Out of Position (52 page)

I scan the room again, taking in a breath to say, “Regarding,” but it catches in my throat. All the way in the back of the room, there’s a pretty, young vixen with blue eyes. She’s wearing a new blouse, Chevali red and gold, which is why I didn’t recognize him right away, not until our eyes met. My mouth dries up. Time stops.

I’m back at the first game he attended, looking up and feeling that compartment in my heart ease open, the knowledge that he was there only for me, and only I knew it. There’s no reason for him to be in drag here at the press conference, except to remind me of those days when his support made all the difference in the world. I don’t know if even now he realizes how much it meant.

It makes me think of him and his life, too, how wearing that disguise is something he does even when he doesn’t have to, just because — for whatever reason — he enjoys it. He likes that I like it, but it’s also who he is, and he doesn’t shy away from it. I know that he might not have intended that to be a message to me today, it’s just something he likes doing. Then I ask myself what the hell I’m thinking. Of course it was a message. He’s a fox, isn’t he?

He smiles. The hands of the clock move again. Ogleby hisses behind me. The reporters play with their pens, impatient. Lee’s smile stays fixed, illuminating the room. He doesn’t know what I’m going to say, for once, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever I say, it’ll be okay. We’ll work through it.

“I came here,” I say, “to address the recent allegations. Because they’ve been a real distraction to the team.” Coach, to my left, nods. And then I picture myself reading the next line in Ogleby’s script:
They are completely false.
I see paws raised for questions, my own bland answers resisting the attempt to catch me out in the lie. Ogleby would take care of me. I’d be assured of my starting job (for a little while), I’d have Carroll’s company, maybe a nice wedding and a honeymoon (she promised I could bring Lee if we go somewhere exotic). Life would be good. It’d be easy.

“They are completely false,” I say. “I never had any contact with Brian Dallas last week, as he claims.” Back in the hallway, Brian smirks. He says something to one of the nearby reporters.

Ogleby pats me on the shoulder. Caroll puts on a gleaming smile. I’m searching for the words to go on with what I really want to say when Frank, in the front, gives me the perfect opening. “What about the previous rumors about your sexuality?”

Ogleby’s paw tightens on my shoulder. Caroll slides her paw over, inviting mine. I ignore it.

I don’t want it to be easy. I love the challenge of football, and if it were easy, it wouldn’t be fun. Lee, smiling in the back of the room, gives me the courage to follow through on what I came here to do: To commit, to give myself wholly to what I care about, on the field and off. I hear his voice in my head, from weeks ago:
you are Devlin Miski.

But there’s more than that. It’s not just who I am. He did the same thing last night, made the same commitment to me.
We are Dev and Lee,
I amend to myself.

“Oh, those are true,” I say. “Completely true.”

Fifty paws shoot into the air. Voices shout questions as though I’d flipped a switch, making the noise in the room almost unbearable. Vince can’t make himself heard. Ogleby makes a noise behind me. Coach moves in my peripheral vision. But the only person I’m looking at is the blue-eyed fox in the back of the room. Lee’s smile falters. He drops his head into his paws. It takes me a moment to see that he’s crying. My resolve wavers, but of course I can’t back out now.

Paws crowd my vision. I turn to Ogleby, but he’s no longer there. Caroll half-rises, looks at the reporters, and then fixes the smile on her muzzle and sits back down. Probably none of the reporters can see the tightness in it that I can. Coach is on his way out of the room, too. The reporters are starting to yell out their questions. “How long…?” “Who is…?” “What do your…?” Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Brian in the doorway to the hall, alone, abandoned.

I recognize Dwight, from Sporting News. He’s one of the few familiar faces in the room. I point at him. “Devlin,” he says, “why did you choose to make this revelation now?”

“I didn’t,” I say. I look to the hallway where Brian’s trying in vain to get the attention of some of the reporters near him. I wonder how he feels.

He got what he wanted: a player is out, and it’s me, Lee’s boyfriend. But I think he wanted to be more involved in the public outing. He wanted me to be dragged out, not for me to stand up and do it on my own. A minor difference, like lining up one foot to the left on the field. I’ve got that feeling now, that no matter how the play unfolds, I’m doing the best I can. I’m in the right position.

“But you chose to acknowledge them.”

My phone buzzes. I glance down at the text message.

Lee 1:16 pm:
Love you.
Through black paws, at the back of the room, light catches the glint of one blue eye. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

The next question is, “Do your teammates know?”

“I don’t want to talk about my team,” I say.

“That’s right.” Everyone turns to see Fisher walk into the room, through the doorway where Brian had been. I didn’t see him leave. “We can speak for ourselves.” Behind him, Coach walks back in and steps to the side, letting six of my teammates through the door. They arrange themselves behind me: Gerrard, Charm, Carson, Ty, one of the backup linebackers, and, in something of a shock, Aston. Fisher comes up to me and pats my shoulder before going to stand back with the rest of the team. Aston gives everyone a big smile and a wave, pats my shoulder just like Fisher did, and then poses in front of the other guys. Fisher will tell me later that he found Aston hanging around and dragged him along to provide star presence. Given the Internet jokes about Aston, I have to say I’m surprised and more than a little impressed.

I turn away from the reporters, look at the guys, and I want to tell them how much this means to me, but they already know. Fisher gives me a quick thumbs-up; Coach, a quick nod. The other guys smile or just fold their arms and look resolute and menacing, like bodyguards. When I turn back to the reporters, I straighten, looking at Vince with confidence. Like Lee always told me, the best way to fight fear and ignorance is with honesty and openness. I think about Charm and Fisher, I think about Brick’s grudging acceptance, and the rest of the guys behind me, and finally, perhaps, I really understand what he means.

Vince has gotten the mob somewhat under control. He points to a black squirrel in the back, who stands up and asks, “When did you first realize you were gay?”

Behind the squirrel, Lee’s sitting up straight, smiling wide as I’ve ever seen him. I hold his eyes with mine.

“Funny thing,” I say. “It started with a girl.”

(Lee)

 
It feels weird getting on the plane to Chevali and not talking to Dev about it. The airport, the terminal, all that is so familiar, and yet there’s that one piece that’s lacking. It’s like going home and forgetting my favorite tail brush at college. Or, more appropriately, it’s like going home and finding a completely different family there.

I lift the white cloth mask to my nose one more time as I walk off the jetway, then drop it in a pocket of my overnight bag. I stock up on NeutraScent because the planes are just hell otherwise, but I’m not one of those canids who’s rude enough to wear one of their masks out in public. You might as well be one of those high school coyotes with the t-shirt that says, “You all smell like sh*t.” On a plane, it’s okay, because you’re crammed together for one, three, six, fourteen hours. Even then it’s kind of rude.

But if I can have a spotted skunk as a best friend for three years, I can take a couple hours on the plane with only a discreet sniff at the NeutraScent now and then to clear my head. One of the reasons Brian and I got on so well together is that we’d both had people stare at us and then press their noses quite obviously into a NeutraScent. Usually it’s cats that are all snooty about odor. Brian and I used to crack up about ’em. You have to laugh. Otherwise you just want to hit them.

Brian and I helped each other laugh a lot. Besides that, we got on well together because we both loved football and cocksucking, not necessarily in that order. Neither is on the agenda for this visit.

He’s leaning against a pillar in the airport when I come through the security area. The grin on his black-and-white muzzle doesn’t change much when he sees me, but his tail twitches behind him. His customary silk shirt is open like it never was in Hilltown, but I notice that he hasn’t quite copped to the local tradition of wearing shorts.

“Still in the slacks,” I say, walking up to him.

He looks me up and down. “Still in the jeans.”

I stick out a paw. He looks at it and then steps forward into a hug. “We’re not gonna start this with a shake, Tip,” he says.

I hug back as noncommittally as I can. His scent is familiar, but a little different. Sharper, maybe. I shrug it off. People change. “What exactly are we starting?”

He doesn’t offer to take my bag. “You got any checked luggage?”

I shake my head and pat the bag. “Travel light. I’m only staying the one night.”

“One night with me and one with him?”

Before I can get a good look at his eyes, he’s turned, leading me through the airport to the parking garage. So I take him at face value. “Just you, Spotty.”

“I feel so special.”

Now this is familiar, but jarring in the Chevali airport. I follow his feathery black-and-white tail amidst the crowd of people. “I thought it’d be easier face to face.” Saying it now, I wonder whether it will be. Perhaps more accurate would have been to say that I have a better chance of convincing him in person.

We trot down a staircase, past a crowd I recognize from my flight, standing around the baggage claim. I hug my bag to my side as Brian leads me past them and outside.

The heat hits me worse than the scents on the plane, a buffeting of sun and temperature like opening an oven. Brian takes out a pair of black designer sunglasses and flips them open as I gasp. He doesn’t turn for my reaction to the heat, but he must know, because as he slips the sunglasses on, he says, “Keep your ears up. Helps dissipate the heat. Hungry?”

I put them up, even though the inside of them already feels almost unbearably sticky. I can’t help panting as we stand waiting for the light to cross to the parking garage. Next to us, a cougar glances our way and then buries his nose in a NeutraScent handkerchief. He doesn’t seem to care that I’m watching him do it. “Sure,” I say. “You got a favorite place here?”

“Have I ever.” The light changes. We cross and take the elevator up two levels. He walks me to a late-model convertible and puts his paw on it, looking back at me with a smile.

I toss my bag in the back and run my paw over it, too. “Nice. How much did it set you back?”

“One phone call a week.” He slides into the driver’s seat, curling his tail around his legs, and rests one arm on the door.

I stand and look down at him, lounging in his convertible with his shirt open. I’d almost swear he was straight. “How is the family, anyway? Do they know you’ve gone native?”

“Dad visited last month,” he says. “They’re the same as ever. All investments and properties and crap. Get in, already.”

The leather is surprisingly cool against my fur. I take out my own sunglasses—narrow, cheap, rectangular—and slide them on. Brian tools out of the parking lot with a lot of showing off of his car’s engine.

The air rushing past me feels like the roaring of the desert, a hot, dry wind that pulls the fur from my face. I hold up a paw to shield myself from the worst of it and yell over the noise, “Thanks for letting me visit.”

“Letting you?” Brian yells back. He laughs. “Tip, I should be thankin’ you for bestowing the favor of your presence on me. And all I hadda do was stalk your boyfriend, snap a pic of him with his fake girlfriend, and threaten to out him.”

That’s enough to shut me up. “What’s the matter?” Brian yells a couple minutes later. “Thought you came here to talk?”

I did, but not to yell. The wind is like a radio turned on full to static in my ears, and my throat’s already dry from the wind. So I just wave a paw to signify, “Later,” and fix my eyes on the distant hills.

He lives in a suburb with parks and trees, about ten minutes from the airport. The houses have flower gardens, some of them, and meticulous landscaping. “You guys use enough water here?” I remark as we roll down the main street, past boutique furscaping stores and fashion clothiers and gourmet food shops.

“I guess,” Brian says. He turns down a side street. “Whatever it takes.”

“Right.” We roll past a school, a nice one, with expensive-looking equipment out on the athletic field and well-groomed cats and rats—and one fennec, I notice—out doing some kind of organized activity on it. It’s September, but it’s still too hot for me to think about running around outdoors, at least here. “Nice neighborhood, anyway. Daddy knows his real estate.”