Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (51 page)

Paul rolls his eyes. “Look, I got work to do,” he says, and starts to move away from the door.

Vince King, the huge bear, slumped on the bench. Dev, anguished, talking to his mother. “Paul,” I say.

He stops. I straighten my shoulders, sit up in my chair. He’s looking right at me, and I say the words loudly, making sure he hears. “I’m gay.”

His wide eyes get wider. He laughs, again. “No, you’re not. Fucker.” He starts to walk on, and then pauses. Alex has his head in his paws and is staring straight down at his desk, ears flopping down so the tips are almost touching the papers he’s looking at. Paul glances at him and then looks at me, nostrils flaring again.

I nod. Now my heart is pounding. “Yeah. Seriously.”

Paul stares, and then looks at Alex. “Did you know this?” Alex doesn’t answer, or even look up.

“
Alex didn’t know,” I say. “Just thought I’d tell you.”

“
Fuck.” He stares at me. “Why?”

I shrug. “We’ve been working together a while. Figured you might be curious why I never talked about a girlfriend.”

He stares at me, and then relaxes. “Just figured you’re a loner. None of my business.”

I feel curiously nervous, still, even though the words are out already. Paul’s not going to punch me, he’s not going to make a scene. “Figured you might want to know who’s listening next time you call someone a ‘faggot.’”

That alarms him. He points at me, nostrils flared. “Listen,” he says, “you can’t get me on no HR bullshit. I didn’t know until just now. You said so yourself.”

I rein in my activist side, which wants to light into him with all sorts of shit about discrimination and ignorance and people like Vince King being his fault. He’s having a hard enough time taking this in. “I’m not planning to go to HR,” I say. “Like I said. Just thought you should know.”

He nods, relaxing, though his eyes are still wide. His words come quickly, jerkily. “All right. Well. I got work to do. See you guys.”

One of his prongs catches the door frame as he walks out, making him jerk and stumble. I glance at Alex, but he keeps his head down. Neither of us says anything. Alex looks up a moment later, then turns to me. “Did you plan that for the moment when he’d be most uncomfortable?”

“
Didn’t really plan it,” I say. “Just seized the moment.”

He grins. “You got a boyfriend?”

Shit, if I say Dev’s my boyfriend, I’ll get myself and Morty in trouble. In the noble moment of coming out, I kind of forgot that. It’s okay, though. If I don’t mention the relationship, we’re cool. I nod, trying to be offhanded. “Saw him this weekend.”

“
Cool,” he says. And bends back to his work.

And that’s it. For Alex, at least. As we’re leaving the office, Morty waves me down. Alex stops along with me. All the things Morty said about being in trouble come rushing back to me. Shit. Did I just get him fired?

Morty smells like cigarette smoke and I don’t think he’s washed his shirt in a few days. The Dragons’ poor performance is weighing on him, or else he’s on the outs with the wife again. “Hey,” he says, one eye on Alex. “I heard about your...talk with Paul.”

“
Alex was there,” I say.

“
He said something about HR?”

I shake my head. “He didn’t coerce me or harass me or make me feel uncomfortable. It just felt like the right time.”

Morty grumbles. “Wish you’d warned me.”

“
If I’d called to warn you while he was standing there, it would’ve spoiled the surprise. Did he come complain about working with the faggot?”

Morty picks his teeth with a claw, then retracts it. “No. Not much, anyway. He’s just paranoid he said something you’re gonna sue him for.”

“
I told him I wouldn’t.”

He glances at Alex, who nods. Morty sighs. “Your timing kinda sucks. Three of our draft picks from last year ain’t done squat but cash our checks. Meanwhile, this fuckin’ Coberton looks like he’s gonna be Rookie of the Year, and we specifically told ’em to pass on him.”

“
Bennett’s gonna be better in two years,” I say, with more confidence than I actually feel. Behind me, Alex agrees.

“
Good. Hope whoever’s runnin’ scouting then appreciates it.” Morty raises a paw. “See you guys later. Lee, I told HR you told me first, then the other scouts. Hope you don’t mind.”

“
I figured Paul would’ve told everyone.”

“
He kinda did.” Morty coughs and chuckles. “Asked the bears if they knew someone who was gay. They said no, and he said, don’t be so sure. Then he gave them three guesses to figure out which of their co-workers he was talking about.”

“
See, that’s something he could get in trouble with HR for. Revealing personal information about a co-worker.” I hold up a paw. “Like I said. I expected that telling Paul was the same as telling the whole group.”

“
I calmed him down,” Morty says. “I think he gets that it’s no big deal. Just take it easy for a couple days. Though if it gets people talkin’ about anything other than the fuckin’ rookies this year…” He scratches his cheek. “I got a meeting with Campbell tomorrow. Think you can show up and come out to him? Might distract him from our piss-poor performance on the field.”

“
It wasn’t that bad,” I say.

“
Did you watch the third quarter?” Morty rolls his eyes. “Don’t know why we’re sending cornerbacks onto the field at all.”

“
I meant my coming-out.” I grin, my tail swishing. Morty rolls his eyes and heads back to his office.

Alex and I walk out into the parking lot. “I think I might actually survive this,” I say.

“
I wonder if one of the bears guessed me first,” Alex says. He folds his ears down against the wind.

“
You?”

“
Yeah, you know. Kickers.” He shrugs and shoulder-bumps me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“
I would’ve.” My tail wags. “You first, of anyone. I just didn’t know how it’d go. You know, you can’t exactly start a conversation with ‘hey, guess what?’.”

“
Could’ve said, ‘I saw my boyfriend this weekend.’”

I shoulder-bump him back. “It’s just hard to break the inertia.”

“
You and your fancy college-words.” He snorts, reaching for his keys. “So what did?”

I sigh. “It was a rough weekend. Made me think about stuff.”

Alex pauses, key in the lock of his car. He looks back at me. “You wanna get a drink?”

I’m itching to call Dev. But Alex looks like he really means it. “Sure,” I say.

We only hang out for an hour. I don’t tell him who my boyfriend is, but I talk to him about the issues with the parents. I talk to him about the long-distance relationship. He sympathizes, telling me about the time he dated a mouse and his parents freaked out about it. I tell him a bit about my parents, too, and we talk about gay marriage. Then he has to go home to his wife, and I have to go home to my takeout dinner and my phone call with my tiger.

Dev laughs when I tell him about my day. “Jealous of all my drama?” He tells me about his day of practice, a rough Monday because it comes on the heels of a game day. Everyone’s still beat up from the game. His ribs are feeling better, enough to hold off Corey for another week, it sounds like. He got a new phone—“I saw that coyote again, and he really recognized me this time”—but hasn’t called his mom yet. It doesn’t sound like he will.

When we hang up, I look at my phone again. I call up his parents’ number and stare at it. Then I put the phone down.

The team meeting the next day is interesting. Paul doesn’t say anything, not directly. Twice he starts to say, “That f—” and changes it to “fucker.” Which, if not more appropriate, is at least less directed. I feel I’ve done some good. I talk about my players, the few really good prospects I see. As the meeting winds down, we start talking about the Dragons. In deference to the formal setting, we dance uncomfortably around the crappiness of the current team, and talk about the bright spots: which players need time to develop, which ones are showing promise on the second and third teams.

The meeting ends without any mention of my little news, or any acknowledgment from anyone, unless you count Paul’s eyes getting a little wide whenever he has to address me directly. That’s only the first half of the meeting, though. When I make another crack about his antlers, his annoyance overwhelms his discomfort. I grin at him, and he scowls.

One of the bears, though, steps up to me as we’re leaving the room. “Hey, you know,” he says as we walk down the hall. Alex, in front of us, swivels his ears. “I know a gay guy. Runs the grocery store down the street. You know him? Lex? He’s a ringtail.”

“
Gee, I dunno.” I pretend to think. “I’ll look him up in the directory.”

I actually take out my phone and play with it for a bit before he catches on. To his credit, he laughs and flicks his ears back. “Pretty dumb,” he says. “Sorry.”

“
Hey,” I say, “look, I know it’s weird. I’m cool with questions, whatever. Just to make it less freaky for you.”

He scratches his ear. “Uh...”

“
I’m not going to answer anything about ‘what we do in bed,’ though.”

“
I wasn’t gonna ask,” he says, so defensively that I feel sure he was. What the hell is it with jocks and wanting to know who’s on top? Paul, with his “guys fuck things,” and Mikhail’s “doesn’t matter what a boy sticks his dick in.”

And that gives me an idea. I miss what the bear says next, and have to ask him to repeat it. “Look, if you were wondering, it’s cool. I mean, I don’t get it, personally, but long as you don’t, like, make a pass at me or anything.”

“
No worries,” I say, perhaps a little too quickly, because Alex stifles a chuckle.

“
What is it,” I ask him later, in our office, “that makes jocks think that gay guys all want to make a pass at them?”

Alex snorts. “We think about our bodies all the time. We can’t imagine that everybody else doesn’t, too.”

I laugh. “I spend a lot of time thinking about my body.”

“
It’s different when you’re an athlete. No offense, but...”

“
No, I know.” To be fair, I spend a lot of time thinking about Dev’s body, too. “What did you think about Paul’s whole ‘guys do this’ thing?”

He grins, showing his prominent incisors. “All I can tell you is I don’t want nothin’ jammed up
my
ass. Maybe that’s what he’s thinkin’. Guys like Paul are old school, y’know. Beef, beer, and boobs.”

I grin back, with fangs. “Yeah. We don’t fit into their paradigm.”

Alex raises an eyebrow. “It probably doesn’t help when you say shit like ‘paradigm.’”

“
Oh, I know he makes fun of that. He did it in an e-mail once.”

But the thing I keep coming back to is that Paul relaxed when I started teasing him again. When I fell back into the pattern we’d had before. When I acted like nothing was different. The question is, how do I do that with Dev’s father, when we didn’t
have
a relationship before this? How can Dev do that with his father, when his father’s cut off all contact?

I turn over my idea. I think it will probably work. But I need to go about it carefully, because I’ll only get one chance at it.

Like Dev, fortunately, I can lose myself in football, watching film, going back to previous weeks when a player appears to come out of nowhere to see if it really is out of nowhere, researching injuries and other reasons previously high prospects might have tanked. Uniforms and numbers blur by the end of the day, until Alex punches me on the shoulder and reminds me to go home.

It’s Tuesday night before I realize that I haven’t heard anything on the sports networks about the tabloid story. Could it be that I was right, that nobody paid attention to it? The thought makes me want to fly to wherever Ogleby is and strangle him. If not for him, we might not have had to go through any of this. If he hadn’t made a big deal out of Brian’s blog outing Dev, the last month might have been much calmer. Dev might be going home for Thanksgiving.

Then again, I think, lying back in bed, is it such a bad thing? Dev’s out and he hasn’t been cut from the team, or speared by an opposing player. Gerrard and his wife were pretty cool, and so was Vonni; Fisher is too, and Gena is warming up to me, I think because I called and asked about Fisher in the hospital.

One of the things my father always told me foxes did best was roll with the changes. Make our own luck. At least, he used to tell me that when I was a cub. I didn’t hear it when I was trying to do just that coming out of college, abandoning my degree for my job scouting football. And I haven’t heard it lately. Lately he’s surrendered to circumstance, forgetting that we Farrels, at least, are quick thinkers and speakers, relying on our brains and tongues to get us out of trouble. Though in my case, at least, my tongue’s gotten me into trouble more recently than it’s gotten me out.

So I call Kinnel, to vent some of that frustration. “What kind of fucking hack job did you let them do on that story?” I start with. I know he’s not responsible, but I want him on the defensive.

“
Whoa,” he says. “I ain’t even seen it.” Which is a lie, I’m sure. “What’d they write?”

So I tell him. Predictably, he denies any involvement in it, and apologizes conditionally. “That’s what tabloids do,” he says. “That’s why they get the big circulation, that’s why they pay.”