Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) (11 page)

When the song came to an end, Alexei stood straight while Kendall bent over with his paws on his knees, both looking at the screen. Alexei’s score, nearly two hundred thousand more than Kendall’s, flashed next to the word “WINNER.”

“That’s a crap song,” Kendall said. “Again.”

“That band’s local,” Mike said. “I’ve seen them a couple times.”

Kendall ignored him, waving at the screen. But Alexei turned to Mike and smiled. “I like the song,” he said.

“You’re really good,” the sheep replied, and that alone was enough to put an extra bounce in Alexei’s step, a quick wag in his tail. He let Kendall choose the music again, and again he let himself go, found his place in the song, and stood proudly at the end as the winner.

“Okay, this game’s timing is off.” Kendall stepped off the pad. “I know I hit more combos than it gave me credit for.”

Alexei was about to step down as well; his point had been made, and Kendall was quitting. Mike had paid him a compliment and the small sun was glowing in his chest. But as he gripped the rail of the game and lifted one foot to step down, a cloud hid the sun inside him. A deep, gruff voice in his head spoke.

Do not let your enemy walk away wounded. Defeat him soundly.

He paused, flicked his ears, and then turned around. Kendall was already off the platform, and had regained his smile and easy manner. In a moment he might propose they go play another game, something Alexei was not as good at, and this victory would fade. So Alexei pulled the chill from his chest and put it into his voice, projected toward Kendall. “I understand they don’t have dancing in Vidalia so much. Don’t worry. You might be good in a year or so, if you practice.”

Sol stared at him again. Even Mike’s smile faltered a little. But Kendall was the one Alexei was focused on, and the marten’s jaw clenched, his ears flat and his hackles rising on the back of his neck. “All right,” he said, stepping back up onto the platform. “One more time.”

The third time was almost laughable. Kendall, flustered and upset even though Alexei had let him pick the song for the third time, missed many steps outright, and the song hadn’t even finished before he said, “No, this game is screwed up,” and jumped off the dance pad.

Alexei finished up while Kendall stalked away, his only worry that Mike might go after the marten. And the sheep did look after Kendall, but he waited to see Alexei’s final score. “Nice,” he said. “Maybe you could teach me some moves.”

“I would love to.” Alexei smiled at Sol. “The wolf here has practiced with me a lot.”

“Yeah,” Sol said. “I think I’m gonna go see if Kendall’s okay.”

“I’m sure he is fine,” Alexei said, trying to tell Sol there was no need to keep the marten occupied, but Sol walked off anyway. Mike, happily, stayed.

“Kendall’s just…he’s really competitive,” he said. “He’s a nice guy.”

“He cannot be the best at everything.” Alexei stepped off the machine and took one more look at the two screens, the “WINNER” flashing on his.

“Yeah. Look.” Mike scratched his ears. “On Saturday, I told Kendall it looked like he was picking on you with the water balloon. And I know he doesn’t have issues with that—he didn’t come out ’til college and he never got bullied. But a lot of us do, so I just asked him to be more considerate.”

“Okay.” Alexei tilted his head. “Thank you, but—”

“So I’m going to ask you the same thing. Because what you were doing with the dance could be construed as bullying. You were taunting him, you humiliated him.”

A warm flush flattened Alexei’s ears. “He taunted me. At the ‘hoops.’”

The sheep moved out of the way of a pair of swift foxes who wanted to play the dancing game. “I know. I reminded him then, too. I’m not mad, I’m just saying, be more considerate.”

“It’s just—” The unfairness of it, that Mike would think he was as bad as Kendall, tore at his chest. “He is always around when I want to talk to you. He never lets me see you alone. This is the only way I could do that.”

“Really.” Mike folded his arms.

“Yes!”

The golden horns tilted. Mike smiled. “If you wanted to talk to me alone, why didn’t you just ask me out?”

Alexei gaped. The room felt quite warm now, and the shame he’d felt just five seconds ago was gone. “I…I never had a chance. You were with Kendall…”

“I’m not dating him.”

“Well.” The fox recovered a little of his poise. “You did not seem interested in asking me out.”

“Until a week or so ago, I thought you were dating Sol. You guys do everything together and he didn’t like me. I thought he was jealous that you did, or that you wanted to have a threesome and he’d said no, or something.”

The thought of a threesome—with Sol!—broke Alexei’s mind for a moment. “No,” he said, trying not to laugh. “No, we are not—well, I—” He gathered himself to ask a question, but for a moment his jaw seemed to go numb. Whether it was from the surprise of Mike’s suggestion or the lingering image of a threesome (
where would everyone go?
), he struggled to form words.

His phone buzzed with a text message then, and he pulled it out. Sol, saying,
You okay?

Mike grinned and straightened. “You’re popular.”

“It’s only Sol. I’m turning the phone off so we will not be interrupted again.” Alexei slid it back into his pocket.

“You don’t have to do that,” the sheep said.

“I want to.” Alexei smiled. He gloried in the unusual feeling of being someone Mike wanted to talk to. Alone.

“So,” Mike grinned. “Are you going to ask me out?”

I could have let her walk off into the night…
“Maybe in a little while. I think I must first convince myself that I am not dreaming.”

The sheep laughed. “You don’t need a pickup line. I’m already interested. But all right. So where did you learn to dance like that?”

Alexei told him about his practices with Sol and asked Mike if he danced at all. They talked about local places they could dance, and then high school proms that allowed gay students to take dates, gay relationships, and the way the country was progressing to accept gay people. “I don’t know that we will ever be accepted,” Alexei said. “There is too much tradition built up against us.”

“Traditions change.” Mike smiled. “It’s actually happening. All those football guys and basketball guys coming out, and I read there’s a baseball player who’s thinking about it. I’m just doing family law now, but I want to—” He hesitated.

“What?” Alexei prompted him.

“Ah, it’s a silly dream.” The sheep ducked his head. “I want to be a judge one day. Maybe on the Supreme Court. And rule on equality laws.”

“It’s all right to dream,” Alexei said. “The world needs dreamers.”

Mike smiled at that, and his smile made Alexei’s tail wag. Talking about gay relationships excited him with the transgressive feeling of being an underground hero, a rebel in a just revolution. Having grown up in a country whose history was littered with revolutions so muddied that just and unjust became as meaningless as colors on a flag, that feeling was shiny and new. He felt kinships here that he had never had in Samorodka with anyone but Cat; with Mike, the conversation held additional promise, hope for many things in the future, some of which ran through Alexei’s mind despite their distracting effect on his conversation.

They wandered through the games with no particular objective until they arrived at a colorful, exciting shooting game, paused to watch it, and grinned at each other when it became clear they both wanted to play. There was a cooperative mode, with no object other than destroying robots sent back in time to kill them, and Alexei was delighted when the game was over and Kendall still had not reappeared.

“I never played many video games,” Mike confessed when they finished. “My ex was into them and I have bad associations.”

Alexei’s instinct was to shy away from the subject of an ex, but Mike had brought it up, and he was intensely curious about the sheep’s prior relationship, if only to find out what things he should not do. At the same time, it was a struggle to ask a direct question about it, possibly because he could not figure out what to ask. He settled for, “How long ago did you stop dating?”

Mike dropped his big brown eyes and shook his head. “Two months ago—no, three now. Brad—you wouldn’t have met him, he moved away right after—he just up and left one day. Said he was taking a job on a cruise ship out of South Beach and maybe he’d see me when he got back.”

“Maybe,” Alexei repeated.

“Yeah. So I said…well, I said I would keep in touch. But he hasn’t written and I haven’t written and we haven’t talked. So it’s pretty much over.”

“I’m sorry.” Near the shooting game, Alexei found a small table with one empty glass. He moved the glass and gestured to Mike to sit in the other chair. “I cannot understand why someone would leave you.”

“Oh, it’s not that strange.” Mike sighed and dropped into the chair. “I guess I’m pretty boring. Brad was always wanting to travel, and I have a job I can’t just leave at the drop of a glove.”

“Brad had a job with a lot of vacation?”

“Well, he wasn’t exactly working,” Mike said.

Alexei began to get a picture of the relationship, and part of him felt a wash of pity for Mike, taken advantage of. But a deeper, colder part of him scorned the weakness of someone who would let himself be used.

He hid his surprise at the feeling and said, “I’m sorry,” again, focusing on the sympathy.

Mike laughed. “I won’t deny it hurt,” he said. “But you know, people had been telling me for months that he wasn’t good for me, and I dunno. I just thought he’d get his act together. He had so much potential, you know?”

“Sometimes you can wish for people to change for a long time, and it never happens.” He breathed in, and for a moment the memory of the rotted wood of his bedroom wall, which was now home to a hive of bees, tickled his nose.

“Amen.” Mike looked down at the table, and then up with a determined let’s-change-the-subject smile. “Heard from your sister?”

Alexei nodded. “She has met a fox who might help her come to this country.”

“Wow, that’s great!”

“Yes.” He twisted his paws together. “I wish I at least knew his name. This helpful fox.”

“Did you ask her?”

He nodded again. “But for the letter to come back, for her to answer…” He sighed. “Two weeks perhaps. If she writes back quickly.”

“It must be hard. Did she say why she didn’t write for so long?” When Alexei didn’t say anything, Mike lowered his voice. “Was it your parents?”

“I think so.” The words spilled out and then Alexei shut his muzzle quickly.

His ears flattened, and Mike must have seen his alarm. “You said your parents weren’t very understanding, and I know parents of gay kids sometimes take it out on their other children if they’re sympathetic, that’s all.” He looked away and fidgeted with his hands. “Do they…hit her?” He met Alexei’s eyes again. “Did they hit you?”

The fox delayed answering until the silence itself became an answer. Then he nodded, once.

Mike sucked in a breath. “Jesus. I’m sorry.” His large frame hunched in as though feeling the blows himself. “For a parent to abuse—that’s just about the worst—God, I’m really sorry.”

Gratitude and affection warred with surprising contempt in Alexei. It was one thing to acknowledge another’s pain; it was something else to let oneself be weakened by it, succumb to it in a way the bearer of the pain never had. Mike had had an easy life, and Alexei could have stood sympathy better than this suffering by proxy…

He shook his head. What kind of thinking was that? Mike was sweet; that was what had attracted Alexei to him in the first place. “I survived,” he said, and when Mike looked up, he pushed aside the bad feelings and forced his ears upright. “I wanted to achieve my potential.”

At that, Mike’s smile returned. “I think you’re doing a good job of it so far.”

Alexei gathered his courage. “Would you like to perhaps have dinner with me?”

“I’d love to.” The sheep’s expression brightened as though they hadn’t discussed it just half an hour before. “Like when?”

“Any time.” Alexei’s heart thudded against his chest, though he remained oddly calm. Chill, Sol would call it, and indeed there was a chill at the tips of his ears—the air conditioning, perhaps—and at the pit of his stomach.

“Well, tomorrow’s not good. Is a weeknight okay? I know we have our game Wednesday, and that guy from the Peaches is going to be there with his friend. So you have to practice hard Tuesday. How about Thursday night?” He grinned. “Maybe we can celebrate you becoming a Peach.”

“Yes,” Alexei said. “Thursday sounds good.”

“Great.” Mike glanced to one side of the room and then turned back to Alexei, his expression clouding and then clearing. “Just text me sometime after six. Tell me where we should meet. We can talk about it after the game, too.” He’d gotten shorter with his language, and was now very determinedly not looking at that side of the room. Alexei flicked his eyes in that direction and saw Kendall gesturing angrily, Sol with a paw on his shoulder.

“I would like to talk at the game.” Alexei hoped that having Mike want to talk to him, with Kendall there, would be another way of cementing his defeat of the marten. He risked another look at Kendall, now sulky and quiet, and felt a surge of fierce joy. But no; Mike had warned him about that, about taunting and humiliating his enemy.