Out of Position (32 page)

“You can bring a date to the dinner.” Oh. Now I get it. “So I just wanted to say, if you need a date, Gena’s got a couple friends who’d go with you.”

“Thanks,” I say, “but I think I’m okay.”

“They’re both nice, single tigers. Trish is even about your age.”

“Really, I’m okay.” I don’t know what to say to him.

Fisher slows to keep pace with me. “If you want, I know a ‘service’ that has some sweet girls. Least, they usedta be.” He’s not looking at me and his ears are halfway back.

I wish there were some way for me to just end this conversation. “I’m not going to bring anyone.”

“You should,” he says. “It’d look good. Just… you need to bring someone…”

“Lion Christ, just say it. Bring a girl, that’s what you mean, right?”

His ears go all the way back. “Yeah.”

I stare at the glossy marble of the shops we’re walking past. I can see my reflection looking morosely back at me. “I already told… her… not to come around anymore, okay? I wouldn’t invite her to the dinner.” Lee’s gonna be furious. But he can’t come to the dinner, he just can’t be around the team—someone would recognize him.

“All right” he says. “Hey, this… this don’t mean nothin’ about you an’ me.”

“Bullshit.” That jerks him around to stare at me. I see him behind me, reflected in the marble. “We talked about every other week in the offseason, and now you just haven’t wanted to talk to me for the last few weeks?”

“I been busy trying to make the team, same as you.” He tries to put on an angry expression.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Thanks for the advice.” I accelerate my pace, walking around the corner with no specific destination. He catches me easily and grabs me by the arm.

“I put a lot of work into helpin’ you stick around. I didn’t want to see you throw it away.”

I wrench my arm away. “Don’t lecture me.”

We glare at each other, face to face. The anger in his eyes is genuine now. “Shut up and listen. You ever hear of Tony Calhoun?”

“No.”

“Course not,” he hisses, voice lowered. “He was a bear, started a couple years before me in the league. When I came up, a coupla guys told me a story about him — he wasn’t playing no more. He was queer, didn’t make too much effort to hide it. Well, they dragged it when he was on the field. Told coach he was a distraction. He wasn’t great, but he was good enough to make a team, if those guys woulda shut up and played.” Fisher pokes me in the chest with a finger. “They bragged about it, how they ran him outta the league.”

I look to either side. The street’s busy, a few people glancing at us as they stroll by. I don’t think anyone heard him. “That was fifteen years ago,” I say. “And I’m not him. I already told Lee… I told her… I told
him
not to come around any more. You think I want trouble?” I feel anger welling up in me. It should be a relief to have my secret out, to Fisher, the one guy on the team I would’ve chosen to tell if I had to. But he’s taking it all wrong, making it harder, not easier.

“I don’t know what you want.”

“I want to play football and for people to leave me the fuck alone.”

He steps back. “Okay,” he says. “I just wanted to make sure.”

“Oh, and another thing,” I say, turning to leave. “If I had any thoughts about maybe telling anyone else on the team, you’ve managed to convince me of what a horrible idea that would be. So congratulations.”

He stalks after me, grasping at my arm and missing. “It is a horrible idea, that’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

“You think everyone is as bigoted as you?”

Now he snarls, but I’m snarling too, not prepared to back down. “I already told you, it don’t matter to me what you do on your own time. I’m looking out for the team.”

“Yeah, yeah, doesn’t matter to you.” I wave him dismissively away. “That’s why you haven’t talked to me in three weeks. That’s why you can’t talk about this shit without dancing around it. That’s why you had to make extra-double-sure that I didn’t bring him,” I spit the word at him, “to the dinner. Tell me something, Fish. When they bragged about kicking that poor guy out of the league, did you laugh and say, ‘Good job?’”

It’s unfair, and I know it’s unfair, but it feels good when I say it. All the anger drains from his muzzle and he stares at me, mouth open. I leave him there and stomp back to the hotel, and he lets me go with only a shouted, “Hey! Hey, fuck you!” over my shoulder as I go. I grab a greasy fast food burger to go and take it back to the room, hoping for fuck’s sake that Charm isn’t there so I can curl up and feel sorry for myself ’til I fall asleep.

Ogleby, with his impeccable sense of timing, calls the next day to tell me he’s finally set up a meeting with this panther, whatever her name is, Charlene or Charlotte. She’s supposed to be at a spa in Date Springs, an hour flight away, and he wants me to go there and just run into her. I tell him to fuck off, that I’m not going to fly to Date Springs just to meet some bimbo he wants me to take around. He gets agitated, in that squeaky ferrety way he has, and I tell him she can fucking well come to Chevali if she wants to meet me, and I hang up on him, because right now he’s the only person in the world I can do that to.

On the day the last round of cuts is announced, I’m out on the field, tossing the ball around with the other backup linebackers, not sitting in my room holding my tail like the twenty guys who think they’re on the fence. Making the cut is a huge weight off my mind, even though I know a starting position is way off in the future. I’ll probably at least be able to play in garbage time, and if I work hard and show the coaches something good, who knows?

By now, three of the rookies who cornered Lee in the locker room are gone, I tell him on my cell phone when we talk. We make plans to have dinner to celebrate me making the team a week from Monday night, a night without curfew since we have Tuesdays off until the season starts. I’ve closed on a condo downtown and it should be set up by then. He asks why not come down for the weekend, since we don’t have a game, and I clearly remember intending not to tell him why even as my stupid mouth was saying the words, “there’s this big dinner thing for everyone who made the team.”

“Can I go?” he asks immediately.

“Lots of guys aren’t taking a date,” I say. If we were together in person, he’d know right away that I was lying.

“Come on,” he says back. “I’ll buy a new dress and everything.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Fisher came to talk to me about that.”

He’s silent for a moment. “So he definitely knows?”

“Probably,” I say. “Hell, the whole team knows, now.”

“It was only five guys,” he says. “Two, now. And they don’t know I was with you.”

“Colin’s still on the team.”

“Trust me, I’ll look completely different. I’ll even fool Fisher.”

“No, you won’t!” I press the phone to my ear, pacing more quickly. “Because you’re not coming.”

“I promise I won’t go anywhere near the locker room.”

“I don’t want you playing ‘dress up and fool the football players’ anywhere,” I hiss.

He snorts. “How about you introduce me as the lucky fan who won the chance to have dinner with the mighty Devlin Miski? You won’t have to show any affection at all.”

I trace a paw along the window glass, looking out at the evening falling over the White Sands University campus. My room overlooks a common area much like the Forester U. lawn. I miss that lawn, the soft bed of grass and the gentle breeze ruffling my fur as I lay back and looked up at the sky. “What do you want me to do? Come out to the team? Come out to the press? You think a second-string converted linebacker can pull that off?”

“It’s not about your position,” he says. “It’s about who you are.”

“Oh, yeah? Who am I, doc?”

There’s a moment of silence. “You’re Devlin Miski,” he says, quietly.

Below me, in the common area, students who have arrived early for the fall term are relaxing and mingling. There’s a weasel pair, boy and girl, talking with a stallion and a desert rat who are also, obviously, a couple. I’ve known couples like that, the guy two feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the girl, the butt of jokes. The ones I’ve known didn’t care, and from the smiles I can see from my window, it looks like these two don’t, either. “Can Devlin Miski pull that off?”

“It’s got to start somewhere,” he says. “It’s got to start with someone.”

His voice sounds as tired as I feel. “That sounds like Brian talking,” I say.

“He’s not wrong all the time,” Lee says.

“Maybe not,” I say, “but his average sucks.”

He’s quiet for another heartbeat or three. “Have fun at the dinner,” he says. “I gotta get up early for work.”

I stare out the window after that for a long time, watching the kids laugh, talk, hold paws. They look so young, and so confident. We don’t choose who to fall in love with. Sometimes nature doesn’t fit nicely and neatly into the rest of your life. It’d be easy to be a football player if I were a straight womanizer like Charm. Of course, he’s a natural at what he does, too. He’s one of the guys who exudes confidence from every pore, him and the stallion down there on the sandy commons, his arm resting on the shoulders of his desert rat girlfriend, both of them laughing like they haven’t a care in the world.

 
The following week of practice is pretty loose, but intense at the same time. Coach Samuelson visits each of the separate group practices in turn, barking at us about a lack of energy, a lack of urgency, but none of us miss the wagging of his tail. We’ve ended the pre-season 2-2, but the pre-season doesn’t mean anything, as any coach will tell you. Ours will tell you that with such upbeat grins that you can read their excitement over the progress of the team.

I stick mostly to the second-string defense in practices, but Gerrard and Carson keep up the extra sessions with me. I start to wonder if they think I’ll be playing with them before too long. Killer either doesn’t know about the extras or doesn’t care, but he knows something is up and he avoids me, which is fine because it saves me the trouble of avoiding him.

Snaps was cut in the last round, which makes our celebration a little bittersweet. Charm and I want to take him out for drinks that night, but he says his agent has a couple teams interested in him and he wants to jump before they change their minds. We promise to stay in touch, and can’t see him off to the airport because we’ve got practice. When we get back, he’s gone. So it goes, I say, and Charm tells me that what I need to cheer me up is a lot of naked ladies.

It’s actually the very next day that I’m coming off the practice field and this gorgeous black panther in a sleek red dress comes up to me, ignoring my teammates. “You must be Dev,” she purrs, and when I confirm that, she extends a paw. “Glad to finally meet you.”

She’s slightly shorter than me. Her figure’s perfect, her expression soft and alluring. Her light blue eyes are wide and clear. I try to remember what Charm says to his girls. “Thanks for being a fan.”

Her paw is cool and firm. She laughs. “Clearly, you’re not. I’m Caroll Chavon. I think my flea talked to your flea?”

“Oh, you’re that actress,” I say.

Colin, the rookie wideout, was behind me coming off the field and stops to gawk, along with a few others. “You were in ‘Soft Touches,’” he says. She looks at him, and his ears go down all funny and he mumbles, “I think.”

A coyote and deer are staring openly at her chest. She takes in the attention, but only for a second. “Shoo, fellas, I’m only here for Dev.” She waves at them and they walk on, though I see them looking back at her ass.

“Thanks,” I say. “That’ll make me popular.”

“This’ll make you more popular,” she says. “That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.” I shake my head. “I don’t understand half the things Ogleby does.”

“And he doesn’t understand a tenth of the things you do. That’s why you’re playing football and he’s the bloodsucker.”

I squint at her. “You like agents, don’t you?”

“My first one tried to take fifty percent of my pay and only got me porno film gigs.” She sees my look and shakes her head. “I didn’t take any of ’em. Save yourself the time. My second agent said he’d give me more money if I’d sleep with him. My third agent dumped me when I didn’t make him a millionaire in a year. So I’m on number four now, older and wiser.” The whole soft and innocent look is gone, remarkably. She’s turned so the sun is no longer behind her and I can see steel grey in the blue of her eyes.

“You don’t look that old.” There, the first thing I’ve said that was remotely appropriate.

She smiles, brushes a paw down the dress. “Thanks. So we’ll look good together on Sunday.”

“Sunday?” It takes me a minute. “The team dinner?”

“You have a team function, we’re supposed to be seen together, makes sense.”

Heat builds in my chest. “Did Fisher set you up for this?”

“Who’s Fisher? I told you, my flea talked to yours. In fact,” she says as we start walking back toward the locker room, “you’re supposed to join me for dinner tonight, too. The Xeric Lounge.”

“What?” I feel like just when I’m getting a handle on things, I find out that there are patterns and plays I didn’t even know were in the book.

She laughs. “Your flea obviously doesn’t talk to you as much as mine does.”

“I think he’s afraid to call me.”

She gives my bicep a nice squeeze. “I would be too, if I made you mad. I hear good things about Xeric. It’s the place to be if you’re unfortunate enough to be in this place.”

I sigh. “Okay.” At least it’ll be a better excuse for Charm than anything else I could come up with.

“Please.” She puts a paw to my chest. I’m impressed by the firmness in that simple touch. “Try to restrain your excitement.”

It’s so dry that I have to laugh. “I’m sorry, it’s just…”

She shakes her head. “No, look, it’s fine. It’s just funny.” Her eyes sweep over the field. “Half those guys would give their left nut to get the dinner invitation you just got, and you’re all ‘I guess.’”

“It’s nothing about you,” I say. “I just don’t really know you.”

“It is refreshing to hear you mean that not in the Biblical sense.”

I search for an appropriate response to that before realizing how sincere she is. “I’m looking forward to dinner,” I say.