by Kyell Gold
He nods. “So Fisher tried these treatments and they seemed to work. He came back a couple weeks early, enough to help with the playoff push and the championship game. And then he was supposed to stop taking it. It was already messing with him, making him more aggressive, but he thought that was okay for playing football, you know?”
“Sure. Help him chase down the quarterback, right?”
“Then he got the concussion in Boliat.”
I read his eyes and see what happened before he tells me. “Oh, fuck, and he went back on the stuff.”
“Uh-huh. And then, because he got another concussion in Crystal City, he forgot he had it in his locker. Someone on the cleaning staff found it and reported it to C.C. management. And they called the Firebirds.”
“That’s why they want him to retire.” Jesus Fox, now I understand how agonized Fisher was. How must he have felt listening to me and Dev talk about our new jobs, our new lives?
“He wouldn’t even admit he’d done anything wrong. He just yelled at me about how precious the remaining years were and how everybody’s doing what they can to get an edge, and how I’m not qualified to judge him. Like he hasn’t judged me plenty.” His muzzle twists into a scowl.
“Leaving that aside.” I slide closer to him and hold his paw. “He’s not really thinking of trying to fight it, is he?”
“He doesn’t want to retire. He wants to fight something, but Damian convinced him that fighting the Firebirds or the league is a bad idea. I hope.”
“Poor guy.”
Dev scoots away from me and glares down. “Poor guy? He did this to himself. He always told me, ‘don’t fuck around with steroids or any of that shit because it’s not worth it,’ and now he’s just a fucking hypocrite, that’s all! What am I supposed to think? ‘Poor guy’? No. Asshole, that’s what he is.”
“Okay.” I pull my legs up onto the couch and hold Dev’s paw. “He’s hurting. He’s being forced to leave the game on a sour note—and this after he risked so much to hold onto it. Can you see how hard that must be for him?”
“He did this to himself.” But he’s softening.
“Granted. Yes. But we can still pity him. And we should help him if we can.”
“What?” He stares down. “Like, help him get out of it?”
“Help him come to terms with the decision. It’s going to be a big change for him and it won’t be easy.”
“Huh.” He leaves his paw in mine and holds my gaze. “So you don’t think he should go to jail?”
I think about that. Do I? If Fisher had robbed a bank or assaulted someone, would I be sitting here talking about helping him adjust to it? “He did break the law,” I say carefully.
“Uh-huh. And the league’s just going to cover it up. They don’t want the embarrassment.”
I sigh. “What do you think?”
He shakes his head. “I asked you first.”
“All right.” I curl my tail into my lap. “I don’t think athletes should be held to a different standard. If he’s suspected of a crime, he should be charged with it and they should try him in court.”
I don’t know how he’s going to react at first, because he doesn’t change his expression. But then he gives me a slow nod. “Okay,” he says. “That makes sense to me.”
“I’m sorry. I know he’s a good friend.”
“He was.”
“Okay, hold on there.” I squeeze his paw. “Maybe he has to go to jail, but he’s still your friend. He didn’t throw that away. I know it feels shitty that he went and did the things he told you not to, but…he’s still the guy who helped you get oriented on the team, who helped motivate you, who accepted me. None of that changed because he committed a crime in a desperate attempt to get one more shot at football.”
“For two weeks!”
“He didn’t know you’d make it to the championship. What if you’d lost that first playoff game to Hellentown while he watched from the bench and that was it, that was his season?”
“He’d have two fewer concussions,” Dev growls. “Maybe he’d be able to remember what fucking year it is.”
I bite my lip again, because that’s the worst part of it all. Who the hell knows what this animal hormone shit did to his system? “Sometimes it takes a few weeks to heal from a concussion,” I say. “He could be better by March.”
“Or maybe he won’t.”
“We can’t know any of that now.”
He stares off into space. “If I couldn’t remember things like that…”
“Hey.” I slide closer. “You’re not there yet and hopefully won’t ever be. Not all football players end up with concussions, and if you do suffer one, I’m sure as hell not going to let you go out and play two weeks later.”
His eyes catch mine. “You think you can stop me?”
It’s playful, but I’m dead serious and I don’t smile. “Yeah,” I say. “I do. Because if it’s a choice between you getting a ring to wear on your finger and you having forty or fifty more years of good quality life, I don’t even have to think about it.”
“So what would you do if I did go back in and play?” Quietly, because I think he knows, but he wants to hear me say it.
“You think I can’t distract you for two weeks?” I say, and now I’m trying to be playful. “Let’s worry about that when it happens, which will hopefully be never.”
Gold eyes search mine, and then he gives a quick nod and a smile. “Thanks, fox. I don’t think a lot of people would make that choice for me, but maybe someone should.”
And he pulls me into a hug, and I think about saying that I’m not condemning Gena for not doing the same for Fisher, because I’m not sure she could. I guess she put her foot down about him fooling around, but that’s not the same as football. If she’d forbidden him from playing in the championship, would he have left her? Would he have done it anyway? Was she scared he might throw another lamp at her, or worse?
I shove those thoughts aside, because I’m in the arms of my tiger and it’s warm and nice here, and things might start moving along to the bedroom in a moment, except right then his phone rings. He glances at it, then at me, and I nod and wink. “Go ahead. We can pick up again when you’re done.”
He returns my wink and picks up the phone. “Oh, right,” he says. “Good to talk to you again. Is anything wrong?” He glances toward the computer. “Oh, no. I got caught up in stuff. I’ll go look at it now?” He starts to get up, then settles back down. “Sure. Tomorrow? That works. Okay. Oh, yeah, I’ve been talking to him too.” He starts to get more animated, and then shuts down. “Right. That makes sense. Sorry. Okay, so tomorrow at two? Are you going to Fisher’s house? We could meet you there. Lee’s been helping out Gena. Okay, sounds great.”
At the mention of Fisher, my ears perk up. When Dev hangs up, I raise my eyebrows and slide closer to him again. He curls an arm around me and purrs. “That was Damian.”
“Kind of late for him to call, isn’t it?” Dev’s phone as he puts it away reads 11:19 pm.
“Yeah, but I didn’t respond to his e-mail. He’s coming into town to meet with Fisher about the situation, and he wanted to take the chance to meet me too.”
“Wow, an agent who actually travels to his clients for important meetings. Imagine that.”
“Ogleby came down for the press conference.” His ears go down.
I rest my muzzle against his neck. “Yeah, he did. He’s a good guy at heart. Just not a very good agent.”
His breath washes down my cheekfur and neck, and he kisses me. “No. Anyway, he wants to meet you, too. He’s going to Fisher’s house to meet him there, so he said we could just come over there again if we wanted to.”
I nod and flick my tail across the couch. “As long as Gena’s okay with it.”
“She loves you. It’ll be fine.”
I look up at his striped muzzle and grin. “She loves me?”
“Yeah.” He reaches up a paw behind my head and rubs at the base of my ears. “You c
an see how relaxed she is around you.”
“Well, that’s nice.” I rest my paw across his chest and rub through his shirt.
“She doesn’t love you like I love you.”
“Mmm. That’s probably good. Fisher’d be jealous.” He chuckles, and then I reach my fingers up to his throat and rub where I can feel him purring. “Why don’t you show me how you love me?”
8
Closed Doors (Dev)
Thursday morning, I wake to an empty bed and the smell of coffee. A moment after I roll over and set the bedsprings creaking, a fox muzzle pokes around the bedroom door, followed a moment later by the rest of the fox, naked, holding a cup of coffee. “Morning, sleepy,” he says, and sits at the edge of the bed. “When you don’t have practice, you sleep late.”
“Mmm.” I reach out for the coffee. “Is that for me?”
He laughs and gives it to me. “Sure. I’m just using your fax machine to officially accept the Whalers’ offer. I already called Peter and I’m just writing up the letter now.”
“Talked to Gena yet?” I sip the coffee and wait for it to wake me up.
“Not yet. When was Damian supposed to be down? Two? So we have a morning together and then lunch, then head over there. Sound good?”
“Uh-huh.” I put the coffee on the nightstand and pull him down atop me, and while we might not get all messy and sticky again, we enjoy just holding each other and having nothing in particular to get out of bed for.
During that time, I tell Lee that I started thinking about our relationship, and about what he would tell me to do about Gregory, and I end up telling him about Gregory’s call and the call to my parents. He lies in my arms, big ears perked, and when I’m finished, he exhales across my muzzle.
“Sorry to hear about Alexi,” he says.
“Yeah, I dunno, my dad says it’s not serious but apparently it costs a lot of money to find out it’s not serious.” I pause. “Was it unreasonable? Saying he has to ask me himself?”
“Keeping in mind that I’m extremely biased…” He rubs a paw up my chest. “I don’t think it was unreasonable. I think it’d be a nice thing for you to do, but at the same time, it feels like he resents your success, and giving him money isn’t going to solve that problem.”
“It might make it worse. Like I’m rubbing it in his face.”
He nods. “So yeah, waiting until he asks you directly is probably a good idea.”
My tail curls and thwaps the bed, and I hug him. “Okay. I feel a little better about it. Still pissed at him, though.”
“Mmm.” He slides his arms around me. “Yeah. So what did you think I would ask you to do about him?”
“Oh, just…” I try to remember. “Talk to him. Confront him directly. I thought you might ask me to make a public statement, but the trial isn’t public and that’d be weird.”
He shakes his head. “No, I think I’d ask you to try to convince him to drop the case.”
“Dammit.” I smack my head. “I didn’t think of that one.”
He kisses my nose. “But I’d understand if you didn’t want to get into a whole thing.”
I press my fingers into his back, rubbing down his spine. “Thanks, fox. I’m going to try not to.”
What I don’t tell him because I haven’t quite finished thinking it through yet is that that conversation with Fisher rattled me. Right now, sure, I don’t want to take any illegal chemicals, but what am I going to do in five years, or eight, or ten? What if that title is tantalizingly close and I twist an ankle, or get gored like Fisher, and someone tells me I just take this one injection this one time…? What if I think I can control the side effects and I lash out at Lee, hurt him even? He trusts me, and I don’t want to let on that I’m scared I might be tempted.
Eventually we shower, and Lee starts packing for our trip to Yerba tomorrow. I ask if he’s got a hotel reserved, and that sends him to his computer to make those reservations, but before he does that he has to sit staring at real estate and apartment listings to figure out what areas he wants to look at.
I sit with him, though to me the areas are just names on a map. I keep pointing at places that sound cool or goofy and saying, “You could live there,” or “I’ve always wanted a house with a Mountain View. You think there are mountains there?”
“Hey,” Lee says after about half an hour of this, “wasn’t Polecki’s boyfriend a Yerba player?”
“Yeah. The mule deer.”
“Why don’t you text Polecki? See if maybe he’ll be up in Yerba when we are.”
“Sure.” I nod and take out my phone, with one last glance at his screen. “Are you just trying to stop me from telling you that you should not even be looking at Coyote’s Point?”
“Depends which coyote,” he says, and grins.
So I text Polecki, Hey, I’m going to Yerba with my boyfriend. Any chance you’d be in the area?
Lee’s now figured out where he wants to look and is finding hotels in the area. His phone rings in the middle of it and it’s his new boss. So I go to the kitchen, find eggs in the fridge, and heat up the stove.
And that’s how our morning goes: making plans, making coffee, making breakfast. We avoid thinking about Fisher’s problems and Gregory’s problems, and for a few hours, the world cooperates. There are no phone calls, no arguments, no practice; an island of peace in our lives, even though the waves of future dramas lap at our shores. Polecki texts back to say that he and his boyfriend are in Crystal City but were heading up to Yerba this weekend for a family thing and would love to meet up. Lee’s boss promises to bring along housing recommendations to the welcome meeting. Gena calls to tell us that she’s ordering out from a barbecue place for lunch if we want to join them and Damian. We offer to pick up the food on our way over. Gerrard calls to ask if I’m free this weekend and I tell him I’ll be back from Yerba in a week, that I thought the workouts hadn’t started yet. He says they haven’t, that he was just watching film of the championship game and wanted to talk about a couple things.
My instinct is to offer to go over there tonight, after Fisher’s, because I want to please him and make sure we keep our good relationship. Then I think, hell, I’ve proven myself on the field and I deserve at least a week of relaxation away from football and Gerrard’s unquenchable fire. I don’t quite have the confidence to tell him to lay off the film, but I do say, “Hold those thoughts until next week. I’m just taking some time off, trying to relax.”
“Enjoy that,” he says, and hangs up.
“You know,” I say to Lee, staring at the phone, “outside of football, Gerrard is kind of a dick.”
“Passionate about the game,” Lee says. “Hey, we have an hour and a half before we have to go. I’ve been wanting to see this movie you rented. Want to pop it in?”
I look at the envelope from the movie-delivery place that I requested like a month ago. “Sure.”
So we sit and watch a movie, lose ourselves in gunshots and explosions, and don’t worry about anything else for a while. It’s a nice feeling, but my muscles feel bored and restless with inactivity when the movie’s heroes are running around, and my mind feels bored when they’re not. It’s weird that there isn’t a game to prepare for this weekend, nor next weekend; no plays to go over, no offense to prepare for. It’s my second off-season, but this past season was so intense as a starter on a playoff team that I’m used to a whole different level of adrenaline now.
Even so, I don’t really want to think about football specifically. Which makes me wonder, am I passionate enough? If I were going to be one of the great football players, would I be already reviewing film of the championship game like Gerrard is? Maybe I should be, but right now I don’t even want to think about it. I’m enjoying relaxing and being Dev Miski, not number fifty-seven. Does that mean that if I were in Fisher’s situation, that I wouldn’t be tempted to break the law? That the title doesn’t mean as much as I think it does, not enough to risk my future?
I’m twenty-four yea
rs old. I have a long time to figure out what my legacy is going to be. I don’t want to get to the end of my career and find out that I don’t have a life. I tell myself those things in my head, but still the itch remains.
The boxes of barbecued chicken and ribs from Uncle Bob’s Southern Kitchen fills my truck with amazing smells, and by the time we get to Fisher’s and bring it into the kitchen, my stomach’s growling and I’m licking my lips compulsively.
“Patience.” Gena’s laughing as she takes it from me, watching me lick a bit of the sauce from one finger. “I’ll have it on plates in a minute. Go meet Damian; he’s in the living room.”
Lee follows me in. Fisher’s sitting on the couch staring out at the patio, and on the other side of the couch, holding his PDA-phone, is a pudgy tiger about a foot shorter than either of us. He stands and smooths down the light grey suit jacket he’s wearing over the lime-green tie, and then I don’t notice the pudge as much. His voice is the same as it is over the phone: deep, smooth, and confident.
“Dev? Damian. And you must be Lee.” He grips my paw firmly, then releases it and takes Lee’s. He’s only a little taller than my fox, so they can almost see eye to eye, and he gives Lee his full attention when they shake paws.
Lee smiles, his tail swishing. “I am. Pleased to meet you.”
“Dev tells me you’ve taken a position with the Whalers. Congratulations. I’ve worked with Peter quite a bit. Good fox, good organization. Big change from a few years ago. And I’m glad you’re working again. What the Dragons did was wrong.”
“Well,” Lee says. “Technically it wasn’t.”
“Perhaps not.” Damian releases his paw. “But it was unkind and unnecessary. You could make an argument that it was homophobic.”
“Oh, I…” Lee flicks his ears back. “I didn’t…”
“No, because you wanted to work in the league again. Smart choice. The league isn’t ready to handle that kind of publicity yet. You’d have been given a settlement and never gotten a phone call returned again.”
