Over Time

by Kyell Gold

  The tall fox took his phone out and thumbed it open. There on the first page of his contacts was the name: Archie Collins. He rubbed his whiskers. Ah, what the hell. It didn’t mean anything.

  So he texted: Sorry about your first game as a Firebirds fan.

  He’d gotten dressed and was just chatting with Rodolf when his phone buzzed. Archie had replied: What makes you think I watched? ;)

  He grinned until Rodolf snapped his fingers, and then he looked up at the deer. “Sorry,” he said. “Messages.”

  As they talked, he typed back: Aw, I thought you liked me.

  Rodolf started telling him about the terrible things this guy he knew on the Hellentown Pilots had said Strike did while he was there, while Ty listened absently. And a couple minutes later, he flipped open his phone when it buzzed with the response.

  “Oh, you think that’s good news?” Rodolf snapped. “You think you won’t come in for some comment about how much better he is than you?”

  “Sorry.” Ty wagged his tail. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’m gonna head out. See you on the plane.”

  He looked again at the message that said, Nice touchdown :), and then called a cab.

  Korsat Street wasn’t nearly as crowded on a Sunday night, and the music in the club wasn’t quite as good. Arch wasn’t anywhere he could see, but then again, he was about ten minutes earlier than he’d said he’d be. So he got a scotch at the bar, savored the flavors, and then raised his arms over his head and sauntered out onto the dance floor. He’d been tackled pretty hard a few times, but he ignored the soreness in his hip and danced anyway.

  He’d been dancing for one and a half songs when the smell of wolf tickled his nose. There was nobody in front of him, so he turned with the music and saw Arch grinning, holding up a paw. Ty slapped it, and they danced as if they’d just taken a break two nights ago and come right back to the floor.

  It was just as good, too. Ty hadn’t really thought much about it, but it was nice to know it hadn’t just been a fluke, or something that he’d been remembering wrong because of the drinks. Arch could move and shake, and maybe he swiveled his hips and flipped his tail up more than Ty wanted to do, but damn he looked good doing it.

  They danced until they were both panting, and then Ty pulled Arch over to the bar, grabbing the wolf’s paw casually just like that. “A scotch and soda,” he told the bartender, “Glenlivet if you have it, the best thing you have otherwise. And whatever he wants.”

  “You don’t have to buy my drink,” Arch said. “In fact, you lost your game. I should be buying you a drink.”

  Ty laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Normally I’m out at a club with a bunch of guys and I drop a thousand bucks.”

  Arch raised an eyebrow. “Cosmo,” he told the bartender, and then, to Ty, “You go out with a bunch of guys?”

  “Friends from college and home. Four of them moved down to Chevali when I got traded there. I got them a house to live in, they support me.”

  “Ah.” Arch’s grin widened. “Around here, ‘going out with a bunch of guys’ means something else.”

  Ty flinched inside, but not as much as he would’ve thought. “That’s not my scene,” he said.

  Their drinks arrived, and as they were sipping, a stallion came over to them. “You guys look great together,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Arch raised a paw, and the guy headed off.

  “We’re not…” Ty called after him, and then shrugged. “Ah, hell with it.”

  The wolf grinned at him. “You and I know it. Who cares what they think?”

  “Well, if they take a picture and publish it, I’d care.”

  “Nobody’s gonna take pictures in here. It’s not cool.”

  Ty looked around, but nobody seemed to have a camera or even to be paying his tall, athletic body any attention other than the kind that didn’t care what his name was. “I guess,” he said. “But if I get ‘outed’ in the paper, it’s on you.”

  “I’ll deny it if they talk to me.” Arch finished his drink. “How’s your scotch?”

  “Enh.” Ty gulped the rest. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t get too buzzed, though. You ready?”

  Arch nodded, and then put his muzzle closer to Ty’s ear. “You ever get high?”

  The words came across clearly even though the wolf had spoken softly and the music was going at full volume. Ty turned and caught rainbow sparkles flashing in the wolf’s dark eyes. “Back in college,” he said. “Been a while. My friends don’t have a source in Chevali so we mostly get drunk.”

  “Do they test you?”

  “Yeah, but they tell us when it’s coming. I already had mine this year.” He waved a paw. “You got some?”

  Arch chuckled. “I get these migraines, see? I really do. So I got a prescription. Got some cookies at home. You want some?”

  The fox narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get experimental when I get high. I just get mellow.”

  “Settle down.” The wolf put a paw on Ty’s. “Just offering. No strings.”

  The fox grinned. “In that case,” he said, “lead on.”

  When Arch pulled out his keys in front of a narrow three-story building on a misty street, Ty started to reconsider. The gate was rusted in spots and the place smelled like urine; Ty could count about ten different people who’d pissed nearby just in the last couple days. The cars on the street, though, were not old beaters; there were a couple BMWs and a whole lot of mid-range cars. So junkies might walk around on the sidewalks, but people with money lived in the buildings.

  And inside, everything was nicer. The urine smell disappeared when he walked through the door into a brightly-lit foyer with mailboxes along one wall, a lot of mailboxes. Arch didn’t stop at any of them, just headed for an old marble staircase at the back of the building, only wide enough for one person at a time.

  Arch led him up to the second floor, down a narrow hallway. “This looks like a college dorm,” Ty said, looking at all the numbered doors and down at the worn carpeting. “Smells better, though.”

  “Still crowded.” Arch’s nose wrinkled just as Ty’s was. “Used to be a small hotel, then a rabbit family bought it. Sold it off in the Depression and homeless people lived here for a while. Then a tech millionaire fixed it up to rent.” The wolf turned his key in the lock of a door with number 225 on it and opened it, letting Ty in.

  The room was a little larger than a hotel room, but not much. To the right, a small wooden table and two chairs bumped up against a small refrigerator and a stack of plastic crates that apparently served as a pantry, filled with cereal boxes and instant dinners. There was no sink in this room, but behind the table, an open door gave onto a bathroom, and Ty saw that at least there was a sink in there.

  To the left, a double bed filled most of the space of the room against the wall, sheets untidy, a collared shirt in a pile at the foot. A brightly colored pressboard dresser had been wedged between the bed and the window, and that was all the furniture the room held. There was no TV, no couch, nothing else, and no other doors apart from the bathroom. Mail and laptops cluttered the wooden table, and clothes dotted the floor.

  “Home sweet home,” Arch said. “Sorry about the mess.”

  Ty shook his head. “Reminds me of my dorm room. You live here…” He sniffed the air. “With a wolverine? Your boyfriend?”

  Arch laughed. “Roommate.”

  “Okay…” Ty definitely smelled sex in the air. Stale, but unmistakable. “So he’s not gay?”

  “Oh, we jerk each other off sometimes. Sometimes more than that.” Arch stopped, cocked his head, and grinned at Ty. “Depends what we’re in the mood for.”

  “Okay.” The fox turned his attention to the fridge. “No kitchen?”

  Arch stepped closer to him. “Tell me,” he said. “If there was a vixen you could hang out with and sometimes sleep with, and she wouldn’t ever want the relationship to be more, would you do it? If it was all just about being friends and sex was just one of the things you di
d?”

  “Look,” Ty said, “I told you, I’m straight.”

  The wolf laughed. “I’m talking about me and Justin. You’re getting all tight and judgy, so I’m just putting a hypothetical to you. If Justin was Justine and we were both straight and I told you I had this female roommate who was a good friend and sometimes we had sex when we both wanted it, what would you say? Something like ‘way to go,’ right?”

  “I guess so.” Ty grinned, felt the brush of his own tail against his legs, and realized he had been getting a little tense. Nothing to be tense about, he told himself, and anyway, it wasn’t like him to get worked up. He usually just let the world come to him and he dealt with it as he dealt with it, a coping mechanism to survive in the uptight worlds of his family and football.

  “So?” Arch stood with paws on hips, grinning.

  Ty laughed and clapped the wolf on the shoulder. “Way to go,” he said.

  “There you go.” Arch turned from the taller fox and walked over to the fridge. “Have a seat on the bed if you want.”

  Ty started toward the chairs by the table, and Arch caught his motion. “Not the chairs. I mean, they’re okay, but what are you going to do, sit at the table and get high? Trust me, the bed’s better. You can sit on the floor if you don’t want to sit on a gay guy’s bed with him.”

  What was he afraid of? “No, it’s okay. I mean, I’m a fox…”

  “So? You going to rub your musk all over my sheets?”

  Ty shook his head, grinning, and went to sit on the bed. This was weird, but it was also fun in a way. Here he wasn’t Ty Nakamura, highly touted wide receiver prospect, Chevali Firebird. He didn’t have to keep thinking about the passes he’d missed in the game they’d just lost or worry about running his routes or about linebackers and safeties smashing into him (despite his hip). He was just Ty, a fox who liked to dance and who’d been invited by a new friend to come chill for an evening. “What if Justin comes in?”

  “Then he can have some,” Arch called from the fridge. “But he won’t. He works graveyard, so he’ll be gone ’til nine. That’s why the bed works well. I sleep until he gets home, then he wakes me up and goes to sleep while I go to work. Sometimes we hang out in the evening.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Data entry and customer service for a small startup downtown. It pays the bills, and I have a job, which is more than a lot of my friends can say. I can just about afford this place, a gym membership, and a little savings.”

  “How much does this cost?” Ty scooted back against the wall and curled his tail around his hips. A couple cracks ran from the corners of the ceiling, but overall the place was in pretty good shape, and it was a good sign that mostly what he smelled was fox and wolverine—no mildew, no rot, no garbage. In that, it wasn’t like a college dorm. Maybe gay guys were more fastidious.

  “The place is twelve hundred a month. Justin and I split it, so I pay six.”

  “Holy shit!” Ty sat up and stared around. “Twelve hundred a month? That’s almost as much as I’m paying for my house.”

  “In Chevali, right?” Arch walked over with a paper plate that had two small cookies on it. “Middle of the desert? This is a highly desirable neighborhood here. Walking distance to Korsat, walking distance to the financial district, short bus ride to my job and thousands of other jobs. Also walking distance to about fifty amazing restaurants.”

  “My house has six bedrooms.” Ty grinned as Arch sat on the bed and put the plate between them. “But yeah, this location is pretty cool. Apart from the piss-stained street.”

  “And these,” Arch tapped the plate, “are legal.”

  The smell of cannabis hovered around the cookies like a cloud. Ty picked one up in his fingers. “Sugar cookies?”

  “I’m not a great cook. I basically know this and chicken casserole.”

  “Where do you cook chicken casserole?”

  Arch jerked his thumb toward the door. “There’s a shared kitchen. Most of us keep a fridge and a hot pot in the rooms. I have to be careful when I’m baking these because if anyone else smells them, they come running and then cookies disappear. I usually melt some peppermint candies at the same time to cover the smell.”

  Ty laughed. “A guy in my college used to put Neutra-Scent over the oven vents when he made them. Once he forgot to insulate them and they caught fire. Nothing smells worse than burning Neutra-Scent.”

  “That’s ironic.” Arch picked the other cookie up. “Your health, sir.”

  It was a good enough cookie, the sugar cutting the sharp cannabis taste. Ty crunched and swallowed, and closed his eyes. It was like college again. He leaned back against the wall and waited for it to kick in.

  Movement brushed his whiskers. He opened his eyes and saw Arch pulling his shirt off. “Whoa,” he said.

  “Don’t freak out, I’m not going down to fur.” Arch dropped the shirt off the side of the bed. “I’ll even keep my pants on for you. I just don’t like chilling in so many clothes, y’know?”

  “Sure.” In a couple minutes he wasn’t going to care anyway, he thought. “What do you do when you’re high without a TV?”

  “Movies.” Arch got up and walked over to his laptop. While he opened it, Ty watched his back move. The wolf had a pretty good slender body, which made sense if he had a gym membership and went out dancing a bunch. And when he bent over and grabbed a DVD, Ty watched the wolf’s tail wag. He’d looked at a lot of guys’ butts—naked ones even—but he’d never thought about them sexually. And he wasn’t really thinking about Arch that way either, only he knew the wolf was gay. So the wolf wanted guys to appreciate his body, right? Anyway, it was a tight, slender butt, almost like a girl’s. Ty still didn’t want to fuck him, but he could maybe see where other guys did.

  The wolf brought the laptop over, trailing a cord, and set it on the floor near the bed. His chest was pretty well defined too.

  “I put in this dragon-fighting movie. The dragons breathe fire and talk.” Arch started the movie and sprawled out on the bed on his stomach. “It gets more dragon-y about forty-five minutes in, which is perfect timing.”

  “Our go-to movie was ‘P.W.’s Big Adventure,’” Ty said, stretching out on the bed and letting his tail relax atop his legs. “But that’s pretty much insane all the way through.”

  As the movie started, Ty grinned to himself. Lying in a dorm room watching a movie—if someone had told him that’s how he was going to spend his Sunday night, he would’ve laughed and told them to fuck off. But it was nice, it was chill, and he was starting to get used to the smell of the wolf.

  The first part of the movie was a lot of setup: a nation of weasels was trying to attack a nation of deer using magic, and the deer were desperate for some way to retaliate. About a half hour in, when the young buck had reached the desert and found the dragon’s egg, Ty got up on his knees and unbuttoned his shirt. He didn’t really process why he was doing it; he just felt warm. Getting the shirt off felt good and cooler.

  Arch turned his head, but didn’t otherwise react. And it was around then that Ty started really noticing shit, like how pretty the dragon’s egg was, and then when the dragon itself appeared on the screen, he said, “Holy shit,” out loud. The camera seemed to linger on it, the sparkling scales and rainbow glitter around the long neck and reptilian head. When it breathed fire and the young buck only barely dove behind a rock in time, the fire danced and cascaded around the screen and looked freaking amazing.

  And it turned out that the young buck had met a sarcastic dragon, but it wasn’t even the dragon’s lines that were cracking Ty up. It was the fact that it was talking at all. He couldn’t explain it, but he just kept thinking, like, what if it wanted to talk and then accidentally breathed fire? Because that’d be hysterical.

  He tried to cover up his giggles, but Arch was giggling too. “I told you this movie is fucking awesome,” he said.

  “Oh shit,” Ty gasped. “The dragon is amazing.”

  “Just wait
.”

  And it did get better. There were more dragons, and they actually set fire to a weasel army, which wasn’t really funny, so they stopped laughing at that part. Arch actually wiped his eyes a couple times.

  “Dude, are you crying?”

  “Shut up,” the wolf said.

  “No, seriously, it’s cool.” On the screen, the weasels were retreating. “I mean, those weasels are assholes, but they shouldn’t be, y’know, uh.” He searched for the word. “Made to be on fire.”

  “Yeah. Can’t they just talk about shit?”

  Ty thought that was a sweet thought, and it seemed like he’d known Arch for ages. At least, the movie had been going on forever. So he put a paw on the wolf’s back. And it was cool, they stayed like that until the end of the movie.

  Arch turned and smiled at Ty, then rolled off the bed away from his paw and put the laptop away. “I guess you probably want to get back to your hotel.”

  His hotel. Oh, shit, right. Ty looked around for his shirt, and then imagined coming in and waking up Rodo. “I don’t know if I should. I mean, they’ll know I’m high.”

  The wolf came back to the bed and grinned down at him. “They won’t know.”

  “No, I’m serious. I could get in deep shit for this. If they find out…”

  “How will they know?”

  Ty inhaled. “Because I’m slurring. No, I’m talking too precisely. See, I can’t tell! I’ll screw up, and then…”

  He sat up with his back to the wall again and gripped his tail in his paw. Arch knelt on the bed in front of him. “You’re not that high. You’ll be fine.”

  “What if I’m not?”

  The wolf laughed. “Well, the alternative is that you sleep here. You wanna sleep here?”

  “I kinda just want to crash.” There was some reason he wouldn’t want to do that, but Ty didn’t remember what it was right away. Then he pulled the bedsheet to his nose and sniffed. “Wait. You’re gay. And you have a gay roommate.”