Uncovered (Dev and Lee Book 4) (14 page)

“Don’t do that. He’s changing the game for you guys. I still think you should’ve gotten a better left tackle for Aston, but…”

“I’ll mention that to Coach. Better yet, why don’t you mention it to Rodriguez?”

“Maybe I will.” I sigh and lean back into the corner of the couch, letting my tail uncurl along the seat where Dev should be. “I wish he wanted to hire me to do that.”

“You’ll get another scouting job,” he says.

“Someday. Maybe.” I lower my ears.

“And I’ll see you Friday.”

“Uh-huh.”

He pauses. “That’s where you’re supposed to say that your next scouting job will be on Friday. When you get to scout me. Only you’re supposed to say it better.”

“Sorry.” I smile, and that does lift my ears a little.

“What have you been up to? You’re all quiet.”

Change from the last call, I think, when he was the one who went quiet on me. I’m worrying about the Yerba job and if I have to interview with a homophobe, I wonder what’s going on with the King family’s lawsuit, and most of all I don’t know what to do about Mother. But I don’t want to dampen his feelings when he’s in a good mood like this, and bringing up all my gay-related issues would do that for sure. “Talked to Father,” I say. “Just dealing with Mother, you know?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. You feeling any better?”

“A little. He thinks I should apologize to her.” That just spills out.

“What?” The indignance sets warmth blooming in my heart, banishes my shadowy fears, and I want to kiss him and tell him I love him.

“I think maybe he has a point. I mean, I did yell at her. If I want her to apologize, I have to be willing to…” I sigh and adjust my position on the couch, leaning my head against the back and closing my eyes.

He doesn’t say anything for a bit, waiting for me, but I don’t know what else I can say. I’m dropped back into the tangle of memories of that day and what I said and should have said, and shouldn’t have said. Perhaps sensing this, Dev changes the subject. “Coach took me aside today.”

I wait. He doesn’t go on. “And?”

“He said he talked to Colin. Said he told him if he doesn’t like seeing you around team family functions, he doesn’t have to attend them.”

I wonder how Colin and Penny will react to being told in the same week that they have to put up with me. At the same time, it’s tremendously heartening that both Coach Samuelson and Gena are supporting Dev and me. My tail wags against the couch.“How’d he take it?”

“Ah, Coach didn’t say. I mean, it doesn’t matter. Coach lays down the law.”

“All right.” I wish I could get him or Gena to call Mother. I search for something else to talk about. “Oh, did you get those e-mails with the interviews?”

“Yeah, looks good. Wish you could do all my interviews that way. They keep bugging me even though it’s the playoffs.”

“If I could, tiger.”

“All right, I need to stretch and then sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow?”

“And see me Friday.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

I hang up and lie back on the couch. I think about Colin and Mother and the lawsuit. In a fantasy, I tell Colin and Mother about the lawsuit at the same time and watch the two vulpine muzzles struggle to reconcile their beliefs with the reality of a dead kid. And then two images click together in my head, of Vince King slumped on the bench and Kodi slumped against the wall, victims of that poisonous painful rhetoric. If Colin could see the effect his words had on a teammate…

He wouldn’t care. But I sit upright with another thought. If—if the lawyers in the court could see another example of Families United breaking up a family…if they could hear that the group regularly tries to turn mothers against sons, make sons feel worthless…

There’s a thing called an
amicus curiae
that I’ve read about in some of the gay rights court cases, where people file testimony pertinent to the case, things that might not otherwise come to light. I’m a witness to some of the behavior Families United promotes: telling parents to discard and disown their cubs. Mrs. Hedley telling me her sons are dead. That’s got to be relevant.

And if I can show Mother that, if I can tell her that her behavior is being used by the court to rule against that organization she’s thrown herself in with, then she’ll have to listen. I won’t be a prick about it…

I stop rubbing my paws together. No, of course I won’t be a prick about it. I’ll…I’ll talk to Father, figure out the best way to do it. But it’s something concrete, something tangible, something I can do to help.

I get out the phone to call Hal, because I don’t know shit about filing an
amicus curiae
, and when I turn it on, it reminds me that I have a voicemail to listen to. Right, the one from Brian. I sigh and put the phone to my ear. “Hi, Wiley,” he says. “Just wanted to let you know that today makes five interviews your boyfriend has turned down from his local chapter of Equality Now. Maybe there’s something you can do.”

I turn the phone off and drop it to the floor, lying back on the couch. Here’s one more thing I can’t talk to Dev about. I lay an arm across my eyes and exhale. Brian’s wrong. There’s nothing I can do, not about Dev. But there might be something I can do about Mother.

Chapter 6 – Aggravated (Dev)

By the time Friday rolls around, I’m feeling better. We practice in full pads, hitting hard, but we all feel better that night than we have since Sunday—physically. Mentally we’ve been charged up all week, and Friday’s no exception. It’s even gotten to the point that we don’t mind Strike all that much. At least, the defense doesn’t. Whenever I’m hanging out with Ty and Strike’s name comes up, the fox just says, “let’s change the subject.”

So I’m in a pretty good mood as I walk over to Lee’s hotel. Boliat’s cold in January, with a wind that knifes down between the buildings and whistles as it rounds the corners, but the lights are pretty and everyone I pass has cheerful smiles. Small flakes of snow sprinkle the air, settling on my jacket and collecting in the concrete corners of the buildings. It’s a nice reminder of the Hilltown winters, though the air is drier and the sky clearer than I remember from my Januarys up north. Still, it feels familiar, friendly and close. I haven’t been in Chevali all that long, but being back in a Midwestern city reminds me of the things I loved about Hilltown: the chill in the air, the feeling of camaraderie among all the people fighting the weather together, the warmth of coming in out of the cold to a hotel lobby.

The Intercontinental is pretty posh. My feet slide along the marble lobby floor, and I reflect that the hotels we meet in are all nicer than my apartment. I go up to the room number Lee texted me and find him in a small, comfortable hotel room looking out onto a large public square with a gilded statue of a white-tailed deer in the center. Founder of the city or one of its early mayors or something. They told us when we arrived, but I was thinking about the Boxers’ receivers at the time.

Anyway, there’s more important things to think about, like the fox in the pretty yellow polo shirt wagging his tail in front of the large white king bed. I step up and take him in my arms, feel his light frame warm against me, squeeze him close. My tail curls around his leg. “Missed you.”

“Mmm. Me too.” He nuzzles against my chest.

I kiss his ears. “You said you had news about your jobs?”

“Sort of.” He slides his paws down my back to rest just above the base of my tail. “You want to hear it now, or after?”

I grin and take one of his ears in my teeth. “It’s up to you.”

“Oh, before, then.” He squirms a little. “I’m going to have some calls next week for the Yerba interview, and they want me to come up there to meet more of the staff.”

“Hey, that’s great!” I squeeze him.

“Emman—Peter says a lot of the guys come back for championship weekend, so I might go up then. Up Saturday, then to watch you in the game Sunday.”

My grin widens. “One more game to win. If we don’t…”

“You will.”

I nuzzle his ears and remember the Firebirds job. “So, the job doing community stuff for the Firebirds?”

He goes a little tense. “Yeah. I dunno. They’re still talking to me, but I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

“Why not?” I wonder if I need to make a call to our media person, the one who set up the job.

“It’s just…we talked about what they wanted, and what I wanted, and it doesn’t look like a great fit right now.”

He’s not meeting my eyes when I stare down at him. He can’t know that I set that up. Unless Vince or someone told him. They wouldn’t have, though. “But I thought...I thought it’d be perfect for you. You’d get to be around football again, and you could do your activist stuff too.”

His nod is a slight motion against my chest. “Not everything’s gonna work out even if it seems perfect at first.” He sighs, warm breath through my shirt and fur. “It was a short, experimental thing, and I was worried it’d mess up my chances to get a scouting job later on. Also, it’s only three months. Rodriguez was clear about that. If I get the job at Yerba, they’d likely want me starting within a few weeks after the championship, and honestly, the Yerba job is the one with more long-term potential.”

Up close, his scent is a little different, a little subdued. Not fear, but maybe he’s getting sick. “Isn’t that giving up the activist stuff you want to do?”

“As a career. Peter says the job takes a lot of time and I know that, but I still think I can do things in my spare time. On planes to come see you.”

“What if you could move into scouting with the Firebirds?” If he’s in Yerba, I guess that’s good too, but it moves us back to living apart, and I really like having him in the apartment with me.

“In what, three years? Their scouting department is pretty solid. I don’t think there’s much open there for a gay outreach person to cross over.”

“Still. You’d have a lot of meetings with the front office…”

“It’s okay,” he says. “It didn’t work out.” He looks up at me, his blue eyes set.

“All right.” I shrug, disguising my disappointment.

Not well enough. “I appreciate the thought behind it,” he says. “I’m still trying to figure things out, and that just wasn’t the right thing. Besides.” He laughs, though it seems to me his laugh is a touch forced. “Then I’d have to be the one harassing you for interviews. Or harassing Ogleby, anyway.”

“You could harass him anyway,” I growl. “It’d save me the trouble. He still lets through a bunch. I had to talk to True Sports for twenty minutes today.”

“Oh, so you are still doing interviews.”

“Some of them.” I slide paws down his shoulders. His ears are down, and he’s not looking at me. “Ogleby sends me some and I do a few. The guys from SI, you know, it’s good to stay on their good side.”

“I’m all in favor of that,” he says. “I like seeing positive coverage of you there. You could also get positive coverage in other places—” Now his ears go all the way flat. “Sorry.”

I let him go and fold my arms. “You’re mad at me for not going to Potomac.”

“No. Well.” He rubs his paws together. “Maybe a little. But they called you to talk about the discussions they’d had, just to get your views on marriage. And you wouldn’t even talk to them for fifteen minutes.”

“Um.” I try to stop my tail from lashing. “You know, I’m not hosting a debate on marriage on Sunday. I’m playing a football game.”

“So you stop being gay until the season’s over?”

“There are a lot of gay people out there. Do they all have to have an opinion on everything?”

He folds his arms, mirroring my pose. “There aren’t a lot of gay people featured on TV every Sunday.”

I mention a flamboyant, jewel-encrusted preacher we both hate. He doesn’t even smile. “Look.” I cross to the bed and sit on the edge of it. He turns to face me, but doesn’t move. “
You
are the one who told me I should focus on football. It’s my job. I’m just starting out. There’ll be plenty of time for me to become a gay marriage activist later.”

“You don’t have to be an activist, or even an advocate, to do a lot of good for—” I wait for him to say that bear’s name, but he swallows it and skips past it. “It just…it seems like you’d be happy for the world to forget that you’re gay.”

“Maybe I would.” My voice is rising. I control it. “At least for the next few days. Maybe—hopefully—the next two weeks.”

“People have short memories,” he says. “Once football season is over, how many people are going to care?”

“More if we win the championship, right?”

“Still not as many as during the season.” He lowers his eyes. “You know, you’re right. I’m sorry. I promised myself I wouldn’t put this on you this week, and I just got caught up in it, and…it’s not fair to you. You need to do what you need to do. Win a championship.”

He comes to sit next to me, and I wait before putting an arm around him. I’m not sure if I’ve won this argument, or just delayed it, or some other alternative. And I’m trying to sort out what that little outburst sparked in me, because while I’m annoyed as shit that he’s still trying to make me feel guilty, I’m also more excited than I’ve been in a few days about being with him because there was, for a bit, that passion in his eyes. When he sits on the bed, he slumps, and I want to put my arm around him and say,
Keep fighting! You can fight without me and I love seeing your passion and fire!

But if I say that, he’ll just keep trying to get me involved. And it’s only another two weeks. I don’t really think he wants me to lose on Sunday so I can start agitating for equal rights with him, but I don’t even want to open that box again. So I just curl my tail back around against his hips and rest a paw on his shoulder, and I say, “I love you.”

“Love you too,” he murmurs, and when I pull him toward me, he doesn’t resist.

*

Saturday is a semi-rest day, when we just do a lot of stretching, some cardio workouts, and film study and playbook review. Ty comes over and sits with me, Zillo, and Charm over lunch, as he’s taken to doing since Strike started eating with the offense.

“Hey,” Ty says into a lull, as though the thought had just occurred to him. “You think anyone else on the team is gay?”

The other three all look at me. “What?” I say.

“You’re the one with some kinda, whatsit, gay-dar,” Charm says, drawing out the word.

“Yeah.” I take a long drink of Bolt-Ade. “You know what I wonder about when I’m around the team? Who’s gonna come in to cover the slot if I break off to stop the run.”

“Oh, come on,” Charm says. “Don’t say you ain’t thought about it.”

“Sure. But it’s their private business.”

“It’s kinda funny,” Zillo says. “I thought I’d be able to tell easy. When you…y’know.” He ducks his long muzzle and avoids my eyes. “I thought about all these things like you not going to clubs, and being private, and stuff. And I thought I shoulda known. But after a while…” After the Gateway game, I’m sure he means, when he stopped thinking that a faggot couldn’t be a tough football player. “I started seein’ that there are a lot of guys who do things that seem the same, and y’know. Some of them are married.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not gay,” Ty points out. “You see that movie about that guy who was married and having an affair with his doctor?”

Again, everybody looks at me. “What? No. I didn’t see it. Did you?”

Ty shakes his head. “I’m just sayin’, married guys could be gay. You had a girlfriend in college, right?”

I wonder how long they’ve wanted to ask these questions. “Could we talk about football?” I say.

Charm drops a hefty arm around my shoulders. “Had a girlfriend every night, he told me. Didn’t you used to take ’em to the ice cream parlor, Gramps? Or was it the soda fountain?”

“I’m six months older than you,” I remind him. He calls me “Gramps” because I spent all four years in college, unlike him, and he’s been in the league two years longer than me.

“See?” Ty says to Zillo. “So maybe.”

“Maybe.” Zillo looks unconvinced, his ears half-down. “They don’t sound like—I mean, they sound happy.”

“Seriously, guys,” I say. “Remember that game we play? There’s kind of a big one tomorrow.”

Ty laughs. “Get your fox to take us to another gay club,” he says, whiskers twitching. His black ears stay perked up. “We’ll see who wants to go.”

“Or who doesn’t wanna go,” Charm says.

“It was cool anyway,” Ty says. “I take my guys out to clubs, I end up a few grand in the hole. I go out with you guys and dance instead of drink, I got out for two hundred. Should teach that in those money management seminars: go to gay clubs, save your money.”

“So,” I say, leaning over to Zillo, “did you see what they like to run to the weak side on short-yardage downs?”

*

All through the afternoon, I do my best to put those thoughts out of my mind so I can focus on plays. But I remember Argonne saying he had another engagement. I remember Rodo and Pike and how much all the guys enjoyed the gay club, and I start analyzing my memory for clues about who might’ve enjoyed it more. But no matter how much I think about it, the one I think had the best time keeps coming up Vonni—the guy who ended the night with a girl.

According to him and Lee. But he wasn’t cagey about it at all, wasn’t ashamed or weird. When he told us about it, his body language was the same as Charm’s when he comes back to the locker room after a night with a girl or three. And I don’t think Vonni is gay. Just married. But that’s another whole bag of fucking problems I don’t want to open.

If I have gay-dar, it’s a really poor model, because there’s nobody on the team who seems even the least bit gay. The only one—maybe, though I’d never say it—is Carson, who hangs around Gerrard all the time and never says much. But Gerrard’s married
and
he has at least two coyote mistresses on the road, and apparently something more that I’m not sure I want to know anything about.

I get my mind back on the film, and finish out the afternoon. The guys are going to dinner, but I promised Lee I’d take him somewhere nice so we could have dinner before our traditional pre-game sex. Fisher bails on the team dinner too, saying he doesn’t feel like being in a big group, and suggests maybe he and Gena could join us. I check with Lee and he says it’s fine.

The steakhouse is nice but not extra-fancy: white tablecloths and candles, dark oak trim and tuxedoed coyotes and bobcats waiting tables. The steaks are rare and juicy and the wine is smooth and fruity. The smell of the place is all sizzling fat, roasting potatoes, and contented customers.

We get a small table for four in the back. Lee’s still quiet throughout the dinner, which is probably good because Fisher’s growling about the coaches and the practices. “They’re going soft on us,” he says, and adds in some choice words for the line coach, about how the playoffs are different and they’re treating it just like the regular season.

I take a break from worrying about Lee. “They’re sticking with what got us here. That’s what Coach said.”

“Yeah, well, the regular season’s totally different from playoff intensity. They’re not getting us ready for it. Do we play the same in preseason as in regular season?”

“Preseason games don’t count on the record.”

“And regular season games don’t count in the playoffs.” He stabs his fork into the steak and attacks it with the knife.

It makes enough noise that other people in the steakhouse turn and look. Lee’s ears flick down. Gena looks at Fisher and then across at me, then the movement of Lee’s ears catches her eye and she turns. He raises his head to meet her eyes. “Well, he’s right,” he says. “But I’ve also heard of coaching staffs saying it helps to keep things the same.”