Divisions (Dev and Lee) (24 page)

The faint trace of a smile lingers over his lips. “What?”

I bring my lips to his ears and slide my paws down his back. “Fuck him,” I whisper.

He shivers. His body relaxes and he wraps his arms around me and his scent fills my nose as I bury it in the fur between his ears. And he murmurs into my throat, “No. Fuck me.”

So we go to the bedroom, and I do just that. But there’s something a little off about it. Even as I’m moving inside him, lying on my back thrusting up with my paws on his hips, I feel like he’s distant. He’s smiling down at me, and he’s certainly erect and enjoying himself, but his body doesn’t vibrate with that energy and excitement I’ve come to expect from him. Beyond a certain point, I don’t notice; my hips arch and I push him down onto me, straining to get as far in as I can, and my body shakes and then shudders as I empty myself deep inside him, mouth open in gasping growls. A couple moments later, his back curves and his tail shivers, his muzzle hangs open, and he makes strained squeaking noises as his cock jerks in my paw and spurts warmth over my fingers. And then we just lie there, panting, and he collapses on top of me.

I want to ask if he’s still thinking about the commercial, I want to clear things up and figure it out, but we’re exhausted and happy now, so I just wrap my arms around him and hold him. We’ll talk about it later. I’m sure we can work it out. For now I need to get my rest and be ready for the game.

Sunday morning, I’m on a bus on my way to the game when Brian calls. My first reaction is apprehension, that tightening in my gut that accompanied that number coming up on my phone in the past, along with a wash of minor disgust. Not fair, I tell myself. Sure, Brian did some crappy things, but the important thing is that he’s helping me out now. With that in mind, I pick up.

“Sorry to interrupt on your way to the game,” he says.

“Aren’t you going?”

“Sadly, with the success of the team, tickets have gotten more exclusive. And I didn’t get invited by anyone with connections to the players.”

The bus pulls up at our stop and two dozen people in Firebirds gear lurch toward the door. “Hang on,” I say, jostled by the crowd as we all hurry off, tails tucked around our bodies so they don’t get caught—still, I accidentally step on the tail of the lion in front of me and say a quick sorry, and he says no problem, the way you do. Tails get stepped on in crowds.

“We’re only just talking civilly again,” I say as I step out into the brisk—oh, who am I kidding, it’s warm—Sunday afternoon air. Green Christmas garlands wrapped around the lightposts along this street look out of place, even hung with red-and-gold Firebirds ornaments. Chevali around me bustles with excitement over the game, crowds in glowing red and gold. It still feels weird to me to be going to football when it’s warm, to be smelling desert and dust behind the tens of thousands of people flooding into the stadium. It feels even weirder to see so many people enthusiastic about the Firebirds, to hear “win the division” and “playoffs” and “championship” in snatches of just about every conversation my ears pick up, but that gives my step a bounce. My tiger is part of the reason for that, and catching sight of a #57 jersey in the crowd, even just the one, makes my tail wag, despite the danger of it getting snagged.

“For which I am grateful,” Brian says as I fish in my pocket for the ticket. “I know I haven’t always behaved the best in the past.”

“Are you calling from outside a church?” I ask.

“This isn’t a confession, and I’m not asking for penance.” There’s a little of that familiar edge. “I talked to Marilee and Paula yesterday. Marilee’s the Communications Director and Paula’s the regional office head. They both love the idea of having a PSA starring Miski.”

I stop about fifty feet from the entrance, in line behind two white-tailed deer, one with a Firebirds jacket and the other with a #14—Aston’s jersey—that’s clearly too big for her. Maybe she gets to wear it while her husband’s antlers are in. “Yeah,” I say, and find the guy wearing the #57 jersey again, a big stallion not too far from me. He’s gesturing to his friend, who’s wearing Gerrard’s #55 “Thing is, we can’t do that during the season.”

“Why not? He filmed that terrible Ultimate Fit commercial.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Wiley.”

I sigh, and edge forward with the line. “Okay, it was pretty bad. But he looked good in it.”

“The point is, if he can film that, he can film this.”

The ears of the couple in front of me flick back. I lower my voice and face away from them, trusting to the noise of the crowd to hide my words. “They’re in the playoff hunt now. He’s paranoid about taking time off.”

“It won’t be that much time.”

“I know. I tried to talk to him…”

I shut up, but Brian picks up on it. “Oh, already. I see. So it’s not that you’re giving up without even trying. It’s that you’re giving up after trying once.”

“I’m not ‘giving up,’” I snap.

“All right, all right.” He stays calm. “The important thing is we both agree something needs to get filmed, right? So if he can’t take the time to do it himself, then maybe we can, you know, just film a spot with a picture of him. Maybe a voiceover, if he can take the time to record that.”

I’ve seen commercials like that. The static picture, the voice behind it. I haven’t seen any in about fifteen years, probably, and even then I thought,
how do I know that’s really the guy? How do I know someone didn’t just take his picture and slap it up there? I don’t know what his voice sounds like.
“Or we could wait until after the season’s over. That’d be good, too.”

“Depends. You wanted to hit college kids, right? College players? Guess when they’re watching the most TV.”

I sigh. The line edges forward another few steps. “Playoffs. Championship.”

“Bingo. Look, Tip, I sympathize, I do. Trust me. You know I know football. Not as well as you, but I know how it goes with those players. Continuity, superstition, belief, whatever you want to call it. If they believe they’re going to fail, then they will.”

“Right.” The deer in front of me are back to ignoring me, now exchanging friendly jabs with a guy in a Freestone jersey.

“So if there’s any way you can talk him into this. It’s just a day. Don’t they get a day off practice?”

I lower my voice again. “They’re supposed to be in film on the days off. Unless they win.”

“Well, there you go. They’ve got Kerina next week. They could win that with ten guys on the field on every play. He’ll have off a week from Monday. We could get a script written, book some studio time quickly, get it done in one day.”

I’m pretty close to the turnstiles where they’re checking tickets, just five people back. “But the following week, they’ve got Hellentown. He needs to be completely focused for that.”

Brian’s silent. “Tip,” he says finally, “there’s never gonna be a good time during the season. But look, I get you. You’re going to Kerina with him, aren’t you?”

“I’m…I don’t know. Probably. Well, not with, but…” I’m trying to be vague so the people listening don’t get what I’m talking about. “Might fly in Friday or Saturday. But I can’t talk to him then. He’s going to be all focused, and…”

He laughs. “The Knights stink. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to worry about that. But that’s not what I meant. I was just wondering if you would want to have dinner one night if he’s not around.”

I think back to the dinners we had in college, great times talking politics and relationships and classwork. And football, of course. But it’s Brian, who basically told me he’d lay off Dev if I jerked him off, the last time I visited him. “How about lunch?”

“We can start with lunch and work up to dinner, sure, Tip.” He sounds amused. “Let me know what day works.”

I’m going to have to tell Dev about this. “All right. I’m at the stadium now.”

“Enjoy the game,” he says.

My ticket gets me through the turnstiles and I’m alone in the 68,000-person stadium, one fox navigating a crowd. Brian and I used to go to football games together in college, or sit in the bar when we didn’t feel like fighting the crowds, watching the people turn their heads with their noses up and the knowing expression on their faces when they saw us, the skunk and fox. Here in Chevali, I’m on my own, but at least the dry air doesn’t carry scent as well, and I don’t see any wrinkled noses.

Like when Father took me to Dragons games up in Hilltown, though there it was cold as well as dry, and the long coats we wore muffled our scents as well as our movement. Mother never came along with us to those games, and maybe that was the start of things unraveling. But no, thousands of families across the country exist in happiness with one parent loving sports and the other not.

I grab a hot dog for lunch at one of the stands, listening to the pre-game buzz around me, walking through past corridors in my mind. My father would not let me have hot dogs the first time we went to a game. Brian sneered whenever I got one, but it was comradely sneering because he always got the terrible pizza they served, which I could sneer right back at. And Dev, Dev loves hot dogs.

My seat is way up in the second deck of the stadium. Dev offered me a seat with the players’ wives, but at home those all get snapped up quickly, and anyway, I’m not quite ready for them yet. I know Gena, Fisher’s wife, and have met Gerrard’s wife Angela, but I don’t know if I know them well enough to sit with them for three hours.

It worked out okay anyway. I think I’m fine sitting by myself today. I keep thinking about what Brian said, and it makes a lot of sense, and then I think about what Dev said, and that makes a lot of sense too, and my head goes round and round and I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to it.

There should be, my mind tells me. I should side with Dev, no questions asked. We’re living together, we’re committed. But the knowledge that I’m going off to Yerba in a month and a half, his obstinacy in refusing to engage me at all…the fact that he doesn’t really get what Vince King means to me…I know it’s just stuff we can work out. I know in the grand scheme of things, what matters is our commitment to each other, and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t wavered.

But it still bothers me enough that I call Father, with the game clock ticking down five minutes until kickoff. “I’m at the game,” I say when he picks up, to explain the crowd noise.

“Where? I’m watching at the bar with Kev and Dave from work.”

“Two-twenty, a third of the way up.” I wave.

“I’ll keep an eye out.” He chuckles. “Is Dev ready?”

“I think so.” I pause. “I wanted to ask you something. How much did you and Mother disagree, or argue about things?”

The crowd around me roars as the Firebirds jog out onto the field. I stick a finger in the other ear and yell, “I didn’t catch that!”

“I didn’t say anything,” he says, faint over the people screaming next to me. “Do you really want to have this conversation now?”

“I was just wondering.”

“We argued about as much as any couple argues.” I think that’s what he says, as best I can make it out. “We got along well until the last couple years, when we just didn’t have much to talk about.”

They had something to talk about: me. Maybe they had too much to talk about and that’s why they stopped talking. “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

“Get to your game. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bye!” I yell, and put the phone away.

To my left is a wolf in a Firebirds t-shirt. To my right is a family of ringtails bedecked in red and gold. It would be nice to have someone I know to talk to, but I have a feeling I’ll be doing enough talking over the next week. Right now I just want to watch the game and cheer.

Freestone isn’t a bad team. They finished 8-8 last year and they’ve already got eight wins this year, which is good enough to lead the East. We’re favored to win by three, if you look at the gambling line, but I’ve learned not to take any game for granted, especially after last week. The coaches have been drilling that into us over and over again, and Coach Samuelson says it one last time as we’re all sitting in the locker room just before game time. “You might think you deserve to win this game,” he says. “Well, that and four bucks will get you a beer at Mickey’s. You need to prove you deserve it, and that means you need to go out and earn it. Play sloppy like we did last week and we’ll lose another game like we did last week.” He glares around the room, challenging us. “I know you’re not going to play sloppy. Play the way I know you can play. Take care of business. Chevali hasn’t had a double-digit win team in a couple decades. You guys are going to be the first, and it’s going to be this week. So get out there and bring that tenth win home, and then we’ll go out and get this city its first division title. ‘Firebirds’ on three—one, two—”

“Firebirds!” We scream it until the room echoes. In that moment, all of us are one, moving with the same energy, the same confidence. Coach believes in us and we will not let him down, not at home, not this week. I grab my helmet and then realize that the last echo was a different voice, not a reflection of ours, coming in late with his own “Firebirds!” cheer. I turn. The rest of the defense is pushing past me, until some people turn with me, and then everyone just kind of stops. The only movement is back at the entrance to the locker room, and that’s where my eyes, along with everyone else’s, are drawn.

Strike’s standing there, leaning against the door in just his uniform pants. His chest has been bleached white, the better to show off the stylized firebird design across both pecs, its wings reaching up to his shoulders. It looks like something I might’ve seen on one of the old vans my dad occasionally got in his shop, complete with the flames running down his arms.

None of us can say anything for a good ten seconds. I actually grab my cell phone, thinking I need to get a picture of this. Then Coach Samuelson says, “Everyone’s required to be in the locker room for the pre-game meeting.”

“Sorry I missed it.” Now Strike walks into the room, heading for his locker, keeping eye contact with Coach. At least he’s that respectful. “I was doing my meditation.”

“Don’t miss next time. Now get out there.” He says this last to all of us, and it snaps us out of our mesmerized state. I shake my head, toss my phone back in my locker, and trot out to the tunnel.

Freestone comes out on the field in their white road uniforms with green helmets and green trim. Gerrard gathers me and Carson together and reminds us of what we have to take care of—watch their screen passes and tight ends, which is more Carson’s responsibility than mine, but I have to cover where he’s not.

We join the rest of the defense, huddle up, and under Gerrard’s direction, break on “Defense!” We won the toss and opted to defer, so Freestone gets the ball first and we have to run out and defend first thing.

They do try a run, which I help stop, and then a short pass to the tight end, which Carson takes down just short of the first down. They punt to us, and we trot back to the sidelines with at least a better feeling than we had after the Yerba game. Sometimes you just need the reassurance that yes, you can do this job.

There’s a little buzz in the stadium as our offense takes the field. The firebird on Strike’s chest is covered by his uniform, of course, the big white “11” outlined in gold against the red, but the flames down his arms are visible. I don’t know how obvious it is to everyone else, but just watching him next to Zaïd, it’s immediately apparent to me how much bigger and bulkier he is. He’s as heavy as I am, though four inches taller, and Zaïd, one of the taller guys on the team, looks average next to him. No wonder Ty was grumpy.

The crowd settles down as the offense lines up at our 25 in a standard running formation. Aston fakes the handoff to the running back, gets good protection as he drops back three-four-five-six-seven steps. His muzzle’s fixed toward the left sideline, all the way through his steps, as he cocks his arm back and heaves the ball to the left side.

The buzz grows again around us. Scanning the field, we see Strike already, somehow, at the Freestone 40, the grass blazing under his feet. He’s two yards ahead of the hapless Freestone cornerback, and even though there’s a safety racing to catch up, neither of them has a chance. The ball is underthrown, but Strike reaches up with those flaming arms and plucks it out of the air, then somehow cuts hard to his right without breaking stride and then…

We’re all cheering, yelling, jumping up and down, and the crowd is too. And then there’s a pause, just a half-second pause, because what Strike does next is insane. It looked like he’d been running all out, leaving the cornerback five yards off his tail. But when he catches the ball, he extends those legs and lowers his head and he is gone. He’s got some other gear, and so do we and the crowd, our cheering reaching new heights. By the time Strike crosses the goal line, the cornerback who’d been chasing him is barely across the twenty.

“Holy shit,” Gerrard says.

“You see it on TV,” Pace says, shaking his head. “But…”

I elbow the jaguar. “Glad the Port City QB never got him the ball with room like that?”

“Well…” Vonni comes up behind us. “We jammed him at the line more. Got him off his routes. Those Freestone corners thought it was a run and just let him get behind them.”

“‘Let’ him.” Pace shakes his head. “Yeah, like there was gonna be anything they could do there.”

I look up into the stands, to where Lee is sitting, and I grin. I don’t know if he can see me or if he’s even looking, but I hope he’s feeling the same swagger for this team that I am.

Strike comes back to the sidelines, still holding the football. He has his paw up, high-fiving anyone who will raise their paw, and considering the number of people who were grumbling about him just twenty-four hours ago, there are a lot of them. He catches my eye, so I put my paw up too. Hell, the guy just put us up 7-0 after fifteen seconds of game time. It’s not just obligation that raises my paw and smacks it against his.

Vonni steps back from high-fiving Strike and shakes a paw at the cornerback, number 22, trudging to the opposite sideline. The curl of that fox’s long red tail around his leg shows how he feels at getting beaten on the first play of the game, as opposed to Vonni’s jaunty arch. “Twenty-two shoulda bumped him.”

“No species loyalty,” I tease him, as the extra point sails through the uprights.

The fox grins at me. “Goodie and I are friends. He’d say the same if I got beat. Anyway, he knows it. Just look at him.”

Charm kicks off to the Fighters, who try to return the ball and get all of three yards. Gerrard fits his helmet over his muzzle. “Back to work,” he says, and Vonni, Pace, and I follow the defense back out to the field.

That first score puts Freestone into a little bit of a panic. Even when they run, you can feel their desperation, and when they do things like fight too hard for one more yard, or tense up at the line of scrimmage, those things eventually result in mistakes. On our side, we only screw up once, and it doesn’t come until late in the fourth quarter.

We’re up 13-3 and the game is almost over. Gerrard and I misread the offense and both hang down to cover the screen pass, but their QB fakes it beautifully and freezes us, lobbing it to their number one wideout. We can’t do anything but turn and watch it fly right into his paws, and then we run down, because you never know, but Vonni tackles him at the nine yard line. Once they’re there, they run it on four straight plays, converting on fourth and two to score the touchdown. But that’s left only two minutes and four seconds on the clock.

“Don’t feel bad,” Gerrard tells me as we head back to the sidelines. “They ran that really well.”

“One of us should’ve picked it up.” It’s the first time I think I’ve had the confidence to suggest that Gerrard might’ve screwed up, too. In the back of my head, I realize it in time to modify the statement, but instead I just wait and see what he’ll say.

He nods, stopping on the sidelines with me and looking out at the field. “Just gotta put it behind you,” he says. “Can’t let it affect the next play. If you’re always looking back at your mistakes, you can’t look forward at the game.”

My mind skitters elsewhere for a moment. “What if you keep making the same mistakes?”

He looks at me. “You’re not. I told you, don’t worry about it. They ran a good play and we bit on it. It’s on film now. We learn from it and go forward.”

Go forward, always forward. Good philosophy for football. Not sure about anything else. Like, I know I’ve done some dumb stuff on the field. I learned to stop doing it, and those mistakes, they’re gone. When the game’s over, the plays are saved on film. You get to see all the things you did wrong over and over again, but the score is final, the stats are inked, the game is done. Every game, you start over from 15:00 in the first quarter.

Oh, sure, your history matters. Teams look at things you did wrong and they play to those weaknesses, the way we know Freestone likes to run the screen pass but their tight end sometimes misses his blocks; the way we know their cornerbacks are sometimes tentative on running plays. Even so, it’s only if you keep making the same mistakes that those things hurt you. And then it’s your own damn fault, and you deserve to lose your job. Like Corey “Killer” Mitchell, letting his emotion and ego get in the way of his play. Strike might be an ass, but he doesn’t bring it onto the field. It’s the one thing we had drilled into our heads, getting ready to face Port City: he’ll do whatever bizarre thing will get him attention off the field, but he knows that all of that rides on his success on the field.

At Port City, though, he didn’t look anything like this. This is him showing off for a new team, keeping a smile on his muzzle even when the team went an entire series without throwing to him. And even though he was pretty quiet for the middle part of the game, compiling over a hundred yards without any other huge plays, he shows up big again at the end. Freestone tries an onside kick and Ty, out there with the chase team, swipes the ball away from a green-and-white clad tiger to give possession back to our offense. With two minutes to go and Freestone out of timeouts, we just need one first down, and it’s Strike who gets it for us. Aston finds him on a short slant over the middle and he dodges one, two, three tacklers, zigging and zagging up twenty yards nearly to midfield, where he goes down under their safety, clinging to the ball with both paws.

Aston kneels three times, and the clock winds down to 00:00, and this game, too, is committed to film and paper, all our plays fixed and the slate wiped clean. We trot out to congratulate the Freestone guys and shake paws. Two of them, a jaguar and a coyote, pass me by with narrowed eyes, but they don’t say anything, so if it’s more than just frustration at losing, I can’t tell. Most of the other guys are cordial, as much as a losing team ever is.

Coach gives the game ball to Strike, predictably—he scored the only touchdown—though he stresses again that this was a real team effort. Strike gets patted on the back, jostled around, and says, “I’m just glad to be in a place with a real winning mindset. That touchdown is just the first of many. We’re going all the way to the championship.”

“Don’t mind him so much if he can do that once a game,” Carson mutters to me as we dress.

Gerrard, between the two of us, nods. “He keeps his mind on the game during the game, at least.”

“Glad he’s on our team,” I say. “Might’ve been a smart move.”

“If we can keep our focus on defense, then he gives us a real chance to break open games on offense,” Gerrard says. “Kerina, next week—they have no secondary. If he plays like this, he’ll get a couple more scores and some confidence for the Hellentown game. That’s where we’ll really need him.”

We watch the division race to see if Hellentown falters, but they get a close win over Gateway, keeping pace with us. Both of us play weak division opponents next week, so it’s looking more and more like our game against them on the last day of the season will be where the division is won or lost.

The good news is that there’s a pretty good chance that even 11-5 will be enough to get us into the playoffs. It’s not assured, but the way the rest of the field sits, we feel like one more win will do it. A lot of the other playoff hopefuls right now are at 8-6, so if we lose two and some other team wins two, it gets complicated with tiebreakers. One win will keep us from having to think about that. Two wins will give us a division title and a whole week off to recover and rest up as one of the top two seeds in the playoffs.

But to get there, we need to take care of Kerina. Gerrard makes sure we don’t forget that at our celebratory dinner after the game. We all laugh at him—Kerina’s two and twelve—but he reminds us that one of those two wins came against Hellentown.