Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (21 page)

He sneers. “Of course you are not.”

“
It’s not because I’m gay,” I say. “It’s because you outweigh me by about a hundred pounds.”

“
I have fought three at once.” He holds up a paw, velvety soft. “No claws. No teeth.”

“
Even more reason I won’t fight you.” I will not take a step back. I will not take a step back. “So is this conversation over yet?”

His breath smells of pot roast and the same testosterone that infuses the air. He pokes my chest. “This is why I know Devlin is no faggot. He is not afraid to fight.”

That poke was harder, the words louder. I’m getting the “
bozhe moi
” vibe off him again. “I know you know him,” I say, “but I have firsthand knowledge to the contrary.”

“
Hmph.” He snorts another meat-infused breath into my face. “Doesn’t matter where a boy sticks his dick,” he says.

“
Oh, is that so?” My ears fold back. I do want to hit him, to wipe that smug goddamn smile off his muzzle, to erase the contempt for the effeminate fox he thinks he sees. But I haven’t been in a fight outside my aikido dojo in, well, ever. Aikido’s no good for starting a fight, anyway. I only know one good way to do that. “What makes you so sure he’s the one doing the sticking?”

He stares for a moment and then laughs, a clipped, humorless laugh. “Now this conversation is over.” He half-pushes, half-punches my shoulder. “You’ll stay away from him, or you will be responsible for tearing him from his family.”

He turns away from me to go back up the stairs, but before he can take even one step, I say, “You think that’ll stop him from being a khooe-sos?”

There’s an instant where I wonder if I pronounced it correctly. I see the bunch of his shoulders. A moment later, there’s no doubt. He doesn’t move quite as fast as Dev, so his first swipe at my muzzle misses as I duck it. I’m so focused on that that I miss his return swipe, allowing him to grab my left wrist awkwardly, his thumb hooked around mine as if we’re exchanging some kind of secret gang sign. With that leverage, he grabs again at my muzzle—grabbing, I note, not just hitting—but I manage to stay away, trying to free my paw.

“
You...will...not...use...that...word.” Grunts punctuate each swipe. I fend him off with my free paw, looking desperately at the windows, but they remain blank and empty.

I decide not to say, “Make me stop,” because, well, he’s already doing that. I twist my wrists in some basic aikido escapes, but he just tightens his grip. Most of the escapes I know get me out of wrist holds, not interlocking paws. “You’ll have to accept it,” I growl over the pain in my thumb. “Or you’ll lose him.”

“
I will not lose him!” He almost shouts this, his face a snarl of frustration. He yanks on my paw, twisting to try to throw me off balance, and his fist clenches around my awkwardly bent thumb at the same time.

I hear the pop before I feel it, a dull crack in the still air. Then I feel it as a movement my paw shouldn’t be able to make, and he feels it too, his paw releasing mine quickly. My thumb is hanging awkwardly away from my paw, at an impossible angle. I have a moment to think, clearly,
this is going to hurt
. And then it does.

Oh, shit. Pain floods my paw, radiating in sharp waves from my thumb. I clutch it to my chest, dimly aware of more rustling and footsteps approaching. Two dim shapes swim into view. “Mickey?” one says.

“
Go away,” Dev’s father says harshly. “Get out of here.”

I’m not sure if I made any noise when my thumb broke. I can hear myself panting harshly, but they’re all standing around not paying attention and my thumb hurts like a son of a bitch, so I start up the stairs to the house.

A heavy paw grabs my shoulder from behind. I twist away from it. “Don’t touch me,” I snarl, protecting my injured paw.

“
Listen,” Dev’s father says. His tail lashes behind him, his voice an intense whisper, shielded from the other figures. “You fell on your paw and it broke. You say otherwise and we disown Devlin.”

It takes me a second to process what he just said. I look down at him from two steps up, his angry muzzle betraying traces of worry. “Christ, you’re an asshole,” I say, and I go into the house.

I’m glad Dad took Lee outside. Hopefully he was just going to have one of his talks, laying down the boundaries of what’s right and what’s not. I wonder briefly if he could’ve seen Lee walking around naked, or if maybe somehow he saw us fooling around. The guilt from this morning stabs me briefly, but I try to summon Lee’s cool about it. It was no big deal, I tell myself. They didn’t know, it shouldn’t bother them.

But Mom is acting weird around me. If I did something wrong, she’d just scold me. If Lee did something wrong...what? This isn’t like a high school girlfriend wearing a revealing dress. I make some comment like, “I hope Dad and Lee are getting along,” and she doesn’t respond, so maybe it was something Lee did. But I don’t know how to get her to tell me what.

So I just help her clear the table and load the dishwasher. I pass by the window to see what Dad and Lee are doing. They’re just talking.

I turn and see Mom standing by the TV in the living room, staring at nothing in particular. I walk over to her. “I’m glad you like Lee, at least.”

Her ears flick quickly back. “Would you like something to drink? I think your father has some beer.”

“
Sure.” I walk to the bar with her and take the bottle she gives me. I pop the cap and take a swig.

She sits on the couch, paws between her knees. I take another drink and lean against the bar. I’m just reaching for the remote to turn on the TV when she says, “Devlin, are you happy?”

I stop in the stillness of the living room. I don’t want to take the question lightly. This is the first real private time we’ve had, Mom and me. So: am I happy? Right now...not exactly. I’m drinking mediocre beer, worrying about what’s bothering her, worrying about what’s going on with Lee and Dad, worrying about my interview tomorrow. But I realize that she doesn’t mean that. So I answer the question I think she’s really asking. “Yeah, I am.”

She takes a breath. “Then that’s what matters,” she says, and goes to the bar to pour herself a drink. When she turns to me, she’s already lowering the glass from her lips, and a third of it is gone. “But when you are in our house, you’ll respect our house. All right?”

My tail curls around my legs. She knows, somehow, she knows. She woke up and saw Lee, or she heard me moan. “I do respect your house,” I mumble.

“
You’re grown up, so I’m asking you, not telling you. I think we raised you to have that much courtesy.”

“
Mom...”

“
I didn’t say anything to your father.” She downs the rest of the glass and turns to look out of the living room window. It’s fully dark outside. “I hope...”

I wait for her to finish, then say, “Do you know what Dad’s talking to Lee about?”

She shakes her head, quickly. We both wait and listen for a moment, and then she sighs. “Tell me about the football game. Did you have to use your claws?”

“
You just get worked up,” I say. “All the guys do. And he went after Fisher.”

“
Two wrongs,” she starts.

“
Mom, it happens all the time. It’s not like high school.”

“
I watch with your father,” she says. “I don’t see many fights.”

“
Fisher’s like my older brother,” I say. “I have to stick up for him. Sometimes not fighting is worse than fighting.”

She frowns. “You sound like your father.”

I don’t know what to say to that. But it’s just then that the front door flies open and Lee strides in. The first thing I look at are his ears, flat against his head. Then I notice his tail curled under his legs. He ignores my mother and comes right up to me. “I need you to drive me to the hospital.”

“
What?” Only then do I see that he’s cradling his left paw against his chest, his teeth gritted. “What happened?”

The front door closes. Dad stalks into the living room, tail lashing. “He fell,” he growls roughly.

Lee half-turns. The only time I’ve seen that kind of look in his eyes before, it was when we were talking about the teammates of mine who beat up his friend Brian. He’s working himself up to say what he needs to. Dad starts to talk again, but Lee interrupts him, roughly. “Your father...broke my thumb,” he says.

Dad’s tail is whipping from side to side, his ears flat too, the kind of look that makes me cringe with the memory of a hundred cracks across my backside, a thousand cuffs to the head. But Lee doesn’t even flinch. He looks back at me as Dad says, “He’s lying. He fell.”

Mom looks between me and Dad. Dad and Lee are both staring at me. Lee’s panting harshly, with pain or worry or something. The fur around his eyes is damp, but he’s not crying. The tears are involuntary, pushed out by the pain. His teeth are gritted as he waits for me. Over his shoulder, Dad glowers. His fists are still clenched.

I turn from my father back to Lee, meet his blue eyes, and take a breath. “C’mon,” I tell him. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

It takes all my courage to just walk past Dad, with him staring me down. But Lee needs me. I keep that in mind. Dad watches me, doesn’t say anything until we’re almost at the door. Then he growls, “You don’t
believe
him, do you?”

I turn and see his claws out. But I also see the wide eyes, the desperation behind the anger. “I’ll be back to get our things,” I say. “Then if you feel like telling me why you broke his paw, I’ll listen.”

He takes another step forward. “Devlin, if you walk out that door...”

“
What?” I say. “‘Don’t come back’?”

He’s breathing hard. Mom walks up and lays a paw on his arm. “Mikhail,” she says softly.

Dad yanks his arm away and gets up in my face. “You’re choosing that fox over us!”

Lee is very still. Only his ears, cupped back and bolt upright now, betray his tension.

“
My boyfriend,” I say deliberately, “needs to go to the hospital. You always taught me to take care of the people you love. That’s what I’m doing.”

“
What about us?” My father almost yells it.

“
You want to come along?”

They stare at me. Then Mom says, “I’ll pack your things for you.”

“
Duscha—” I don’t hear the rest of whatever Dad says. Lee opens the door with his good paw, and I follow him out.

He walks stiffly down the path, past a tiger with a gut and a black bear, who watch him without moving. The tiger’s muzzle, even in the yellow streetlight, shows grey. “Devlin?” he says as I approach, and I recognize Ivan, the head mechanic at Dad’s auto shop.

I stop. Lee crosses the street, his steps still hurried. I can’t think of anything intelligent to say. “Ivan? What’s up?”

“
Your dad,” he says, and then looks at Lee and stops. The bear I don’t recognize, but he’s wearing overalls with the shop logo on them, so it’s not hard to figure out the association.

“
What, is it poker night?”

“
We just thought...” Ivan looks at the bear, then back at me. “He said you were home. We just wanted to say hi. Is he okay?”

I don’t know if they mean Dad or Lee. The windows of the house are empty, but Lee’s looking my way from the passenger seat of his car. “We’re fine,” I say. “I gotta go.”

Only in the car, as I wedge myself behind the wheel and adjust the seat for my bulk, does Lee unwind, letting his shoulders slump back against the seat and his eyes close. He lists toward me so that I think he’s passed out, until he nuzzles my shoulder and says, “Thank you.”

“
For what?”

One eye cracks open. “Believing me.”

“
Did you lie?” I’m a little rougher than I should be, for a question I’m only asking to hear him say ‘no.’ It’s just him and me, on the road now, heading for the hospital my parents rushed me to when I fell out of the maple tree in the front yard and broke my arm.

Lee sits back up. “No.”

I can see that maple tree in the rear view mirror, Ivan and the bear standing beneath it watching us go. I can’t see the front of the house, until we turn the corner and I get a brief glimpse of two bright, empty windows, like a pair of golden eyes behind us. “I won’t ask what happened,” I say. “Not now. The hospital’s only like ten minutes away. You okay?”