Uncovered (Dev and Lee Book 4) (4 page)

“Oh, well, that’s me in the shower.” He rubs his muzzle. “Or the Floral Times ad? I’m the husband who comes in with the load of dead fish?”

I shake my head. “Sorry.”

“Ah, it’s okay.” His ears go down for a bit, then come up. “Beer ad, though. Whole new market.”

“Right.” I glance over to where it looks like Strike has his paws inside the leopard girl’s robe.

Keith follows my look. “Yeah,” he says, and comes over to stand next to me. “You okay with this?”

“I guess I have to be.” I force a grin and stop my tail from lashing. “What should I do?”

“Well, you’ve put your arm around your boyfriend, right?”

“Um.” I don’t know if I want to be having Lee-thoughts when I’m in a commercial.

Keith’s patient. “Okay. You hug other guys on the team?”

“Sure.”

“So just think of me as a teammate.”

I try, but he’s really slender for a football player, and a little short. I wait for him to make a move, but he’s just standing there, so I drape an arm over his shoulder. Immediately he slides his paw around my lower back and holds me against him.

It’s a weird feeling, because yeah, I hug my teammates, but I don’t
hold
the hugs. I hold hugs with family members, but as this one goes on, it surpasses any family hug and lands firmly in the territory of hugs I’ve only shared in the last few years with Lee.

And Keith is close to Lee’s build; he’s slender, if not quite
that
slender. His tail is naturally shorter and a little better managed (I would never in a million years tell Lee that), and he definitely smells different and talks less. He does feel sort of similar against me, or if not similar in a physical way, similar in the casual ease of his embrace. Because he’s comfortable, I relax until I wonder what it means that I’m feeling comfortable hugging another guy. Does this mean I could just get close to anyone who’s willing to get close to me? The Firebirds t-shirt I’m wearing feels warm where he’s pressed against it, and even where he’s not.

“Devlin? Do you go by Devlin?”

He’s got blue eyes that remind me of Lee at first, but as I look more closely, I see that they have a green cast that Lee’s don’t have. The difference calms me a little. “Uh, yeah. That’s fine.”

“Okay, Devlin, you’re a little tense here. Let me just try this.” And he takes the paw I have resting on his shoulder and moves it down, below his arm, curled around his chest. He’s got some muscles, and I find myself thinking that maybe Lee ought to work out more. Then I dismiss that. Lee’s fine the way he is, and I love him.

The weirdness of having my arm around another guy doesn’t go away, but I do get used to it over the next fifteen minutes. And Keith helps a lot. “I’m a part-time masseur,” he says, and puts his paws on my shoulders and then my hips, telling me where to relax. At first, that doesn’t help, but when he takes his paws away and I can focus on the spots and not his touch, I am able to relax a little more. It reduces the weirdness I felt about being “the gay guy.” While it’s not as reassuring as being with Lee, it’s better than being alone.

“Hey,” Strike says. He and Iva look like they’ve been going out for years. His head’s almost resting on hers, his left paw’s firm around her back, and his right paw rests on her stomach. “You having fun over there?”

I still feel awkward, but I grin. “Sure.” I wish they’d just put us on stage and get it over with.

“Okay,” Keith says. “Now let’s work on your smile.”

“You’re not a director,” Iva informs him.

“I don’t see Hemmler over here, so I’m going to help him work on his smile, if that’s all right with you.”

She sniffs and turns back to Strike. Keith lowers his voice. “Bitch,” he says. “Now try to imagine something you’re happy about, if you don’t like putting your arm around me.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” I say.

“I know, I know. It’s awkward. We just met. So imagine I’m your boyfriend. What is he?”

“Fox.”

“Oh, good, so that isn’t too far off. Just imagine bigger ears and a longer tail.” He flicks his ears with a grin. “You don’t have to imagine anything else.”

Lee’s much more than just ears and tail, but I don’t say that. I don't want to think about Lee while I'm holding Keith, so the first thing I imagine to make myself smile is intercepting the ball against Hellentown, preferably right in front of that fox, Eighty-Three. I see it in front of me, my paws closing around it, hear his angry grunt as he swipes at me. I see my teammates swarming around me, feel that glow in my chest from knowing I can do something well, knowing that in that moment I’m better than anyone else on the field. Then of course, I imagine Lee watching, jumping up and down in the stands, and from there, it’s not a big jump to Lee watching this commercial, getting excited about a major (well, fairly major) beer company asking me to be gay on national TV, putting their money behind an athlete hugging another guy. I imagine that kid he was so worried about maybe watching the ad and thinking that gay guys can get beer commercials and be successful too. I think about Lee coming up to me after the commercial and saying that I can wait until the off-season to do those other gay rights spots, that this is actually enough, and it’s something I got paid for. I imagine cashing that check for however much it’s going to be after Ogleby’s cut.

Thinking about Ogleby reminds me of the two extra Ultimate Fit commercials I have to do because he screwed up the contract, which endangers my smile, so I focus back on this commercial. I’ve got my arm around Keith and his body is warm and close and he does kind of remind me of Lee. That seems to work pretty well, because after a few minutes Keith says, “Great, that’s great. It really looks like you’re happy to be with me here.”

“I am,” I say, “It’s just…”

He holds up a paw. “You’re not an actor. I know. It’s okay. Didn’t that other commercial have you do anything?”

“Just run around in tight clothes.”

“Oh.” He nods. “One of those.”

My stomach rumbles a little; I haven’t eaten since before the plane flight. It’s not loud, but Keith feels it and grins. “You want something to eat?”

“No, I’m good…”

“Come on.” His arm slips away from my waist; I follow him over to the catering table. Strike and Iva trail behind us, which I think is going to be great because Strike’s not going to find anything to eat here, but to my surprise, the table has mini-veggie wraps and skewers of roasted vegetables in addition to cold sandwiches, energy bars, apples, bananas, and cookies. Strike grabs a veggie wrap; I take an energy bar, partly just to tweak him. But he doesn’t seem to notice, just starts talking to Iva about his diet and how his body is a temple and so on and so forth.

Keith, meanwhile, takes one of the energy bars too. I look toward the stage, which to me looks exactly like it did when I walked in. “So I thought it was only going to be another ten minutes,” I say.

He laughs. “It’s always ‘another ten minutes,’ until it’s ‘right now!’” He eyes the crew and then checks his phone to see that it’s almost eleven. “We’re supposed to wrap by one, so I’d say probably they’ll need to get going by quarter after.”

“Oh, okay.” I look at a pair of raccoons farther down the table, idly chatting while they eat cookies, and a weasel rushing back and forth between the stage and the director. It’s so different from football practices, where everyone knows where he has to be and everyone except the kickers is always doing something. “So, you have a boyfriend?”

Keith grins that perfect smile at me again. “Oh, I’m not gay,” he says.

I stare at him. “But…” Those paws that were just on my hips, wrapped so securely around me…

He shakes his head. “I’m an actor.” The smile gets wider. “I’ll take it as a compliment that I was able to convince you that I’m gay. I guess the TV audiences won’t be able to tell either.”

Just like that, I’m back to being the only gay one. “Aren’t you…aren’t you worried about people thinking you’re gay when you show up on TV?”

His head tilts back with a musical laugh. “I wish! You know what kind of parts a guy who’s willing to play gay roles will get? Like every year there’s a Best Actor nominee from a ‘thoughtful gay movie.’ And if it’s a straight guy playing the role, then people are even more impressed. Because there’s going to be gay love scenes, you know, so if I can act well in those…” He holds up a paw with crossed fingers. “Course, I have to get smaller roles first. Get the attention of some good directors. I dunno.” He laughs. “I guess it’s the same with you, right? You don’t just start out like, Devlin Miski, superstar.”

“He’s more the superstar.” I jerk a thumb over toward Strike.

Keith gives the cheetah a thoughtful look. “Well, he knows a lot about keeping his image up, right? I mean, for me to hear about him, he’s got to be getting his name out into non-sports places. That’s one of the things about acting: you have to just take a bunch of different jobs. The more things you do, the more chance you have of being seen.”

“Football is a lot more focused. Well, I mean, I started out on special teams—that’s the guys who only play on kicks and returns, field goals, things like that—and I got a starting spot when the guy ahead of me got injured.”

“Then you proved you could handle it, right? What happened to the guy who got injured? Still hurt?”

I shake my head. “We traded him for that guy.” Again, I jerk my thumb toward Strike.

“Huh.” Keith grins. “Well, there’s so many different jobs for actors that I guess it can be kind of the same thing, but it’s more like if I happen to be available one day when, say, Bennie Rays is doing another project, I might get that spot. Then if I do well, people will notice. But if I screw up, the phone might not ring for months.”

“Yeah.” I think about how quickly Corey was traded after his asshole stunt breaking that deer’s leg. “Same thing kinda goes with us.”

Charisse comes running back over. “They’re ready for you,” she says to me and Keith, and I think,
finally
. I give her my iPhone and ask if she can take some pictures of me during makeup and the commercial to show Lee. When she’s done admiring the phone, she reminds me that the contract I signed means I can’t talk about the commercial or distribute pictures of it until after it airs, and that she isn’t even sure she’s allowed to take pictures, so she has to go talk to the director while I head for the stage, not wanting to hold them up if they’re ready.

But “ready for you” turns out to mean that they want me to sit in a chair for twenty minutes while they brush out my fur, examine it under lights, apply tint to it, get some of the tint in my eye, apologize, make me take off my Firebirds t-shirt, bring out three Firebirds polo shirts for me to choose from while I’m sitting there shirtless, apologize for the tint in my eye again, dress me in the shirt, and then take the shirt off when the director comes over and says, “Get that off him.”

All the while, the makeup people are oohing and aahing over Strike’s fur, asking him where he gets it done, and he’s preening in the attention. He doesn’t get his shirt taken off, so I guess whatever he was wearing was fine, and meanwhile I’m sitting patiently in the chair while they decide between the remaining two polo shirts, and the head of makeup, a female raccoon, keeps saying things like, “the shorter sleeves on this one will really accent his muscles” and “we really want his chest to show.”

Keith says, “Why not have him do it shirtless?” and that leads to Iva sniping at him again.

“Jesus Dog, people,” the director, a grey wolf who reminds me of Coach Samuelson, says when he comes back over and I’m still shirtless. “What the hell is going on? No, not that shirt either,” as the raccoon brandishes a shirt at his muzzle. “We don’t have permission to use the logo.”

“I…” The raccoon stares at the shirt in her paw. “I thought…Kevin told me…”

The wolf clutches his cheekruffs. “Kevin was reassigned. You’re killing me.
Killing me!
What’s that one?”

He points to my discarded t-shirt. I hold it up to show him the Firebirds logo, and his ears flatten. “Shirtless,” he says. “In two.”

He stalks off, while Keith murmurs in my ear, “You look better that way anyway.”

“I thought you weren’t gay,” I mutter back as the makeup team descends on me again, brushing out my chest fur, applying finishing touches to my muzzle, apologizing one last time for the tint in my eye.

“Hey,” Strike says. “If he’s shirtless, I want to be, too.” So we wait another five minutes while he takes his shirt off and they touch up his fur.

After all that, the filming of the actual commercial takes only about thirty-five minutes. It goes something like this: Strike says, “A football team is made up of offense,” and then I say, “and defense.” And then Strike says, “But no matter what side of the ball you’re on, you work up a big thirst.”

Then I hold up the beer bottle, which just has water in it, and I say, “On defense, we drink Strongwell.” And I look at Strike, and he says, “Hey, we drink that on offense, too.”

I have to say, Strike is a lot more natural than I am. He gets most of his lines in three takes, whereas it takes me that many just to get one that sounds natural to
me
, and then four or five more of the director saying, “That was great, Dev, just great, it was perfect, let’s have one more and try to keep your ears up this time.”