Out of Position (31 page)

He answers on the second ring, after two eternities. “Hey,” he says. “Great game.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

I wait. He doesn’t say anything else. “You sound tired,” I say finally.

“You looked good out there. New position and all.”

“Thanks.” I start pacing back and forth in the alley. “Did you come down to the locker room after the game?”

Even over the noise in the alley, I can hear the softest whisper of breath in his sigh. I can picture him sitting in his hotel room, holding the phone and closing his eyes. I can see the rise and fall of his chest as he sighs. Because, of course, I’m picturing him naked.

I don’t say anything. I let him be ready in his own time. I’m looking up at the stars, which even in the city are pretty amazingly bright. The ground is still warm as I pace. In my mind’s eye, he’s playing with his tail, the way he does when he doesn’t want me to know he doesn’t know the answer to something. Finally, he inhales. “Fisher told you?”

“I think he recognized you.”

“He didn’t say anything to me.”

I lean against the wall. “No. He came and said something to me, right away.”

“Dammit.” He sounds shaken. “I’m sorry.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No.” He answers fast. “They weren’t going to… I was fine.”

“You always say that.” Now that I’m no longer worried about him, I’m starting to feel annoyed. “What if Fisher hadn’t been there?”

“They were just horsing around.”

I know the look in his eyes right now, the defiant stare I’d be getting if I were in the room. “I’d have thought Brian wouldn’t let you forget what football players can do.”

“He’s got nothing to do with this.”

“I didn’t say he does.”

“Are you going to be able to come see me tonight?” I glance back at the pub. In my mind, he’s still naked, and now he’s hard, too. “I, uh, I’m out with some of the guys. Might be a little late.”

“Well, fine. If you’re out with the guys.”

There’s genuine hurt in his voice. I curse myself for not being able to think about what I say before I say it. “No, I mean, I’ll come over. Just give me like an hour?”

“Don’t go to any trouble.”

“Don’t be like that.”

He’s quiet. I wait. “I’ll be here,” he says finally.

I go back in and finish my beer, giving Fisher a punch on the shoulder and a muttered, “Thanks.” We talk a little more about the game, and then Gerrard starts exchanging stories with Fisher. It kills me to go, because I love listening to them talk about great games and great players, but I can’t leave Lee alone in the hotel room for too long, both for his sake and for mine. When we get to a break, I stand up. It turns out that a couple of the other guys are ready to go, so I get a ride to the parking lot and drive over to the hotel.

He’s not naked when I get there. Strangely—for us—he doesn’t get naked until much later that night. When I first arrive, he answers the door and walks quickly away from it toward the bed. I think I know what’s on his mind and I’m about to tell him that maybe we should talk first when he turns and leans on the dresser. “Thanks for coming,” he says, his smile forced.

He’s changed into a yellow polo shirt and jeans. The polo shirt is soft on my pawpads as I hug him. “You okay?”

“I told you I was.” He sounds a bit annoyed, but leans into the hug. “Good to see you.”

“Should I check you for bruises?” I poke down his back and rear.

He squirms a bit. “They didn’t do anything.”

“Did they hurt the blouse? I liked that blouse.”

“No.” He noses my shoulder. “Let’s talk about something else.”

He looks a bit sulky when I push back to look down into his eyes. “Don’t come around the locker room in drag again.”

“I can—”

“I know you can take care of yourself.” Now he shuts his muzzle and looks even sulkier. “Lion Christ, Lee, I don’t want to tell you what to do, but why did you even do it?”

“To see you, what do you think?”

“Yeah, but the fucking locker room? It’s like you want…” I trail off, not wanting to accuse him directly.

Of course, he gets it. He pushes away from me. “Just because I’m a fox doesn’t mean there’s some sinister agenda to everything I do.”

“So you just wanted to flirt with some pro players?”

He tilts his muzzle, eyes still narrowed. “What, I’m not as pretty as I used to be?”

“I told you. These guys are dangerous, immature…”

He steps back from me, tail curled under his legs. “You were the one who told me Brian was wrong about them.”

This isn’t the evening I wanted, and I don’t think it’s the evening he wanted, either. But when he mentions Brian’s name, I can’t stop myself from saying, “And another thing. What was he doing at the game?”

“He just moved to the area. He likes football.” But his ears are back as he says this.

“He doesn’t have to sit with you.”

“He doesn’t know anyone else.”

“Doesn’t he annoy the shit out of you?”

“I don’t know anyone else, either. I can’t exactly sit with the players’ wives.”

He’s being deliberately frustrating. I know he doesn’t like Brian, but the flash in his eyes tells me he’s trying to get at me. No, I don’t envy what Brian went through; yes, I feel sorry for him; yes, I understand his beef with football players. Nobody should get put in the hospital no matter how obnoxious they are.

What I can’t stand about him is what he did to Lee. They were best friends, back before I met him, and then after that night Brian got beat up, everything went sour. He got bitter, got worse when Lee met me, tried to break us up a few times, and got so annoying that Lee changed his number without telling him. Where I come from, you don’t do that to friends. You have a fight, you maybe scrap a little, but at the end of the day you can always count on each other.

Brian betrayed Lee, far as I’m concerned. So it worries me that Lee’s hanging out with him again. He’s just setting himself up for another letdown. “What do you guys talk about?”

He shrugs. “Football.”

“What’s he think of our chances this year?”

“He says you’ll go 4-12 again. Out of the playoff chase by Halloween.”

“Fuck him.”

Now he gets the twitch at the corner of his muzzle that usually means I’m gonna get a smile sometime soon. “He’d like that. He’d take pictures.”

I cross the room to sit on the bed, tired of talking about Brian. “Promise me you won’t come around the locker room in drag again.”

He scowls at the floor. “Fine,” he says. I see the tight curling of his tail, the lowering of his eyes, and it sinks into even my thick skull that he probably was pretty scared at that point.

We stay like that, me on the bed, him leaning against the dresser, until I say, “So are you coming over here, or what?”

I get a look and the chance to see the decision going on in his head. When he does come over, it’s slowly, with his tail down. I put an arm around him when he sits down, not telling him I’ll protect him, not telling him I’ll get the asshole who grabbed him (he should know better than to try to fool another fox, though I don’t say that either), just being there for him to lean against. After a moment, he does.

“I’m doing better,” I say. “If I can just make the team, things’ll get slower.”

“You won’t be free ’til the season’s over.” He sighs.

“Well, if you wanted someone year-round, you shouldn’t have gotten involved with a football player.” He looks sharply at me, so I add, “But I’m glad you did.”

His eyes soften. “It’s not exactly what I pictured.”

“When?”

“Oh.” He rests a paw on my leg, scritches idly. “When we used to talk about the future. Me and the FLAG guys.” He adds that last part for my benefit, because of course he means him and Brian. “I said I was going to move to Freestone and marry some actor and we were going to live in a stone cottage and have three cockatoos.”

I try not to giggle, unsuccessfully. He gives me a sharp look. I try to look innocent, and, again, fail. “That’s so… gay,” I say.

“Well,” he says, “you did know I was gay when we started going out, right? There’s the whole thing where I love cock.”

“I know, but… cockatoos?”

“Sometimes it was canaries.”

“Oh, so there was flexibility.”

“What do you like?”

“I’m partial to gray parrots. Good manly birds.”

He grins. “We can get a parrot if you want.”

I rub his shoulder. “I can’t move to Freestone, though. Unless I get traded.”

“You don’t want to play for them anyway. They make players pay for their own uniform cleaning.”

“You serious?” He nods. I flip my tail back, brushing his on the bed. “I don’t know where you hear this stuff.”

“Amazing what scouts from other teams will say after a few drinks.”

I trail my claws down his arm. He shivers and snuggles closer. “You really want that?”

“You to clean your own uniform?”

I poke his side. “The stone cottage, the cockatoos.”

“They could be parrots.” I snuffle his ear. “I don’t know. I thought I did, but I think it might’ve been one of those things you want because everyone expects you to want it. You know?” I don’t answer. He goes on. “Like Salim said he just wanted someone from Delhia, and Allen just wanted someone to go to raves with, and all of us not thinking about what we really wanted, just what it would be appropriate for us to want.”

“What did Brian want?”

He doesn’t look at me. His paw doesn’t stop moving on my leg. “I don’t remember.”

It was a stupid question for me to ask. “I wanted a big family, a house in the suburbs, a steady job.”

“You didn’t want to play football?”

I laugh. “More than anything. But my—everyone told me it wasn’t gonna happen.” I nuzzle him. “Even you.”

“Only at first.”

It’s a game night, so I don’t have a curfew for once, a rare exception. I feel the tension of the week melting away, just sitting with him and talking about what’s going on in the world, what’s going on with people we know, what the new restaurants in Hilltown are like, and so on. When we don’t feel like talking any more, we cuddle quietly for a nice long time.

Then
we get naked.

 
Fisher avoids me for another week. I’m busy enough with my assignments and studying and working with the second team (which earns me a little “woohoo” from Lee over the phone) that I don’t really notice until after our second pre-season game when I’m at Mick’s with the guys and I look around and think, jeez, I haven’t talked to Fisher in a week. Of course, being in Mick’s spurs the right memory for me to figure out why.

Lee couldn’t make it to this game; his whole office was at the Dragons’ game in Millenport, a team outing. But he promised to watch on Monday. One of the perks of his job is that their office tapes all of every game and he can just go check it out of the library when he feels like it. Even without him in the stands, I did well, feeling more relaxed with the guys, more comfortable with Gerrard, and more like I fit in overall. The coyote with the ragged ear, Dix, is the second team’s Mike (middle linebacker), the one I work most closely with. Between him and Gerrard, in the third week at my new position, things are finally starting to make sense. I’m finding I like the flexibility of it, sometimes dropping back to cover receivers who aren’t going to blow past me, and sometimes coming up to attack the play at the lines.

It’s that last part that I have to work on. I’m used to letting the play come to me. Defending running plays means a lot more hunting on my part, watching to make sure the running back has the ball, guessing where he’s going, and avoiding his teammates on my way to him. I’m not good at that last part, not at first, so I get blindsided a lot. I work hard, though.

To my surprise, Gerrard and Carson approach me after the second game and tell me they want to start practicing with me, extra sessions after regular practice. Even though the idea of doing more work after our regular practice is crazy, I leap at the chance. “Why aren’t you practicing with Corey?” I ask them.

Carson snorts. He never says much. Gerrard just says, “We’re practicing with you,” and that’s the end of it. Nobody ever tells me what’s going on. In this case, though, I don’t care. They drive me harder than Steez does, but they also make it easier to learn. I start feeling like we have a rapport, and I see the three of us trotting out onto the field, the starting linebackers unit. I hold onto that vision to keep me going through the extra hour and a half workout every day.

The third pre-season game, I only get hit once, and I save a couple big runs. Lee watches from the stands, in jeans and a green polo shirt, with Brian nowhere around. The fourth and last pre-season game is in Port City. I play less, as the starters are getting up to speed now, but I’m really growing into the position. Steez pats me as I jog off the field at the end of the game, even though we lose. After a nap at the hotel, I feel pretty happy, so I decide to go track down a restaurant Lee recommended to me for a nice dinner.

Walking out into the lobby, I nearly run into Fisher. “Hey,” he says. “Got a minute?”

“Sure. I’m just heading to dinner. You eaten?”

He shakes his head, falling into step beside me through the door and out onto the street. It’s actually cool up here, a welcome change from the relentless heat of Chevali, though it is more humid.

We have one of those silences where you’re waiting for the other guy to start talking and hoping he doesn’t. Finally, I break it. “Fisher…”

“There’s a team dinner Sunday night,” he says. “For the start of the season, for the guys who make the team.”

My ears perk up. “I made the final roster?”

He waves away my concern. “You will. I saw you play out there today. Not that there was much doubt.”

“I had doubt.” I can’t help but look across to the skyscrapers of downtown Port City. It’s only my third time here, and I’ve never actually been downtown. They look majestic, pushing upwards against the sky full of stars.

“Not me.” He links his paws behind his back, staring down the street. “You’re a smart kid. Make good decisions.”

“Thanks.” I’m not sure now what he’s going on about. I’d thought this was going to be about something else. And he’s not smiling or patting me on the shoulder like he normally would if he’d just come up to give me good news.