by Kyell Gold
“Okay.” My heart sinks.
“But,” he says, and lets it hang there for a moment. “I’ve also had clients whose relationships enhanced their careers, wives who provided stability and confidence, who attended the meetings with them and helped them make decisions.”
“Oh.”
“What I’m guessing is that you’re going to ask me next how to tell which kind of relationship you have.”
“Something like that.”
“Dev, if I could do that, I wouldn’t be wasting my time making mere millions in the sports agency biz. Here’s my advice for you right now: stay with Lee at least for the next year, because from a business standpoint, you’ve got a high profile relationship and you don’t want to be explaining to the public why you’re not together anymore. Or if you really have to break up, do it in the next couple months before the training camps kick in. I think personally if you were single, you’d get a little more play with the ads, but again, I have no idea. So if you’re doubting whether Lee will help your career…maybe you should focus on that and not what I think.”
“All right.” My voice sounds very small.
“If you need a couples therapist, I can look one up in the area.”
“No, no. We’re fine, thanks. Just…we might be buying a house in Yerba.”
“Okay. That’s a good investment even if you don’t stay together.”
I exhale and close my eyes. “So I’ve heard. Thanks for taking the time to talk.”
“Sure. Let me know about the therapist.”
Lee’s still talking to his father and so I lie back and think. My gut feeling is that I want him by my side. But what’s the chance that something he would do might fuck up my career? What’s the chance that football or the life I’m living will lead to something that’ll make him miserable? What if I don’t have as much self-control when it comes to someone like Argonne in five years? What if I see a pretty tigress? I mean, I chased enough females in college…I might miss it.
Argh, I’m going around in circles about it. I just don’t know. I love him. I don’t want to hurt him. So I focus on what Damian said about the business side of my career. It’s nice to have earned at least enough respect that my salary might double, and it’s nice to think that if I play at the same level next season—why would I not—I could earn even more. Being gay isn’t an issue if you can play. I’m sure Polecki’s not suffering from coming out. I wonder if Cornwall will reconsider staying in the closet. I mean, he plays for Yerba, after all, and if they’re coming after me to sign there, they’d surely be open to another gay player.
But there, the problem isn’t the front office, it’s the team, and Cornwall knows his team better than I do. I wonder if he’d want to come play for Chevali. More likely he’d go to Crystal City to be with Polecki, but would that make things worse? Would guys razz them more as a couple? I sort of feel like that’s how things would go if Lee were a Firebird. It’s already bad enough listening to them talk about the wives and all.
Lee comes into the room and flops next to me, draping an arm across my chest. “Father’s staying in a hotel downtown, and he’s busy all day, but he’s got time for dinner. What was that about other teams?”
I tell him briefly what Damian said, and he nods. “How does it feel to have an actual agent?”
“Pretty good. I won’t lie and say I don’t still feel bad about Ogleby.”
He rolls against me and rests his paw on my stomach. “It’s okay to feel bad. That means you’re a nice guy. I like that about you.”
“And are we going to see Fisher later?”
“I’ll call Gena and see if he’s in shape to get visitors.” He teases his fingers up and down my stomach. “Later.”
I kinda want to stay in bed with him, but the need isn’t that strong, and if he calls Gena now, then there’s no chance she’ll call while we’re occupied. So I shove him in the chest and say, “Call her now.”
He yips and rolls away, and then looks back with mock hurt. “Fine, fine, push me out of bed.” And he really does get up all the way out of bed.
“I didn’t mean,” I start, but he’s got a sly smile going. As he stands up, he brushes down his fur slowly, and then up his sheath and his half-hard cock.
Just like that, the need is stronger. I get up on my elbows, making his smile wider. He curls his tongue out over his lips. “I’ll just go shower first.”
I wait until he’s in the bathroom to run in and pounce him.
When we get to Fisher’s that afternoon, Gena answers the door with a smile and ushers us in. We meet the nurse, a tall cougar who eyes us both with clinical professionalism as if diagnosing us somehow, and then Lee sits down with Gena while I ask what Fisher’s up to and if I can see him.
He’s out on the patio, sitting in the sun with a small laptop computer and a whiteboard. The first thing I notice is how white the bandages around his jaw and head are in the sunlight. Otherwise, he looks normal, eyes closed as though he’s just napping, ears flicking around.
As I come up beside him, his eyes open and he looks up. He makes a noise in his throat, then looks annoyed and writes, Hi, on the whiteboard.
“Hi. How you feeling?”
Shitty. Keep forgetting I can’t talk.
His paw shakes slightly as he writes. Some of the letters look ragged, but then some of them look fine. “Are you in a lot of pain?”
He shakes his head, erases the board, and starts over. Lots of pills.
From the side table next to him, he picks up a glass of water—at least, it looks like water—and inserts the straw into a small space between his lips. I have an odd feeling of looking into my future.
But that’s silly. I mean, Gerrard is almost as old and he’s doing fine.
And one year ago, Fisher seemed fine as well.
Wind rustles the leaves. I can’t figure out a good way to introduce the subject, so I just bull right into it. “Hey, do you think you might want to talk to other retired players?”
He turns in my direction and his paw lifts in a gesture that’s hard to interpret. So I forge ahead. “You know, Lee’s friend Hal, the reporter…he’s writing an article on retired players.” I clear my throat. “There’s a support group.”
Fisher makes the same gesture with his paw, only stronger. This time it registers more clearly as a dismissal. I sit back, but then I think, let me try one more time. “A lot of them are going through injuries, conditions and stuff that their careers left them with. I’m sure some of them are depressed too. It might be good to talk to them.”
He finally stirs and wipes the whiteboard clean. Leave me alone, he writes. I’m fine.
“All right,” I say, and turn, getting up from the seat.
He takes hold of my arm, keeping me in place as he scrawls a few words below the others. What’s going on with the team?
“Don’t know.” I stare at the word “team” and think of Gerrard. “Lee and I have been in Yerba for the past week.”
He asks how that went and I tell him we’re going to buy a house, probably, and he wants to know if I’m going to buy one here too, and that leads to a discussion about whether the Firebirds are going to keep me. I tell him what Damian told me that morning, and he says the Firebirds would be idiots to let me go, which leaves me warmer than the sunlight on my knees.
His tone, scrawled in impermanent marker though it is, reminds me a lot of the old Fisher, the one who came up to me in practice nine months ago and told me I should try to move to linebacker. I guess talking about football and listening to other people’s news is easy for him, but it’s easy to forget when he’s having problems that the Fisher I’m friends with is still in there. But it’s there in the letters on his whiteboard, however shaky, in his scowl and irritation in having to write them, in the concern I can see in his eyes when we discuss my contract.
So I keep the conversation on football and away from his family and his accident. I don’t mention his retirement, and he doesn’t either.
He does once write that he’d like to play with me again, but I don’t know if that’s wishful thinking or if he’s forgotten that he retired. The question gives me a sinking feeling, so I sidestep it.
The nurse comes out about fifteen minutes later to ask if Fisher needs anything. He shakes his head, but his eyelids are drooping, so I leave him to nap in the sun and follow the nurse back inside.
Lee and Gena are sitting on the couch talking about Gerrard and his family situation. I join them for a little while, and then Bradley and Junior get home from school and the house turns chaotic for a while. They both run out to say hi to Fisher, and the nurse has to go out to tell them not to excite him too much. Then they say hi to us and run off to their rooms. Junior doesn’t even look at firing up the FBA game he’d been playing with Lee.
“They’ve both been worried about their father,” Gena says, looking after them. “But they also missed a couple days of school and I told them they had to make up all that work.”
We don’t stay much longer, because we have to go to dinner. “Social butterflies,” Lee says. We both walk out to say good-bye to Fisher, and he stirs from his nap to wave, not even moving to pick up the whiteboard pen.
Brenly looks up over his glasses from the shiny plastic-topped table in the colorful flower-riffic hotel restaurant, and a smile curls up the corners of his mouth when he sees us. He’s got on a collared shirt, open at the collar, and tan slacks, and he looks like he’s been working all day.
Which I guess he has. We sit around the table and Lee lets his dad order wine, and we ask how his day’s gone.
“Good, I suppose. I visited with Carson Omba—”
“Carson’s back?” I interrupt.
Lee gives me a look, while his father smiles and says, “Yes. And Winston, and Angela Marvell.” He hesitates.
“We heard,” Lee says. “She and Gerrard are having difficulties.”
Brenly looks down at the table, his ears flat. “Yes, well. I think that may be somewhat my fault.”
Lee and I both stare at him. “Wha…?” is all I can manage.
“Did you introduce Gerrard to that coyote in Hellentown?” Lee asks faintly.
Brenly shakes his head. “When I took over their finances, I’d gotten their salary info from the Internet to give myself an idea of what sort of packages I’d be proposing to them. They have a lot of options I don’t normally get to consider, and I wanted to be prepared. Then when I got the financial records, to be thorough,” he adjusts his glasses, “I checked the finances against the salaries. For Winston and Carson and Jorge, they all matched up more or less perfectly.” His brow wrinkles. “They don’t have a lot of imagination. They’ve dumped it into savings accounts.”
“They’re trying to play football,” I say.
Lee looks at me. “Didn’t the rookie symposium teach you guys about managing money? You called me after that with all these ideas.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, “and then a week later I was in a minicamp and they got…” The visit to Fisher is recent enough to make me stop myself from saying “knocked out of my head.” I adjust clumsily. “I forgot all of them.”
“You should be okay,” Brenly says. “Especially if you buy the house in Yerba, which is about as solid an investment as you can make. And when you get a bigger contract, we can talk about what else you can do. If you still want to hire me.”
“Of course,” I say without hesitation.
Lee’s tail wags at that. He flashes me a smile and then goes back to his dad. “So what happened with Gerrard?”
“Oh. Well, they were managing their money very sparingly, regular deposits to a money market fund and into the household expenses, but the deposits didn’t match the salary; they were off by about ten thousand a month, a hundred fifty thousand over last season. The other guys are off by a thousand here, a thousand there, and that alarmed me at first, but when I talked to Jorge about it, he said, ‘Oh, I drop a thousand at a nightclub,’ so I bumped up my margin of error. But a hundred fifty thousand…well, Gerrard doesn’t seem like the clubbing type, much less a hundred, hundred fifty nights a year. So I, uh.”
He scratches behind his ears and exhales. Lee can’t let the silence sit for long. “You asked Angela about it.”
“I thought she might have another fund she’d forgotten to tell me about, or that they’d helped out a family member.”
“Well…” Lee lets it hang there.
“Right. So she said she would check into it and get back to me, and she never did. I asked her about it when I visited her today, and she said she was going to assume that she wouldn’t have that money, and then she asked me how much I thought she would get from a divorce settlement.”
“Jesus,” I say.
“Divorce,” Lee sighs. “Already? She knows what athletes do.”
“I asked,” Brenly says. “As tactfully as I could. I mean, I asked whether she was certain she would be getting divorced. She said that he knew the rules and he’d always promised her that she and her family would come first. She seemed to view that as stealing from her cubs.”
We look at each other. “No wonder Gerrard didn’t call you,” Lee says softly. “He blames me for breaking up his family.”
“He blames me,” I say, my chest tight. I think about Mike and—what was the other cub’s name?
“Poor Mike and Jaren,” Lee says. “I wonder how much she’s told them.”
“The only thing preventing me from feeling like a total shit about this is that Angela said they’re used to their father not being around much,” Brenly says. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her many questions. I talked about my divorce and recommended a lawyer; she didn’t have one.”
“You shouldn’t feel bad.” Lee leans toward his father. “Gerrard did the cheating.”
“That’s not how ‘feeling bad’ works.” His father adjusts his glasses. “Just the word ‘divorce’ brings up a lot of the feelings and issues from the last few years. It’s worse because Angela is trying to shut out her feelings, and I don’t know her well enough to tell her that that just prolongs the time it takes to deal with them. So I get to go back through a mini-recital of all my feelings at the time too.”
Lee stares down at his plate, and I feel bad for him, so I try to move the subject away from his parents’ divorce. “So they’re not even going to try to work things out?”
Brenly spreads his paws. “Maybe the divorce lawyer is just a tactic. But she seemed serious about it. She said that she wanted her home and her cubs, and that if Gerrard was going to be a part-time father, then she’d rather that be official.”
“Seems extreme.” Lee rubs his muzzle. “I bet there’s other stuff going on.”
“Maybe,” Brenly says. “I didn’t get that deep into the conversation. It’s not really my business. She mentioned calling the Firebirds liaison guy…”
“Elmsley?” Lee’s ears go up.
“That’s it. She said he told her to do nothing and the team would look into it. That didn’t sit real well with her. She told him off.”
“Whew.” I shake my head and take a drink of the wine. It’s a little sharper than the whites Lee usually orders, but not too bad. I roll it over my tongue. “I’m going to see him tomorrow for the workout, so I guess I’ll see if he’s doing okay.”
We go on to talk about our trip to Yerba, and Brenly wants to see the houses we looked at, so Lee takes out his phone and flips through the photos.
It’s neat looking through them and talking about them as a couple, but now I’m looking at the kitchen and the staged bedrooms and living room in a flat, scentless way. They’re the imagination of some agent who sets them up to appeal to the broadest possible crowd of people, of course. While we were walking through the house, we could ignore that and focus on the space, but in the photos the house doesn’t look like ours, and all the doubts about our faithfulness and temptations creep back around the edges of my mind.
I don’t want to dwell on them, though. So while
we’re eating (the food is presented as elegantly as at the French restaurant, though it’s not as good), I talk with Lee and Brenly about our visit up to Forester. Lee fills his father in on Gregory and our agenda for visiting, and that’s not much better than me thinking about Lee cheating on me. I clench my teeth and chew my food with hard, fast movements. With Fisher’s crisis and Ty’s surprise, I’d sort of pushed Gregory to the back of my mind, but now he jumps back. He hasn’t gotten in touch with me to apologize; my parents haven’t called me to arrange anything, and as I finish up my cut of steak, my stomach twists with the worry over seeing them all again. Maybe I will end up cutting him out of my life. Maybe I’ve already started.
And then my fox drops something I hadn’t known, something that shoves Gregory back into the background. “I was thinking about visiting Mother,” Lee says.
Again, the table quiets. Brenly says, “Did you want me to come along?”
“Maybe? I promise not to shout at her this time. It’ll be easier without that otter there.”
“Why do you want to visit?”
Lee scrapes his fork around his plate. “To talk to her. And to try to get some of my stuff out of my room. I don’t want all of it—she can keep some of it if she wants. But there are a couple things maybe I’d like to have.”
And he wants to know exactly what was burned. He hasn’t told me that, but I can read it. I think maybe Brenly can, too. “I think it’s a nice thought and I’m sure Eileen will appreciate it.”
“I’ll give her a call before we come by,” Lee says.
Brenly turns to me. “It’s nice that you’re doing this thing with Forester,” he says. “Have you thought about including parents as well?”
“It’s open to everyone,” I say. I wonder whether my parents will attend. I wonder whether they would’ve attended something like that when I was a student.
“Right,” he says, “but you could reach out to parents specifically. I think there’s a ‘parents of Forester students’ mailing that I still get occasionally.”