Uncovered (Dev and Lee Book 4) (33 page)

I sit up and blow my nose, and for a few seconds it is actually clear. Scents come flooding back to me, my ears pop, and I remember what it is to feel normal. As the mucus collects back in the cavities I’ve just cleared, I reflect back on the previous night and rub my head. The shadows have retreated from the room in the harsh sunlight, and the illuminated clutter of Hal’s office, smelling of swift fox, reminds me that I do have a friend. There is another morning, and another. Life is not that bad. Life always gives you another chance.

Unless you leave a voicemail or send an e-mail, I remember. No second chances there. Fur prickling, I reach for the laptop and wake it up.

Well, at least I didn’t send the damn message. But there’s two more full paragraphs after the “shining comet” line, and I mean “full” as in “verbose mode on.” I stare at the text, which I have absolutely no recollection of, while shame builds up at my self-pitying rambling. Jesus Fox, I’m glad I didn’t send it. Dev would definitely dump me if he read something like that. Not only is it full of things like “all that you’ve done was in you all the time and I just latched on to your success,” but that “shining comet-Marley’s chains” thing is the least of my literary transgressions. I even wrote at one point in what I think is supposed to be French.

I erase the text and cancel the message, because I never want to remember that I did something like that. “Thank God for Mondays,” I mutter, shutting the laptop, and set about distracting myself with trying to clean up Hal’s place. He’s out of coffee, so I take a trip to Starbucks, where to my dismay I actually feel excited at the green sign and awnings, and then come back, sweep up stray fur in the living room, and tackle the kitchen. The work makes me feel good, or at least useful.

He comes out sort of bemused an hour later, after I was making noise putting away dishes in the kitchen. “What’re you doing?” he yawns.

“Cleaning. And not blowing my nose every five minutes. Sorry about the noise.” I put away a saucepan.

“So all my dishes have germs on them.” He scans the kitchen back and forth. “Where are my coffee mugs?”

“Up here,” I say, “and I washed my paws with hot water and soap.”

He reaches into the cabinet and retrieves a mug. “I’m not going to tell you to stop,” he says, holding the mug and looking lost, as though it’s my kitchen. “But, um.”

“Want me to make coffee?” I give him a bright smile.

“Do I have coffee?” He blinks at me.

I show him the bag of Starbucks. His eyes widen. “You went to Starbucks? Voluntarily?”

“Their tea is okay,” I say, measuring out the coffee. “And you like their coffee. Also, I got you some blazers.”

He sniffs the air. “At Starbucks? That smells pretty good, by the way.”

“It’s their strongest blend. I thought maybe it wouldn’t taste like piss.”

He makes a face at me. “You going to have some?”

“I’m still on tea.” I point to the Starbucks cup on the counter.

“Oh, that’s what I smell. I thought you’d left the garbage out.”

“No,” I say, “but I can put some in your coffee if you want.”

He leans against the kitchen door frame, swishing his tail back and forth. A smile creeps along his muzzle. “Sounds like you’re feeling better.”

“A little,” and of course, I barely get the coffee started before I have to run past him out into the living room to blow my nose.

But yes, Monday is better. I get Hal to open up about his date, which he’s reluctant to talk about, I think partly because he doesn’t want to rub it in my nose as well as because he just doesn’t want to talk to me about his private life. Eventually he says they had a nice dinner, they went back to her place and had a serious talk about their priorities.

“How serious?” I say. “I can’t smell anything and I was asleep so I don’t know when you came home.”

He makes a face at me. “We decided we like each other’s company and maybe that’ll be enough.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “So. How serious?”

“I don’t know that I want to talk about that.”

“Oh, come on. I don’t have a love life of my own. Shirts-off serious? Naked serious?”

He flicks his ears. “We just held each other on the couch.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

His tail flicks. “And a little bit of petting.”

“There you go.” I leave the coffee to percolate and go sit on the couch. The TV comes on to a sports channel and I think it’ll be okay, because I can always flip away when they start talking about football. The national ones aren’t as relentlessly Firebirds-heavy as the local stations are, although the Firebirds are a great underdog story and Dev is a great story and they’re not shying away from it by any means.

I’m in a better mood to deal with it than I have been in days, and when they flip to talking about Dev, I stay on to test myself. They rehash all the same old things, play a clip from his coming-out press conference and footage of him getting flattened by Bixon, followed by some of his interceptions, ending with the one in Boliat, to create this illusory arc that coming out made him seem weak until he got his head on straight. At least they don’t pull out footage of the Millenport fight where he tackled the boar that gored Fisher, which is kind of funny because that was one of the turning points of the season. It let his teammates know he was backing them up, and it let the rest of the league know he wasn’t going to let them fuck with him.

The piece makes me feel moody, but more nostalgic-moody than depressed. I only feel the pressure of tears at one point. Hal goes into his room to write, and I pull up the laptop and open Dev’s e-mail account, which I’d been avoiding doing. I was pretty sure nobody’d been looking at it since I left, but on the off chance that someone had, I would’ve been crushed and I didn’t want to deal with that. I’m not sure I’m still allowed to read his e-mail, but as long as nobody else is doing it, it needs to be answered, and he’s not going to do it.

Nobody has been accessing his e-mail; a small relief. I read through the letters to him with as much detachment as I can muster and respond to the ones that need responses. The volume’s gone up steadily throughout the playoffs, with lots of e-mails from local Chevali cubs saying how awesome they think he is, and three requests for interviews that I route to Ogleby. There’s some abuse and some praise and guys wanting to hook up with him, which makes me pause. Should I pass those on now? Will he want to try out someone besides me? One of the guys is a fox, too, or at least the picture he sent is of a fox, a red fox, in tight white underwear.

The thought of him with someone else makes me sad, not angry, so I pull up my solitaire game and play it until my mind is more or less clear. I’m still congested, but better than yesterday, so I don’t take any more of the pills, which Hal notices when he comes out. “Did you only take two of those?” he says, pointing at the packet on the side of the couch.

“Yeah. They make my head feel stupid.”

He puts his paws on his hips. “You could’ve told me that before I spent thirteen bucks on them.”

My ears go back. “I left you grocery money,” I say. “Anyway, you can get the generic store brand for like six.”

“You telling me how to shop?”

“Oh, come on. What are we, married?”

His jaw hangs open and then snaps shut. “Yeah, well,” he says gruffly. “Glad you’re feeling better.”

I mimic his voice. “Sure am, bro.” Then I cough and have to blow my nose again.

“Jesus Fox, seriously, take the pills.” He comes over to stand by the couch and picks up the box.

“I’m getting better.”

“Not fast enough.” He pops two pills out of the foil (easily, the bastard) and holds them out.

“I finished off the Southern Comfort last night,” I say. “I feel better.” My nose tickles, but I resist the urge to blow it yet again. Timing is everything.

“Trust ten years more experience,” he says. “Take the pills.”

I sigh, but I’m staying on his floor, so what else am I supposed to do? I take the pills and wash them down, and wait for my head to get warm and muzzy again. In the meantime, I think seriously for the first time about what my long-term plans are going to be. I want to move back in with Dev when he comes back from the game, and I’m gonna try like hell for that, but I have to face the fact that realistically it may not happen.

So what are my options? I can’t impose on Hal for too long. After the championship, I can hopefully get a better sense of the situation in Yerba. I mean, they wouldn’t invite me up for the game if they weren’t serious about hiring me. Or I could go back to Hilltown and sleep on Father’s couch. If he has one. Does he? I can’t remember whether he told me that.

After about ten minutes of trying to figure out if my father owns a couch, I remember that I slept on it when I went up to get my stuff from Mother’s. The pills are working again, I guess, so I shelve the thinking process for another day. “Make things go boom,” I instruct Hal, and he throws on a DVD of a terrible movie with good explosions.

The urge to blow my nose decreases as the day goes on, and though I hate the hollow, dry feeling and the crazy, skittering paths my thoughts take, I do appreciate not having to live with a tissue box grafted to my side. I take more pills at the appointed time, and when my head throbs with a headache, I go and lie down, and Monday slides away from me easily.

Tuesday I get up, throw a t-shirt on, and march out to the living room to announce to Hal, “I think I’m over the worst of it.”

“Good,” he says from the kitchen, and sips his coffee, reading something on his laptop, already accustomed to my presence.

I pull out my iPhone. I would’ve heard if there were a message from Dev, but I still check—there isn’t. I decide I may as well figure out how to get my e-mail on the phone, so I pull out the laptop and do that.

“Want to turn on the TV?” Hal asks, coming in with his computer.

I don’t look up. “It’s Media Day.”

“Yeah?”

I sigh and pick up the computer and phone. “I should just go in the office. You might want to watch this.”

“I’d like to.”

Dev would’ve said he didn’t have to, maybe. Or I would’ve realized it was important to him and not been waiting for him to say he didn’t want to. At any rate, it’s fine. I tune out the muffled TV noise with the door closed, and work on my e-mail, which is more complicated than I thought it would be and involves looking at a bunch of different web pages and typing server names into programs.

“Going to grab lunch,” Hal says in a little bit. “Want to come?”

“Sure,” I say, bringing the phone with me. “I think I have this set up right.”

He snorts. “Fancy things.”

“You’ll have one before long,” I say, showing off the mail. “It gets e-mail and plays games, and has a camera, too.”

“If I want to read e-mail, I’ll sit down at the computer. I just want my phone to take phone calls.” He pauses. “And send text messages.”

“Really? You never text me.” I shrug on a jacket.

“It’s warm out.”

“I’m sick,” I point out. “Who do you text?”

We walk out into the sun. “Pol,” he says. “She likes to text.”

I grin and elbow him. “So you’re adopting new technology for her.”

“I didn’t say I liked it,” he says.

“Your tail says otherwise.” I grin, and he stops wagging it, but by then it’s too late.

He takes me a little farther than the taco stand, to a burger place—not the fast food one that I growl at as we approach, but a little mom-and-pop place that he swears is run by an actual mom and pop, a pair of raccoons. And it smells really good, all grease and beef and cheese, and the female raccoon behind the counter is pretty friendly. We sit in the window with the sun on the table and enjoy the sandwiches, the crispy fries, and the onion rings. It’s horrible and unhealthy and I don’t care. I only have to blow my nose twice, and my throat is all better.

I’m starting to think that it might be a pretty nice day when my phone rings, and I see Brian’s number on it. “So much for that,” I say aloud.

Hal glances at the phone in my paw. “You don’t have to take the call, you know.”

“I can handle him.” But still I hesitate a second, because it’s Brian, and I don’t want to talk to him until I get my situation resolved with Dev. I wouldn’t say anything to him about it, but I wouldn’t put it past him to know, somehow, or to figure it out from talking to me.

Then the phone stops ringing. “Problem solved,” Hal says.

I feel the weight of the phone in my pocket the whole way back to the apartment. It beeps to let me know Brian left a message, but I wait until we get back to listen to it, because somehow I don’t want to hear his voice or his words under the bright sun.

Back in the apartment, Hal turns on the TV and I retreat into the office. I sit on the air mattress and curl my tail around my legs and pull up the voicemail on the phone.

“Well, I’m not surprised you’re not talking to me, Tip,” Brian says. “I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard what he said by now. I was just calling to see if you had any comment on it before I write it up for our newsletter. Let me know if you’d like to give the boyfriend’s perspective.” He pauses. “If you still want to, that is.”

I’m not sure what he means, but my fur prickles with foreboding. And then Hal calls from the other room, “Lee? I think you might wanna see this.”

Chapter 16 – In Media (Dev)

Monday goes by in a blur of film study and light practice. Monday night, Charm goes out and I stay in the room and jerk off and then study the playbook and get restless and think about Lee and jerk off again—it’s mechanical and unfulfilling and halfway through I almost stop, but I don’t want to go to bed hard. So I finish, with little more thought than “finally,” and still don’t sleep all that well.

Tuesday is my first Media Day. All the members of the team have to give some time to the media, and someone like me, who’s been in interviews all year, gets a more prime spot (though still not as prime as Strike, or Aston, the actual stars, the ones who move jerseys, as Strike would put it). Because there are fifty-three of us, they have ten at a time, podiums lined up along the field with canvas backdrops, separated just enough that one crowd of reporters doesn’t run into the other. When I walk up to my podium for the allotted half hour at 11:30, I’m still a little bleary. I sit down in front of the Firebirds backdrop and look up and down the length of the field. It’s a sunny day, and I’m second from the end; to my right, our special teams otter is fielding a crowd of ten or so reporters. To my left stretch eight more interviews, the most crowded being Jaws all the way at the far end. I can’t tell how many he has, but my crowd looks at least as big, with probably some fifty muzzles all pointed my way.

It’s okay, I tell myself. Bland answers, that’s all I need to give.

They don’t make it easy. The first question is, “What kind of pressure do you feel, being the first openly gay player to play in a championship game?”

“The same pressure my teammates are feeling,” I say. “We’re all excited to bring a championship home to Chevali.” That’s pretty good and bland. Go me.

I try to pick the reporters, but they all blurt out their questions, and the next one is, “But doesn’t being gay mean anything special to you?”

“That’s part of my private life,” I growl out into the sea of muzzles. “It has nothing to do with what I do on the field.”

“What does your boyfriend think about that?” The high, sneering voice is familiar. I look through the brown and gold and tan and red and there, at the back, I spot a black-and-white muzzle.

“I thought this was only for reporters,” I say.

“I think you know my media credentials,” Brian says.

A hundred gleaming eyes turn on me. I can feel the energy in the crowd pick up.
They know each other! What will Miski do here? This could be a story!
Already some of them are jotting notes or muttering into their phones.

So I take a breath and relax. I picture Lee in the stands at a game, not huddled on the couch as I last saw him. He’s standing and smiling, and his tail wags in the sun. “My boyfriend is proud of me. He believes I’m a pretty good football player, and that’s what I intend to be on Sunday.”

Someone else asks a question about the Crystal City offense, thank God, and I take my time addressing that. Then there are more football questions, and someone asks if I had any pets growing up, and someone else asks what other tigers I’ve modeled myself after (Fisher is the obvious answer, but I’m also careful to say that I admire a lot of players, not just those of my species). And then Brian again, asking, “Why do you think no other gay players have come out?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “You’d have to ask them.”

“Do you think it could be because you haven’t embraced your sexuality?”

“I don’t know,” I repeat. I turn to someone else, but it’s become a theme now and they’re all asking about it.

“Do you think there aren’t any other gay football players?”

“I’m sure there are,” I say. “Now…”

“Why do you think no other players have come out?”

I fidget. “I’ve answered that question already.”

“Sorry,” Brian says, “but you really haven’t. You just said you didn’t know. But you must have a thought.”

“I can’t tell what other gay players might be thinking,” I say.

“Well, then,” a sheep near the front says, “why did you come out?”

“I’ve talked about that a hundred times,” I say, and glare at Brian. “There was a threat—there were allegations, and I wanted to address them.”

“But you could have just denied them.”

I rub my eyes. “I could have, sure, but…” But that would’ve been lying. But I would’ve disappointed Lee. But I would’ve disappointed myself. But none of that seems as important right now as the overwhelming desire to get the fuck out of this Media Day and stop talking about why there aren’t more gay players or why more gay players haven’t come out or any number of other things I have no control over. How much time is left out of my half hour? Eighteen minutes? That can’t be right.

They don’t wait for me to finish my answer. “Is your boyfriend going to be at the game?”

“I don’t know,” I say without thinking, and then regret that. Lying would have been the better option there.

“You don’t know?” “Hasn’t he told you?” “Are you fighting?” “Did you break up?”

The questions come scattershot and I can’t focus on any of them. “No,” I say, and lift a paw, trying to get a moment of peace. I’m feeling stretched thin and I don’t like it. “Can we talk about the game?”

But they keep at it. A few gamely put some football questions up, which I pounce on, but I only get to talk about the Sabretooths’ running game for a few minutes—and believe me, I drag those out—before someone’s asking me about my boyfriend, or what brand of lube we use (really?), other things like that.

The sports reporters drift away about twenty minutes in, even though I was trying to give them good lines about our planning. Left behind are the supermarket rags and Brian, for ten more minutes, and then there’s nothing but questions about my lifestyle. I resort to bland “No comment” and “I don’t know” answers, hoping they’ll get bored, but Brian is always ready with another question, and my nerves are frayed.

And when he says, “How does it feel being the only player to have come out? Do you feel pressured?” for the hundredth time in half an hour, that is just about all I can fucking take.

“I wish I hadn’t,” I snap. “Then I could just talk about football.”

In the silent seconds after that, I’m aware that I’ve done something pretty wrong. But I can’t call attention to it or backtrack; that’d look worse. So I just go on, saying that we’ve got a great team, that they’re all being overshadowed by this lifestyle question, that all I want to do is play football.

Brian calls, “Do you really want to go back into the closet?” I ignore him, and the second my thirty minutes is up, I stand, thank everyone, and walk quickly off the little stage, behind the screen with the Firebirds logos printed on it.

To my surprise, Zillo is standing back there. I’m out of sight of the cameras, so I take a deep breath and close my eyes. “You next?” I ask.

“Nah.” He doesn’t move. “Just want to see how the starters handle it. I’m going in another half hour.”

“So how did the starters handle it?”

I open my eyes and he’s shaking his head, with that kind of wide-eyed look, like he had when I came off the field after getting steamrolled by the wolverine in the Gateway game. “They really push on the gay thing. I mean, why hasn’t someone else come out—well, maybe nobody wants to sit through hours of inane questions about who they fuck in a football press conference, huh?”

“Yeah. Sort of my thinking.” I sigh. “I let them get to me.”

“Hey.” He gives a little smile—as little as a long coyote muzzle can manage. “If I had people badgering me for half an hour about the girls I fucked, or if Gerrard—well, you know—I mean, I bet we’d let loose with a good, hearty ‘Fuck you’ too.”

“It’s not that.” I start to walk back, and Zillo walks alongside, somewhat to my surprise.

“So what is it? I thought you did pretty well.”

“Saying I wish I hadn’t come out. I mean, you get that coming out is a big deal, right?”

His ears twitch. “Sort of?”

I sigh. “Being gay, it’s like—like being a Unicorns fan in Chevali. You know everyone would hate you if you told them who you root for. But it’s not something you can put aside, you can’t just say, ‘well, we’re all fans of the game,’ because people get fanatical about it. And it’s…it’s about living your life, not just who you root for on Sundays. Right?” He nods. “So lots of people just hide those relationships. And that’s like saying that all those other guys are right, that we deserve to be marginalized,” there’s a word I definitely picked up from Lee, “and hidden in shadows and ‘straightened out’ and shit like that. And beaten up, sometimes.”

His ears go flat at that, and the smile disappears. “And have people call you shitty names.”

“Yeah. But coming out, it’s a big deal, it’s standing up and saying ‘Fuck you, bigots, I am not ashamed.’ So you know, me saying I wish I hadn’t…”

“But you didn’t mean it.” I give him a weary look, and he laughs. “Right, right, it’s the fucking media. Can’t you just go out and apologize for it?”

“I’ll call my agent and have him send out a statement, yeah.” I cringe at the thought of Ogleby handling the press, and I wish I could just call Lee and have him issue a statement. He’d write it so much more elegantly. Also he would give me a whole pile of shit for saying something like that in the first place. And I’d feel better about it, afterwards, because I’d know that he still loved me in spite of all of that. Now I don’t have that to fall back on, and it’s bugging the hell out of me that I lost control like I did. What if Lee sees it? Is he going to think it’s his fault, that I wish I hadn’t come out because of our fight?

Well, maybe it’d serve him right, walking the fuck out on me like he did. I take out my phone to text him and then I think, I’d better handle this first. So I call Ogleby and tell him I’m handling the situation (“What situation, Dev?” he says, and I hang up). I call two sports reporters I trust, who aren’t answering their phones because they’re probably outside listening to Aston or whoever’s out there now. So I leave messages telling them to call me back, saying I want to apologize for my remarks, that I just got frustrated because football is so heavily on my mind and that one so-called “reporter” wouldn’t leave me alone.

One of them calls back right away and we have a pretty good conversation about football and about the idiots they’ll let into Media Day nowadays. I don’t mention that I know Brian from way back.

The other reporter calls me back when the day is over, and though he’s brisk, he sympathizes with my situation as well. Both these guys are veterans of the reporting business and have talked to me in the past about being “the gay guy.” So I feel comfortable sitting down in the locker room talking to him about how the press conference went. He has a column that’s updating all week, and he promises to give me some space in it on Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest.

Nobody else in the locker room really gets how important this was. Everyone talks about the stupid questions they got asked, and I don’t want to talk about any of it, so I go off and sit in the film room and stare at the same loop of the Sabretooths’ running offense for hours, at the running backs hitting the gaps and the slot receivers running formations. I try to impress the patterns on my mind.

When I come out and go back to the locker room, Fisher comes up and tells me I’m an idiot, and I say, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

We’re standing eye to eye near my locker. Charm and Zillo are talking next to us, but stop at my remark. “Did you even listen to me? Don’t ever try to control a press conference,” Fisher says. “Just makes ’em madder.”

“Right,” I say. “Next time I’m losing my temper, I’ll remember that.”

“You can’t lose your temper with the press,
rook
.” He tries to poke my shoulder, and I dodge it.

“Obviously, I can. And keep your paws off me.”

I remember the fight we had a few months ago, but that was when we were alone in the weight room and it was about me bringing Lee to an event. If I hadn’t wanted to do that…if I had just kept myself in the closet…but I didn’t, I fought for him, and for me. But Fisher won’t do anything like that here in the locker room, I think.

Wrong, it turns out. He shoves me harder in the chest, knocking me back into the massive bulk of Charm, who acts quickly, pulling me to the side. “Hey, hey,” he says. “We’re all on the same team. Come on, Gramps, Fish, let’s not play like that ’til we’re out with the Sabretooths.”

“We?” Fisher snorts up at him. “We? Only opponent you ever faced was a leather ball.” He puts a paw to his forehead and closes his eyes for a moment.

Strike hurries over, too, just as Charm is saying, “Yeah, but some of those balls are tough customers.” The cheetah assesses the situation and puts his paws up between me and Fisher, even though we’re already clearly settled down.

“You boys need to take some rest,” he says. “Worst thing can happen in a championship game is the stress gets to you. It’s just another football game and we’re all on the same side, remember.”

“I’m fine,” I snap.

“Listen, maybe what you need is—”

“So help me God,” I say, “if you tell me a vegetable smoothie I will personally force a cheeseburger down your throat.”

Strike looks as offended as someone can be with bright gold fur and red firebird markings on his muzzle. He looks like a fucking clown. “I was going to say, you need to get away from this for a bit. Listen, I’m going out with Iva tonight. You want me to get hold of Keith? I’m sure I can track him down. You guys can come along.”

“Wait,” I say. “Wait a fucking minute. You’re going out with Iva?”

Charm nudges me. “Might do you good to get out,” he says, which I think is as close as he’s going to come to telling me to cheat on Lee even though maybe we’re already broken up. He’s got to have seen that interview and quote by now—Lee, I mean, not Charm. He didn’t text me to give me shit for it, which was the right thing to do but I’m mad at him for it, because I’m turning it into thinking he’s given up on me. If he’d texted me to tell me I’m an asshole, at least I’d know he still cared. Shit, now I’m hearing his lectures in my head, and that is not what I need, not this week. I’m glad he didn’t text me. But why didn’t he? Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.