Over Time

by Kyell Gold

  “Yeah,” the raccoon says, “but you were first, and you’re from here.”

  And then we talk about next year, and whether I’ll be back with Chevali. They both want me to come back to the Dragons, but the ermine says with a laugh, “I wouldn’t want you to waste your career here.”

  That turns into a general discussion of how teams will do next year, which becomes an in-depth conversation that Lee has to drag me out of.

  “Hey,” he says, “people are heading out. You want to get back to the hotel?”

  I raise my head and look around and see people shrugging on jackets, shaking paws. “That time already?”

  “They’re going to close up soon,” Chuck says. “Actually, they’re already closed, but we try not to stick around too long past closing so they don’t have to wait to clean up. They have classes in the morning too.”

  The raccoon and ermine I’ve been talking to shake my paw and say how nice it is to meet me, and I say the same. And then the ermine kind of hangs around, so I grab a napkin and scrawl my signature on it, and do one for the raccoon too. As an afterthought, I scribble my personal e-mail address on them. “I’m not great about checking it, but if you guys want to talk football again, drop me a line.”

  They both play it cool, tucking the napkins away and saying genuine thanks, but as they leave, I see the ermine’s huge grin and the raccoon’s tail wagging.

  “So it went well?” Lee asks as we hurry down the stairs. Outside a cluster of people waits: Misha and Parlon, Allen and Salim, and Chuck.

  “Yeah.” I hug him around the shoulders. “Real well. Good guys.”

  “They are.” He smiles fondly at Misha, holding the door. “Thanks.”

  “Good to see you again. Write me!” The arctic fox lets the door go, wagging a finger at Lee. He and his partner are wearing only loose jackets over t-shirts, unlike the rest of us who at least have fastened our jackets against the weather. I keep my fur short, but I’ve also got an Ultimate Fit undershirt on, which insulates pretty well. There are times, though, when I envy the thick fur I used to grow in winter.

  As Lee and I walk together back to the car, I put an arm around his shoulder. He leans into it and looks up. “Not worried people will see us together?”

  I shrug. “If people see a big football-playing tiger and a little scrawny fox walking around together, they’ll assume it’s me anyway, so I might as well get to hold you.”

  “Ha,” he says. “Scrawny, now?”

  “I meant it as a compliment,” I protest, unconvincingly I’m sure. “You have a lovely physique.”

  “Right.” He snorts.

  The night is cold and still, and the shadowy buildings of the campus are familiar and strange both, silhouettes I remember but whose associations are long in the past. I used to walk around this campus thinking that being a football player gave me lots of privileges, that I didn’t have to worry too much about my classes because they’d be taken care of if I had trouble (I never did, though), that I could always find company any night I wanted. Forester might be a liberal arts college, but it’s still in the upper Midwest, college football country, and the football players here have a certain amount of swagger.

  Now I’m back as a professional football player, and I know that that job gives me exactly as much right to set myself above other people as any other job, which is to say, none. It’s taken me a while to learn that, but I started to learn it here.

  I squeeze Lee’s shoulder at the car and release him. When we’re in with the doors shut, I ask, “So how’d it go with your mom?”

  I’m guessing it can’t have been too bad, because he was in a good mood the whole night, but he hunches his shoulders and stares forward. “It was…fine,” he says finally as I pull out onto the street. “I didn’t snap and yell at her.”

  His voice is distant and neutral. “But?” I prod.

  “But.” He sighs. “I feel sorry for her. She’s stuck in the past and really struggling to get to a future she can be comfortable with.”

  I stay quiet, and he turns to look at me. “Sort of like me,” he says.

  “You?” I frown. “Come on, you’re all about the future and what comes next and all.”

  “Yeah.” He leans back and clasps his paws in front of him. “I hadn’t looked at it that way before either. But it’s something I thought about a lot on the way back. I’m afraid of moving forward because of how I’ve spent the last six months. I was feeling like I can’t change.”

  “Based on tonight,” I say, “you haven’t changed all that much.”

  He shoots me a look, and I follow up with, “Okay, in some ways you’ve changed a lot. Like, you don’t try to blow me in public restrooms.”

  That gets a little grin out of him. “Would you like me to?”

  “No,” I say. “Well. Maybe? No. I mean, if we get caught, the headlines…”

  “Right.” He grins. “So we won’t get caught.”

  I shift in the driver’s seat. My pants feel tighter. “We can talk about that, I guess. But right now we should wait until we’re at the hotel.”

  “We are at the hotel.” Lee looks up and out the windshield. His ears perk up.

  “Yeah.” I park in the garage and we grab the elevator up to the room. On the way, I notice his empty paws. “Didn’t you get anything from your mother’s place?”

  “Father has it. He’s going to send it on when my living situation’s settled.”

  “Right, the house.” We walk back down the hall and to the room, where Lee opens the door and gestures me inside. I shed the jacket and toss it onto a chair. “When do you think she’ll write back about it?”

  “Soon.” He drops his jacket as well and grabs my paw to pull me over to the bed, but he doesn’t hug me or start any kind of foreplay. He just sits down and pulls me down beside him. “So I was thinking about us and our month and all that.”

  “I was too.” I pull one knee up onto the bed so I can face him, and I can’t keep the smile off my muzzle. “I really saw another side of you tonight.”

  “I…really?” His ears go askew and he raises his eyebrows.

  “Yeah. But what did you want to say?”

  He relaxes and smiles. “It can wait a second. Now I’m curious what you were thinking.”

  “Well, uh.” I rub my paws together. “I talked to Misha for a bit.”

  His eyebrows crease together. “I thought you said you don’t want me to blow you in a restroom.”

  “Nah, but…” I take a breath. “Look, I know I’ve kind of driven this relationship and all. You went into the closet for me, you lost your job because of me, you left because you were worried about my career. And I’ve been listening to your friends talk about all the stuff you used to do, so I want to promise you that…going forward, I’m going to listen to you more and I’m going to try harder to let you express the passion and stuff…” I take one of his paws. “In the bedroom and out of it.”

  His ears stay up, and so do his whiskers. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  I’m nervous as hell, but I make myself go on. “Misha said you used to top him.”

  Now he laughs. “When two bottoms get together, someone has to be on top. Not all the time. You know, you can blow each other, but it’s not the same.”

  “If you want to do that again…”

  His laugh dies down and he searches my eyes. “With you?”

  I nod. He squeezes my paw and leans forward, still smiling. “Well, let me ask you something. Do you want to be a bottom?”

  “I, uh…”

  “Honestly.”

  “Honestly?” I don’t know what to say to that, so I answer honestly. “Not really. But I’d do it for you. At least once.”

  “Okay.” He lifts my paw and kisses it. “I have no fucking desire to be on top. So thank you for the offer, but I think I will respectfully decline.”

  I laugh and hug him, then sit back. “Thank God. But I meant the rest of it. I don’t know what else I can d
o. I don’t know why you need so long to commit.”

  “Let me try to tell you,” he says.

  28

  Talking It Out Two (Lee)

  The call from Brian wasn’t the only call I got after leaving Mother’s; in fact, Brian’s came in while I was on the phone with Hal. I’m sure Brian thinks I simply ignored his call, and I would have anyway, but Hal’s was genuinely more interesting.

  “I just had a big fight with Pol,” he says.

  I’m standing on the corner where Father dropped me off, against the frosted glass of a coffee shop. I could go inside, but it’s rude to do that. Anyway, the bite of the cold air on my nose and ears is refreshing, not so bad yet that I want to forget again what it’s like. I watch my words puff white breath across my phone mic and wait for Salim to show up. “Big fight like you need to get her flowers, or big fight like you’re breaking up?”

  “Could go either way, I guess. Didn’t exactly make plans to get together to finish the argument.”

  “What happened? She asked if she looked fat and you hesitated?”

  “I was married for ten years. Give me some credit. Nah, it was about Fisher.”

  My ears perk up and then I flatten them again as the wind bites at their tips. “Oh, she didn’t like you interviewing him?”

  “Kinda that. Invasion of his privacy, causing hurt to the family, bothering a guy who just tried to kill himself and should be left alone, my article would be fine without him.”

  I sag back against the wall. “You know about the gunshot.”

  “First clue was when Gena asked me not to write about the ‘accident.’ Second was the bandaged head. Come on, I’ve been a reporter longer’n I’ve been married.”

  I exhale again, fighting a sinking feeling. “Would your article work without Fisher’s stuff? Not the gunshot, but the rest.”

  “Wouldn’t be as good, that’s for damn sure.”

  “You got a lot of stuff you can use?”

  “Ayup.”

  “Glad Dev convinced him to talk to you.”

  “Ah, he wanted to anyway. They all do. It’s just whether you can get a little bit of trust from ’em. First thing he wanted was to know who else was having mental problems, so I gave him a couple names and contact numbers. Then he talked.”

  “About what?”

  “I guided him to talk about the cost of his career. Once or twice he thought I was talking to him after his championship wins. Talked for about fifteen minutes about the Rocs’ chances to three-peat. Which was interesting, and I s’pose useful in a high-level way. I didn’t stop him.”

  “Jeez.” It clutches at my heart, this unmooring of Fisher’s memories, how he is floundering around in time and trying so hard to figure a way back to his family. “Still, huh?”

  Hal’s voice is soft. “I talked to his nurse real briefly too. She only had a couple days with him, but she said she’s tryin’ to prepare Gena. She doesn’t think it’ll get better.”

  The glass of the coffee shop is cold against the back of my head and ears. I close my eyes. “But it won’t get worse, will it?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Fuck.” I don’t want to have to tell Dev any of this. Across the road from the coffee shop there’s a bar, and I wait for the light and then start crunching through the snow in that direction.

  “I talked to Dev, earlier. Didn’t tell him that part, though.”

  I don’t want to think about Gena and Bradley and Junior, but at least they have each other, and they have part of their father, if not all of him. For better or worse, they all knew that football is a violent game, that people get hurt. I don’t think anyone realized the danger to someone’s mind, but that’s what Hal’s article is trying to bring out.

  Warm air and the smell of beer wash over me with the babble of conversation and music as I open the door to the bar. It’s a loud campus bar; even on a Sunday night, there are students planning to sleep in on Monday and students who arranged their schedule to have no Monday classes (I never managed that). Some trashy 90’s song is playing as I order a Leiney. I make sure I can see through the windows to the corner where Salim was supposed to be ten minutes ago. “What did you tell Dev?” I ask, raising my voice over the music.

  “Where are you?” Hal asks.

  “A bar. I have to go see some old friends, and after hearing about Fisher, I need a beer to relax myself.” I glance down at the coasters, and then sit hard on the barstool and laugh.

  “What?”

  “I’m in the Fang. I’m sitting at the bar where Dev walked up to me, when I was…” The bartender comes over with my beer.

  “When you were the charming Ms. White?”

  “Yep.” I lean on the bar and look to my right. There aren’t any football players there, not tonight. I do let my gaze linger on a grey fox sitting alone in a salmon silk shirt, and when he lifts his muzzle and catches my eye, he frowns and looks away. Straight boys. I chuckle and down a couple gulps of my cold, malty beer. “Maybe you should hit a singles bar tonight,” I tell Hal.

  “Relationship advice?”

  “Life advice. I don’t know, it sounds like the thing with Fisher went okay, and if Pol’s going to get upset any time you have to push at people’s privacy to do your job…”

  “Thinking that m’self. When are you back?”

  “Few days.”

  “Want to grab lunch?”

  I get down to halfway through my beer, set it down, wipe my lips. The cold turns warm in my stomach. I glance over at the grey fox again and he looks away. So he was looking at me. Amusing. Maybe I should drag him along to the FLAG meeting. “Sure. I’ve got a week or two before I need to start work.”

  He makes an exasperated noise. “When you come down to see Miski, you better not forget about me, y’know.”

  “I won’t. I’m getting together with some old friends tonight. I don’t want to let people go anymore.”

  “Good ma’e.”

  “Ha. You can come up to Yerba, too. We’ve got a football team.”

  “Planning on it.”

  “And hey, the thing with Pol…good luck.” I check the window. Salim’s wandering around outside. “Speaking of old friends…I gotta go, my friend’s here.”

  “All right. Take care. Best to the tiger.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for the info.” I hang up, pause to consider whether I’m sufficiently buzzed for the FLAG meeting, and decide I should probably finish the beer. So I gulp down the remainder, leave the bartender a tip, and hurry out.

  It’s not easy, but I push the Fisher stuff to the back of my mind while chatting with Salim. I haven’t gotten a chance to see him in forever, so I ask how his various families are. His legal one is going well: one kit and a second on the way, everyone healthy now, his wife a wonderful mother and a good companion. They live with her mother and her aunt, so the kits are well cared for and the elder weasels do most of the cooking. Salim insists on bringing in hired help to clean. “It’s expected,” he says, “but it’s also considered very nice of me to do. If I did not, then Nonna and Tanta would clean the house, and I don’t feel that’s right.”

  “All right. And how’s Jeremy?”

  He smiles. “The promotion means more work, more hours. But it is good.”

  “So he won’t want more of your time.”

  Salim shakes his head. “You know how cats are. He does love his time alone.”

  “I think tigers are different from bobcats,” I say. “At least, Dev isn’t big on crowds, but he likes spending time with me.”

  “Jeremy appreciates the time we have and appreciates the time we do not have,” Salim says with a chuckle.

  “Sounds like a good arrangement.”

  He points to the street we’re crossing. “This looks new. Was there a hole there that Brian tripped into one night?”

  “Yeah.” The street’s been paved over, smooth black asphalt. “Oh, he called while I was talking to Hal. I guess I should listen to the message.”
<
br />   So Salim and I listen to it together. I shake my head. “One crusade after another.”

  “That was you once, too,” Salim says. His dark eyes meet mine. “But no more? Are you happy?”

  “I’m happy.” I swish my tail. “The crusades haven’t gone away, not by a long shot.” I tell him about Vince King, about my Yerba job and my confrontation with Jocko and how scared I was to push the gay tolerance thing with him.

  “But it worked out?”

  “Yeah.” I remember his and Peter’s reaction. “Some guys who come off as homophobic really don’t know any better. It’s like if I told you that all tigers are…well, no, I’m not going to say anything that’ll get me in trouble later.” He laughs. “But if I told you that all people in the football world are dumb jocks. And maybe you meet one player and he is a dumb jock. And you read in the papers about how dumb some football players are. So you’re not, like, biased against football players. You just have a small sample size and a whole bunch of media bias. So then say you meet Dev and you expect him to be dumb. I guess that’s what this guy was thinking.”

  “Still, he should be open to understanding people,” Salim says.

  “He is, I hope.” I look ahead at the street we used to walk up years ago, familiar and yet new, and spot the Starbucks logo. “At least his boss likes me.”

  “That is good. Oh, when did this Starbucks come in?”

  We make small talk all the way to the green mer-otter. By this time, I am done with the cold, so we hurry inside, wipe our feet on the mat, and head right upstairs.

  I’d intended to get to know some of the younger FLAG members, to give them advice and listen to their stories. But right away I hug Dev and kiss him, and then Misha’s there, and Allen, and we get talking about the old days and the time skips on by. Brian’s name comes up once, so I play his voicemail for everyone, because nothing in it is particularly private, and it’s good for everyone to hear where he is.

  Before I know it, people are exchanging e-mail addresses and pulling on jackets and getting ready to leave. Misha and his adorable husband hug us warmly, as do Allen and Salim, and Chuck too, a little over-enthusiastically. But it’s all good, and to me it feels, more than dinner tonight, like coming home.