Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (73 page)

The Pilots hit short throws, short throws. The fox is targeted twice more, and once Miski knocks the pass away; once the fox catches it and Miski drops him right away. Great coverage. Can’t ask for more outta the guy.

The only big play they get is an end-around to the rabbit tight end, a risky play with the clock winding down, because if he’s tackled on the field, time keeps slipping away. But it catches the Firebirds off guard, and the rabbit skips past the sidelines at the Firebirds’ thirty-nine. The crowd goes berserk, most of them on their feet now.

The Pilots are right at the edge of their field goal range. They try a run on second down and get stuffed. The crowd doesn’t care. They’re yelling at them to go for it. In the box, the cheers are quieter, and mixed between “we’re in range” and “a few more yards to be sure.”

On third, Marvell leans in to Miski as the offense is setting up and yells something. Miski listens, nods, sets. The linebackers and safeties get into their set, and when the ball is snapped, that fox receiver comes across again. And this time, Miski lets him go. The big tiger charges straight through the line.

The Pilots got so used to him covering the fox that this catches them off guard. Their quarterback is good, though; he realizes right away that this means the fox is uncovered and cocks to throw in that direction.

And Marvell is right there, pacing the fox stride for stride. The quarterback hesitates, moves to his second read, and then he has to dodge out of the way of Miski to avoid being sacked.

He doesn’t quite make it.

The crowd goes as still as their quarterback, and then, like him, they get up again, cheering their team on as they line up for fourth down. There’s no question of a field goal now; they need to get a first down. The quarterback lines up in the shotgun, takes the snap, drops back to pass. And the Firebirds are blanketing all his receivers, all of them. Miski sticks to the fox like glue. The corners and safeties jostle with the wideouts. And here comes the leopard, Carson Jones, the other outside linebacker, escaping his blocker and charging the quarterback.

Gamely, the lion tucks the ball down and tries to run, but he has nowhere to go. He runs into his own line and the leopard grabs him and he falls and he’s on the forty-four of Chevali and it’s Firebirds ball and that’s it, that’s the ballgame. The Pilots don’t have enough timeouts to stop Aston from kneeling and running out the clock, and the final score stays up there on the scoreboard no matter how much we rub our eyes: 20-19. Firebirds win.

I can’t believe it. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen.

Lee runs past me, out of the box. I get up just as the door swings shut behind him, but I resist the urge to follow him. Instead, I just put my ear to the door and listen. Brenly gives me a disapproving look, so I smile back.

All I hear at first is gasping, and then there’s laughing and then, finally, a long, sustained cry of “YEEEEEESSS!” A thump, like a body slumped against a wall in relief, and a high-pitched sound like tension being vented through a steam whistle.

I chuckle to myself and leave the kid to celebrate. “I’m curious,” I say to Brenly as I sit down. “It’s why I’m a reporter.”

“
You’ve certainly got a passion for it,” he grumbles.

The weasel and his friends stand, packing up their stuff. They thank Ponaxos for the seats, talk about when they’ll see him again, and file past us without saying anything. As the weasel passes us, he drops a clump of bills into my lap.

“
Thanks,” I say, but he doesn’t even turn.

I give Brenly his forty just as Lee comes in from the outside, his smile as big as I’ve seen it. “Perfect end to a perfect weekend,” he says.

He’s been in the hospital, in jail, and this is a perfect weekend? Brenly’s last comment to me echoes in my head, and it clicks, then, the heart of my story. It’s the passion—not just the attraction to each other, but Lee’s passion for life, Miski’s passion for football. That’s what binds them together. That’s what Cim and I never had, that’s what got Miski to come out on TV and Lee to drive five hours to pick a fight with a tiger twice his size and Miski to fly up there to get him and Lee to stand here pressed against glass for three hours devouring every scrap of action that happens on the field. It’s a passion for life, when you get right down to it.

With that realization comes jealousy. I’m older and wiser, I tell myself. That makes up for it. But there’s no getting around the fact that this kid feels something I’ve never felt before, akin to what the kids down on that field feel every week, or what the cougar walking past us out of the box feels with his business.

But just because I haven’t felt it doesn’t mean I can’t write about it. I’ve got my story now, and I’m already composing the end of it in my head as I stand with Brenly.

“
Lee,” Brenly says. “Coming?”

The kid puts his paw up and exhales, fogging the glass around it. He turns before it dissipates, leaving an outline of five fingers, slowly fading. “I can’t imagine a better game to watch from the owner’s box,” he says. He bounces across the room to join us, stopping to get his money behind the ice bucket on the way. “God, I want to write about it right now.”

His tail’s wagging up a storm, and sympathetically, mine starts going too. It was a hell of a game, and as a reporter I’m pretty excited about seeing the changing of the guard.

Maybe that’s another angle for the story. New ways, new thoughts, new traditions. The team accepting the gay teammate beating the team that, well, it’s not really fair to cast the Pilots as standing in the way of progress or anything. They were all professionals there. None of them spit on him or anything, not that we could see.

Times are changing, that’s the angle. And changing for Lee, too, I think as I follow father and son down the hall. He’s going to be moving in with Miski, and that’ll be—well, I don’t know how that’ll be. Can’t ever predict those kind of things ‘til they happen.

I hope it goes well for them, I really do. The odds are stacked against ‘em, but I hope they beat the natural order. Hell, if the Firebirds can be leading the division in the middle of November, anything’s possible.

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 and short stories. He has since won four more Ursa Major awards, including one for “In Between,” the first Dev and Lee story, and one for
Out of Position
, which also won two Rainbow Awards for gay fiction.

His various online presences are linked from
www.kyellgold.com
. In the off-season, he lives in California with his husband.

Blotch was one of the top-rated high school furry artist prospects of 2006 and starred in college before being made the #1 pick of Sofawolf. He’s excelled in his first two years, garnering several convention GOH appearances. He has won the last three Ursa Major awards for Best Published Illustration (including a 2009 win for the cover of
Out of Position
), and in 2008, his full-color graphic novel
Dog’s Days of Summer
won an Ursa Major for Best Other Literary Work. His next project is the Nordguard Adventure, a painted graphic novel to be released in three parts.
Across Thin Ice
, the first volume, will be released in 2011.

His all-ages gallery can be found at
www.blotchinc.com
. For more information on the Nordguard Adventure, please visit the official website at
www.nordguard.com.

Sofawolf Press was founded in 1999 to provide a venue to showcase great writers of anthropomorphic fiction and to promote the genre to a wider audience.

Since the debut of its flagship publication, Anthrolations, a literary anthology of short stories, the Press has added to its lineup other magazine-length anthologies, novels, shared-world anthologies, and other novel-length collections, comics and graphic novels, artists’ sketchbooks, and calendars. The Press continues to seek out new and creative ways of expanding its offerings of printed creations.

Please visit their website at
www.sofawolf.com/catalog/
for a full list of titles available from Sofawolf Press. Thanks for reading!