Over Time

by Kyell Gold

  “It’s nothing more or less than most wives go through. I didn’t know it then. I thought I was special, and I was ashamed to talk about it with the other wives. We weren’t all that close anyway. It wasn’t until a couple years later at Pelagia that I found out that it happens a lot with football players.” She sips and looks over her glass at me. “That’s where I met Felice, my friend who’s coming in Friday for the weekend. She’s Alex Forcetti’s ex-wife—he was cheating on her, too, and—sorry. It doesn’t happen with everyone. I’m sure Dev won’t…”

  But I’m already remembering Vonni and the blow job he got at the club just months after his wedding, how it wasn’t a big deal for him. I’m remembering all the groupies sitting in the lobby of the hotel and how improbable it would be that all of them would be only going to the single guys on the team. That lifestyle is something that comes with the money and glamor of being an athlete.

  Dev is different; he never came up as a star, and so he doesn’t have the entitlement complex that a lot of his teammates do. By the time a guy gets to the UFL, he’s been one of the top players in college and probably in high school, and he’s used to getting anything he wants. Sometimes, like Fisher, they grow up—sooner or later. Sometimes, like Lightning Strike, they never do. Dev, I think, has grown up a lot, but has he grown up enough?

  Well, maybe in a month it won’t matter. Maybe we’d be better off if we just agreed we would fuck when we’re together and when we’re not, all bets are off. That thought doesn’t sit well with me, though, so I change the subject. I feel a little uneasy discussing Fisher when he’s right there in the den, so instead I ask Gena how she likes the Firebirds wives after two years.

  We both like Angela, Gerrard’s wife, who is a sweet homemaker. “I know what it’s like raising two boys,” Gena says, “and she’s just getting to the hard part.”

  I chuckle. “One was enough for my parents. I think if they’d had another they would’ve killed one of us.”

  “Oh, no. Angela and I both feel that two is the right number. They get each other in trouble, but they also look out for each other.”

  Of course, Dev has a brother, and the two of them don’t exactly look out for each other. But I just go on making conversation with Gena until Fisher comes out of the den. “Where’s Dev?” he asks, interrupting our conversation. “I thought he was going to be here.”

  “He’s coming later.” Gena scrambles to her feet. The change in her demeanor makes my ears flatten. From the relaxed, confident lady I’d been talking to, she’s transformed in a moment into a tense, worried wife with wrinkles along her forehead and a twitch to the end of her tail. “Is there anything you need?”

  The big tiger’s gaze drops to me. “No. I just want to talk to Dev.”

  “He signed with Damian,” I say, trying to be friendly.

  The words have the wrong effect. “Damian! That asshole. I should never have—” Fisher swipes at a curtain, tearing it. Gena winces. “I should go back to Leroy. That guy knew how to take care of a football player.”

  “He was cheating you out of hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Gena says steadily.

  “Who? Leroy?” Fisher looks confused. “The hell he was.”

  “You fired him for it.”

  “I fired him?”

  Gena nods. “Your last year in Highbourne.”

  The big tiger’s eyes widen and he looks out at the patio as though just now realizing where he is. He growls and kicks at a nearby side table, sending it toppling over. The picture of their family that was resting on it hits the carpet at the wrong angle, and a sharp crack announces the shattering of the glass. Gena jumps and I startle, my tail bristling up.

  “Shit.” Fisher stares down.

  Gena holds up a paw. “I’ll clean it up. Just…go back to the den. I’ll bring you some iced tea.”

  “I want a beer.”

  “All right. I’ll get you a beer. Just go sit down and we’ll figure out when Dev is coming.”

  He goes back to the den. When the door closes, I say, “I can clean up the glass.”

  I think Gena would normally refuse, but she just says a distracted, “Thanks,” so as she gets the non-alcoholic beer from the fridge and pours it into a glass so Fisher won’t see the bottle, I spend a few moments picking glass out of the carpet. There are only a few pieces, and when I’m done I ask Gena for the vacuum and run it over the spot to make sure. She stands to the side, her tail twitching.

  With the vacuum running and the den door closed, I’m more confident about talking. “That guy from the Firebirds…Elmsley. You ever think about calling him?”

  She shakes her head. I can’t read her expression. “Maybe you should,” I say. “Just in case. I mean, he told me to call if things went bad with Dev…”

  “Every team has a Lake, or an Elmsley,” she says. “I called the one at Highbourne. Fisher had been cheating and we’d fought. He threw a lamp at me.”

  I stop moving the vacuum and just stare at her. She nods slowly. “It didn’t hit me, but still, I was scared. But that was the first time, and the last. He came back and apologized the next day. I think he scared himself, too. He promised to stop cheating, to never hurt me, and I told him the next time he threw something or hit me that I’d call the police. And he hasn’t. Until now. He’s scared again.”

  “So what did the Elmsley at Highbourne say?”

  Her tone sharpens. “His name was Jake. He told me not to call the police, that the team would talk to him and they’d work things out. And he told me that if I called the police, then things would be out of the team’s hands and I might lose a lot of friends.”

  I suck in a breath. “Seriously?”

  She nods. “And it worked, too. I was too scared to call the police, worried about everything I might lose. Looking back…I should have called them anyway. There was no way I could’ve known he’d actually change. What if he kept doing it and getting worse? I know a couple wives that happened to, until they left. They never called the police either.” She meets my eyes. “You’re lucky with Dev. I don’t think he’d ever hurt you.”

  “No,” I say, and I go back to vacuuming. But Dev did hit me the one time, years ago at the combine. He hasn’t since, but if he did, if the stress gets to him and that ugly side comes out again, I won’t have the team to count on. As long as it took them to embrace me as his boyfriend, they’ll drop me in a second if I’m a threat to the image of one of their players—and by association, their team.

  Still, I’m not nearly as worried about Dev as I am about Gena. Fisher’s a good guy, but just because he’s been restrained thus far doesn’t mean he’ll continue to be, especially as the stresses of his memory loss and the situation with the Firebirds continue to get worse. I had planned to go home with Dev, but now I wonder whether I should try to stick around for a night until she finds a live-in nurse. I’m not under the illusion that I can do anything other than call 911 if Fisher becomes violent, but maybe my presence as a guest will give him an extra incentive to behave well.

  The boys come home as I’m finishing up, and everything is chaos for a while. They’re not sure why I’m there or why I’m vacuuming, but once Bradley goes up to his room, Junior invites me to play FBA Basketball with him.

  I’m not very good, which is perfect, because it gives him the chance to teach me some of the game. He’s a nice kid; he gives me the Bikers, a great team, and he coaches me on how to play. I still don’t beat him, but we have a couple fun hours.

  That’s when Dev calls and I tell him to come over for dinner. I think it would do Fisher good to have someone else to talk to. I’m curious about Dev’s agent, too, wondering what’s going on with him and Fisher.

  Gena comes out into the living room as I’m wrapping up the call and puts her paws on her hips. “If you boys have nothing better to do than play games, you can help me fix dinner.” To me, in a less sharp voice, she asks, “Is Devlin coming?”

  Junior gulps and mutters something about homewo
rk and runs upstairs before I finish nodding my head. I smile and get up from the floor in front of the couch. “I’ll help. I like cooking.”

  She puts me to work cutting green beans while she seasons ground beef. In the middle of that, Dev shows up with my offer letter from Yerba, so Gena and I wash our paws and the two of them crowd around me as I open it. I show them the signature from Peter Emmanuel and the one from the owner, Michaela Martinet, and they can’t help but see the salary offer as well.

  “That’s all?” Dev wrinkles his nose. He’s been a little quiet since he arrived.

  “It’s a good salary.” I shove the letter back in the envelope. “It’s enough to live on in Yerba. You do know that not everyone makes athlete salaries, right?”

  “Yeah, but…” He scratches his ear. “I thought you’d be making…well, you’re part of a football team.”

  “Sure. And I’m not the part that gets on TV or gets merchandise sold or gets his picture on banners outside the stadium. ‘Wiley Farrel, new,’ um,” I pull the letter out to check the title. “New College Scout, Southwestern Region. Whoa. They put me in the Southwest?”

  “He was Eastern Region with the Dragons,” Dev tells Gena.

  “Maybe they did it so you could be closer to Dev.”

  My tiger and I edge a bit closer together, our tails touching behind us. “Maybe. Peter didn’t talk about that. I thought they only had one opening.”

  Still, money aside (it is a good salary, really, and more than I was making with the Dragons), I feel warm and bouncy and wanted all through dinner prep and the dinner itself. There’s a lot of talk and joking about me helping the enemy—Yerba lost the championship game just a couple years ago and I say I’m going to get them back there again, but only after Dev gets a couple rings. Fisher comes out and actually makes conversation throughout the dinner without getting too angry, though we keep the topics away from football. I find myself watching him as subtly as I can, tensing slightly every time he picks up a knife.

  The dinner passes without incident. As soon as we’re finished, he grabs Dev and pulls him off to the den. I help Gena wash dishes and our spirits remain pretty high. I’m reminded of Dev’s family in the way Gena’s just accepted me as part of Dev’s life and a friend of hers, and so when she asks me about my own family, I speak pretty frankly.

  She’s sympathetic about my mom, saying that sometimes it’s hard for someone to recognize change in the people close to them and even harder to accept it once they do see it. I agree, even though Father did an admirable job of changing along with me and we’ve grown closer than ever these past few months.

  When the dishes are done, Gena goes upstairs to check on the boys’ homework and I go sit in the living room. To pass the time, I take out the laptop and look for flights to Yerba, and grab a couple for Friday even though they’re more expensive. Thursday—tomorrow—is cheaper, but I told Gena I’d be around one more day if she needed someone until her friend Felice gets here Friday.

  That reminds me that I still haven’t talked to Fisher about Hal’s article. I bite my lip and wonder whether I want to broach that subject or let Dev do it. My tiger has a better in, but also a lot more to lose if things go south. Probably better that I do it. Maybe tomorrow. I’m sure I can bring up some way to work it into a conversation.

  Gena comes back down as I’m pondering how to do that, and it strikes me that I could ask her about it too. But I don’t want to jump into that because she looks relaxed and relieved as she plops down on the couch, so instead I tell her about our upcoming trip to Yerba. She promises to give me the name of this restaurant she and Felice found when they traveled down there for a game one weekend.

  I’m just about to work my way delicately to Hal’s article when there’s shouting from the hallway, only it’s not Fisher this time. It’s Dev. My ears perk up reflexively and I catch most of the words. “…can’t believe you would do that! You told me not to!”

  The door opens, and now we can hear Fisher as well. “…my age, your priorities change. Call me in ten years and then we’ll see who’s the asshole!”

  “In ten years, if I’ve gone through what you have, I’ll hang up the uniform, and you should too!” Dev stomps out into the hallway and stands at the entrance to the living room, staring at me.

  I shoot a look at Gena as I stand. “Hey,” I say. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I—sorry.” He gives Gena a shake of his head. “I think I better go. You want to come?”

  I pack up the laptop under one arm and turn to Gena. “Are you going to be okay if we go?”

  “I’ll be fine.” She looks toward the den, then at my tiger. “Is he…”

  “He’s stubborn.” Dev’s tail lashes.

  “I can come back tomorrow,” I offer.

  “If you want.” She stands up and straightens her back. “Don’t worry. I know you have to go with Dev. I can handle this.”

  She sounds tired, but confident enough that I really believe her. So I give her a hug, and I say, “Call us right away if you need anything at all. Promise.”

  Dev doesn’t say a word as we walk out to our cars. “What happened?” I say, dropping the laptop into mine. “Or should it wait until we’re home?”

  “Home.” He talks tightly and shakes his head. “I can’t believe he’d—what an idiot. Like nobody would—Lion Christ!” The words explode out of him like fireworks.

  I grab his paw. “You okay to drive home?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” He exhales. “I’ll see you there.”

  I follow his truck all the way home trying not to think about what he found out, and the CD in my car doesn’t really help. I end up tapping my paws on the wheel and thinking a lot about Dev and football players in general. Fisher isn’t just Dev plus twelve years, I remind myself. He’s a different guy, rated highly enough by scouts (like me, again!) that Highbourne grabbed him in the second round. He had a big salary and bonuses from the beginning, the full entitled lifestyle, and he’s been fortunate enough to have had a career that includes two championships and relatively little injury. Two of the years in Pelagia, he was hurt, but only pulled muscles and sprained ankles, things that heal relatively quickly on their own. Not until the Millenport game last year did he have anything serious, and a boar’s tusk tearing up your calf muscle is pretty damn serious.

  Gena and I both thought he was taking steroids to keep up his muscle tone, but Dev wouldn’t have reacted so strongly to Fisher confirming that. It saddened him, but he understands it. Probably a third of the guys he knows take them, and for the guys on the line who have to get bigger, they’re almost an unspoken part of the job. Dev always looked up to Fisher, though, called him a good guy who did things the right way.

  The thing about good guys, moral guys, is that it’s easy to do things the right way when everything works for you, when you win championships and get endorsements and accolades and big eight-figure contracts (and a pretty, compliant wife). A lot of lucky bounces start to look to you like things you deserve. Then when the breaks don’t go your way, when “the right way” doesn’t heal your torn calf muscle (or when your pretty wife becomes less compliant), you…you what? What’s worse than steroids?

  The growth hormones I’ve read about, maybe. For years, people have known that cubs produce hormones that help the body accelerate new cell development; cubs heal quickly partly because their bodies are working overtime to turn this little infant into a full-grown person. A scrape here or there isn’t much more than a speed bump.

  So science, in the enterprising way it has, set about trying to isolate the growth hormone so they could give it to adults to accelerate healing. The article I read on it said that a lot of this was happening in Sonora, just south of where we were in Chevali. Easy for Fisher or someone close to him to get access too: the Sonoran border was only six hours by car.

  If someone found out he was doing that, then yeah, he’d be in big trouble. That’s illegal importing of drugs, possession and use of a controlle
d substance…that’s potentially jail time, even if the league gets involved. But Gena never said anything about trips to Sonora or shady meetings or anything. She just found the bottle labeled Somatotropin and that was it.

  So when I meet Dev in the parking garage, I’m still trying to figure this all out. He doesn’t say anything until we get up to the apartment, where he twists his key in the lock savagely, then kicks the door open.

  “Hey,” I say as I ease it shut behind us. “Calm down. You’re reminding me of Fisher. What’s going on?”

  He closes his eyes, breathes, and collects himself. “You know, he always told me to keep my nose clean, that nothing was worth breaking the law, that I had a promising career that I shouldn’t throw away. And then he goes and…”

  I pull him over to the couch and sit down, surrounded by our scent in our place. “Was it the growth hormone?”

  He shakes his head. “He had a friend, wouldn’t tell me who…I can’t believe he’d do this to himself!”

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  His golden eyes meet mine, and at the pain in them, I just want to hug him. “I gotta tell someone,” he says. “Okay. So when Gena found that bottle? He’d stopped taking it. He took the somato-whatever for a month and then went to the doctor and got the same return schedule he’d had. So he got impatient. He wasn’t sure he’d be at full strength for the playoffs.”

  “Oh, no.” I can already feel how bad this is.

  He takes another breath. “So I guess there’s this new kind of growth hormone shit they’re doing over in Xiaqin. It combines regular growth hormone and growth hormone from wild animals.”

  Ah, shit.

  Not all the species in the world have extant ancestors close enough to do that with. Wild foxes are all over, of course, and coyotes and mice and rats.

  “The first experiments used wild rat hormone with rats—person-rats—and got improved results. So they started making them with other ancestors.”

  “And there are wild tigers in Xiaqin.” I can’t even imagine putting animal hormones into myself. It just sounds insane.