Gold Standard

by Kyell Gold

  His body shuddered and tensed, and his paw slowed just a bit, prolonging it. Not too long, he told himself, but he couldn’t help holding back, while his body cried out for release. Just one more stroke along his tingling shaft, and another, and another...

  He gasped, getting water in his mouth. His body insisted, and finally he could deny it no longer. Stroke, and stroke, and stroke, stroke, strokestrokestrokestroke and...

  “Mmmf!” He kept his muzzle clenched, feeling the warmth of his seed briefly on his paw before the water washed it away. His body convulsed again and again, emptying his longing and pain in thick white spurts onto his paw, and the water carried it away down the drain.

  Then it was time for a long, thorough scrub, long enough that his erection had time to subside. Long enough for him to reflect on how pathetic he was, jerking off at the local gym because he didn’t want his boyfriend to smell his come in their shower at home. Too shy, too afraid to break out of his rut. He made sure all the thick white mass was cleaned off the tile floor, rubbing around with a bit of shampoo to be sure, and then rinsed himself off. He turned the faucet to shut off the water and composed himself, shedding all the self-loathing despair, leaving only the nagging little knowledge that he would be right back here in twenty-four hours.

  Five minutes in the full-body dryer left his beige fur fluffy. He turned around to give his tail a few extra minutes, while he brushed the rest of his body fur out, thinking of nothing in particular. And he dressed for work, as he did every day, and walked out of the locker room.

  Only today, as he was walking out, he noticed an older coyote glaring at him. And Marty, in his “Steel Body Staff” tank top, started walking purposefully toward Tobias as the lemur crossed the main floor of the gym.

  Tobias felt his stomach sink. Keep calm, it’s probably not what you think. He just wants to ask you about doing more sessions. But although Marty did occasionally approach him to ask about that, the fox’s dark muzzle was serious now, his eyes not sparkling.

  “Hey, Tobias,” Marty said. Before Tobias could respond, he said, “Mind stepping over into the office for a second?”

  Marty always called him “Tobe.” Tobias fought the pressure in his throat and nodded, following the fox across the floor. He looked morosely at the big glass windows. Maybe a car would careen out of control into one of them. Or maybe a political riot would break out, though admittedly even in his home country that only happened every twenty years or so, and here in Riviera they were going on fifty years since the last one.

  The gym remained intact as Marty gestured him to one of the stiff office-supply chairs and seated himself on the other side of the desk. The fox’s ears were back, and he didn’t look at Tobias as he took a breath. “So, look, do you know what this is about?”

  Tobias shook his head without even thinking about it. That was another strange thing about this country: if Marty’d just clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, quit jerking off in the shower, okay?” it would have been a lot easier. But the fox’s sympathetic shame on Tobias’s part just made Tobias feel it more acutely.

  Marty took another breath. His paw rested on a binder on the desk, and his eyes kept flicking to the computer screen. The spine on the binder was angled so Tobias could just barely read the title: “Steel Body Fitness Member Conduct Rules.” He spent a moment thinking about why a public gym needed an inch-thick stack of paper telling people how to behave in public before realizing with a guilty start that it was because of people like him.

  “There’s some stuff that you can’t do in the showers,” the fox said, without looking at him. “Listen, I get the whole gym thing, y’know. But please just wait ‘til you get home.” And that wasn’t so bad, not by itself, until he went on. “A couple of the other members have complained.”

  Tobias opened his mouth to reply, but his mind jumped ahead to the fact that not only Marty, but other people—the older coyote who’d given him the stink-eye on his way out today, probably—knew about his jerking off. And that meant that they probably knew how unfulfilling his relationship was and therefore how much of a failure he himself was. None of this registered consciously, but overwhelmed him in a hot rush. “S-sorry,” he choked out, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing a paw to his face.

  “Hey...hey.” Marty’s voice had lost the clinical detachment and regained its warmth. He was kneeling beside Tobias’s chair a moment later, the warmth of his body and his smell at once reassuring and a reminder of humiliation.

  “I’m okay,” Tobias said in a small voice.

  Marty rested a paw on his knee. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Look, we catch guys every other week. I just have to give you a warning not to do it again. It’s no big deal,” he repeated.

  “I know,” Tobias said, struggling to get himself under control. “Sorry. I w-won’t do it again.”

  Marty lifted his paw. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “No! I’m fine.” Tobias rubbed the fur around his eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

  Any more sympathy from Marty might be too much. Fortunately, the fox stood up and leaned against the desk. When Tobias raised his head, he was looking into a calm smile. The sparkle had returned, at least a little, to the fox’s dark eyes. “Hey, do you work nearby? You said something about Crick Co.?”

  Tobias nodded. “Down on High, just off 890.”

  Marty walked back around the desk. “That Victorino’s Pizza is around there, isn’t it? I like their thin-crust. I might head over there for lunch once I get out of here. Around one.”

  “I won’t do it again, Marty,” Tobias said. “I promise.” He stood with one more long sniff and waited to see if the fox would say anything else, but Marty just waved. Tobias hurried out of the office.

  All the way to work, he regretted moving to Riviera. Back home, things were simpler. People just talked, and the things you didn’t talk about, you didn’t talk about. You didn’t allude to them with your ears down as if they were a piece of garbage. And back home, he had family and friends—well, not so many since he’d moved to the New World.

  At least here, if he didn’t have friends other than Dylan, he had a comfortable routine. When the questions got to be too loud, he could just lower his head and lose himself in his life. Such as it was. He nodded to his co-workers and settled himself into his cubicle, but when he called up the article he was supposed to review, he just stared without seeing the words. The morning’s humiliation, on top of what he’d come to view as the wreck of his life, gnawed at him. How would the raccoon in the next cube react if Tobias asked him for relationship advice over morning coffee? For that matter, what kind of relationship was the raccoon even in? Tobias didn’t know whether he was married or dating, gay or straight.

  The bat-eared fox who worked on the other side of him, she was married. He heard her talking to her husband on the phone, and she had to leave to pick up kids about once a week. But he couldn’t talk to her. He shook his head and tried to read through the article again, but he kept having to remind himself that he couldn’t talk to anyone, didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  He’d only gotten through half the article when he realized he was starving. Guiltily, he looked up and saw that it was one o’clock already. He’d have to do better this afternoon, but he needed food now.

  So he wandered down to the street, and stopped outside Victorino’s Pizza. He needed someone to talk to more than he needed food, but could he bring himself to talk to Marty? He stared in the door at the slices of pizza, and then at the sandwich shop next door. It’d be easy to go have a sandwich, keep an eye on the street, and if Marty showed up, he could make a decision then. It’d be easier to keep his head down.

  Or he could just make the decision now. He was tired of not talking. He’d been not talking for months, years. And he didn’t have to talk to Marty, not if he didn’t feel like it. But as he inhaled the aroma of cooking dough and tomato sauce, letting the door swing shut behind him, he rather thought he would.
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  “So how long have you been in Riviera?”

  Marty’d strolled in at quarter past and sat down at Tobias’s table just as naturally as if he’d made an appointment, two slices of Hawaiian pizza on his plate. And his first question hadn’t been what Tobias was expecting.

  The lemur found it easier to answer because it was so impersonal, unrelated to everything else that had happened. “Eight years last March.”

  Marty nodded, munching his pizza. “Did you move here for someone?”

  “No.” He said it automatically and then felt ashamed. He took the scrap of crust he had left and chewed on it.

  “I did.” Tobias looked up at the cross fox’s wry smile. Marty nodded once. “Grew up in the south on a farm. Went to the big city every month. Clubbing, drinking, having fun. Met a lion there.” He leaned back and took a breath, gesturing with the paw that held the slice of pizza. “He was exotic, he was beautiful, and he was into me. Told me if I came to Riviera with him, he’d take care of me.”

  He took another bite. Tobias leaned forward. “I guess he didn’t?”

  Marty chewed, taking his time. “He did, for a while,” he said, once he’d swallowed. “Then I got boring.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tobias said.

  Marty waved him off. “It was a few years ago. I decided to stick around, joined the gym, started training there last year. You were one of my first trainees, did you know that?”

  Tobias grinned, spontaneously. The fox was wearing a tight t-shirt that mashed down his fur in muscular contours. It was hard to imagine that he hadn’t been always a trainer at the gym. “You never told me.”

  “You remember what you said when I asked you why you joined the gym?”

  Tobias nodded. “I just wanted to get in shape.” But the question recalled to him that Dylan had joined with him, making his smile falter.

  Marty pointed a finger at him. “Exactly. Done a good job of that, too. You want to hear a secret, though?” He took another bite of pizza and chewed as Tobias nodded. “That’s not the real answer. Everyone comes to the gym to get in shape. What we don’t ask people is why they want to get in shape.”

  “Oh.” Tobias’s ears drooped. He waited for the question to come, but Marty just finished off the first slice of pizza. He didn’t say anything else until he’d taken a drink, and then he smiled.

  “So what do you do at Crick?”

  “Quality assurance,” Tobias said. “I review the scientific reports before they go out.”

  “Wow, you’re a scientist?”

  “Not really.” Tobias smiled, Dylan receding from his mind. “I had some science training but I never finished my degree. I mostly proof them to make sure all the tables match the numbers and the names are all spelled right, stuff like that.”

  “What happens if you mess up?”

  “Nothing, really. Nobody reads them. We just release them to make sure people remember our name. Kinda pathetic.” The fox’s dark muzzle was welcoming, smiling. Tobias ventured a question. “Do you do the training full-time?”

  Marty shook his head. “Part time, and I do odd jobs for a carpenter when he needs me. But it pays the rent.”

  By the time Tobias had to go back to work, to his astonishment, the subject of him being caught at the gym hadn’t even come up. But as they got up, Marty eyed the menu. “There’s a lot of good-looking pizzas here,” he said. “Might come back here for lunch. I train Monday-Wednesday-Friday.”

  Tobias smiled and clasped the fox’s offered paw. “Maybe I’ll see you,” he said.

  He found himself smiling as he walked back up to work.

  When he got home, Dylan was at the game console playing Streets of War 3. “Hey,” he said as Tobias closed the door. “How was your day?”

  Tobias said, “Pretty good” before remembering that he’d been warned at the gym for masturbating in the shower.

  “Cool. Want to grab some Chinese when I finish this level?”

  “Sure,” he said, heading into the bedroom to drop his stuff off. He looked down at the bed and then out at Dylan, and walked slowly back out. “Dylan?”

  “Just a sec.” The panther kept shooting down terrorists, peeking out of windows and hiding behind barricades.

  “What’s going on?” Tobias’s good mood was gone. He could barely remember what it had been like talking to Marty, making a friend.

  “Uh...I’m trying to clear Manchester of terrorists.”

  “No, I mean...” He glanced back at the bed again. “Is everything okay?”

  Dylan killed two terrorist weasels and paused the game. “Fine,” he said, but after eight years Tobias knew the guarded look, the half-back ears, and the twitch in the panther’s tail that he could never quite disguise, that meant he was tense about something. And he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Because it doesn’t feel fine to me, Tobias wanted to say, but Dylan’s expression discouraged him. “All right,” he said. “I’ll call ahead for the Chinese.”

  The Chinese food was good, but once it was gone, Dylan went back to his computer. Tobias took over the video game console, and then went to bed, pressing his face into the pillow and wondering if anything would ever change.

  In the morning, he almost did opt to sit for two hours in a coffee shop. But then he thought, if I stop going to the gym now, I’ll never go back. That prospect filled him with a strange hollowness. So he walked in again, ran on the treadmill, and when he was done, stepped into the shower and did nothing but wash.

  Walking out, to the older coyote’s narrowed eyes, Tobias gave an innocent smile, bouncing his ringed tail behind him. The smile persisted most of the way to work, and when he went to lunch, even though he didn’t go to Victorino’s, he got a warm feeling when he walked by it.

  And on Friday, when he did go to Victorino’s, Marty was already there, relaxing in a corner booth. Tobias picked up two slices of plain cheese and went to sit with him.

  “How’s work?” Marty started, and they talked about people at the gym and scientific reports, until it was time for Tobias to go. Marty clasped his paw when they stood and said, “Have a nice weekend.”

  And the first thing he asked on Monday was, “How was the weekend?”

  “We went to dinner and saw a movie. I played some video games,” Tobias said. “How about you?”

  “Did some carpentry work. Helped build a table. Went out to a club, got laid.”

  He said it casually, the slice of alfredo pizza halfway to his muzzle, but his eyes watched Tobias keenly. Tobias forced himself to be casual as well, chewing the rest of his pepperoni and swallowing before saying, “Oh yeah?”

  Marty dipped his muzzle in a nod, ears flicking. “You ever go to clubs?”

  “Not really my scene.” Tobias shook his head, staring down at his pizza.

  “Well, I admit the guy wasn’t all that hot stuff, but it’s a good way to blow a load once in a while.” When Tobias looked up, Marty’d put the pizza down. “I mean, works for me.”

  “I dunno. My boyfriend’s not really into that.”

  “What do you guys do together?”

  “Oh, we play video games sometimes. We used to, anyway. Now we mostly watch movies and TV. Sometimes at the same time.”

  “What video games?”

  And they talked about video games, and left the subject of Dylan for that day.

  It was sausage and mushroom pizza on Wednesday, and only a couple bites into his slice, Tobias took a breath and looked across the plastic table at the fox. “It’s been a while since things were really good with me and Dylan,” he said, and then stopped.

  Marty just nodded his long muzzle, ears perking slightly. “What changed?”

  Tobias put the pizza down. “I don’t know,” he said. “It must be something I did, but...”

  When he didn’t go on, Marty raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t talked about it?”

  “I try.” Tobias rested a paw on the table and looked at his fingers tapping the plastic. “But
he just...doesn’t talk.”

  “At all?”

  Tobias sighed. “When my father threw me out, y’know, he said, ‘If you won’t carry on the family, you are no longer part of it.’ And that was it. There was nothing to talk about.”

  “Tobe, that’s not really a model you want your boyfriends to follow. Don’t go Oedipal.”

  “Edible?”

  Marty grinned. “Don’t look for your father in your boyfriend.”

  Tobias sighed. “We like the same games, movies...relationships are so hard.”

  Marty shoved the remaining slice of pizza into his muzzle. “Mmm. ‘S’why I don’t bother with ‘em. You got friends to do all that stuff with, and you can always find people to do the...”

  Tobias looked curiously at Marty, who paused and then went on. “The everything else.” He waved a paw. “I get on by myself pretty good. Not saying that’s what you should do, just saying that works for me. So how about you come out to a club Friday night?”

  “I, uh, what?” Tobias flicked his ears up, wondering if he’d missed a linking sentence somewhere.

  “You know, dancing, drinking, bright lights, lots of hot guys?”

  “Oh, it’s not really my thing.” Tobias nibbled on his crust.

  “Ah, you’ve tried it already.”

  He put the crust down and took a drink. Marty waited. “Well. No.”

  “Look, I’m not saying you have to hook up or anything. It’s a great way to burn calories. More fun than the treadmill.”

  “I’d have to ask.”

  Marty brushed crumbs from his whiskers, his smile broader. “So ask.”

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy. Thursday night, Tobias realized he wasn’t going to have much more chance to ask Dylan if he wanted to go Friday, so as he was getting ready for bed, he rehearsed what he was going to say in his mind. For all that helped; it still came out awkward as he said it.