by Kyell Gold
I wriggle against him, but now he has both arms around me and he mouths my ear, rumbling, “You cannot escape me,” and I giggle and squirm, making sure my rear rubs against his boxers, where I can feel him ready. And when the boxers come off and we get down to it, I’m not all that careful about where we get the lube, or what parts of the floor I get sticky. They’re going to use every penny of that descenting fee.
I make sure not to come on the bed, though. I mean, we have to sleep there.
Lying next to him, his breathing regular, his chest rising and falling, one great paw resting on my thigh, my thoughts turn to our month. All this thinking about what makes a family and I still don’t know whether Dev and I would make a good one. We fight a lot, but the fights are fun, except when they’re not. Maybe this whole month idea was a mistake. After all, it’s the off-season, we’re both happy to be together again after the two weeks off, and we’ve been busy with Fisher, with Gerrard, with Ty, and with our respective sets of parents.
The sheets are warm with our shared body heat and the ceiling is patterned in shadow. I imagine lying in a bed in our house in three years, five years, ten years. Isn’t that why you stay with someone? Because you see a future with them? I picture Dev lying beside me after I’ve been with the Whalers and he with the Firebirds another three years, if he takes a contract offer this offseason, or another four or five if he waits until next year. Maybe each of us will have won a championship by then; maybe neither. Maybe we’ll have had another big fight. Am I still active in gay rights? Have I lost myself in football again, the way I did with the Dragons?
I know what my heart says. My heart doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here. I know how amazing Dev is, how much he’s done for me and for himself, and how much he’s improved my life. But I keep coming back to my particular talent for fucking things up. Even after three years, more or less, I’m not sure he knows how to deal with it. But that’s who we are, right? Me the troublemaking fox and him the focused tiger.
Salim’s words come back to me, about the kinds of people in the world. I think neither Dev nor me is immovable, but I don’t know if that’s enough.
So what my question comes down to is: do I think I can stop myself from fucking this up?
23
Brother In Law (Dev)
I’m yawning and stretching in bed, and Lee’s already out of it, sitting naked on one of the chairs by the window—not the one I bent him over the night before. He’s got his nose to the break in the curtain, and the bright crack of sunlight in the dark room illuminates the tousled russet fur between his chocolate-brown ears. Where the sun doesn’t hit his ears, they turn black and disappear into shadow. Below the curve of his legs and the shadowy outlines of his similarly dark feet, I see the white tip of his tail twitching restlessly. I lift my head. “Taking in the, what did you call it, ‘industrial wasteland’?”
He turns so that the daylight catches one of his blue eyes. “It’s pretty under the snow. You can’t tell how ugly the buildings or the asphalt are. Except where the cars have gone.”
“That’s one thing I miss about winter.” I don’t particularly want to get out of the warm bed. “The snow was pretty.”
“It melts eventually,” he says.
“In Lake Handerson, there’s an abandoned train depot where they plow all the snow, and there’s a big pile that lasts until June.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Remember the lot behind the abandoned Ark-Mart? About a mile from Forester?”
I shake my head. “Never went there.”
“Ah.” His white teeth flash sharp in the light. “We used to go have snowball fights there in May. Great fun.”
“We should go,” I say, and then laugh. “I guess now it’s nothing special.”
“Now we could probably go sledding down the pile of snow there,” he says. “I did that once or twice with…friends.”
Brian, I think, but I let it go. “What time is it?”
“Eight.” He yawns and looks back outside. “Pretty day.”
“I guess we should shower soon.” Mom said she’d have breakfast on the table at nine, and Dad was annoyed that it would be that late. Usually he wants to be at the garage by quarter to eight, and even on a Sunday he likes to keep those hours. But I told Mom that I was not getting up at six in the morning while I was on vacation, and anyway it was going to take Gregory two hours to drive here from Gateway.
He wriggles around in the chair before getting up. “Jesus, Lee,” I say, grinning. “It was twenty-five dollars.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. They’ve got fabrics that are easier to treat now, they’ve got Neutra-Scent. It’s a hold-over from the days when strong-scented people weren’t welcome in polite parlors.”
He walks over as he talks, finishing up by bending over my side of the bed. I scoot backwards to make room for him to sit. “I know,” I say. “I learned about the Great Odor Rebellion of 1881.”
“Ha.” A smile plays across his muzzle. “No, the annoying thing is that this isn’t even one of the places where foxes and skunks and weasels were kept to the ‘smelly’ parts of town. It’s just this hotel chain using a holdover from those prejudices to wring a little more money out of people. It makes me mad, so I’m protesting within their terms.”
I reach out from under the covers and rest a paw on his thigh, rubbing the cool fur and the warm muscle beneath. “Didn’t you tell me once that protesting on their terms is ultimately futile?”
“Okay,” he concedes, “maybe I’m just being spiteful.”
He leans over to kiss me, and his nose is as cold as if he’d been pressing it against the glass. “Is it that chilly out?” I sigh. “Maybe we can stay curled up in bed and they can come over here.”
He doesn’t even respond to that, just raises an eyebrow and smirks, and I say, “You’re right, you’re right. Give it another few years before we have sex in front of them?”
He laughs. “I’ll go start the water.” He curls and flicks his tail as he walks away toward the bathroom, and I watch his body, bringing my paw back under the covers to rest my cooler pads on the warmth of my morning erection.
We don’t do anything about that, unless you count Lee soaping it up, because it’s not really that urgent. Lee offers a quick soapie in the shower, but I’m happy to wait until he’s ready too and we can get off together. Anyway, I don’t want to chance leaving any stickiness in my fur where one of my family members might smell it at an awkward moment.
I’m waiting for him to finish drying his fur when he says, “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
I poke my head into the bathroom where he’s standing in the big stall, heat lamps and gentle blowers coaxing the water out of his fur, magically silent. That’s classy hotels for you. “Is it a magic word to say to Gregory so he’ll accept us?”
“I wish.” He runs his paws along his tail, fluffing up the fur, and motions with his muzzle toward the main room. “In the inside pocket of my jacket there’s an envelope.” As I walk out and over to the chair where he draped his jacket, he goes on. “I was thinking about what you said, about me giving my own money to Gregory for Alexi.”
I pull the envelope out. “I’m sure he won’t take it, but…” My claws find the open flap and the check inside and I stare at it.
“I never did anything else with your playoff check,” he says from the bathroom. “I deposited it, so that’s off my account, which isn’t ideal, but…”
“Lee.” I stare at the numbers, the name “Gregory Miski” in his neat writing, and walk back in so I can see him.
He keeps talking, quickly. “If you think it’s too much, I won’t do it. I wanted to tell you a bunch of times but I couldn’t find the right time, with Fisher and all the stuff going on, but, uh.” He ruffles the tip of his tail, the fur blowing back and forth and little clouds of it drifting across the bathroom. “I didn’t want to give it to him without letting you know.”
“This is too muc
h.” I wave the envelope.
“It’s my money.”
“He’s my nephew!”
His blue eyes fix mine. “Yeah. And you’d feel like shit if something happened to him that you could’ve prevented if your brother wasn’t being an asshole.”
God dammit, he’s right. I start to put the envelope back in his pocket, then take it out again. “He’ll never take it from you. And stop doing that while we’re talking about him.”
He’s got his legs spread and is rubbing his balls. “What?” he says, looking innocent. “The fur’s damp. This is always the hardest place to get dry.”
“Gah.” I turn away from him.
“Anyway,” he goes on, “I thought it’d be better from me, because of him thinking you were trying to bribe him and all.”
“If he thinks I’m trying to bribe him, he’ll think I asked you to give him the money so it wouldn’t look like I was trying to bribe him.”
“All right. So…do you want to do it?”
I sigh and look down at the envelope again. The image of Gregory’s muzzle snarling at me comes up. What’s he going to do? Well, he’s practical. He’ll take the money if he needs it. He may not like it, but he’ll take it. “I could give it to Mom and have her give it to him.”
“I’d have to write out another check.”
“No,” I decide. “You’re right, we should give him the money. But I want to do it. I want him to say ‘thank you’ to me and you both. Can I turn around yet?”
“I’m drying my butt. And if you’re giving him the money to get a reaction, it’s not the right reason to do it.”
“Doc, I know it’s not. But right now it’s a damn sight better than punching him in the face, which is kind of my other alternative, so I’m gonna go with forcing him to thank us for something.” I wave fox fur away from my nose with the envelope. “This shows him that we’re family, that we want to help him. And the ‘thank you’ just means he’s acknowledging that. Do you actually have any fur left or is it all in the room now? Should I buy some glue and have you roll around here?”
“Sounds like fun, but I’ll pass.” The blowers go off and he steps out as I turn around. “If you’re sure you want to do this, then okay.”
“This is a really nice thing you’re doing,” I tell him, admiring his fluffy, clean fur and his bright eyes and smile. “Didn’t you want to give this to Equality Now or something?”
His tail wags slowly. “Don’t really want Brian to have any of it.”
“But wouldn’t it help a lot of other people? Make a lot of kids’ lives better?”
“Sure,” he says. “But I want to help your nephew. Besides, Gregory saying ‘thank you’ to both of us is worth forty grand right there.”
That startles a laugh out of me, a deep one from my stomach, and he laughs with me. I hold the envelope in my thumb and one finger and use my other eight fingers to rub down his sides, through his freshly-clean fur. “Hey,” he says, “if we get the house, can we install one of those dryers? I kind of love it.”
“More than me?” I lean down and nuzzle his ears.
“Well…” He pretends to think about it, his ears splaying. “Get it some attachments maybe…”
I turn the rubbing into tickling and chase him out of the bathroom. “Go get dressed, traitor fox.”
He laughs and waves. “You should try it tomorrow. I know your fur’s all short but it feels awesome.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll love it more than you.”
“We can have a three-way with it,” he calls.
I adjust the front of my pants. “Stop saying things like that or we’ll be late.”
It’s five after nine when we get to my parents’ house, and I recognize Gregory’s car out front, an ostentatious luxury sedan that makes my claws extend around the steering wheel of the rental car as I park out front. “He had to get an overpriced foreign car,” I say.
Lee eyes the car as we get out. “Probably a company car. Maybe he didn’t have any say in it.”
“Maybe he didn’t.” I slam the door of our rental car. “But this is a rental and I made sure it was States-made.”
My fox chuckles. “Mikhail never said, but I wonder if he was staring at my Civique the whole time we were arguing on the porch.”
“I don’t think he was arguing because of the type of car you drive,” I say, tension winding a knot around my gut as I look up at the house and picture Gregory inside.
“No, but I’m sure it didn’t help. What was that word again? Khoo-ee something?”
“Fox.” I stare down at him.
Lee looks up at me and squeezes my paw, and then, like he did back at Thanksgiving, he says, “We got this, tiger.”
“You’re not going to call anyone a cocksucker?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Does anyone else in there suck cock?”
“It’s cold,” I say, and start walking toward the house.
“Oh, come on.” He hurries through the snow, crunching after me until we get to the sidewalk. “That was a little bit funny.”
I squint against the bright blanket of snow glowing in the morning sun. “A little,” I admit.
“Okay then.” He pats me on the small of the back, smoothing down the nice collared shirt I put on, and follows me up the porch steps.
Mom opens the door, so they’d been watching the street or heard the car. We come into the dining room, where an awkward five places are set around the table and the smell of eggs and toast fills the air. I guess Lee and I are meant to take the two on one long side of the table, and Gregory is already sitting across from those places, with Dad to his left.
We take our seats and Mom brings coffee out as we help ourselves from the bowl of scrambled eggs and the plate of wheat toast. Lee takes black coffee and I add cream and sugar. Gregory’s, too, has milk and sugar, I note. I look up from the steaming coffee cup to Gregory’s face, which is carefully facing forward between me and Lee.
I see myself there, the lines he and I both inherited from our father traced in black fur between our ears and down around our eyes, the set of our eyes around our muzzles. But where my head is rounded like our mother’s, Gregory’s is wider and square like our father’s, his cheek ruffs more full. There are lines in the fur around his eyes that I don’t think I have, severe wrinkles that make him look more than the three years older he is.
Mom is good with the small talk, so we hear a lot about our former high school friends and their parents. She alternates: one of Gregory’s old friends, and then one of mine. We listen, making small talk, and when Mom throws in a news tidbit about one of her friends’ sons who is gay, Gregory throws down his fork on his mostly-empty plate.
“Is that what I’m missing a day with my family to talk about?” he says, still not looking at me. “I could just log in to Locale dot net if I wanted to know who’s having kids and whose marriage is broken up and who’s…” He glances at Lee, then at me, and then ducks his head. “This is about that Families United case, so let’s talk about it.”
The table is silent. Gregory lifts his head and looks toward Mom and Dad. “It’s over, by the way. They settled, no court, no drama, okay? No wrongdoing admitted.”
“I told them,” I say. “Also about the statement you made afterwards.”
He looks perfectly puzzled, so I take out my phone, where I’ve stored the statement for Mom and Dad’s benefit. “This sound familiar? ‘I’m proud to have reached a settlement that reinforces the value of traditional families and the good work done by the Christians of Families United. I look forward to continuing to support them against all the intolerant people who wish to encumber their freedom of expression in this country.’”
It takes me a long time to read it, during which Mom and Dad sit with ears perked and Gregory looks bored. When I set down my phone and look at him, he says, “Oh, that.”
“Did you say these things?” Dad asks.
“Probably.” He waves a paw, glaring at me. “If you’d
followed any of my other cases, you would know that it’s very common for me to read a statement prepared by my client at the conclusion of a case.”
“One that lays out your feelings on a social issue?” Lee jumps in.
“They’re paying for my time, they get to dictate what I say. And look.” He raises a paw and points at me. “It wouldn’t have been news at all if not for you. So if you’re looking for someone to blame…”
It takes me a moment to process that. “What—me? You’re blaming me for your right-wing bigoted—”
“Devlin!” Dad snaps.
“—hate speech?”
“Where’s the hate?” Gregory demands. “Read it again. ‘The value of traditional families.’ ‘The good work done by the Christians of Families United.’ I never mention you, or homosexuals, or anything like that.”
“Don’t act stupid.” I snarl. “As the brother of a publicly gay figure, your support of ‘traditional’ families…” I hope I’m getting the words right, and I check briefly with Lee, “…implies that you’re opposing me and other gay families.”
He holds up a finger, smug. “I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what ‘implies’ means,” Lee says.
Gregory rounds on him. “You stay out of this.”
“He’s here with me,” I say. “He can talk if he wants to.”
The table is silent for a moment. Then Mom says, “I think Devlin has a point, Gregory.”
“What point? That he can bring in some random…fox to be part of our family?” His glance toward her and Dad is a little uneasy, and his voice rises before they can object. “I know what you mean. Listen, this is how the firm works. When I defended the real estate developers—successfully, you know—I wasn’t going to make a statement to the press about how I really wanted the two acres of wetland to survive but I was glad I’d won the case. My client was Families United and all that statement did was reflect their values.”