Over Time

by Kyell Gold

  I turn him around and hug him against me. Even dirty and smelly (like me), he feels good and warm, our mutual connection still resonating from the previous night. “I’ll leave them a big tip. Come on, let’s shower.”

  In the shower, we talk about the flight home, about going to Gerrard’s workouts and going to see Fisher, and I remember what Hal told me about Damian. My mood takes a downward shift. “I have some advice to ask you on the way to the airport,” I say, “but not right now.”

  “Okay.” He nods, scrubbing through my fur. “Serious? Your ears went back. Is it about—” He cuts himself off with a shake of his head. “Never mind. I’ll hear it when you’re ready to tell me.”

  “Yeah. I just have to make another choice, you know? Right thing, wrong thing, hard thing, easy thing.” I close my eyes and let his paws clean me off. “Except there are no easy things. Why does everything have to be difficult? Why can’t my friends just be my friends and my agent just be my agent and my family just be my family?”

  “And your boyfriend just be your boyfriend?” He steps back so he can work shampoo into my chest and stomach fur.

  “I don’t think you could ever just be my boyfriend.” I hold him tighter over his protests, trapping his paws between us. “No. I don’t want you to stop challenging me.”

  “That’s what the world is doing, your friends and family and agent and team: Challenging you. When you have the opportunity to do the wrong thing, or to avoid doing the right thing, that’s how you become the person you are. Like you said, you don’t get to jump to midfield or the end zone just because you want to be there. You get there over time, by making those decisions every day. Big choices, small choices; the choices you make become your habits, and your habits define the person you are. You’re the accumulation of your past, both good and bad, and the only way to change is to begin making different choices today.” He clears his throat. “That didn’t start out being about us, but you know, it sort of ended up that way.”

  “Uh-huh. Like how we’re choosing to talk to each other and think about each other and our future.”

  “And not to walk out on difficult situations.”

  “And not to keep things inside.”

  “Well,” he says, stepping back again to cup his lathery paws around my sheath. “Maybe we can keep some things inside. Sometimes.”

  “As long as we do it together,” I say, and I pull his muzzle up to kiss me, and he doesn’t resist.

  My short fur dries pretty quickly with the blow dryers, so I’ve got the towel wrapped around my waist as I search through my suitcase for clothes. This hotel doesn’t have a full blow-drying stall, so Lee stands naked at his desk, checking the computer while his damp fur air-dries. I admire the light on his body and abandon the suitcase for a moment to take a picture with my phone.

  “Don’t post that on the Internet,” he says, grinning.

  “Why not? Everyone should see how hot my boyfriend is.”

  I play at using the phone to send the pic to the Internet. I know that he knows I have no idea how to do that, but I still expect him to run at me and try to get the phone away. Instead, he sits in the chair and pulls his tail into his lap, though I can still see his sheath and balls through the fur. He just looks at me with a wide smile and runs claws through his tail.

  “Okay, if you don’t object…” I press some random buttons on the phone. Then it dials Carson, and I hurriedly hang it up before it can connect. Lee’s still watching me, grooming his tail, with a restless energy as though he’s waiting to tell me something. “Any good e-mail?”

  His muzzle lifts. The smile brightens. “Oh, maybe.”

  Just as thinking about Damian depressed my mood, this perks it up. “What?” When he stays silent, I advance a step. “Do I have to come over there and tickle it out of you?”

  He indicates the laptop screen, getting up as I walk over. I only process the name of our realtor and the word Congratulations with a parade of exclamation points after it before Lee, fidgeting from foot to foot, says, “Our bid went through. You now own a house in Yerba.”

  It takes a moment for the words to sink in. Then I match his smile and wrap him up in my arms. “You mean, ‘We own a house.’”

  “That too.” He grins and nuzzles against me, craning his muzzle up for a kiss, which I gladly give him. While our muzzles meet, his paws tease nimbly at my towel until it falls to the floor and our bodies press close.

  “Mmmmf.” We pull apart from the kiss. His paws slide down my hips, down my rear and tail. “I think we should celebrate.”

  “We just showered,” I point out. “And we’ve got to be at the airport in, uh…”

  He kisses me again and brings his paws up to my cheek ruffs. Again I see a clear blue sky in his eyes, stretching on and on and on. “Don’t worry, tiger,” he says. “We’ve got time.”

  Part VI

  Epilogue

  Home (Dev)

  I jog out onto the field between Gerrard and Brick. Pike’s gone to the Devils, but we signed a new defensive end, a tiger from the Tornadoes named Robi. Seems like a nice guy from the couple times we’ve been out for drinks (he told me about a friend of his who has a gay cousin; everyone wants to tell me about their gay friend or relative now). Every time I look at him, though, I think of Fisher, still living with the in-home nurse, still slipping between years and forgetting the names of his children. Gena’s adapting, though, and Fisher seemed to be too, last time I saw them. Junior quit football to try out for baseball, and Gena says that was his idea, not hers.

  I never talked to Damian about the serum he got for Fisher. Lee and I decided it was worth the risk to stay with him; Lee agreed with my assessment of it and suggested I talk to some of Damian’s other clients to see if drug use was common among them, in which case it might be better to bail. But the Diversity in Athletics Day at Forester went great, and Damian was very helpful when we talked about whether to take a contract from the two interested teams (Yerba was one of them; Gateway, to my surprise, was the other). He and I (and Lee) concluded that it was best not to leave the situation in Chevali: a good young team with lots of promise. What’s more, I have a lot of friends here, most of whom are still here: Ty and Zillo and Carson, Gerrard and Steez and even Coach Samuelson. Vonni’s gone; Colin stayed. I wish I could reverse that, but you can’t have everything.

  Haven’t gotten a chance to talk to Ty without a hundred other people around, but he seems pretty happy. Rodo asked him about the TMZ article while I was around and he said that the wife hunt was over, but she couldn’t come around to meet everyone. I’ll have to find out what the deal is, but there’s a whole season for that.

  The sun is shining and the grass is a brilliant green. My teammates are dazzling in our away jerseys, white with red numbers; we’re scrimmaging against our own offense, in the home red with white numbers. Grass and earth, crisp uniform smell, and the scent of sixty thousand people wash over me as I stand in the huddle.

  “Standard play,” Gerrard says to us. “Running down. Plug your gaps.”

  We disperse to our positions. I keep in mind the lessons from the summer, the special seminar I and a few others attended on safe tackling to reduce the risk of concussions. Gerrard and many others didn’t go, but Vonni and Zillo and Carson and I did, and Gerrard doesn’t care how we tackle as long as we stop the guy. When it comes right down to it, some of us are still going to get hit. Football’s a physical game, and with the rewards come a whole pile of dangerous risks. But if you’re smart, and you have someone helping to look at it in the right way, you can figure out how to get the most out of it.

  The offensive line sets. I crouch down behind Robi and Brick and listen for the snap, every muscle ready, every sense alert. They snap the ball and drop back to pass, but Gerrard and I annihilate their protection and swarm our backup quarterback, dropping him to the turf with the ball clutched to his chest.

  We trot back to the bench and here, in an intra-squad scrimmage, the sideline
is much more casual. A few of the special teams players stand near the fans in the first row having conversations. Gerrard, of course, keeps his attention on the game, but I turn around and look along the stands.

  Hal, whose article inspired the seminar, isn’t with the press. The league won’t issue him a pass for the games anymore, but that doesn’t stop him from attending as a fan. And some of us who appreciate what he’s done to help us still give him interviews. I pass his phone number around where I can. I don’t see him, but really I’m not looking for him.

  To my left and ahead of me, a few rows back from the Firebirds bench, is a fox in a Firebirds polo shirt. He’s walking up the aisle toward me, smiling and applauding, and I see our history and our future. For a moment, my heart feels too big for this fragile chest of mine.

  Life changes you and everyone around you. You can pretend it’s not coming or you can brace for it or you can welcome it with open arms, but whatever you do, it’s going to come at you like a pair of three hundred pound boars. The best you can ask for is a partner to stand at your side, friends and family and co-workers to surround you, a team to face the onslaught. You’ll never learn exactly how to prepare, but you’ll all be doing it together, and you’ll never have to face it alone.

  I head to the front row and meet Lee there. “Nice sack,” he says. “Even if you had to share it.”

  “It was a team effort,” I say.

  A couple of my teammates along the line glance my way. Charm, chatting up a couple well-endowed female rabbits, winks at me. Lee nods back at the big horse with an answering smile. “Go get ready. Looks like you’ll be back out there in a minute.”

  He leans forward and kisses me lightly. When I open my eyes and step back, he does the same. Nobody around us grimaces or turns away. None of my nearby teammates says anything about it as I make my way back to stand among them, ready to go back on the field with my fox’s kiss on my lips.

  This, I think, this is what life is all about.

  Afterword: A Lifetime in a Decade

  In November 2004, across nearly a dozen states, voters overwhelmingly approved the notion that two men or two women could not enter into the institution of marriage. Whether they meant only to preserve the religious institution of marriage without commentary to the validity of same-sex relationships, the message received by those of us in such relationships was loud and clear: you are not worth including in our community. Only months earlier, Massachusetts had become the first state in the U.S. to allow same-sex couples to marry, though that right was limited to residents of the state (it would later be expanded). In November, that historic advancement looked as though it would stand alone for a very long time.

  In November 2004, I was living with my then-boyfriend Kit and working at a high-tech market research firm in the Bay Area, on about the third reboot of a career that had so far been guided by opportunity more than passion. I’d briefly worked at things I loved but could not build a career out of; the work I could build a career out of, while I liked it well enough, was not what I loved. It was somewhere around this time that I was finishing the manuscript of my first novel, “Volle,” which I had written with the dual intention of showing a gay character who was comfortable with his sexuality and whose relationships were not looked down upon, and showing that one could write a novel with both a good story and explicitly sexual scenes.

  “Volle” appeared in 2005 to just enough enthusiasm to encourage me to write another novel. Soon after its publication, I was laid off from one tech job and stepped immediately into another. And sometime in the following year, as I was stepping out of the shower, a scene flashed into my head, bright and compelling, a scene in which a tiger had come to a fox’s door to scream at him that he could no longer sleep with girls. “You’ve ruined me for women!” he cried, and I heard the fox’s reply: “You were never for women.”

  I wrote the story, “In Between,” which was promptly rejected for publication the only place I sent it, and so I posted it to my LiveJournal. But the fox and tiger, Lee and Dev, remained in my head. A year later, I wrote “Secrets,” and then I knew there was a novel to be written. I started to write it.

  In 2008, I left my tech job for what would be my last one. My novel “Waterways” came out and eclipsed my other novels almost instantly, building on the popularity of its first part, “Aquifers,” which had appeared on Yiffstar (now SoFurry) and gained a great following. I was deep into writing “Out of Position” at this point, and early in the year I talked to some friends who happened to be immensely talented furry artists. Thinking that a football-based book would need quite a boost to sell to the fandom (I had, it turns out, greatly underestimated the love for sports in the furry fandom), I asked if they would illustrate the book, and they accepted, though they knew nothing about football.

  In May, the California Supreme Court ruled that 2000’s Prop 22, asserting that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” was unconstitutional. Same-sex marriage immediately became legal, and within weeks, Prop 8 was placed on the November ballot, altering California’s constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. A virulent, expensive fight for public perception followed, with the projected vote hovering around 50%. And in November, Barack Obama was elected, and Prop 8 passed in California. We cheered Obama and mourned Prop 8, feeling rather disgusted at not only the people who’d been “taken in,” we thought, by the ridiculous anti-gay propaganda, but also the people who hadn’t bothered to cast their votes. Again, marriage seemed far off, despite a slow trickle of states including Iowa and most of New England approving it (with, in some cases, voter initiatives to repeal it again).

  “Out of Position” debuted in January of 2009. As I’d hoped, Blotch’s art drew many more eyes to it, and the story did a good job of keeping them there.

  A little later in 2009, Kit proposed to me.

  Still later in 2009, “Out of Position” did an admirable job of reaching out to the gay romance audience, even the non-furry ones. I already knew there would be a sequel, and I was glad that the book was doing well enough for Sofawolf to approve one. Blotch, too, loved the characters enough to ask to return for the sequel.

  In 2010, Kit and I got married—in Boston, since our home state was still reviewing challenges to Prop 8. We were hopeful that it would be overturned, but too impatient to wait.

  And at the end of 2010, my tech job informed me apologetically that due to a reorganization, they were going to have to pay me not to work there for several months and then stop paying me. My husband sat me down and said that if I wanted to make a career out of being a novelist, then I would have to do it full time, and largely due to the success of “Out of Position,” we both thought it was worth a shot.

  In 2011, “Isolation Play” came out, and the state of New York became the most populous state to allow same-sex marriage. You all calmed my fears that I could not continue Dev and Lee’s story with as much power as it had begun.

  In 2012, voters went to the polls in four states (Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington) and voted to allow same-sex marriage, the first time popular vote had come down in favor of marriage equality. Meanwhile, Lee and Dev’s saga had grown from a projected four books into five, as the third book sprawled over 200,000 words in the first draft. I split it into “Divisions,” released in 2013, and “Uncovered,” released in 2014.

  In 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned California’s Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, citing no reasonable reason to prevent same-sex couples from enjoying the benefits of marriage. For the next two years, marriage restrictions toppled like dominoes around the country. I went from tracking every court case and vote that might result in a marriage decision to being surprised on a nearly monthly basis. “Wait, Utah? Indiana? Kentucky?” Court decisions and legislatures made same-sex marriage legal in thirty-eight states.

  And in 2014, a highly regarded college football player came out to the world. He revealed that his team had known all season that he was gay
and had kept it out of the media. Michael Sam, a defensive end for the Missouri Tigers, was drafted by the St. Louis Rams that summer, and famously kissed his boyfriend Vito on national TV when he got the news. He would later credit his boyfriend, a swimmer (with, dare I say, a foxy build) with pushing him to come out (he also said that they first met when he saw Vito throwing up over a balcony, so let’s not take the parallel too far).

  “Uncovered” came out that summer as I was already writing and planning this final volume. In the meantime, I’d begun another series of books, less gay-rights focused, and written a bunch of novellas. With this last volume on the horizon and my other series finishing up, I started planning future books.

  On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state-level bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. Couples of any mix of genders are now free to marry anywhere in the United States. There are still places in this country where this change is not welcome, but there are no longer places where it is in dispute.

  In January of 2016, the “Out of Position” series came to an end.

  When Dev and Lee first appeared in my head, none of us could have imagined how quickly and thoroughly our society would embrace change. I wrote at the beginning of “Waterways,” in 2008, that I expected attitudes to change in perhaps the next ten years and that I hoped the book would one day be a quaint reminder of how closed-minded we used to be.

  In many ways, Dev and Lee’s journey from discomfort to acceptance to joy has been echoed in the world around me, and like the world’s, their journey is not over. They like it in my head and have made it clear they intend to stay. Many of you reading this have told me stories of how they’ve affected your lives, touching, beautiful, happy stories and difficult but necessary stories. You may not know how much they have also affected my life.