Divisions (Dev and Lee) (23 page)

His ears are down, shoulders lowered, and his voice drops. “It’s still a distraction I don’t need during football season.”

I bite my lip and then shove a mouthful of salad into my muzzle. So it’s okay to be distracted for a million-dollar commercial, but not for something that might really help a lot of kids? But I swallow the salad and just say, “It might not be during the season at all. I haven’t even talked about anything concrete yet. I won’t push you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

His features slide into a smile. “I know you won’t, fox,” he says. “You’re happy enough with the things I do want to do.”

When we finish washing up, he settles into the couch and turns his gold eyes on me as I come out of the kitchen wiping my paws dry. “So Brian didn’t want you to come over or anything?”

I sit down next to him. “No. I would’ve told you. And I wouldn’t have gone.” I rest my paw over his.

He shakes his head. I hurry to go on. “I can handle him. I’ll only meet him in public and I’ll make sure we stay focused on work.”

His features relax into a smile. “Okay. Sorry. You said you’re doing lunch with Kinnel? Why? What’s he want?”

“My winning personality.” That gets a smile from him. “Also, I think he’s lonely.”

Dev raises his eyebrows. “Do I have to worry about him, too?”

I plop myself down into his lap, angling at the last minute to try to avoid his right leg. “He’s very straight. Also he’s like ten years older than me. Don’t worry about it. Am I allowed to have friends here or do I just have to stay in the apartment all day?”

His paw strokes between my ears. “You’re allowed. He’s a good guy. Is he still asking you for quotes from me?”

I lean into him. “He wants to know how you feel about Strike.”

“Oh God.”

My fingers rub his right leg. “That bad?”

“No, it’s just…” He exhales. “I don’t know how to sum it up. He’s frustrating, but he’s also…Lion Christ, I dunno. He keeps calling me his ‘gay teammate.’”

I slide a paw over to squeeze his sheath. “The nerve of him.”

“It’s not that.” He tightens his arm around me. “It’s like, why does he have to call attention to it? I just want to play the games and have nobody give a shit what I do when I go home.”

“I know the type,” I say. “We had a couple at Forester. Go out of their way to show how liberal they are, how they totally don’t care that this guy is gay, and in fact they’ll stand near him for a picture to prove it. But still that’s kind of all they talk about, so you know it’s on their minds.”

“He’s not exactly like that. Still. I’m glad we only have to play with him for three more games.”

“Hopefully five or six,” I say with a poke.

He hugs me closer. “Yeah.” His paws slide down my back. “But I don’t want to talk about him any more.”

I give my hips a little shimmy. “You sure that aching body is up to not talking?”

His muscles shift, his arms tighten around me like steel. Next thing I know, I’m up in the air and moving toward the bedroom. “Why don’t I show you?” Dev says, his eyes bright and nose almost touching mine.

I kiss him. “Sounds like a lovely plan.”

I show up for lunch with Hal in a t-shirt and jeans, which he acknowledges with a grin and a twitch of his whiskers. We sit at the orange plastic table and munch on what is some pretty darn good greasy pizza, and we have a nice chat about his life and his friends and my life and my friends, which I have to say are much more interesting. His newspaper buddies don’t really talk to him much; his wife doesn’t talk to him; he has friends on the local basketball team and in the Firebirds front office, but being a freelance writer is tough.

He does say that the first date with the coyote went okay. I ask if he has another lined up and he says maybe, he’ll see.

I realize I never told him that my parents got divorced, which makes him jot down a note to call my father. Good, I think. He could use the help. I oughta call him myself. And mother again. That separation in my mind makes me uneasy, tinges my conversation and shortens my answers for a little while.

“How’s cohabitation?” Hal asks as we push the empty pizza plates away from us.

His ears are perked, and the way he says it, it looks like he’s trying to get my mind off the divorce. So I smile and wipe my muzzle with a napkin. “Going well so far. He hasn’t objected to my additions to the apartment.”

“Nice to find someone you fit with like that.” He pauses and then his ears flick, like he changed what he was going to say. “Going to look for a house?”

I look down at the table and trace drops of condensation around my root beer glass on the orange plastic table. “It looks like I’ll be in Yerba next year.”

“Oh?” His ears perk. “Congratulations. That’s great.”

“Provided I don’t piss off the rest of the Whalers’ scouting team.”

He grins. “Hence the gay activism?”

“Me, I’m going to be behind the scenes.”

“With that Brian guy.”

I flatten my ears and frown. “I’m already getting it from Dev. Now you too?”

“Hey.” He puts his paws out. “I’m all for mending fences. Just seems like this guy caused you more trouble than good, over the years.”

“We were good friends for a while.” I drink the root beer. “It’ll be fine. I’m more worried about how I’m going to get Dev to take time off during the season without him getting a million dollar paycheck for it.”

His ears cup forward. “Someone’s paying him a million?”

I set down the glass coolly. “When it’s public, maybe I’ll tell you.”

“Hmph.” He looks genuinely hurt, but then, he likes to mess with me. “How much time would he need to take off?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve even talked to anyone or made firm plans. I just mentioned it and he closed down.” I still don’t want to tell him about Dev’s ad, so I think up another question, a safe one. “So what are you working on now?”

That does jar him out of the sulk, mock or not. “What?”

I’m not sure what he thought I might mean. “Another article about football, something else about Dev?”

“Oh. Right.” He nods. “Been wanting to do a follow-up on Miski’s article. Little bit of interest from ESPN on the reaction, but they got their own guys. Also following up another story about injuries.”

“Football injuries?” I grin. “What, is the 1920 Times buying stories again?”

He smirks and taps his nose. “There’s a unit in a college outside Peco that’s been studying the long-term effects of football injuries on quality of life. It’s gotten a little play, but not a whole lot. I interviewed them and then last week I’ve been talking to the local school here, too. They do a lot of work on retirees in this climate and they have a good baseline to measure the effects of age and maybe isolate them from the injuries. Anyway.” He waves a paw. “Just something that came up through a friend.”

“Seems worthwhile. I’d volunteer Dev for it, but I don’t know if he’d want to go. I’m amazed at how much he’s getting beat up, though. I mean, you read about it in the papers, I know it’s a brutal game, but…college wasn’t this bad.”

“Don’t worry about it. Probably won’t go anywhere. Nobody wants to see the bad side of their entertainment, right?” His muzzle dips, ears folding back to the sides. “Nobody wants to know that shit. But they ought to.”

“Sure.” I nod. “Families putting kids into football programs.”

“College kids making decisions about their futures.”

I shake my head. “Don’t know about that one. College kids think they’re invincible.”

A long grin spreads up his muzzle. “You do, do you?”

“It’s been a couple years.” I sip the root beer. “But I remember what it’s like. Still, if colleges were forced to provide full disclosure…”

“There could be legal ramifications as well. Another reason the UFL and fans aren’t likely to be that interested in the story.”

“But people ought to know.”

He nods. “Like they ought to know about Miski and you.”

“We’re like football injuries?” I tilt my muzzle to the side.

“Only in that nobody wants to talk about you yet.” He laughs. “That’s changing though. Can you believe how nobody’s talking about Miski being gay any more, even here?”

“Couple video segments on SportsCenter two weeks ago, but now it’s all about Strike,” I say.

“Flavor of the month.” He drains the last of his Coke. “Look, if you want to get your boyfriend to take some time off for this ad, I think…if you want to hear my opinion…”

I nod. “Sure.”

“Well, look. Can’t you just show him how important it is to you? I know he’s got all his football goin’ on, but you guys really got it for each other. I think if you laid it on, told him it really mattered to you, you could get him to do just about anything.”

I stare down at my paw, chocolate brown against the orange tabletop. The orange is not Dev’s orange; it’s artificially bright and cold and smooth. But still, when I stroke my fingers down it, I feel the toughness of his muscles. “Maybe,” I say. “But then if I lay it all out like that, what happens if he still says no?”

“Yeah.” Hal shakes his head. “I been there. Let me tell you, it’s better to get it out in the open soon as possible. Don’t wait ten years to put it all on the table. ’Cause, you know, that don’t change the result.”

The table doesn’t give under my fingers, but the condensation collected on it lets them slide smoothly back and forth. I sigh. “But maybe you never need to put it all out there like that.”

“Don’t you worry,” he says, leaning across. “He’s got a good heart, and so do you. I wrote a whole article about you, remember? You won’t end up like me and Cim.”

“Maybe we will, eventually,” I say. “Maybe it’s all just a matter of how many years you can squeeze out before it all goes south.”

“My parents never split up.” Hal pokes the table with a finger. “Lived together ‘til Mom died.”

“And were they happy?”

He falters at that, but recovers quickly, ears and whiskers flicking up. “Happy enough,” he says quietly. “Ain’t nobody one hundred percent happy in this world. You get to eighty percent and you count yourself damn lucky.”

Eighty percent. That’s not so bad. That’s less than what I’d say I’ve got with Dev, even with the fighting and everything. And maybe when I actually get to talk with Brian, with the Equality Now people, they’ll be reasonable about it. I try to push away the image of Dev sitting at the table, putting up walls against me as soon as I mentioned doing commercials. It was just a reflex, just him reminding me he has to focus on football. That’s all. That’s good. I should be proud of him.

Hal watches me think and then taps the table. He grins when I look up. “I guess I oughta let you get going.”

“Sure.” We get up together and I stick out my paw. He grasps it and holds it just a half-second longer than I expect. I wonder if there’s more he wants to talk about, but if there is, he isn’t ready to do it just yet. So I smile, and say, “If you want to get together again, just let me know.”

He smiles back. “Sure will. And you know, if you need to talk…you do the same.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I will.”

Saturday we run through a bunch of drills and then some scrimmages, defense against the second-string offense while the offense takes on our second-string defense. It’s good to run some practices that require a lot of thinking on my part so I don’t have to think about what Lee’s been telling me since he hooked up with that activist group.

The fact that he’s going to be working closely with Brian bothers me, but he did tell me about it, and I have to trust him. It just makes me squirm. It feels like trouble waiting to happen, mostly because every experience I’ve ever had with Brian has made me want to punch him in the face. What’s black and white and red all over? A skunk with a bloody nose, ha ha.

Then there’s the part where I’m involved, filming commercials or doing billboard spots or God knows what. The commercial deal pending with the Strongwell people is scheduled tentatively for the week after the final game of the season, and that’s already stressing me out. Of course, it’s also stressing me because of my co-star in the commercial, who’s decided that since we’re doing a commercial together, we must be best friends. Or maybe it’s that “stand beside a gay person” thing Lee was talking about. Or maybe it’s because already most of the other players in the locker room won’t talk to him. Whatever it is, it’s annoying, and it means I’ve been eating most of my lunches with him and Charm.

I get an idea over lunch as he’s talking about what he’s going to wear in the commercials. He’s still got the same Firebirds colors painted into his fur, and I’m almost used to it at this point. “Hey,” I say. “You know, I have this friend who’s helping with a bunch of gay rights spots. Maybe you could do one of those with me, too. It’d be like the Strongwell spot, only in reverse.”

Strike stops, rubs his chin. “How much does it pay?”

“Um. You’d be doing it for free. To help gay kids.”

His eyes widen. “For free? Look. My time is valuable and there’s a lot of kids that need help out there. I founded the Lightning Strikes Twice Foundation to help out kids who been in trouble with the law once, so I think I’m doing my part for the kids, right?”

“Gay kids too?”

He taps his tray, rubs his fingers over his whiskers. “Some of them are gay, I guess. I don’t ask. It’s their business, you know? Unless they decide to tell you.”

“Hey,” Charm says. “Is that the color you’re going to be tomorrow?”

We both turn and stare at him. Strike brushes the red stripe on his fur. “No, dude, I’m getting it redone tonight.”

“What’s it gonna be?”

The cheetah grins. I don’t want to describe it as smug, but I can’t think of a better word. “Oh, don’t ruin the surprise.”

Charm blinks. “I wasn’t gonna tell the papers,” he says. “Do you really think people care?”

The grin vanishes and Strike stands abruptly. He picks up his tray. “I have a website,” he says, and then turns and leaves, though his food was only half done.

“Lion Christ,” I mutter, “it’s like I’m back in high school again.”

Charm bumps my shoulder with enough force to knock me half into Strike’s abandoned seat. I push him back, grinning. “Ah, the guy was being a dick about your commercial. Rather he be pissed at me about making fun of his fur than have you guys get in a fight.”

“Thanks, Mister Charm,” I say in an affected high-pitched voice. “I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.”

“Get in fights.” He shrugs and chews a mouthful of greens, grinning around stalks of spinach and lettuce leaves. “This don’t mean you’re my bitch or something, does it?”

I laugh. “Lee would have something to say about that.”

“Bet he would.” He watches Strike stop to talk to Aston and the backup quarterback, another wolf named Ferrix. I follow his gaze and see the two wolves with their ears partly back, both leaning away from him. Strike seems oblivious to their body language, chatting happily, and then he says something to Ferrix with the air of a teacher giving a student a gold star. He pats Ferrix’s shoulder as the wolf flinches, recoiling so much that it’s visible even to me from halfway across the room, and then walks on.

Aston and Ferrix lean together to talk in low whispers. I’m about to say something to Charm when another clatter sounds beside me and I smell fox. I turn to see Ty picking up the steak sandwich he’s slathered in horseradish to take a huge bite out of it. Zillo sits down across from us a moment later, says hi, and looks off to the side to make sure Strike is really gone.

“Hey,” I say.

“Thought he’d never leave,” Zillo mutters.

“That guy’s an asshole,” Ty says around his mouthful of steak. His tail’s curled tight around the back of the chair.

“I dunno.” Charm chews slowly. “He’s kinda growing on me.”

“He keeps trying to coach us. Marky tells him to just quiet down and run his routes, but he just won’t fucking shut up.” Ty looks across the room at nothing in particular, as far as I can tell. “I think Zaïd might actually take a shiv to him. This experiment is going to last all of like two weeks.”

“A shiv?” I shake my head. “Does Zaïd have a shiv?”

“Probably, I dunno.” Ty munches on his sandwich. “He keeps talking about his ‘hood and all the guys he grew up with who are in jail. And you know what he said to me?” That “he” is Strike, obviously. “He said, ‘You know, for a fox, you run pretty good.’”

“Wow.”

“I know, right?”

“What lousy grammar,” Charm says.

“No kidding,” I say.

Ty stares at both of us and Zillo does too. Charm grins. “It should be, ‘You run pretty good—for a
fox
.’”

Zillo laughs. For a second, I worry that Ty is going to lunge across me and punch Charm. But then the fox’s muzzle breaks into a smile and he shakes his head. “Lippy fucker,” he laughs. “I run pretty
awesome
.”

“For a fox,” I add.

Ty takes another bite. “I’ma tell Zaïd you said that. He’s gonna crack up.”

“Tell him to just do his job. So they’re keeping you in at slot, that means Rodo’s down to fourth?”

“Well…” Ty gulps down a mouthful. “They’re doin’ a lot more trips, so I’d be the inside guy on the trips side and they’ll put
him
on the end and iso Zaïd on the other side. So Rodo takes the middle position on the trips side. When they run that. If it’s just a power run then they take me or Zaïd out ‘cause we don’t block as well.”

Trips is a formation with three wideouts on the same side of the ball, so “trips right” would be three wideouts on the right side; “iso” means Zaïd would be the only receiver on the other side. “That’s good,” I say. “At least they’re putting something in for all you guys. Sucks to learn a ton of new plays so fast, though.”

Ty wiggles his paw. “It’s not bad. Mostly it’s the same shit. It’s the blocking that’s different—the O-line is pissed about that. Me, I just run and break, or else I block. Been doing that since I was eight.” He describes a zig-zag with his paw. “Five steps and break, or ten steps and break, or just cross the middle and be the hot read.”

“That leopard from Yerba told me you’re not as hot a read as Vonni,” Charm says.

The fox’s ears flick back. He shakes his head. “I gotta get a wedding ring. Hey, Dev, any gay clubs in Chevali? If girls like that hang around ‘em, I should go.”

“I don’t know.” I look away, like I’m looking for someone elsewhere in the room. “Never actually went and looked.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been with Lee since before I moved here. So you guys going to be okay with Strike on game day?”

“Doesn’t he ever wanna go out and dance?”

Lee, he means, of course. I can’t get away from being the go-to guy for gay lifestyle questions. “Never really thought of that. He was always just here on weekends and we didn’t have a lot of time to go do stuff.”

Ty points a finger at me like a gun. “If you find one where hot girls hang out, lemme know. I’m cool with dudes dancing with dudes. No matter what that asshole over there thinks.”

I look in the direction he jerks his head and see Colin there. He’s sitting with the backup quarterback.

“Aw,” Zillo says, looking in the same direction. “Colin’s not a bad guy.”

“He was all buddy-buddy with me—fox pride and all that—until Yerba. Now he looks down his nose like I stepped in shit or something.” Ty shrugs. “Vonni can’t stand him. He keeps trying to get the guys to do prayer circles after practice.”

“He’s religious.” Zillo shrugs. “I think he just wants to play football without people rubbing his face in the whole ‘gay teammate’ thing all the time.”

“He won’t say a word to Vonni,” Ty says. “’Cause he knows Vonni likes you.”

“Who’s rubbing his face in it?” I say. “I just want to play football, too.”

“Yeah.” Charm chews another mouthful of salad. “That’s all any of us wants to do. You got a problem with someone here, save it for after the games.”

“He’s been playing well.” Zillo kind of looks away from us.

“He hasn’t talked to you much since you started hanging out with me, either, has he?” I say.

“No, well…” Zillo sighs. “We both been pretty busy.”

“See?” Ty glares in Colin’s direction. “He’s an asshole. Listen.” He leans across to Zillo. “You come with us next time we go out to a gay club and I will hook you up with some sweet ass. Girl ass,” he clarifies. “You’re invited. You got it?”

“Yeah.” Zillo shakes his head. “I dunno if I’m ready for that…”

“Hey,” Ty says. “There’s no question. You’re coming. Right, Dev?”

“Sure.” In the back of my head I am thinking, no way am I going to give Lee another chance to fake Ty out into having a gay experience, or whatever. I was freaking out already when it was just a girl. Next time I bet Lee does dig up someone in drag.

And again I get that feeling of being a hypocrite. Ty is pretty gay-friendly, almost curious even, so what if he just needs that push? What if he gets married and fifteen years from now ditches his wife and family to go off with a guy because he didn’t have the guts to do it when he was younger, or didn’t know?

That’s not my problem. All I know is my own situation, and I can’t put that on Ty. He’s got to make his own decisions, and I think he’s been around me enough to know that it’d be okay to be gay. So I put that out of my head. But I keep thinking about Strike, and how quickly the team’s gone from a bunch of guys having fun to a bunch of guys complaining about the new guy. At least we’re still sort of united, although if Zaïd quits on the team or Rodo gets upset at his reduced playing time, I don’t know if that’ll balance out.

When I tell Lee about my day that night, I leave out the bit about Ty and the gay club. He makes sympathetic noises about Strike, and asks if I need his help in going over plays.

“Nah,” I say. “They’re really focusing on getting the new stuff in for the offense. Our plays haven’t changed all that much, to be honest.”

“Oh, okay.” He shrugs and goes back to the chicken he’s sauteeing, which smells like wine and mushrooms.

“That smells awesome,” I say, and that gets a smile out of him.

It tastes as good as it smells. “Where did you learn to cook?” I ask. “I’m seriously thinking about licking this plate clean.”

He grins. “The Internet. And you can if you want, but I also have bread. That’s how grownups do it.”

“Really?” I rub the bread around in the sauce and then lick the side of the bread. “That doesn’t seem to work as well.”

That gets a laugh out of him, and it’s a pleasant enough evening. We play some UFL 2009 and I’m winning (with the Firebirds, even), and then he mentions that he talked to Brian again about the activism stuff.

“It sounds like they want me to come in and talk about some of the things we could do,” he says.

“Great.” I focus on the game, hoping that none of those things involve me, knowing full well that they will.

“Before I go in, I need to know what you’re willing to do.”

I pause the game and drop the controller. “I’ll support you.”

He holds on to his controller, balancing it in one paw. “Support me by…coming in to film a PSA spot?”

Christ. I can’t hesitate too long, or he’ll know I’m thinking about an answer and not giving him my immediate response. But I know better than to give him my immediate response, because he would not react well to me saying I don’t want to push the gay angle until after this season. So I start with a vague protest until my mind kicks in something more concrete. “It’s a time commitment, and there’s a lot on the line. The coaches are really riding us, and I mean Gerrard, too.” Ah, here we go. My mind clicks in with a solution. Thanks, brain. “Anyway, aren’t you the one who told me I need to focus on football? We have a chance to win the division, to go to the playoffs here.”

He looks steadily at me. For a moment I’m convinced he can see through me, because he always does. But I’m not lying, just not giving him the number one reason. Focusing on football is a totally valid reason. “It wouldn’t take that long,” he says. “And…”

He’s searching my eyes, and he looks nervous, uncertain. I don’t know what’s going on. I just hold my pose, and when he doesn’t say anything, I say, “And?”

“It’d be something really good you could do.”

“I can do it after the season,” I say.

He nods, but his ears are a little askew, not up, and his eyes aren’t completely on mine. So if he accepts this, I’m going to have to do something to make him happy after. Like an unspoken “thanks for dropping it.”

But we’re not quite there yet. “It’s just that…” He hesitates. “Then I wouldn’t be able to be involved.”

“Why can’t I do it in Yerba? Your group has offices there, right?” And, bonus, Brian wouldn’t be around for it.

“Fine.” He picks up the controller and quits the game. “We can talk about it later, I guess.”

I look at the screen. I hadn’t been ready to quit; I wanted to keep playing. But he doesn’t, so I just shrug and get up. “Want to put in a movie?”

“You need to go to bed in an hour anyway.”

I reach down a paw. “I could go to bed now.”

He looks at me a moment and then takes my paw and stands. His tail swishes behind him. “If you really want to.”

“Well,” I say, “Strike says I shouldn’t have sex the night before a game. But you know what?”