Out of Position (19 page)

He answers the door in a suit and tie, two hundred plus pounds of muscles packed into sartorial elegance, a sight that makes me kind of dizzy. “Lee?” he says as I stumble into the room and rub a paw down his shirt. The door swings shut behind me with a slam.

“You didn’t h-have to dresh up for m-me,” I say. Damn. Better not talk so much. I may be a little bit drunk.

“Listen,” he says, “can you…”

“You look great.” I take care, enunciating each word. “I have missed you.”

“I missed you too,” he says. “Lee…”

My paw has already found his crotch. “I missed this.”

He moans, reacting immediately to my touch. He’s also kind of trying to push me away, but I’m not in the mood for our little games. I want what’s in my paw, and I know what will stop his playful resistance.

Slipping under the range of his paws, I drop to my knees and focus hard on my fingers. Fortunately, his zipper is pretty loose and it comes down easily. “Lee…” he says again, panting hard.

My paw slides into his loose slacks and through his boxers, finding his big, warm hardness and squeezing. I pull it free and slide my tongue up it. “Mmm?” I say, tilting my muzzle up with a smile. Finally I feel on solid ground, literally and figuratively. On my knees, I’m much less wobbly, and I know where the next few minutes are going to go. Even slightly drunk, I can still suck cock. And if I weren’t drunk, I’d probably go into some philosophical aside about how being good at cocksucking is a talent whose cultivation is the mark of a person who realizes that it doesn’t have to be just a quickie, but my mind is a little fuzzy and, to be honest, getting his long, stiff length between my lips feels as good to me as it probably does to him. I just let myself go, shaping my muzzle to his hardness, feeling it out with my tongue, sliding up the length and around his sensitive barbed tip, which always gives me a little twinge of memory under my tail.

Whatever he was thinking, it’s gone as I cup his balls and slide my muzzle up and down, leaving his shaft glistening and trembling. With one free paw, I open my own pants and let my erection hang out, stroking a paw along my own length. See, I can’t be that drunk, or I wouldn’t be able to get this hard. But then again, I’ve never been drunk around my tiger before. Maybe he’s an aphrodisiac powerful enough to counter the effects of alcohol. If I could bottle that… but I don’t have to. I have him, and screw everyone else.

At this point, I’m so wound up that as much as I’d like a proper reunion, I’ll be happy if he comes in my mouth while I shoot all over the hotel floor. He’s moaning, I’ve got my eyes closed and my mouth full of wonderful, delicious tiger, jamming in all the way to the back of my throat and then pulling out so just his tip is set between my lips, letting my tongue flick it teasingly. I can feel the bristling of my tail and a nice warmth building up between my legs, where my paw is working faster.

“Lee…” he chokes out again between moans.

He’s making some kind of movement, probably toward the bed. I don’t need to get to the bed. I just want to finish this, more than anything right now. I ignore the protest, and the tightening of his paw on my shoulder tells me that it wasn’t that serious a protest anyway.

I’m getting good pressure with the base of my tongue against his shaft as he slides in and out. I can taste his musk over the slightly stale taste of beer, even more intoxicating and rare. My paw feels damp; I rub my thumb over my tip to make myself shiver, squeeze my growing knot. He growls and lashes his tail around to curl under my shoulders.

That’s when there’s a loud knock at the door.

“Mmmph,” I say, and don’t stop. Room service or something.

Dev reacts abruptly and sharply, pushing my shoulder and stepping back, then trying frantically to stuff his hard, glistening length back into his pants. “Lee,” he hisses, “it’s Hellentown.”

“Forget about it, Dev,” I say, pulling out the movie reference. “It’s
Hellentown.”

He’s not laughing, which peeves me, but I don’t have time to be upset. He points at the door and forces me toward it, pushing me aside at the last moment into the sliding closet. “Be right there,” he calls, then glares down at me and makes a gesture, sealing his lips shut with his fingers. He’s been this rough with me before, and the intensity is always frightening. I sit there half-angry, half-terrified, as the closet door slides shut and I hear the hotel room door open.

“Devlin Miski? George Tuppan. This is Coach Shymer and Jenkins.”

I can smell them, over the sex and beer and thick tiger musk permeating the track suit I’m sitting on, and they sure as heck can smell me. “Don’t you hate it when they let foxes clean the rooms?” a different voice says. “Phew. Can’t ever get rid of the stink.”

“Come on in,” Dev says, after an awkward pause. There’s some shuffling sounds and they all move away from the closet, thank goodness. I’m frozen, not daring even to zip up my pants in case they hear me. Every breath I take seems magnified, echoing off the walls of the tiny, confined space. I have to breathe through my mouth because my nose whistles.

“It’s late,” the first voice—Tuppan?—says, “so we’ll get right down to it.”

They ask him a bunch of questions about his teammates, his play in certain games and what he learned, and as they’re doing this I’m sinking further into despondency. I was drunk,
am
drunk, in fact, and I didn’t even stop to think that maybe he was trying to stop me because he’d made an appointment. Just because my day was over didn’t mean his was going to be. And here I am, jeopardizing his career because I was a little pent-up. Could I have been more selfish? Possibly, though it was hard to imagine how. I picture the general manager catching me in the room, sheath hanging out, drunk, and what it would mean for Dev. Maybe not just the end of his chances with Hellentown, but with the whole league, if it got out. A kid who’s a marginal pick at best needs every advantage he could get, and an oversexed boyfriend definitely ticks in the disadvantages column. Stupid, stupid fox.

“We noticed,” one of the coaches says outside, “that your play picked up significantly your senior year. Looks like you figured something out.”

“Yeah, I did,” Dev says.

Another voice. “Was that from Coach, um…” A rustling of papers.

“Kimble. Partly,” Dev says. “But also, there was a friend of mine who…” They let him gather his thoughts. “He kind of pointed out to me that there were a few things I could be doing better.”

“Not one of the coaching staff?” one voice says, at the same time as another says, “What kind of things?”

He recites off some of the stuff we’d talked about last year: proper positioning for the play, proper footwork, precision in routes, and reading the opposing plays. He’s exaggerating. He was already pretty good at running routes and reading plays. He was just sloppy.

“Pretty good friend,” one coach says.

Tuppan chimes in again. “Knows a lot about football?” He’s got a high voice, which makes me picture him as a weasel. I try to remember whether I’ve seen any pictures of him, and I can’t bring any to mind. Coach Shymer is a wolf, a former backup quarterback. I’d love to ask him how it felt to hold for the kick that won the championship in ’73.

“Yeah,” Dev says. “He was a big help.” Did I imagine the emphasis on ‘was’? I cringe, trying to do it as quietly as possible. I wonder if I can gnaw through the wall and into the next room without making any noise. Probably not.

They talk football for another ten or fifteen minutes, tell him they’ll be talking to his coach, ask questions about his family. I say ten or fifteen minutes because I figure out later that that’s how long it is, but if you’d asked me while I was huddled in the closet, I would’ve said it was at least two hours. I itch in a dozen places I don’t dare scratch, my sheath is cold from being out in the air, my mouth is dry from not breathing through my nose, and every second they’re not speaking is a second I’m telling myself what an idiot I am. Oh, and also, as my erection vanishes, I have to pee. Badly.

The only thing that stops me from making a mess on the bottom of my closet is that I’m sure they’ll smell it on the way out. The only thing worse than being walked in on would be being discovered after a successful interview, which is what it sounds like this is. At the very least, they’re continuing to ask him questions, where I imagine they would just terminate the interview, especially at 10 or 11 or 1 am or whatever the hell it is now on the last day. Of course, they do keep asking him why he switched from being a defensive end, which is ridiculous because he never was a defensive end. But when he tells them that, they come back a minute later with “so when did you make the change?” Idiots. No wonder they’ve missed the playoffs six years in a row.

My back is stiff, my bladder is about to burst, my neck is killing me, my right leg is asleep, and the fleas from my hotel room must have followed me here and are having a party for all their friends in my tail, stomach, back, all over. I focus on the questions and remind myself that I’ve already been enough of an idiot, thinking back to each beer and swearing that I will never, ever, ever get this drunk again.

It’s 6 am the following Tuesday when they finally get up and walk to the door. “Good talking to you,” Tuppan says.

“Hellentown is a great organization,” Dev says. “I’d be proud to be a part of it.”

“Let’s hope it works out,” one of the coaches, probably Shymer, says. I hear the lupine growl in his tired rasp. 

“Night,” Dev says, and closes the door.

I wait for another eternity. I can hear him breathing on the other side of the door, can feel him standing there, but I don’t dare move for fear that maybe the Hellentown guys haven’t left. Which is stupid, of course, because what would they be doing, all clustered together around the closet with Dev? Waiting to see how long before I pee on the closet floor?

The door slides open. Dev’s staring down at me. “Can’t believe you kept quiet,” he rumbles.

I scramble past him and to the bathroom, swinging the door shut and not even waiting to hear it latch as I relieve myself, moaning in satisfaction. I give myself a good scratching at the same time, fluffing my tail out and stroking it back into place. When I’ve zipped up and wiped my paws, I hesitate in front of the bathroom door, which isn’t even all the way closed. Ears down, I ease it open, half-hoping Dev will be curled up on the bed facing away from me so I can just slink out of the room.

He’s sitting right on the bed, of course, staring at the door as though it’s an opposing quarterback. When I poke my muzzle out, he lifts a paw and crooks a finger, beckoning me toward him.

It’s a terrifying feeling, a completely different kind of terror than when he threw me into the closet. I’ve always been the one in control, the one who knew what he was doing and knew what Dev was doing before he did, half the time. I know I’ve fucked up, here, and I have no idea what to expect from him. His expression is completely neutral and I can’t smell him over the beer on my breath. I shuffle across the floor like a cub.

For the span of several heartbeats, we stare at each other. Then we both start talking at the same time, and, amazingly, our words are exactly the same.

“I’m sorry…”

I stare at him. “What on the green earth could you possibly be sorry about?”

“For throwing you in the closet.”

“The closet? I deserved to be thrown out of the window!”

He peers at me. “You’re drunk.”

It’s such a surreal moment. I thought it was fucking obvious, like I might as well have staggered in with my tongue hanging out and eyes crossed. I reek of beer, I’m slurring my words… but of course, he doesn’t have a fox’s nose. And suddenly, the whole thing, this whole scenario, is absurd. Of
course
I’m drunk. Did he think I just wandered in here all loopy and horny without the benefit of alcohol? I stare at him, and I can see every wrinkle in his very slight frown, like he’s just starting to figure out whether to be annoyed that I just burst into his room and started sucking him off, or to forgive me because I’m drunk, or to be angry because I’m drunk, and I can’t help it. I giggle.

He frowns a little more, right as my gut chooses to send a little bubble of air back up. It’s halfway between a burp and a hiccup, but it’s the funniest noise in the world. I giggle again, and this time I can’t stop. It’s even funnier because he keeps frowning, and I have to clutch my stomach, doubled over from laughing so hard. I sit down on the floor, the nice plush carpet, howling with laughter because even if his face weren’t screwed up comically trying to figure out what’s going on, the giggles are just building off themselves now in a way they haven’t in years.

“Lee,” he says patiently, making me fall onto my side, shaking with giggles. I turn over onto my back and close my eyes, hoping it’ll run its course but enjoying it at the same time. “What’s so funny?”

“I’m drunk,” I try to explain in between snorting laughs. Clamping a paw around my muzzle just hurts my throat when the convulsions are trapped back in there, so I let it out again.

“And that’s funny?”

“No,” I choke out, which is funny enough in and of itself to set me off all over again, though I try not to laugh so noisily this time. Shaking with silent mirth, at least I can’t see his face anymore. I’ve gone from horny to depressed to hysterical in about half an hour, forty-five minutes tops, and the more I think about it, the funnier it is.