by Kyell Gold
“Business,” Hal reminds him. “Do you get all weepy when you cut up a credit card, too?”
Dev’s eyes go wide. “I don’t know. I never have.”
“Okay, well.” The swift fox takes out a credit card and taps it on the table. “When I cut up the first credit card I ever got, I got kind of emotional about it. It was dumb. The company didn’t give a shit. But I made it emotional. It’s what we do: we like to put emotion and feeling into our lives. You have to recognize when it doesn’t help you.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah.” Dev points at both of us. “When you have to fire someone you’ve done business with for years, who gave you your first break…”
“Don’t have to,” I say. “They fired me.”
“Ditto.”
We both look smugly back at him and he growls. “Foxes.”
“People,” Hal says. “Also, your Dragons basically fired you, too, only they set you up with another job when they did it. So it all works out. Your ferret’ll find another client, and you’ve got a new agent, and the world keeps turning. Nothing’s irreplaceable.”
It’s a good lesson to learn, although as we drive back from lunch I wonder how much it applies to our relationship. Could Dev replace me? Well, that’s a stupid question; of course he could. There’s no shortage of gay guys out there who’d at least be interested in a relationship with him. I’m not that vain, that I think I’m the only guy, or even the only fox, who’d be able to live with him. Would someone else be better for him? Maybe. Probably in the world there’s at least one guy who’d challenge him without sparking fights so furious that they endanger his focus.
At least, I think, I’m not the Ogleby of relationships. Sure, my list of missteps is nothing to be proud of, and I recite them to myself whenever I need to feel humble or ashamed of myself. And then there are the things that aren’t isolated incidents, like the way I can’t seem to keep my muzzle shut around him. I’ve always been able to fool people and lie to them or tell them only the right parts of the truth, but I can’t do that with Dev. Things would be a lot easier if I could, that’s for sure. But I always want to tell him everything on my mind, and while sometimes it’s to produce a desired effect, most of the time it’s just to share myself with him.
That’s why I found it so difficult during the playoffs not to talk to him all the time about Equality Now and Vince King. Not because I wanted him to do anything about it, but because I wanted him to know what was on my mind. I’m not sure he understood that, or understands it now, so I file it away for something to discuss during our month of relationship examination. It gives me hope; maybe if we just sit down and affirm where we are with each other, we can keep going.
Back at his place, I throw my stuff into a bag and he walks me down to my car. “You’re packing a bag?”
“Yeah. I called Gena. She’s setting up a spare room for me just in case she feels like she needs help tomorrow too, and she talked to Fisher.”
“He’s okay with it?”
I make a noncommittal head movement. “She said she told him. I don’t know what he thinks about it.”
“Well, take care of yourself, fox.” He wraps arms around me, right there on the street.
I hug him back. “I’ll either come see you for dinner or invite you over, if Fisher wants to talk to you a little more. And if you want to go out tonight, I can stay there. If not, I can come back.” I poke him. “Don’t call Gregory.”
“I was trying not to think about that.”
“I know.” I nuzzle him. “But sitting alone in the apartment, you were going to, and then you might call him. So call me instead and talk about it.”
“Or,” he says, “I can start our month of thinking about our relationship.”
“Even better.” I grin and try to pull back, but he doesn’t let go.
“Hey, so…where should I start with that?”
His ears are askew, so I squeeze his arm. “Well, you know what our problems are, right?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Mostly you?”
I laugh to cover up the sneaking suspicion that he’s right. “Okay, then, figure out what you’ll need to do so I don’t drive you crazy.”
“I was teasing.” He pokes me back. “I know I got to work on stuff too.”
It’s a nice retraction but doesn’t make me feel a hundred percent better. “Let’s start with…well, I think we both feel like the relationship is worth working for. So let’s think about the problems we’ve had, and how we can avoid them if they come up again.”
He squints. “Like if Brian threatens to out me to the league that already knows I’m gay?”
“Brian has moved on to sending me good-bye e-mails,” I say.
“Do you have other friends who will threaten me about other things?”
I glare. “I was thinking more about family issues—”
“You told me not to think about Gregory.”
I put a paw on his arm. “But think about how it affects our relationship. Like, do you want my help with whatever you’re going to do, or do you want my advice, and can you not blow up if I tell you things you don’t want to hear.” I clear my throat. “Whether or not they’re my fault.”
“All right.” He smiles at me. “I’ll give it a shot, and maybe go out with the guys, too. Go see what Gena wants you to do.” He looks around and then ruffles between my ears. “Don’t cause too much trouble there.”
I wiggle my thumb at him. “I’ve been practicing my aikido.”
He snorts. “What, while you were sick with a cold at Hal’s?”
“It’s congested style aikido. I blow my nose on my attacker and run away while he’s wiping mucus out of his fur.”
That makes him laugh, and I smile and wag my tail as I get into the car and head off to another house full of tigers.
6
Connections (Dev)
True to Lee’s prediction, once he’s gone off to Fisher’s I try to think about anything but my brother, and I fail. I keep replaying the short, harsh phone conversation we had this morning.
“You’re defending a hate group?” I yelled.
“Whoa,” he said, “they’re not a hate group, and—”
“They killed a kid,” I growled, “and you’re defending them.”
“I don’t get to pick my cases.”
“You can tell your company you don’t want to take one.”
“And anyway,” he said, “they didn’t kill the kid. They tried to help him, but he was already pretty fucked up in the head.”
“Why, because he was gay?”
“Your words, not mine. I think the evidence is that he ate a shotgun, but I won’t argue with you.”
“He killed himself because bigots like you convinced him he couldn’t have a life!”
“So can I talk to your husband directly or are you just going to spout his words at me all day, Devlina?”
“Fuck,” I snarled, “you.”
“Now those sound like your words,” he said.
“If you’re not going to talk seriously about this, then just hang up,” I said, and he did.
So nothing really got resolved except I yelled at him and he put me off and I didn’t feel any better about it. I sit and think about Lee and Gregory, and what Lee might say, what he might want to do that would piss me off.
Lee might want me to make a statement about my brother representing Families United, so that we could call attention to the case. How would I feel about doing that? Well, Dad wouldn’t want me to pull our family business out in the open. I could say something about this tragedy, but it’s not my family. I guess the kid did write to me, so maybe I could do an interview with Hal about it, but I still feel like it’s not my place to do it.
Lee would understand that, I think. And if he didn’t…well, I would have to do a better job of explaining to him what was important. And if it was really more important for him than for me, then…I could talk abo
ut Vince King if I left Gregory out of it.
Even if he agreed about the statement though, Lee would want to go have a conversation. He’d tell me that the best way to change Gregory’s mind would be for me to let him get to know us better so that he wouldn’t have these conceptions of what gay people were. And he isn’t necessarily wrong, only with me and my brother it’s more complicated than that. I honestly don’t think Gregory’s issue is that I’m gay. I think it’s that I’m winning.
Gregory is at the same point in his career that I am in mine: just about two years in, enough to know how the system works, enough to know where his place in it is. We should be talking to each other, sharing our discoveries like we did back in middle school.
But that changed when Gregory hit high school. He was a tough tiger then, didn’t want his kid brother tagging along with him. I had just started playing football, and Gregory was too smart for sports; he was on the debate team and taking advanced placement tests and talking about going to Whitford and those fancy East Coast schools (eventually he went to the U of Aventira, which is still a good school). I had football friends and football games that he wasn’t interested in attending, and so even though we had adjacent rooms, we didn’t talk much his last few years of high school. When I came home proud of a two-interception game, he said, “But you didn’t really have to think. You just went where the coach told you and caught the ball.” Not in front of Mom and Dad, of course; there he limited his comments to “Good job” as he artfully turned the conversation back around to his accomplishments.
I went to his graduation and he came back for mine, but the couple times I wrote him to talk about problems I was having in high school, he just wrote back with quick, short messages. School was hard, taking up a ton of his time, he was busy, he was rushing a fraternity or planning his fraternity’s rush calendar or studying for finals. When I told him I had a sort-of girlfriend, he said lazily that he wasn’t going to tie himself down to any one girl, that college was a time for exploration.
He spent one summer back home, but even then I spent a lot of that summer in football practice and I barely saw him. After that, he stayed the summer down in Aventira with some friends, and then got an internship at a law firm one summer.
He attended law school in Gateway, and my parents were thrilled. At the time, I was just a junior in college, and my football career wasn’t going anywhere. That was right before I met Lee, that Christmas that Gregory came home brandishing his acceptance to law school. “Well,” he said to Dad, “if you get sued because Dev breaks something on someone’s car, I’ll be able to defend you.”
Didn’t matter that I was getting a basic business degree or that Dad was thinking I’d work in the office, not on the cars. He showed off pictures of Marta then, and when I told him that I had lots of different girls, he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Someday you’ll meet the right one.”
Like that was all there was to it. Meet the right one and everything works out. I wonder if he and Marta fight about things like whether he should take the case. Probably not; Marta seemed happy to go along with whatever her husband wanted to do as long as she got a family to take care of. As far as I could tell, she doesn’t challenge Gregory at all, not like my fox does me.
Which makes me a better person, I know, even if it also makes me an annoyed person. But the point is, he’s the one who comes up with the ways to challenge me. If I could imagine the things he’d say to me, then he wouldn’t be challenging, would he? He’d just be saying things I already knew.
Ugh. It’s complicated, thinking about this relationship stuff. I pull up my e-mail on the off chance that there’s another kid sending me a desperate attempt to connect. There isn’t; just the usual parade of fans and crazies. I get bored of it after twenty minutes and nostalgic for my team.
So I put the computer away and pick up the phone. Gerrard and Ty don’t answer, and Carson’s out of town, but Charm and Zillo both pick up and say they’d love to get together. “I can squeeze in a couple hours before my date,” Charm says.
We get together at the bar we went to after games, and the first thing Charm asks me is how Lee—“Mrs. Gramps”—and I are doing. I scowl at the big stallion, who’s got his date clothes on already: silk shirt over black jeans with his mane artfully styled between his ears into a kind of wave. Zillo’s just wearing a Firebirds t-shirt, cargo pants, and a wary expression at the discussion of my love life. “We’re doing better, Winston,” I say.
“You’re the one who called me,” Charm says. “You want me to go home, I’ll go.”
I shake my head. “Sorry. It’s fine. We’re talking.”
He elbows me. “Just talking?”
I’m comfortable with him and he clearly wants to hear it. I’m surprised and pleased at how easily the response comes to me. “And fucking, okay?”
The coyote looks mortified, ducking his long muzzle behind the big glass of beer he got, but Charm just laughs and punches my shoulder. “Good,” he says.
“You really want to hear about it?”
“Not more than that,” he says. “I mean, I could tell you about the gal I’m taking out tonight.” Both of his massive hands come out to cup imaginary breasts a foot in front of his chest. “But I guess you’d be about as interested.”
I snort and turn to Zillo. “What about you? When do you leave for that island with your girlfriend?”
“Oh, uh.” He shakes his head. “Couple days, I think. Maybe next week.”
“You don’t know?”
“She planned it.” His big ears flatten out. “I’m just goin’ along, you know?”
“How come we never met her?” Charm leans forward.
Zillo snorts. “You think I’d introduce her to you?”
I’m remembering Zillo going to the strip club in Crystal City, and maybe Charm is too, because he meets my eye and raises an eyebrow. “Hey, I don’t hit on my pal’s gals,” he says. “Sometimes they hit on me, though.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.” Zillo looks away and waves. “She’s not that into football anyway.”
“So why the hell is she going out with you?” Charm gulps down half his beer and signals the waitress that he’ll want another one pretty soon.
I clear my throat and step in before Zillo can answer or punch Charm. “So is she off somewhere tonight?”
“Yeah, she’s got her own friends, and I was at my folks’ place anyway.”
He tells us a bit about his older sister, who’s a nurse, and then we start talking about siblings and Charm mentions his two younger brothers, one in the army and one still in college.
“Oh hey,” he says to me. “I was gonna tell you. My brother in the army called me up yesterday and came out. Told me he’s gay.”
“Wow.” I stare.
“Said he heard about you and then Polecki and he figured he could tell me now because I know you, but he always kept it hid.”
“Yeah, being gay in the army kinda sucks.” I flick my tail. “Poor guy.”
“That’s what he said.”
“But hey, on the bright side,” Zillo pipes up, “he’s a horse.”
We both stare at him. He grins. “So he doesn’t give a shit. Isn’t that what you always say?”
Charm laughs and slaps a huge hand on the table. “That’s right. Only his problem is, if he came out, he could get all the guys he wants, but he can’t, so he can get the girls, but he doesn’t want ‘em.” He holds up his glass. “It’s like me at a wine bar.”
Zillo and I exchange looks. “Because…there are no girls at a wine bar?” he says.
“Or all the guys at a wine bar are gay?”
Charm snorts at us. “Because I drink beer, not wine, and they don’t serve beer at a wine bar. Jeez, I thought you guys were s’posed to be the smart ones. Well, coyote over here anyway.”
“Ah, whatever.” Zillo sticks his tongue out and drinks. “I told you ’bout my cousin, right?”
“The gay one? Yeah.”
I look at both of them. “Am I the only one who doesn’t have a gay relative?”
Charm points a finger at me. “You are the gay relative.”
I consider that and it seems a fair point, so I nod and toast him. We shoot the breeze a little more, and I worry that Zillo feels left out because Charm and I just joke back and forth a bunch. But he sticks around and puts in a comment here and there, and when Charm leaves, he says he’ll stick around if I do.
So we say goodbye to the stallion, making sure he’s okay to drive (he says he’s fine, with two light beers over two and a half hours), and then order one more round. “Look,” Zillo says, “if you called me to make sure I’m coming to the workouts, don’t worry. I will.”
I frown. “No. Just wanted some company tonight. Lee’s busy and…” I lap up a little beer. I could never say this next thing in front of Charm; he’d tease the hell out of me. “I miss you guys.”
His ears go up. “Really? I mean, I miss you guys too, but I figured you got your fox and Gerrard and all them.”
“I haven’t seen Gerrard since Monday morning. I just saw Fisher yesterday, but he’s…he’s not doing so great. I wanted to talk to someone.” I squint at him. “And hey, you can always call me if you want to hang out.”
“Yeah, okay. I wasn’t sure, you know. I mean, season’s over, contracts are getting tossed around. If you’re going to another team…”
“We been through a lot this season,” I say. Sometimes I forget that it’s Zillo’s second season too, and he came out as a sophomore, so he’s two years younger than I am. “We’re not gonna just say goodbye and never talk again.”
“I know,” he says.
“Anyway, you’ve got lots of other friends on the team, right?” I think of who else I’ve seen him palling around with. “I know you and Colin aren’t, but…”
He shakes his head slowly. “Nah. My roommate last year is in Peco now, and me and Marais kind of talk, but he’s back home, and I mean, I know a bunch of the special teams guys, but not, like, to go out for drinks with. And nobody else really went out of their way to hang out.” He tips his glass to his muzzle. “I was one of only two guys my year from Candleton to be drafted. My old college teammates are all, I dunno, selling real estate or cars or boats.”
