.A.T.s, blared the cover in bright red letters like a theater marquee. On the front, a buxom female bat pinched the nipples on breasts the size of her head, her wings strategically hiding her sex, but not much else. Kory looked up from the cover at Malaya. “You just carry this around with you?”

“Bushytail confiscates ’em if I leave ’em in my room. Go ahead, look through it.”

He pulled himself all the way onto the mat and flipped the pages, past photo after photo of different kinds of bats showing off their immense chests, plump rear ends, and full-lipped genitals. As he flipped through, he found himself more interested in the different species; most were large-eared, small-nosed bats, not like Malaya. The few fruit bats who were in the magazine had more attractive faces, he thought. He got to the last well-worn page and tossed the magazine back to Malaya. “And?”

“There you go,” she said, picking up the magazine and tucking it back into her vest. “You’re gay.”

“Huh?”

“Well, first, you didn’t stop to stare at any of the pictures. Second, those shorts you’re wearin’ don’t look any tighter now than when you started. So I’m guessing none of those really did anything for you. Me, I can’t get four pages into this without getting all wet. So, y’know, don’t sweat
that.
You’re better off anyway. Women are bitches.”

“Thanks. I don’t really know if I feel better.”

“Hey, us faggots have to look out for each other.” She leaned back on the bed, cradling her broken arm in her lap.

Kory rested his head on his folded arms. “So what now?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Malaya said. “Maybe you get back together, maybe you don’t. You’re gonna break up eventually. Maybe this is it. Better to get it over with, eh?”

Kory lowered his head. “I wish it were that easy.”

“Make it easy, then. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is I don’t know what the problem is!” he cried.

He listened to the ripples of water and the rustle of bat wings fill the space until she said, “You want me to tell you?”

Kory snorted. “Go for it.”

“You and I got the same problem. We’re trying to figure this whole fucked-up thing out on our own. Dating’s hard enough without knowing what to do with gay dating. Can’t talk to our parents, can’t talk to our friends, and we can barely talk to each other.”

“I dunno,” Kory said. “I wasn’t that good at dating girls, either.”

“Course not. Your heart wasn’t in it. Well, your dick wasn’t in it.” She flashed a quick grin.

He opened his mouth to argue, but he couldn’t, really. “I guess not.”

She waved her good arm, the wing trailing over his sheets. “So you’ll make up with Blackie or not. If you want to, just call him.”

“I can’t,” Kory said. “He said we needed some space.” He couldn’t bear the thought of going to Samaki and trying to talk and being pushed away again. Besides that, he was still mad at Samaki for judging him so quickly, for not giving him more time to figure things out, and for walking out on him. And there was a little voice in his head saying that those things they’d said couldn’t be taken back, and maybe the whole relationship was ruined now. “He’s just so… so used to it. He doesn’t care if everyone knows about us.” Because the Starbucks cup was just sitting there, he picked it up and took a sip. The latte was cold, undrinkable.

He’d expected Malaya to be on his side, after her experience with her father. “And you do?”

“Well… yeah.”

She smirked back. “Why you think I ended up in the hospital?”

He stared at the cast as she held it up. “Uh, because your homophobic asshole father caught you looking at Vogue?”

“Wrong.” She pointed the magazine at him. “If he didn’t know I’m gay, he could’ve caught me looking at this and he wouldn’ta cared.”

“But he found out. You said he caught you and Jen…”

She laughed. “You think he’da caught us if I didn’t want him to? I’m not that stupid. And he is.”

He shook his head. “Why?”

“I thought you understood about life,” she said, looking down at him. “No point sugarcoating it. Y’are what you are. If the world can’t deal with it, fuck em. But don’t hide it. That’s just wishing, pretending it ain’t true.”

“So you’d rather get beat up than just keep your private life private?”

She held up the cast again. “This heals faster.”

“Right.” He snorted, and looked down at the mat.

Malaya shrugged. “Okay, well, I need a smoke. I’m gonna head upstairs.”

“I thought you quit.”

She grinned at him. “Old habits. You coming to lunch?”

“I guess,” Kory said. She nodded and waved, gliding through the door.