by Kyell Gold
It was true; I hadn’t seen him ‘til we were running in at halftime. “It was our first game. I was excited.”
“You certainly weren’t concentrating on defense.”
That one stings. “I had a good game.”
“You know,” he says, one blue eye piercing me, “I’ve seen these muscles up close and personal. I know what you can do and when you’re just going through the motions.”
“Going through the motions?”
“Mm-hmm.” His tail sways slowly from side to side. “First play of the second quarter. You let that puma get past you. You could’ve stopped him easy. You were lucky he dropped the ball.”
I open my muzzle to say something, but then I remember the play, and I close it again. He goes on. “You’re not in any danger of losing your job. Your partner, though, what’s his name, Mike? If he doesn’t shape up, that coyote will be starting before October.”
Coach had yelled that at Mike, the other defensive back, but he’d yelled it in the locker room and I haven’t mentioned it. I trace the curve of his spine with a claw, and he shivers. “What else?”
He yawns. “You’re sloppy lining up. Looks like you’re joking with that wolf and you just kind of get close to your spot.”
“So?” I’m starting to freak out a little bit. It’s like I was just fucking my coach.
“So they put you in a spot for a reason. You line up a foot to one side, it throws off your moves.”
“What about the rest of the team?” I’ve got a paw on his butt and I move it back up to his back, not wanting to remember the sex while we’re talking about football.
He blinks, slowly. “I was only watching you. I didn’t know I was supposed to report on the whole team.”
“You know a lot about football.”
Now there’s a definite smile to his muzzle. “I’ve watched guys prance around in tight pants since I was eleven. It’s pretty, but it gets boring if you don’t think about it some.”
“Don’t you like me better out of the tight pants?” He just grins at me. I relax a little. “What does it matter, anyway? Why not just have fun? Weren’t you the one who said we’re all Division II jocks with no sniff of playing professionally?”
His blue eyes meet mine and his ears flick back, then forward. “Well,” he says softly, “I guess I’m not always right.”
“That’s a relief,” I say, and he snaps back with something about a higher batting average and I ask him what sport he thinks I play, anyway.
And I begin to glimpse my secret, dimly.
October 2006
The phone rings. We got caller ID last month, so I say, “Hi, Mom,” as I pick it up.
“Hi, sweetie,” Mom says. “How are you? Are you nervous?”
“No. It’s just another game.”
“Because we all think it’s just wonderful what you’re doing, but if you don’t play well today, it’s okay.”
I wish our new phone had a cord I could wrap around my paw as I start to pace around the room. “What do you mean, if I don’t play well?”
“Oh, I’m sure you will, sweetie,” she says unconvincingly. “I just don’t want you to feel bad if you don’t.”
“How’s Gregory?” I ask, because I’d rather hear her babble for five minutes about my brother in law school than listen to any more of the excruciating conversation about how I’m going to fail eventually. I get my wish. Then I get to talk to my dad.
“Nice play last couple games,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“Been working out more?”
I’m certainly not telling my parents my secret. I give them the line I give the paper. “Things just started to click.”
“Hm.” There’s a moment’s pause, and then he says, “If you’d played like that in high school, you’d be at North State now.”
“Come on, Dad,” I say, trying to make a joke out of it. “My grades weren’t bad enough for North State.”
He just grunts and says, “Coulda played wherever you want.”
I’m tired of this conversation, too. “How’s the garage?”
I get a couple clipped comments, another few lines with Mom, and then I tell them I need to run off to morning practice. Which I do, but not for another half hour. I sink back into bed and sigh. Aren’t parents supposed to make you feel good?
The phone rings again.
It’s my turn to soap now. When I’m done rubbing the shampoo into Lee’s backfur, I lift up his tail. I like the way he shivers when I rub under there, just a tiny twitch. Probably he thinks I don’t notice, or maybe he wants me to think that he thinks I don’t notice. Anyway, it’s cute, so I do it a lot. Three times during this shower alone.
“We’re working really hard on this play,” he says unexpectedly.
“Which one?”
“Square Room,” he says. “It’s a dram-mmmmmmmmma.” I chose that moment to soap up under his tail, and I leave my paw there as he leans back into it. If we hadn’t just spent ourselves half an hour ago, I’d leave it there longer. As it is, I feel a little stirring, and when I reach around to soap between his legs, he’s not fully relaxed either. But it’s been a long day, and we’re both tired.
“It’s about a family of foxes. The father uncovers something in the mother’s past and they have to work through it.” He talks as we rinse off. “It’s a pretty talky piece. Probably not really your speed.”
“Probably not,” I say agreeably, helping brush the soap from his fur. I feel way too mellow to rise to his bait.
He switches gears as we rub down with towels. “Is Tuesday the day you don’t have practice?”
“Yeah.”
He grins up at me. “Where do you eat lunch?”
“Why?” I know why, I’m just stalling.
He knows that, and snorts. “So I can tell the West Hillman coach where to poison your food before next week’s game. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I say slowly.
“It’s not a math problem,” he says.
“I know. Then I could just look up the answer.”
He huffs. “Think about it. I’m going to bed.”
I join him in bed, knowing that whatever he wants, I’ll end up giving him.
He sits down across from me in the Maple Hall cafeteria, 12:02 pm on Tuesday. If it weren’t for the blue eyes and the confidence with which he sits down, I might not recognize him: he’s wearing, not a blouse, but a collared shirt that lets only a small puff of his white chest fur show, and his butt, instead of being a suggestive curve under a skirt, is tightly defined by his jeans, leaving very little to my already-exploding imagination.
I’ve never looked at a guy that way in public before. I wonder if people can tell.
“Nice day,” he says, glancing outside where the leaves are just starting to turn, spots of yellow in the green, and the blue sky behind them.
“Yeah,” I say, taking another bite of turkey tetrazini.
“Oh, stop worrying.” He pitches his voice low. “Nobody cares that we’re eating together.”
“What if someone saw me going to your place,” I say, very low, “and then sees me here. And puts it together?”
He wrinkles his nose at the first bite he lifts to his muzzle, pops it in with a faintly disgusted look. “I think you give the students here far too much credit,” he says while chewing. “The brainiacs in my building still think I’m rooming with my sister.”
“Really?”
He nods. “One of them said to me the other day, ‘hey, you know your sister has a big boyfriend who comes over when you’re out.’”
I feel cold worry clamp my stomach. “They saw me?”
“You’re not exactly invisible. Anyway, I told him, ‘she’s my sister, not my girlfriend. She’s a big girl.’ And that was the end of that.” He shrugs and takes another bite. “So chill.”
“Easy for you to say, doc,” I grumble. “You’re not risking anything.”
“I’m risking having a st
udly boyfriend on the football team.” He tosses off a smile which I don’t register immediately because I can’t fucking believe he just said that out loud, even if he did whisper it.
“Shhh!” I hiss, panicked.
The smile shifts to one of his cocky grins. “Chill,” he says. “Nobody’s close enough to hear. I know. I have excellent hearing myself.”
“Well, listen to this,” I snarl, aware that fear is giving my voice an edge I don’t necessarily want it to have. “This was a stupid idea and I don’t want to do it again.”
I watch his ears fold back, but he only gives me that shrug and says, “Fine.”
We eat in silence for a bit, and then are interrupted by two young coyote girls who want to know if I’m really on the football team and if I’m really Devlin Miski, who returned an interception for the winning score against St. Francis two weeks ago. Lee mutters something about my four interceptions last week, but they don’t appear to be able to see or hear him, so I nod and smile, and thank them for watching. They ask if I can introduce them to Eck, and I tell them to come on down to the Fang on Friday night if they want to meet him.
“See?” he says as they walk away. “I’m invisible.”
I can’t tell whether he’s pleased about that or not. When he wants to be neutral, he’s very hard to read. “To them,” I say, but for whatever reason, the fear and panic has subsided. “But they’re just girls, after all.”
I know he has a little misanthropic streak, and sure enough, he grins in response. “Looking for a daddy. They saw what they wanted and put the blinders on.”
I hate to say it, but the rest of the lunch is really pretty pleasant. We talk about our classes and stuff we never talk about in bed, and by the time he gets up to run to his World Civilizations seminar, I don’t even blink when he says, “Next week?” I just nod.
I watch him leave, and as I’m putting my tray on the conveyor belt and thinking about our lunch, I remember the smile he gave me, the one when he called me his boyfriend. I would’ve thought he would be wearing his possessive smile, or his I’m-saying-something-to-shock-you smile, or his cocky, cleverer-than-you smile, but it was none of those. It was, as far as I could tell, a genuine, full-on, I’m-happy smile, and as I stroll out into the crisp fall air, I wonder if my little fox has some secrets of his own.
I want to go to the play by myself, but Randy is all curious about why I want to see something called “The Square Room,” and I can’t stop him from coming along. He looks dubious when we get there and see the hand-painted signs and the hand-painted bunny handing out flyers. She, on the other paw, doesn’t blink an eye, just smiles with both teeth and hands us the playbill, a folded-over photocopy.
Randy looks even more dubious when mine doesn’t follow his into the trash can just inside the doors. I don’t notice his look until I’ve found the name “Wiley Farrel” on the cast list. Then I see him looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I shove the paper casually into my pocket.
My fox is not the lead in the play, but he’s the main supporting character, and he’s good. I wish I knew more about theater so I could tell him that, the way he knows about football. All I know is if I hadn’t read his name in the program, I wouldn’t know it was him. Even in the dress.
Randy sits quietly through the first act, in which the main characters fight and the wife retreats to her bedroom. My fox plays the teenaged daughter, and I think I understand why he is playing a girl: the parents are both foxes. There must be a shortage of vixens in the troupe, and the wife is the larger part. She’s not bad, but my fox is great.
In the second act, Randy gets restless and starts fidgeting, then whispering things to me like, “Why did she only brush part of her tail?” and “Is that supposed to be a lemon pie?” and “Why does he put up with her? If it was me, I’d break the door down!” I try to ignore him, but I find myself agreeing with him. When my fox isn’t on stage, my attention wanders, and I can’t honestly say I understand the bleak ending. But we clap along with the rest of the crowd when it’s over and ignore the whispers of the people around us who were offended by our talking during the movie. Hey, if the play were better, they’d be able to tune us out.
We go down to Smokey’s afterwards, a bar for drinking, not a meat market. Randy slurps his Coors and I get a Miller, and he grins at me. “So that’s it, huh?”
“What?” It looks like he thinks he’s figured out something.
“That vixen, huh? You’re seeing her on the side, right? That’s who the phone calls are from?”
I get a cold shiver. It takes me a couple seconds to remember that there were two vixens in the play, because I can only think of my faux-vixen. “Which one?” I ask cagily.
“Hey,” he says, “It’s okay with me if you wanna get serious outside your species. No worries about cubs or anything, right?” Good old Randy, always getting right to the heart of the matter.
The good thing is, he just wanted to know. And now that he does, or thinks he does, he’s happy. He knows something the rest of the team doesn’t. I figure I’ll take him to a couple more plays, keep him happy, hope he doesn’t ask too many questions. Let him think he knows my secret. He’s closest of anyone, and still not close enough that I’m worried.
Until two weeks later, when I return to the room to find him sitting on his bed, talking to my fox in blouse and skirt.
I stop dead in the doorway, muzzle hanging partway open. Randy’s tail is wagging, making thumping sounds against the bed. “Hey,” he says, grinning so wide I expect to see canary feathers sticking out of his muzzle. “I ran into Lee outside the theater and invited her back to the room. You should bring her round more often.”
“Yes, dear,” he says, and I can see from the glint in his blue eyes that he’s enjoying this. “You have such a charming roommate.”
I look around. “I’m sorry,” I say, stalling while I think of how to get him out of here without Randy getting suspicious. “Did you mean the wolf there who once tried to fart Beethoven’s Fifth?”
“Oh!” Lee feigns interest. At least, I hope he’s feigning. “He has a taste for the classics.”
“The taste of Old Hilltown.” I cross to my bed and sit down.
Randy hadn’t been quite sure how to take my remark, but he’d grinned throughout. The mention of beer restored his confidence. Now he gestures to the little fridge we have. “I’ve got a couple left, if you want…”
“That’s okay,” Lee says. “I’m sure it’s better in my imagination.” He turns to me and gives me a smile. “No kiss?”
Oh, god. He wants to kiss in front of Randy. I look back at him and watch his smile curve up a little bit more. It seems impossible that Randy won’t notice the things I can’t help seeing: the slightly broader, male muzzle; the way the hips don’t quite flare enough; the roughness around the base of the claws. But I can’t think of a good excuse not to go over, and Randy’s still grinning that I-found-you-out grin, and so I walk over and lean down, intending to give him a soft peck on the muzzle.
I get a muzzle full of fox tongue and an instant hard-on. We don’t hold the kiss as long as we normally do, but it’s plenty. I pull back and sit down hard on my bed, only dimly hearing Randy’s “Wooooo!”
Lee’s licking his lips and smiling. I can’t believe there’s no bulge under his skirt like there is in my jeans. Randy rubs his paws together. “I see what you see in her, Dev. Woof! I wish I could find a nice bitch to kiss me like that.”
“Oh, I bet there’s more than just bitches would kiss you like that,” the fox says nonchalantly. My claws sink into the bed. Why is he doing this?
“Sure,” Randy says, so calmly I can’t believe it. “But I don’t really like goin’ outside my species. Just me personally,” he says hurriedly. “Dev here, he likes sleepin’ around. That’s cool with me.”
“Oh, does he?” Lee says, and turns to me.
I still can’t believe Randy didn’t pick up on what he meant by the last comment. Fortunat
ely, Randy is more worried about what he’s said.
“Oh, I mean, he used to. But not this year. He doesn’t come to Fang no more. That’s why I thought he was seeing someone seriously. I dunno why he didn’t introduce us before.”
“Yes, Dev, why on Earth didn’t you?” The fox smiles.
“Because I wanted to keep you all to myself,” I say through gritted teeth.
Randy slaps his knee and grins. “He’s always like that,” he says. “Won’t let me copy off him in History class either.”
The fox’s ears flick, and I see the beginnings of trouble in his eyes. “I didn’t think you had trouble passing classes anyway,” he says. “Doesn’t your coach take care of that?”
“Sure,” Randy says, to demonstrate his one big talent besides football: saying exactly the wrong thing. Then he actually follows that up with something half-reasonable: “But we’re all jealous of guys like Dev who don’t need any help.”
“Hey,” I say, heading off the next biting comment from the fox, “how about we go grab something to drink? Or eat?” We decide on the local pizza place, which in retrospect turns out to be probably the worst idea I’ve had in a long time.
Lee just gets a soda. Diet, of course. Randy and I get our favorite: two slices with everything. We’re chowing down, and the conversation is at least not as pointed as it had been getting in the room, when another plate flops onto the table next to me and three hundred pounds of bear slams down into the plastic chairs, which are much sturdier than they look. “Hey, Dev, hey, Randy.”
“Hey, Jack.” Jack is the anchor of our defensive line. And if he’s here, then the other three are not far behind. I watch Lee’s eyes as the other bear, the elephant, and the stallion pull chairs up to our table. They all want to meet Lee, and I introduce her as my World Cultures tutor, with a warning glance at Randy. He gives me a broad wink that only a mole—or four football players gorging on pizza—could miss.
