Divisions (Dev and Lee) (11 page)

“Actually,” Brick says, “I bet they seen his commercial and just don’t wanna dress in that Ultimate Fit crap.”

“You’re wearing that Ultimate Fit crap,” I point out.

“Yeah, well, it was free.” He grins. “And it ain’t so bad under a uniform. Wouldn’t wear it out on its own though.”

“I hope nobody else does come out,” Gerrard says. “Just distracts from the game.”

I would love to just walk away, but I can’t, not in the middle of a talk like this. I think about what Lee would say, and temper it as much as I can. “It does,” I say, “but it shouldn’t. And the only way to do that is for enough guys to come out so it’s not a big thing any more.”

“Ahh.” Pike waves a huge white paw. “It’s gonna be a big thing for years. Next guy to come out’s gonna have to be like the MVP or something. Or do it off-season when nobody notices.”

“I did it,” I say mildly.

“Oh, yeah, I don’t mean to put you down or nothin’. But I think like Marvell says here, people see it mostly as a distraction. No reason to put your team through that, right?”

I think about being able to bring Lee to Gerrard’s house. I think about being able to talk about him with my teammates, and what a weight that is off my chest. I think about how excruciating this conversation would be if I were still closeted. “It’s not about that. It’s about being happy with your life,” I say.

“If that’s what you need to be a better player, do it,” Gerrard says. “Just keep the distraction to a minimum.”

At the end of the day, Coach gives us the info for the morning flight to Yerba and directions to the practice facilities we’ll be using in case we want to do our own thing while there. Lee’s flying in on a later flight and renting a car; he has a Friday appointment with the GM. It’s not a formal interview, but the guy apparently was intrigued after Lee’s old boss recommended him, and more interested once Hal’s piece on Lee came out. We don’t know how the whole thing with him dating a player at another franchise will work out, but Lee says people should be grown-ups about it, and I guess I go along with that.

“Hey, Dev, wanna go out for a beer?” Pike calls from his locker. “Fisher wants to see us off before we fly out.”

“Nah,” I wave. “Give him my best. I got dinner at home.”

Another one of my friends, Ty Nakamura, happens to be walking by with Vonni DiCarlo, both foxes (Ty’s a wideout, Vonni a cornerback). Ty punches my shoulder when he hears that. “Ah,” he says, “that means the boyfriend is in town. Dev’s gonna get some tonight!”

I grin, and push the fox back. I start to say more, and then I hesitate, and then I think, what the hell, these guys are my friends. So I say, “Actually, he moved in yesterday.”

“Wow.” Ty stops and shakes his head sadly, his tail drooping. “My friends, let’s have a moment of silence.”

Gerrard, next to me, snorts and keeps pulling on his shirt. Pike looks confused, furrowing his brow. “Isn’t that a good thing?” Behind him, the two black bears, Kodi and Brick, watch the discussion. Brick looks bored, Kodi uncomfortable.

Ty raises his head. “Poor Dev’s freedom is gone. No more nights out with the guys.”

“Whoa.” Pike lifts large white paws. “Since when? Nights out ain’t got nothin’ to do with having a live-in.”

“He’s lucky,” Brick growls. “No fuckin’ naggin’ about engagements.”

“Getting married isn’t so bad.” Vonni, in a short-sleeved blue collared shirt, holds up a paw with a gold ring.

Ty grins at Vonni and nudges my shoulder. “Hey, I’d be happy if my grandma would quit mentioning me getting married every time we talk. But sadly, I like me the vixens.”

I bump back, grinning. “We’re goin’ to Yerba, you know. You might take a walk down Korsat Boulevard and see something you like.”

“Korsat Boulevard?” Vonni squints at me.

“Uh, yeah.” Lee’s talked about it a bunch. I didn’t realize everyone didn’t know about it. “That’s where, like…”

“The gay stuff all happens. Most famous gay neighborhood in the country,” Ty fills in. “Gay bars and gay clubs all over. And any gal I pick up in Yerba, she’s taking all her clothes off before I do anything.
All
.” His paws mime undressing.

Vonni sticks his paws in his pockets, hiding his ring. “Hey, what’s the diff, Ty?” he says. “A mouth’s a mouth, right?”

“Better than a girl, I heard.” Pike grins; we all turn to look at him. “Hey, some of the old guys, they were in clubhouses where guys’d come around and blow whoever wanted it. Sometimes you can’t get a girl to put anything in her muzzle, y’know?”

My ears get warm, thinking about the times I’ve had Lee in my muzzle. I turn to my locker and rub my head with a towel, but I can’t stop hearing them. I wish Ty would stop saying “gay” all the time, too.

“It’s different!” Ty turns around and taps his nose. “Smells different, you know?”

Vonni swings his hips back and forth. “They got pher-o-mones, you know? Make ‘em smell like whatever you want. Even to us.” He taps his nose the same as Ty did.

Kodi mumbles something to Pike and wanders out, while Ty is looking stricken. He stands up on the bench and spreads his arms. “No foolin’ my nose!” he announces to the whole locker room. “Bring it on, I’ll sniff it out.”

“Sniff this,” Pike says, lifting his sweaty clothing to the fox.

Ty waves it away, still talking to Vonni. “Maybe you oughta take that walk down Korsat,” he says, hopping down. “Sniff out some gay action for yourself.”

“I’m married,” Vonni says, “so sure, I’ll go with you.”

Ty’s tail flicks. Half the locker room is watching them. Pike, who was about to walk out after Kodi, stops to look, and even I turn around. I’m amused and fascinated, just thinking that I’m glad they’re not talking about me anymore, and then Ty looks over his shoulder at me. “I’ll go if Dev goes.”

“Wait, what?”

Ty punches my shoulder. “Come on, what do you say?”

“Look,” I say, “I don’t really know—”

“Let him be, Ty,” Vonni says. “You and me. Anyone else who wants to go, too. You don’t have to be foxes,” he adds generously to the rest of the locker room.

Ty kind of squints at me. “You think you’ll get in trouble?”

I’m aware of Gerrard looking at me, Carson waiting behind him. “Not from Lee,” I say.

“Oh, what, Coach over there?” Ty waves at Gerrard. “C’mon, we’ll go Thursday night. Plenty of time.”

“The thing is,” I say, “I mean, I’ve never been there myself. I’d be as lost as all of you.”

“So ask your boyfriend.”

“Nah,” Vonni says to Ty. “Then he’d have to admit he’s going. There’d be questions and all.”

“Aren’t you gonna tell your wife you’re going?”

Vonni laughs. “Hell no. She’s got enough to worry about.”

Pike shakes his head. “Still don’t get why he can’t just go out when he’s on the road. You two should just hitch up your pants and go. I wanna hear what happens.” He grins at Ty and Vonni, and lumbers out of the locker room. Brick follows him a moment later.

Vonni looks at Ty, and Ty looks at me. “Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll ask him to recommend some places for you to go. Depending how practice goes, maybe I’ll go with you.” I don’t want to, but I also think it’s kind of cool that they want to go, and I don’t want to give them an excuse to back down.

Fortunately, they leave it there. And Lee is amused, at least, when I relate the whole exchange to him. “I’ve never been to Korsat either,” he says, leaning against me on the couch. “But I can look up some stuff.”

“Don’t send them anywhere really skeezy.” I run fingers through the fur between his ears. “They need to have a good experience of gay people.”

“They need a good blow job.” He turns and arches an eyebrow up at me. “Or a good fuck. Look what it did for you.”

“Yeah, well.” The portion of my dating life prior to meeting Lee is there in my memory, but it’s misty, like the watercolor he hung in the living room. “So when are you coming out to Yerba?”

“I got tickets for Friday.” He rests a paw on my knee and rubs gently. “My hotel’s near yours but not too near, and I’ll have a car.”

“Sunday night I should have free.” I think about our new plays and Gerrard’s eyes on me. “Up ‘til the game, I should practice, though.”

“When you’re not parading down Korsat Boulevard with your bi-curious friends.”

“I think they’re just curious.”

“It’s not a bad thing, being bi-curious. Means you’re open-minded.”

I shake my head and then stop. “I just thought it was cool that they asked. What’s for dinner?”

“Oh.” He rubs up against my paw and then gets up. “I got a roast chicken from the store, some salad, and potatoes. Mashed okay?”

“Great.”

I look around while he goes into the kitchen to finish up dinner. He’s also done some decorating, but not a whole lot. He had my Beatles poster framed—or just bought a cheap frame for it, maybe. I know he had other posters: Dragons, Firebirds, a male fox modeling a swimsuit. Those must still be in the closet, though.

Dinner is good, the mashed potatoes lumpy but tasty. I tease him about them, pick at the salad, devour half the chicken while he gnaws daintily on a leg. I help do the washing up, and then wander around the apartment while he sets up the video games.

There’s more of his presence visible in the bedroom. For one thing, his scent is stronger there than anywhere but the living room couch. He’s also got that picture of us up on the dresser, a picture of the Hilltown Dragons 1968 championship team up on the wall, next to that winter landscape, and on the nightstand by the bed…

I peer at it. “Hey,” I say. “When did you have this done?”

He’s leaning in the doorway of the bedroom. “Like it?”

The picture shows him reclining on his side, naked, with just about an inch of erection showing at the end of his sheath. His muzzle’s curved in a sly smile, one paw cupping his sheath and balls, his tail draped artfully over one leg.

“I love it,” I say. “But who took the picture? It looks professional.”

He walks in, tail swishing behind him. “I just set up some lights in my apartment and a sheet behind. Looks good, though, huh? I took a whole set and this one came out best.”

I turn and wrap him in a hug, linking my paws behind his back. “Oh, a whole set. Were there any ‘after’ pictures?”

“Uh-huh.” He grins. “They’re on my laptop. I’ll show you.”

“I’d rather get a re-enactment.”

“We can arrange that too.” He tilts his muzzle up, and we kiss, and rub up against each other.

“You’re not going away in the morning.” I grin down. “Still getting used to that.”

“Mm-hmm.” He squeezes my rear, his tail wagging, and we just hold each other, video games forgotten. I keep looking around at the changes in the apartment, the little touches combining his home with mine into ours. He’s been careful about not moving too many of my things, and I’m determined not to have a sitcom moment where I get way too attached to some silly thing that he wants to throw out. Then I keep looking down at that picture, and I think it’s pretty nice, but the real thing is even nicer.

“I sent Hal an e-mail,” he says.

“About what?”

He steps back. “About Vince King?”

It takes me a second to place the name. “Oh, right.” I scratch my muzzle. “Poor kid. So what’d Hal say?”

Lee shrugs. “He’s going to look into it and get back to me. He thinks he might be able to talk to the local paper and get at least a little more of the story, if not something documented.”

“Like he did when he wrote that story about me and my dad?” My claws flex out; I pull them in.

“Come on. He apologized for that, and anyway, the piece that ran last week was way better.”

I grumble. The whole article seemed to me to be just a lot of fluff. It made me out to be some kind of heroic tough guy, Lee to be sensitive and smart, and our love to be some kind of passionate romance that defied all the odds. I guess it’s just how you look at it. For my money, Lee’s just a great guy that I’d do most anything to be with. Even if he is a fox, even if he does frustrate the hell out of me sometimes, even if I look at him in certain moments and see wheels turning behind those blue eyes, thoughts going places I can’t imagine. I know I’m a pretty simple guy and he wants to be with me anyway, and sometimes I have no idea why.

“So anyway.” Lee sits on the bed. “I’m trying not to think about King. I went out and found a frame for your poster at the store.”

“It looks nice.”

“And I talked to my father. He’s doing okay. He won’t settle on a time to get our stuff from the house.”

I look down at the picture, at the posters. I imagine the two of us breaking up and Lee’s things still being here. Would I want to hold onto them as tightly as I could, memories of the past? Or would I want to throw them out into the street? I guess it would depend on which of us broke up with the other, and that’s not worth thinking about because it ain’t gonna happen. “How’s your mom doing?”

He scowls, and his ears lower. “That fucking hate group she’s all in with? They put up a page for people to pray to cure Vince.”

Vince, like he knew the guy personally. I sigh. “She didn’t put the page up herself, though, right?”

“No…” And his muzzle lifts and his eyes get a shrewd gleam in them. “No, I don’t think
she
did…”

I have no idea where this scheming could be going, so I head it off. “What’s your schedule in Yerba? When are you talking to the Whalers guy about the job?”

He comes back to me, ears perking up a little. “Friday at two. Late lunch at a sushi place.”

“Is he an otter?”

“Fox. But I guess everyone on the coast eats sushi. Hey, we’ll be done by Friday night. Maybe I could go with you and your friends to Korsat Boulevard.”

“If I go.” If that’s what he was scheming about, then I’m worried, but he looks just honestly enthusiastic. “If you go and I don’t, that’d be weird. Anyway, I think they’re planning to go Thursday.”

“I’ve met a couple of them. Maybe they’ll wait.”

I lean over and growl at him, theatrically. “After you interview with another team, you want to drag my teammates out to a nightspot?”

“Hey,” he says, curling his tail back around me and smiling a sly fox smile, “I won’t start sabotaging your team until I’m officially hired by the Whalers.”