Out of Position (53 page)

“I picked it.” He snaps that, then settles. “It’s not that pricey. We get airplane noise sometimes. They change the flight paths when the wind kicks up. But there’s a theater group just down that road.”

“Course there is.” I allow myself a bit of a smile. We turn the other way from where the theater group apparently is, onto a shady street of condos. Brian parks in a garage and puts the top up. I lean against the shady concrete, still panting. “Not quite crime-free?”

“Why tempt fate?” He flicks the remote to lock it, with a chirp of the alarm, and leads me upstairs.

Why, indeed? Why am I here in the desert instead of in downtown Chevali with Dev, or at home in my loft bed sifting through player rankings for work?

“I picked up a six of diet for you.” Brian fills a glass of water at the door of the gleaming chrome fridge. His apartment—condo, I guess—is air-cooled to a comfy sixty-five or so. The kitchen floor is cool ceramic under my paws. The brush of air circulation against my ears everywhere I go tells me why his smell isn’t as strong as it had been back in his college dorm. Also why I can’t smell anyone else in here. Posh place, then. Or else he’s just been really antisocial since moving down.

“Actually, the water looks good,” I say.

Brian shrugs and gives me the glass he’s just filled. I wander into the living room and park myself on the comfy fabric sofa. The glossy wood coffee table is stacked with sports magazines, but I can’t see a remote, so I just drink my water and lean back. The posters here are the ones Brian had in college: famous Port City productions, professionally framed. Something about the room nags at me. I look around, trying to put my finger on it.

He sits on the couch next to me, sets his own glass of water on the side table, and takes out his phone. “You want to see your tiger with his black panther?”

“Seen it.” I take another drink and stare at the blank TV. Is it the posters? Where have I seen them before, other than in Brian’s room at Forester?

He holds the phone in his paw and then puts it away. “Okay. What do you want to eat?”

My stomach does growl, then. Maybe it’d be better to get some food and drink in me before having this discussion. I give up trying to figure out the living room, for the moment.“What’s good around here?”

“Besides me?” He smirks. I don’t react, so he lists his two favorite places, and I pick a nice-sounding Sonoran restaurant. We chill a bit longer, while he talks about his theater group and I rehydrate myself. The theater group, of course, is far below his skill level. Just a community theater, but he’s doing all he can. It’s really much better for them to have him, but he gets what he can out of it. I nod sympathetically.

Over dinner, he does ask me about my life for a bit as well. I tell him about my job working scouting for the Dragons, and about Hilltown, how little it’s changed in the few years he’s been gone. Just a couple friends catching up, avoiding the elephant—or tiger—in the room.

The food’s as good as he claimed. I’m still eating the chips and salsa even after my tacos have vanished. You don’t get this kind of food in Hilltown. Brian watches over the rim of his second margarita. I’ve limited myself to one, though they’re good, too. “You going to be okay to drive home?” I ask him.

“I figure you can drive.” He hefts the glass, toasting me, and drains it.

“Really.” I’m not sure what to make of this. Perhaps he thinks it’ll win me over, letting me drive his expensive convertible. Maybe he thinks putting himself under my care will make me feel more protective of him, more inclined to help. “Shouldn’t
you
be getting
me
drunk?”

“Oh, Tip, we’re beyond that.” He sets down the empty glass. “We’ve had ample opportunity to take advantage of each other.”

“Mmm.” I sigh. On the few occasions when Dev and I talk about Brian, Dev insists that he wants to fuck me, or wants me to fuck him, even though I keep telling Dev that Brian and I never did anything more than hug. He regrets that, Dev says. I tell him he doesn’t know Brian like I do.

“This is nice, isn’t it?” Brian leans over the table, just a bit. “Couple friends out for dinner, right?”

“Sure,” I say.

“You should come visit more often.”

When I don’t reply, he holds up a paw. “I know, I know, the photo, the whole ‘outing’ thing. Look, it’s not…” He bites his lip. “It’s not personal.”

“Right. If he were just anybody’s boyfriend…”

“Hey, you saw all that nice shit I wrote about him yesterday, right?”

“After I agreed to come down here.” I toy with my silverware. “Also doesn’t hurt for him to be more high-profile once he’s outed, does it? Makes it more likely he’ll stay in the league.”

“You overestimate my influence. Really. I’m sure there’s some other gay football player out there trembling in his tight-fitting uniform that someone will see him and his darling together. I just don’t know the darling. My options are limited.”

His voice is a little loud, but nobody looks around. “You shouldn’t be interfering at all,” I say, keeping my own voice low.

“Interfering.” He shakes his head. “I should support the status quo, huh?”

“You should support
my
status quo.”

His muzzle sways back and forth. “What is your status quo? Furtive kisses under the bleachers? Night after night at home, never going out, watching him on TV with that black panther?” He leans forward. “Isn’t that what we promised to fight?”

I fold my ears down. To avoid answering, I pick up my margarita glass and lick out the bottom. The sour tang and sharp tequila sting wash over my tongue. “I didn’t know then,” I say. The words to make him understand elude me. All I can offer is my own ignorance.

“How trite.” He smiles, with some sadness. “Does he really love you?”

“Yes!” That, I know.

“Then what’s the problem?” Brian rests an elbow on the table and leans his head into his paw. “Would he give up football for you?”

If I say no, Brian will feel he has to force Dev. If I say yes, he’ll feel justified in whatever he does. “Would you give up the theater for—for someone special?”

His little smile vanishes. “Sure I would.”

“I don’t just mean this little community theater.” I wave a paw at the window. “I mean everywhere. Acting, writing, all of it. If I—if your boyfriend asked you to give it all up to be with him, would you do it?”

He straightens, lowers his paw to the table. His eyes are serious, and not at all drunk. “I promise you I would.”

It’s very convincing. I don’t know where the acting ends and the real Brian begins.

I drive back to his place, while he sits in the front seat and directs me. He tries singing a song from one of the musicals he did back in college, a little number called “Under the Moon,” which goes, in part, “Two of us under the moon, our paws in time and touch, this night will end too soon, I love you far too much.”

“What musical is that from?” I ask, as much because I don’t remember as to stop his singing. It’s not that he’s bad—he’s not—it just isn’t what I need to hear right now. It’s making me think of Dev in his apartment, looking out the window at the moon, thinking I’m at home in Hilltown.

Brian stops and leans against the door, looking across the seat at me. He grins. “It’s ‘Win Some, Lose Some.’ Freshman year.”

“Right.” Dev never leaves my mind completely, but for a moment I’m an eighteen-year-old fox again, in a cramped, hot student theater. “You were the stockbroker. You didn’t sing that song.”

“Not in the play. But it got me laid a half-dozen times.”

“Only that many?”

“I had a bunch of songs.” He rests his arm on the door and looks ahead. “Turn here.”

I turn, looking up at the old stone building, and my mind is back with my tiger again. I’m doing this for him, I remind myself.

Brian stops me when we get to his garage. “I’ll pull it in,” he says. “Don’t want you to scrape the paint and then feel guilty.”

“I wouldn’t,” I murmur as I get out and wait, but I don’t think he hears me. He manages to get the car into his space without touching either of the cars next to it, then hits the button to put the top up and tries to vault out of the car without opening the door.

There are times when you know something’s a bad idea a split-second before it happens. I feel the beginning of the urge to yell at him not to do it, but my muzzle is not even open when his foot catches on the door. His body twists in mid-air as though someone had hit him. He smacks into the car next to his before dropping flat to the concrete with a sound like a hard tackle on the football field.

The rag-top keeps closing with a mechanical whirr. I hurry forward to him. “Teeth and tail, are you okay?”

“Fine,” he slurs. “Just banged up.” But when he lifts a paw to wipe his muzzle, I smell the tang of blood.

“Come on,” I sigh. “Let’s go upstairs.”

He limps along until I help him, over his protests. I’m a little taller than he is, but by stooping, I can support him with his arm over my shoulders. It’s not that uncomfortable, and it gets him up the stairs and to his door. After that, he collapses on the couch while I get a fresh cloth.

“Feel like an idiot,” he murmurs.

I sit next to him and wipe at his muzzle. This is ‘taking care of him’ on whole new level. “You look like an idiot,” I say.

His tail flips across the sofa, away from me. The cloth comes away bloody, but by the third time I swap him, it’s clean. “Did you think you were going to impress me, jumping out of the car like that?”

“Wasn’t room to open the door,” he says.

“Seriously,” I say. I get up to toss the cloth into the hamper in the bathroom. When I come back, he’s put on a DVD of “Win Some, Lose Some,” the Port City production. It’s a little loud for the room, but perhaps not as much for him as for me. I fold my ears back, give him a clean cloth, and sit in the armchair next to the couch.

“I remember seeing you in the audience,” he says, not looking at me. “Remember those first meetings? FLAG, with, um, what was his name, the arctic fox?”

“Micha?”

“No, not Micha. The one who was running the group then.”

“Oh!” I search my memory, but all I see is Micha’s amber eyes and short muzzle. “Can’t remember.”

He takes the cloth down and puts it in his lap. “We laughed at him, I remember.”

“But we missed him later.”

“Lion Christ, yes.”

“Keith was such a tool.”

He frowns. “When did Keith…” He realizes it in the same moment I do.

“Yeah, that was… after.”

He stares down into his lap. “I shouldn’t have left,” he says.

I didn’t expect that. I rest my paws on my knees and look at him, at the white cloth in his lap. “It was a while ago,” I say. “You were scared.”

He shakes his head sharply once, then stops, as if thinking about it. “Maybe. Dad was more scared.”

But he wouldn’t have moved you out of Forester if you hadn’t wanted it. The old argument surfaces, and I swallow it before it gets past my throat. “You’re safer here.”

“Somewhat.” He snorts. “It’s not exactly a gilded cage. Maybe a silver-plated one.”

“Poor, poor, pitiful me. Poor little rich drama queen. You know this place is like three times the size of mine?”

“Why doesn’t your boyfriend get you a better place?”

“Why don’t you get a job?”

At that, he looks up. “If I wanted that lecture, I’d have asked my Dad down for the weekend.”

I wave a paw. “You sit here and complain about things, but—”

“What am I qualified to do? With a theater degree?” His tone sharpens. “Answer phones? Make telemarketing calls? Fast food server? ’Prithee, good sir, wouldst thou like fries with that?’ I’m not going to do that, Tip. I’m an actor.”

“Fine,” I say, pulling my knees up to my chest and curling my tail around them. “So act. But don’t go around complaining like there’s this big piece of your life that’s missing.”

He shrugs. “There’s no gay scene. Nothing.”

“Not even the theater group?”

He snorts. “They all act kind of queeny. But none of them even have a sniff of interest. There’s a gay area in downtown Chevali. It’s pathetic. Half a block. I went there once and got so depressed I listened to “Hello Dolly” all the way home.”

“So you are trying to… what?”

“I don’t know.” He seems to cave in on himself, shoulders falling in, head dropping. “I just want to do something worthwhile.”

“You can. You’ve got so much going for you.”

“Like what? Come on, throw me a bone. List my good qualities.”

We share a grin. I tick them off on my fingers. “You’re smart, you’re attractive, you take care of yourself, you’re endearingly stupid sometimes, you’re a great actor—”

“All right, all right. Consider my ego assuaged.” He doesn’t sit up any straighter, though, just rubs the spot on his muzzle that hit the ground. “I just don’t have anyone to talk to.”

“You have the whole Internet.”

“Not the same.”

He wants me to come sit next to him. Less sophisticated guys than Brian have tried that hangdog ‘I need an arm across my shoulders’ routine. But it’s precisely because it’s so transparent that I can’t believe he doesn’t actually mean it. “I don’t know what you want me to do. You want me to chat with you more?”

“That’d be a start.”

“So stop threatening my boyfriend.”

He sighs. “I don’t wanna talk about him.”

I drum claws on the arm of his armchair. “Well, that’s too bad, seeing as how that’s the whole reason I came down here. We’re gonna talk about him sooner or later.”

“Gosh,” he says, without a smile, “and here I thought you came to see me.”

“Is it really that bad?” I flick my tail against the chair. “You can’t find anything better to do than out famous people.”

“Not so bad a hobby,” he says. “Maybe then someone’d pay attention to me.”

I can’t help it; I laugh. “You can’t get people to pay attention to you? No wonder you’re not getting along with the theater group.”

“It’s so easy for you,” he says. “You’ve got a great job, you’ve got a boyfriend. Don’t need poor old Spots now you’ve got your Stripes.”

“Hey,” I say. “That’s not—”

He waves the paw holding the white cloth. “I know, I know, I left. But you never gave me a chance to make it up.”