Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (23 page)

I wake up in a hotel bed, my thumb still throbbing, but not searing with pain. Dev isn’t there, but his smell is in the bed. I open my eyes to a flood of bright light. A shape moves through it toward me.

“
How you doing?”

I yawn. “Where are we?”

“
The Lake Handerson Homeward Suites.” He kneels on the bed, rolling me toward him. “You ready? We need to get going pretty soon to get to the Hillsdale Airport.”

I nod. “I can skip the shower.”

So we’re in the car twenty minutes later, on our way back. Even though it’s quiet, I’m starting to get a headache from the bright light. I veto the radio and just close my eyes.

I think it’s safe to say that the visit could’ve gone better. But I can think of ways it could’ve gone worse. Like, Dev’s parents could’ve actually disowned him in front of me. They could have poisoned me. Mikhail could have broken more than just my thumb.

Well, it wasn’t broken, just dislocated. The doctor said, when looking at it, “it looks like someone did this on purpose.” I just shrugged and he didn’t say anything else. I don’t feel like telling Dev this.

I can’t see how I can make things up with Mikhail. And I think the fact that Dev stayed in the hotel room with me last night probably didn’t go over too well with them either. I haven’t asked him yet. He’s quiet and his tail is curled tightly under his seat. I try to gauge how bad it is from his scent and his posture, when I crack my eyes open to look. He’s stressed, but not disconsolate; tense, but not desperate. So I’m guessing they haven’t kicked him out of the house. I, on the other hand, am definitely not invited back to dinner.

But Dev’s tension eases as the day goes on. When I ask him to stop at the Chicken Stand for lunch, he nods and even smiles. And when we get back in the car, after some small talk, that’s when the questions start. I kinda hope maybe he’ll be distracted by the Today Show, and catching the flight, and other stuff, but no such luck.

“
So what happened?” He says it softly, but I don’t have any trouble hearing it, even with the highway whizzing by.

“
We had an argument. We both kind of lost our tempers. He grabbed my paw and twisted it.”

“
What did you say?”

“
You don’t want to know what he said?”

He chuckles. “I have a pretty good idea. But I want to know what you said that set him off.”

I fidget in the seat. “You remember your airplane story?”

He whips around his head and stares at me, and then he just starts laughing. “You called him that?”

“
Not exactly.” I stare down at my lap. “I, uh, called you that.”

His laughter dies down. “That’s when he grabbed your paw.”

“
Yeah.” It’s all kind of hazy in my head now. “I think he was trying to take a swing at me, and I was holding him off...”

He sighs. “Did you have to provoke him?”

“
Me?”

One of his fingers taps the wheel. “You could’ve just nodded and gone along with him.”

“
Come on,” I say. “You know me.”

“
Yeah.” He isn’t laughing at all, now. “You make things harder for yourself. You mess with people because you can.” I stay quiet. “Like that reporter guy.”

“
That’s different. I wasn’t just trying to mess with your dad. He told me to keep away from you.”

“
So what?” I can hear the rustle of his tail lashing, now. “You know how he is. Why can’t you just let that go? We don’t have to do what he says when we’re not in his house.”

“
You weren’t so worried about that the night before last.”

He doesn’t look at me. “Maybe that was a mistake.”

Shows what I know. I thought it was pretty amazing. My own tail curls up behind me. “So you just want to be my boyfriend when it’s convenient?”

Now he shoots me a look, a dangerous one. “You know better than that.”

“
I thought I did. I guess maybe Dev At Home is different from Dev everywhere else.”

“
Maybe he is.” He glares ahead at the road. We’re coming up on a slow car; he cuts off someone in the passing lane to get around them.

“
Maybe Dev the Driver needs to calm the fuck down,” I say.

“
If you could just not have to be right every single fucking time, maybe you’d be able to drive yourself,” he says. “But I guess you’ll just have to live with Dev the Driver.”

“
I’d like to,” I say tightly. “Live, that is.”

He swings back into the slow lane and drops to fifty-five. “That work for you?”

The car we just passed is coming up on our bumper. I sigh and close my eyes again.

The argument doesn’t simmer over for the rest of the trip, staying below the surface all the way back to Hilltown. He does help me out of the car at my apartment, but I insist on getting my own bag. I can carry one over my shoulder and the computer bag in my paw. My dislocated thumb is throbbing, but I’m trying to ignore it. I can’t take a pill for another hour, and we need to get packed for the flight to Port City.

I let Dev unlock the door. He tosses both bags onto the bed, and as I start to unzip mine, he stares down at his. “Shit,” he says.

I look over. He reaches into his bag and picks up the bottle of lube.

Our eyes meet. “Please tell me you packed that.” I know he didn’t, though, just from his expression, before he even shakes his head.

“
If you hadn’t...” He trails off.

“
Well,” I say, trying to joke, “it’s not like it made things any worse.”

“
Mom liked you,” he shoots back. “Until she found this.” He brandishes the bottle.

“
She still likes me,” I say. “I had to slave away in the kitchen, but we were okay. Maybe she told your father, and that’s why—”

“
She said she didn’t.” He drops the bottle on the bed. “I didn’t know what she was talking about. Christ.”

“
Look,” I say. “We’re dating. We’re boyfriends. Boyfriends do stuff with each other.”

“
They don’t have to do stuff all the time.” He starts throwing clothes out of his bag onto the bed.

I watch him for a minute, then empty my own bag, one-pawed. “Fine. So next time, stop me.”

He grabs the garment bag from the closet, the one with his nice suit. For a moment he just stands there and holds it. “It probably won’t matter,” he says, and lays the bag on the bed.

He wants me to ask him what he means, so I don’t. I try not to worry that Mikhail’s prediction is already coming true. We fight all the time anyway. This isn’t any different.

We pack with no more than small talk, “are you taking this?” and “will I need this?” Originally, I was supposed to drop him off at the airport, park the car, and take the shuttle over, but I can’t really drive now. So he drops me off and goes to park.

Standing in the chill autumn air, watching my car disappear along the airport drive, the tension I felt from our argument fades. Dammit, I miss him. I pull out my phone to text him, but texting with my broken thumb is too painful. So I heft my shoulder bag and go inside to check in for my flight.

I had Dev buy our tickets on different airlines so we won’t be seen traveling together. This also avoids the conflict of him sitting in first and me in coach on the same airplane. We leave within half an hour of each other and arrive within forty-five minutes.

I take the opportunity to call in to the office. I get my slate of games from Morty, give him the highlights from my spreadsheet, and promise I’ll send it to him when I get to the hotel in Port City. He tells me a place to get terrific bagels, and I promise to bring him back a couple. With that obligation discharged, I can relax a little more on the flight.

That’s the plan, but it doesn’t really work. You never really notice how much you use your thumbs for things until it hurts you to do it. At least the marmot next to me, overweight through she is, clucked at my thumb and offered to help me with my seatbelt and stuff. I spend a lot of time holding the cast and wishing I could take another dose of pain pills. But I shouldn’t while flying, even if I hadn’t taken some just an hour ago. Instead I get to think thoughts about Dev, about how flying separately sucks when we’re going to the same place, about his family and how glad I am that football screws up the big family holidays so it’s not as obvious how I’m doing it too.

Because it certainly doesn’t look like I’ll be coming to Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas Mass in Lake Handerson anytime soon. And I know he sees that in our future, even if now it’s a fainter hope than it was three days ago. Sitting in midsize coach class, squeezed between the marmot and an adolescent porcupine who doesn’t even apologize every time he jabs me in the arm, it’s hard not to feel down on myself. There’s no pills for that ache.

It was obvious how Dev fit into the family dynamic: the dutiful son expected to bring honor to the family, in the shadow of his father and older brother. He didn’t seem particularly happy there; at least, not the kind of happy he is when he’s with me, or playing football. But he felt comfortable in a way I’m not even sure he does with me, yet. He’s been with them for twenty-four years, after all, and with me barely two and a half.

Dev could do better than me. He could at least find someone who’d be happy to be in his closet, like Salim has with Jeremy. Maybe he’d be better off living Salim’s life, with a wife he can bring home to the family, and a boyfriend who wouldn’t care that he was just a piece on the side.

His father’s threat echoes in my head as I obsessively imagine Dev with a wife and cubs, with mechanical sex (as he described it to me, back in college), sitting around the table in his parents’ house. I imagine myself lurking under the maple tree in the dark, waiting until he can slip out for a furtive blow job. Then he goes back inside, and I slink back to...to what?

I love Dev, and I’m pretty sure he loves me. I mean, it’s been a few years now. If he wanted to dump me, he would have by now. But I can’t get the question out of my head: is that enough?

It stays with me all the way to the landing in Port City, by which time my right arm has half a dozen little pricks in it from the bigger prick sitting next to me. We all give him a wide berth on the way out. Most porcupines are considerate enough to wear long sleeves in crowded situations, but what can you do when there’s one guy who just doesn’t care about the people around him?

He fits right in at the Port City airport, though. It’s loud and full of smells and people, jostling and filling the air and just generally making it miserable for folks with sensitive noses who don’t want to wear NeutraScent the whole time they’re in the airport. They keep talking about upgrading the filtering system, but there’s no canids on the Transit Authority. The signs say, ‘improvements coming 2012—Port City is Airport City.’ In the two years I’ve been flying, the only change I’ve seen in that sign is the year. It’s a lot easier to promise change than to make it.

Happily, the guy in the taxi line gets me a Cleen-Fresh taxi without me having to ask. The one thing I’ll say for Port City is that whatever you need, you can get it here. The Cleen-Fresh taxis use scent-maskers to keep the passenger area pretty fresh. And they’re okay picking up foxes or even skunks, with no extra scent-removal fee.

On the way to the hotel, I get a text from Dev with the room number, so when I get there, I just head right for the elevators and walk down to the room. He’s left it ajar, and when I walk in, he’s lying back on the bed, napping. I close the door, drop my bag, and just watch him sleeping.

It’d kill me to leave him. But if I knew he was going to be happy, I could manage. I always hated those sappy stories where the one guy says all he cares about is that the other guy is happy. I always thought it was a load of romantic crap. And yet, here I am, thinking, yeah, if he’ll be miserable missing his family, would I want to be the cause of that?

He opens his eyes. “How was your flight?”

“
Prickly.” I rub my right arm. “How was yours?”

He yawns. “They ran out of cookies.”

“
Hope you lodged a complaint.” I stand near the bed, still looking down.

He cracks an eye up at me. “I won’t bite you, doc.”

I force a smile. “Aw. I’m not that sleepy, really. Was thinking about finding a place to eat.”

“
Order out?”

“
Yeah.”

He yawns again and closes his eyes. “Let’s just do room service.”

We stay pleasant through the rest of the night, but I can tell his family is still on his mind. It probably wasn’t the best idea to agree to the TV spot right after the trip home. Although if the visit had gone well, it would’ve been great to be able to go on TV and tell them that his family supports him.

Knowing his family, though, how likely would that really have been? I can only hope that a night’s sleep puts it out of his mind. He’s got to be up at five to go down to the studio, and I can’t go with him, obviously, so I coach him on some questions until he gets snappy, and then I tell him he’d better not be snappy tomorrow, and he says as long as I’m not the one asking him questions on the show, he’ll be fine.

It’s tense, but no more than we’re used to, and we go to sleep in the same bed. Neither of us feels like taking our boxers off, but when I nudge up against his arm, he drapes it over me. Things feel okay.