Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (24 page)

I feel more in the mood to take my boxers off the next morning, but by the time I do, he’s already opened the curtains and jumped right into the shower. I want to test whether things are as okay between us as I feel they are. So I lie naked on the bed, paws linked awkwardly behind my head, tail twitching between my legs, getting myself hard. My paw hurts, but not a lot, so I leave the painkillers on the bedside table and watch Dev come out of the shower.

He notices me right away. I don’t show my relief when he just gives a little shake of his head and sets about pulling on his clothes. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t say anything as he slips into his shirt and tucks it into his pants. He keeps looking at me in the mirror.

Watching him dress is pretty hot, not just because I always like watching his muscles under his short fur, but also because his suit looks really good, and he looks hot in it. Very fuckable. I curl my tail under my erection, showing it off against the white fur of my tail tip.

“
Tryin’ to distract me?” Dev looks sideways at me.

“
Just giving you something to think about while they’re talking to you.” I reach down and put my uninjured paw on my sheath. “They’re going to talk to you about being gay, remember? What if you forget what a naked fox looks like?”

He looks away and reaches for his tie. “They’re just going to ask me stupid stuff about the team and bigots in the league.”

He’s still tense. He’s keeping his tail pretty still, but there are a hundred little things I know about him that show me he’s nervous. “Come on,” I say. “This is just like a ballgame. In fact, fewer people watch the Today Show than watch a typical football game.”

“
Really?” He still doesn’t look at me.

“
Yeah.” I just made that up.

“
I don’t have to talk during football games.”

“
You talked during the press conference.” He’s having a little trouble with the tie. “Didn’t they teach you how to tie those in rookie orientation?”

Now he gives me a baleful look. “I’ll get it.”

“
I don’t mind helping you with
your
knot, for once.”

That’s normally the kind of joke-slash-offer he’d respond to, but even if things are okay between us, he’s still nervous about the show. He unloops the tie and starts over again. On the third try, he gets it. Then he shrugs on his suit jacket and turns to me. “How do I look?”

“
You look great.” I trail a finger up my sheath, not to tease him, but because I want to, because he does look great.

He walks over to the edge of the bed and leans over. “Wish me luck.”

We kiss. “Listen,” I say as he straightens. “Be careful, okay? I mean, really careful.”

“
I know.”

“
Seriously,” I say. “Think about what you’re gonna say. Even if it takes a couple seconds. People expect jocks to be slow.”

“
I’m not slow.” He starts to walk away.

“
I know,” I call after him. “The point is, you’re quick enough that you can take a half-second and people won’t think you’re slow.”

He doesn’t look back, just raises a paw. “Thanks.”

“
Good luck,” I say, and then, as the door closes, “knock ’em dead.”

I’ve got two hours before the show comes on, and a warm sheath. For about fifteen minutes, I tell myself I should stay ready for him for when he comes back from the show, while my paw is telling me that if I’m fast, I’ll have plenty of time to recover and be ready in four hours, or however long it is. By the time my mind finally gives in, I’m already hard and half-knotted. From there, it’s a simple matter of closing my eyes and imagining Dev thrusting up inside me, and before long the tension of my knot is pounding with every heartbeat. Several gasping strokes later, I let out a nice long moan and come all over my stomach.

It’s only then that I wonder if Dev put the privacy sign on the door. I lie back, letting my tongue loll out, taking the chance that ten more minutes won’t bring the housekeeping staff.

When I wake up, the sun’s hitting me right in the face. I rub my eyes and yawn, sitting up and checking the time. Fifteen minutes ’til his show. Plenty of time to hop in the shower. I check, first, and the privacy sign is on the door. Good tiger.

I’m pleasantly tired and still naked when the Today Show comes on. I lean back on the bed on my elbows, feeling more relaxed than I have since coming in Dev’s muzzle back in his brother’s room. When I see the promo for Dev, I sit up, tail twitching. I really want this to go well.

I have to sit through the news, and then they bring Dev out. He looks great on TV, in that dark grey suit setting off his orange stripes, with the Firebirds logo tie. He shakes the paw of the two hosts, the attractive vixen and the young stag, and sits down.

At first, it goes well. They lob him some softball questions about how it feels to be gay, to let his secrets out, and he says it feels great to be himself, and so on. He’s doing pretty well at keeping his tail from betraying his tension; I can see it in the taps of his fingers on the chair. I’m just starting to relax again when the vixen leans in and soft-voices a question about his family.

He gets real stiff and stumbles over his generic answer. The vixen, sensing trouble and an opportunity, presses, asking if there are problems. Don’t raise your voice, I pray, don’t raise your voice, and he doesn’t, not that time.

But when the stag asks if his parents have met his boyfriend, and he just says “Yes” with enough ice to chill a cooler of beer, my prayers stop being answered. The hosts glance at each other before continuing. Before they can, Dev says, “Can we just talk about football?”

Oh, tiger. I want to turn the channel off, but I can’t make myself do it.

The vixen gives a short laugh. “Does your boyfriend play football?”

Dev glowers at her. “It’s not anybody on the team.”

The stag jumps back in. “What didn’t your parents like about him?”

“
It wasn’t—look, I’m not gonna get into that.” Dev looks back and forth between them. I see him tensing, and I know he feels double-teamed. “Calm down, calm down,” I say under my breath.

“
Do they feel you’re jeopardizing your football career?”

Please, I send in my thought-message, just say, I love my parents.

Clearly my psychic powers are as bad as my ability to be tactful with homophobic parents. “They don’t care about—they don’t think that,” my painfully honest boyfriend says.

“
Are they prejudiced?” The stag leans forward.

Dev looks flustered now. “That’s not...”

The vixen chimes in, gently. “Did they support your decision to come out?”

“
My parents have always been...have always supported me.” I see the flash in his eyes, looking for the next question. But here, he can’t just skip to the next reporter. He’s trapped.

The stag takes his turn again. “Did you tell them you were going to come out?” When Dev doesn’t answer, he goes on. “How long have they known you’re gay? Did you tell them?”

Dev’s fur is all sleek from the makeup, but I can see it prickling, and though they’re not showing his tail, I’m sure it’s lashing. “What does that have to do with anything?” he snaps. He starts to get up out of his chair; because he’s facing the stag, it does almost look like he’s going to go after him. The stag jumps back and almost topples his chair over.

I cover my eyes. The vixen says, with forced cheer, “Okay, boys, break it up.” The silence seems to go on for hours, and finally I look back up again to see Dev sitting sulkily in his chair.

The interview is pretty much over at that point. The vixen asks, “What are you going to do to prepare for Gateway?” and Dev mumbles a bland “give it 110%” answer, and they cut to commercial.

But that’s not it. When they come back, they joke for a little while about how Dev “didn’t seem very happy,” and how he was more jock than they’d expected. “You can tell why he’s a good tackler,” the stag says, “and why it might not be a good idea to talk about his sexuality on the field.” That plays to the middle America audience, I’m sure, but it still sets my teeth on edge. Sure, he could’ve been more polite, but they could just recognize that all of us have problems: gay, straight, jock, TV personality.

Then all that is driven out of my mind by the commercial they show. It’s Dev’s commercial, the one we haven’t seen yet. It takes me a moment to realize that, because it looks so foreign. The shirt he’s wearing looks good on him. Really good. Like, touched-up-in-post good. I’m pretty sure that even naked, he doesn’t have abs that defined. (Not that they look bad. Quite the contrary.) Over the “Ultimate Fit conforms to your body’s shape,” they focus a lot on his arms, his shoulders, and his butt. “Fit to bring out the best no matter what your species.” Oh God, there’s a shot of his package. It’s framed by the abs and legs, so it’s not super-obvious, but it’s definitely there.

They must have worked on it for a day straight to have rushed it out by Sunday. And they obviously had someone who knew exactly what would register with the gay community. I’m almost afraid to check Dev’s e-mail now. And it ran during the football game, and his parents saw it...I stare numbly at the TV as the jovial weather forecaster comes on.

Even he makes a joke about Dev, saying, “Well, the clouds are going to clear up in the studio now that the football player’s gone.” He’s an ass. I can’t understand why people like him.

I turn off the TV and lie back on the bed again. Dev coming out should have made everything easier. I knew there’d be challenges, but they were supposed to be the kind of things we could meet head on instead of sneaking around them. We should be having discussions about gay identity, helping other athletes to come out, being a positive force. Instead we’re getting dragged down into questions of who fucks whom, and what does your family think, and is everything that happens to you in your entire life now because you came out?

It’s not quite eight, and Dev still has to leave the studio and get a cab back. That’ll be nine at the earliest, and I’m hungry. Port City has great greasy diners, so there’s sure to be something nearby. Right now I don’t feel like eating healthy, and I have to get Morty his bagels. So I slip out of the hall, replacing the privacy sign, and jog down the stairs to the street.

The bustle of people, which I usually hate, is somehow comforting. I can lose myself in them. Scents and muzzle flash by me, a hundred a minute, and I don’t have to remember any of them. None of them will know me. None of them cares whom I sleep with, none of them cares about my job or my family, or Dev’s family. I presume some of them do care about his job, though; I see Devils caps and the occasional jersey. Dev’ll be here playing them in about six weeks, and no doubt the Port City crowd will have the homophobic chants out in force.

They’ll find something to rag on anyone about, though. Week ten at New Kestle, in the south, that’s going to be tough too. I run over his schedule absently in my head. Kerina, affectionately known as Chaw-ville, the next to last week of the season, is the only other away game in a fairly homophobic city. Hopefully by then some of the furor will have died down.

It’s nice to hope that, but part of me knows it never will, that as long as he plays in the league he’ll be “fag” or “HOMO-SKI” or any one of the other creative idiot things people think of to write on signs. It’d be nice to imagine someone else coming out, but all that depends on the reception Dev gets, and the aggressive play of the Millenport line doesn’t bode well.

There’s a reasonable-looking diner serving a bunch of eggs saturated in butter two and a half blocks from the hotel. I’m just crossing the street toward it when my phone rings. I glance at the number, weigh the conversation against the growling in my stomach, and decide, hell, I kind of want to hear what he thinks. I duck into the entryway of a store that isn’t open yet.

“
You’re up early, Mister Kinnel.”

“
I saw your ex on TV. Didn’t look too happy.”

“
Well, the questions were rather unfair.”

He coughs. “I was just wondering if you knew what’s going on with him and his parents. Did you ever meet them?”

I lean against the glass. Behind it, dresses and fabric glimmer in the morning sun. “Once.”

“
Did you get along?”

My thumb twinges. “They weren’t thrilled.”

“
I find that hard to believe.”

Quick, why would Duscha and Mikhail not like a vixen? Ah, my own mother provides the answer. “Let’s just say his mother didn’t see grandchildren in our future.”

“
Ah.” He sighs. “If you and he didn’t care, the parents should butt out. Not like he’s gonna have cubs now, anyway.”

“
There’s adopting. Surrogates.”

“
Sure. But if his folks didn’t want that with him and a vixen, I don’t reckon they’ll be too excited about it now.”

A wolf peers curiously in at the storefront, her ears perked. I turn away. “Probably not. You think he should just do what his parents want?”

“
Hell, no,” he says. “Never known a mom or dad did anything but screw up their kids’ love life.”

“
Like Cim’s?”

He’s quiet. “Wasn’t her mom’s fault,” he says, gruff.

“
But I gather she didn’t help.”

“
Miss White...” He chuckles, without much humor. “Nah. Her mom didn’t help. But Cim’s Cim, y’know? Knew what she wanted when we got married. I can’t stop lovin’ her because I stopped bein’ what she wanted.”