Tales of the Firebirds

Kyell Gold

Contents

Introduction

1. Off the Cuff (Lee)

2. The Wallet Story (Dev)

3. Halftime Entertainment (Jay Cornwall)

4. Blessed (Colin Smith)

5. Sinful (Penny Smith)

6. Slowing Down (Coach Samuelson)

7. False Dawn (Lee)

8. Heart (Hal)

9. Getting to Sleep (Brenly)

10. Rest Stop (Argonne)

11. More Than a Game (Gerrard)

12. Contents Under Pressure (Kodi)

Acknowledgments

About the Author and Artists

Also by Kyell Gold

Introduction

Spending a decade in the Out of Position world inevitably led to me thinking about things that might have happened off the stage of the novels, first to the main characters Lee and Dev, and later to a number of the side characters. Many of the stories in this collection were published elsewhere; some were written just to explore certain characters, and one was written to round out the collection about a character who won a Twitter poll.

If you haven’t read any of the OOP books, you can still enjoy this collection, and if you do enjoy it, you know where to go next.

The stories are presented in more or less chronological order of when they took place in the world. Read on, and enjoy!

-Kyell, June 2018

1

Off the Cuff (Lee)

This story has appeared on my website, but never in print. I wrote it as part of a challenge to write stories about characters in sexy situations with police, and as I’d thought a lot about Lee and Brian’s college days prior to Out of Position but never actually written about them, I thought this would be a good chance to see Lee as part of his social group before his romance took him out of it.

* * *

They were all sitting around Kitteridge’s, the sophomores and juniors and the new freshmen, and the air reeked of coffee and activism. Lee and Brian had done this ritual the year before when they’d joined Forester Lesbians and Gays and now sat a little closer to the head of the table. The seniors gave the official speeches about how much FLAG hoped to make a difference, but Lee and Brian, precocious sophomores, had researched recent headlines for examples of the discrimination they were fighting against. Misha, the arctic fox senior and secretary of FLAG, had read out the list with grave meaning as well as he could with his light voice and frequent misreading of words.

That had been a couple hours ago, and the group was now well into the “getting to know you” portion of the evening. It would’ve been easier with alcohol, but Kitteridge’s had a strict policy about that and besides, all the frosh were underage, and technically the sophomores and most of the juniors were too, for all that counted at Forester.

But in Kitteridge’s, it counted, and so the ten of them sat around a table in the back, claws tapping along the worn wood or scraping already-etched letters deeper, tails flicking about as uneven chair legs clunked back and forth.

The frosh were a good group this year. Last year there had been twelve newbies, eight of whom had joined; of those, only Lee, Brian, and Liz the badger still sat around the table. The president of FLAG, an otter named Ryan, had just finished a story about a publicly straight fox on his high school’s baseball team who’d let Ryan fuck him more than once, and the vice president, a large stallion named Kosh, had said, “Well, sure, that makes sense. All foxes just want to be fucked anyway.”

All heads turned toward Lee and Misha, the two foxes at the table, who happened to be sitting side by side. “Hey,” Misha said mildly. “That’s a stereotype.”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “Lots of foxes are tops.”

“Just not either of you,” Ryan said, grinning.

Misha looked down and Lee flattened his ears. Ryan and Kosh had crossed a line in talking about personal habits, which happened a lot, actually. Keith, a polar bear who was one of the new recruits, broke the uneasy silence. “I thought we were fighting stereotypes.”

“That’s different,” Kosh said. “Anyway, the foxes know I’m just kiddin’ around. It’s just cause Misha’s famous for it, and Lee’s following right in his, uh, footsteps.”

“Hey,” Ryan said, “someone’s got to bottom if someone’s gonna top.”

All the frosh were looking at them, and so Lee said, “I’ve topped. When motivated properly.”

The attention shifted from Misha to focus totally on him. “I smell a story,” said Liz. “Oh, wait, that’s just fox musk.” She waved a paw in front of her nose.

“Surprised you can smell it through the thick badger smell on your overalls,” Lee said sweetly. “But yes, if you are all interested in hearing a story, I’ll be delighted to regale you.”

“A story of a top fox.” Kosh leaned forward, and the faint whiff of alcohol, which perhaps only a fox or wolf would have been able to smell, hinted that he might have been enhancing his coffee under the table.

“A story of a top fox,” Lee agreed, and spread his paws.

* * *

This was late last summer when I was down in Aventira with my father. The Dragons were playing a preseason game and he’d gotten tickets, so we went down to make a day of it.

He went to sleep early, but I was still wide awake, so I went out to walk around. I’d brought my pride jacket and had looked up a couple gay bars, and since I was eighteen and legal, I thought I’d see if I could meet a cute guy to make the night more interesting. It was warm enough for me to leave my t-shirt in the room and just wear the jacket over my fur, hanging open.

The nearest bar was still a bus ride away, so I hopped on. Don’t know if you’ve ever been on an Aventira bus in summer at eleven at night, but if you’ve got a working nose, I don’t recommend it. I’m pretty sure the raccoon next to me was pissing his pants during the ride.

(A general chorus of “Ew” and “Not hot!” greeted this part of the story.)

All right, so I got to where the bar was, and dismounted the bus much like a longtime resident of Aventira, with all the swagger of an eighteen-year-old who thinks everyone wants him.

(“You’re still exactly that,” Brian pointed out. “Only nineteen.”)

(“Do you want me to get to the end of the story or not?” Lee asked.)

Anyway, the bus had dropped me off a block away from the neon glow of The Jack of Diamonds, so I walked out into the street, again like a longtime resident. And when I got to the other side, this otter accosted me. “Where do you think you’re going, there?” he asked.

I hadn’t noticed his dark blue uniform until he stepped up close to me, and that made me reconsider my first remark. As if it weren’t obvious where the kid with the pink triangles all over his jacket was headed, twenty feet from a bar with rainbow flags and the same triangles hanging out front. Still, he was a cop, and so I pointed to the bar. “There.”

“And what’s wrong with our crosswalks, I must know? Have a phobia of them, do we?”

I didn’t quite know what to say to that. “I was in a hurry, sorry,” I said.

“Jaywalking’s a crime, you know.”

Now I was starting to see what was going on. The “cop” was staking out the gay club, using jaywalking as a pretext to proposition people. So I gave him a good long look over. I like otters, you know…

(“We do?”)

(“You do now.”)

…and he was just a little shorter than me, with a nice physique. He pulled off the cop costume pretty well. Broader shoulders than I usually see on otters, thick tail, and a handsome enough face. I did want to see the inside of the club, but I also know enough not to let an opportunity slide by.

“I’m so sorry, officer,” I said, and gave him a good coy look. “Do you need to punish me in that club there?”

“No,” he said, “I need to write you a ticket.”

“Ah-ha.” I looked around. “In your car? Or in a private room somewhere?”

“Well, not necessarily, but…” He looked at me directly then, and his eyes were very dark. “Do you want to go somewhere private? Sure, I think I know a place.”

It was my first completely anonymous hookup, and my heart was pounding. But I thought about how completely lovely it would be and what a wonderful story it would make—don’t roll your eyes—and so I flicked my ears and said, “I think we should go somewhere private. I’ve been very bad, jaywalking like that.”

“Yes, well.” He seemed unprepared for someone to play along quite so thoroughly and willingly. I worried for a bit that I was doing it wrong, but he was leading me around the corner, so I couldn’t have been that far off.

The street we turned onto had a little more life to it than the one sustained only by the poor gay bar: a pool hall, an all-night diner, and two small hotels. But to my surprise, he led me to a pizza place where a plump red fox read a newspaper behind the counter and a short weasel scampered around behind it with trays of pizza dough. The whole place smelled of cooking dough and tomato sauce: heavenly, in other words.

I wondered if this was some kind of Aventira ritual: pizza before sex. But the cop just waved to the fox and said, “Hi, Dolan. Two slices in about twenty minutes, can you?”

“Sure,” the fox said, and looked at me. “What you want on yours?”

I turned to the otter and said, “Why don’t you pick the topping?”

(“You did not say that,” Ryan interjected, but was shushed by the rest of the listeners.)

“Two pepperoni, then.” And he led me past the kitchen, reluctantly, because I was getting a little hungry, and into a narrow back hallway.

“The restroom?” I said as he held the door open. It smelled okay, though, clean enough. Better than the bus, at any rate.

“It’s quite private, and Dolan’s not busy this time of night. Besides, they’ve got supplies.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant until he locked the door and reached up to a little dispenser next to it. Three thunks of quarters hit my ears and then a little packet dropped down out of the machine.

The otter tore the plastic open and tossed me the condom. “There you are, lad,” he said, and started to undo his pants.

Well. I just held the thing and said, “You want me to put this on you?”

He looked up from his belt and tilted his head. “That wouldn’t do me much good when you’re inside me, would it now?”

“Whoa,” I said.

His eyebrows rose. “Did you or did you not say that I could pick the topping?”

“Well, yes, but…” My ears were going every which way. “I’m not—I mean, I don’t really—I haven’t—”

“Now, don’t tell me that pretty little equipment of yours isn’t working,” the guy said, “because those pants you’re wearing don’t do much to hide your state of mind, you know.”

“No, but—”

He reached behind him and pulled a pair of wristcuffs from his pocket. “I can remove the choice if that makes it easier for you.”

The guy really got into his roleplay—or else it wasn’t roleplay. I wasn’t sure what to think, then; I just held the condom and stared. “Right,” he said, and snap! He had a cuff around one of my wrists. Quick and easy, like he’d done it many times before. “Over here,” he said, and pulled me down to the floor, lifting my arm above my head. He threaded the other cuff behind a pipe that ran down the wall and said, “Now give me your other arm.”

I raised it and he snapped the cuff around it. So there I was, sitting on the floor, and when he started unsnapping my pants, for the first time it occurred to me that he might just take my clothes and leave me cuffed to the bathroom. The fox had seen me come in with him, sure, but also they knew each other and maybe he took a cut of whatever this guy could steal. Of course, he couldn’t get my jacket off now that he’d bound me, but who would want a ratty denim jacket anyway?

Not that I had much; probably had a twenty in my pocket and my credit card with a two thousand dollar limit on it, so…anyway, this wouldn’t be a very good story if it ended with me broke, half-naked, and unfulfilled on the floor of an Aventira bathroom…

(“I disagree,” Liz said.)

…so I will skip ahead to where the otter was neatly folding my pants and putting them on top of the back of the toilet, and then looking down at me. The tile floor was cold through my summer coat and probably not very hygienic, but I was mostly sitting on my tail and the cold was not foremost on my mind.

“I see you’re ready for action despite your words,” he said, and took the condom from my fingers that were still holding it. That brought his groin level with my nose, and I could smell that he was just as ready as I was, if not more.

He looked down and grinned. With one paw, he ruffled my ears, and with the other, he dropped his pants so my eyes could confirm what my nose had told me, and when I turned my muzzle toward his groin, he said, “Oh, aye, you can have a taste if you like.”

It was right there, and so of course I stuck my tongue out to give it a taste, and then I tasted it a little more, as you do, and then he pushed his hips forward and I got a much better taste.

You know, I would’ve been happy just sucking on that for a while and then maybe getting a reciprocal or even just a paw, but the otter—the cop—didn’t let it get that far. He pulled back, panting, so I knew I’d been doing something right, and then he let his eyes drift down my slender white-furred chest, down my stomach, to where I was all ready except for the condom.

“I suppose I’ll have to help you with this,” he said, and I rattled the cuffs to let him know that yes, I could not put a condom on myself with my feet. So he knelt down, and his paws were soft and smooth, and I watched them work up and down, getting to know me. They explored lower, too, nudging my legs apart, and I thought he might be reconsidering who was going to be on top, but then he just cupped my balls and said, “Lovely,” and ripped open the condom package.

The way he held me and rolled the condom down, I knew he’d done this before, many times. He even made sure to get the ring over the knot, which wasn’t very big yet, but was certainly getting there. It’s important to do that with canids, or else the condom can come off really easily. Not everyone knows that.

Then he squirted out some of the lube from the tiny tube the vending machine had spit out next to the condom, and smeared it over me, and rubbed what was left back up under that thick tail of his. Then he lifted one knee over my midsection and dropped his weight on top of me, and I got another good view of what I’d just had in my muzzle.

But of course, he had other things on his mind, keeping hold of me as he positioned himself and then lowered himself down, and, well, then I was topping from the bottom. I brought my knees up to support him and he settled his tail between them, and then he pushed his hips down and gasped, and he was—

(“One of the mounted police?” Brian asked with a smirk.)

Bad puns aside, he was certainly having a good ride and enjoying himself. I pulled the cuffs against the pipe, but all that did was make a nice banging sound to go along with the actual banging on the floor. The otter was heavier than he looked, all muscle and a bit of a gut that his uniform did a good job hiding, but he kept his weight back and I didn’t have any trouble pushing my hips up to meet his. I mean, I felt like I should do at least a little of the work, since he’d gone to all the trouble of the cuffs and the condom and all.

He didn’t seem to mind much what I did. Those big thighs pushed him up and down, and sometimes he landed a bit heavy, but if I didn’t think about it then all I felt was the pressure sliding up and down and my knot getting bigger. He took care of himself with a paw, both of mine being still well restrained, but he took his time.

I admit, I enjoyed it. I hadn’t had much practice, but straining against the cuffs gave everything a more urgent sense, and being buried deep inside the guy like that was getting me excited quickly. My knot had gotten big enough that it didn’t go in easily, so he was pressing back against it, and the more he pressed, the more I squirmed and pushed, and we got it in. Then he pulled off it again, and I almost just finished right there…

(“You don’t need to go into detail,” one of the frosh said, and was quickly shushed.)

…but a moment later we were pressing again, and this time I knew it was going in to stay. You know how—well, you non-canids don’t, of course, but it becomes this focal point of pressure, like it wants to expand even more but your skin is restraining it, and when he worked himself back and I pushed up and I finally got locked inside him, well, all that pressure released. I’m sure you all know how that goes.

And then he wasn’t shy about releasing his own pressure, and he did it all over my soft white fur, too. I didn’t much care, though it smelled, because I was sagged back against the wall panting.

We stayed like that for a minute or so, and he put a big paw on my chest like he needed to brace himself to hold me down. “I don’t think you can get up,” I said, but he just laughed and worked his hips, and with a slick tugging he actually did come free.

While I watched, he pulled the condom off me, cleaned himself up, and pulled his pants up. My post-coital bliss was fading into worry again that this guy was going to rob me and leave me cuffed in the bathroom, especially because whenever I said, “You are going to let me go, right?” he just laughed and said I should be patient.

But when he was all ready, he reached around behind me with a key and unlocked the cuffs. “Can’t leave these behind,” he said, and winked. “They come out of my pay.”

I rubbed my wrists as he slipped the cuffs back into his pocket. “Thanks,” I said.

“Have a slice when you get out,” he said. “It’s on me. And one tip for you.” He looked quite serious. “Don’t follow strange fellows into bathrooms.”

“I followed you in,” I said.

“That’s why I waited ‘til after to warn you.” He winked again, opened the door, and left.

I hurried to re-lock it, very conscious of my lower half’s nakedness, and got cleaned up myself, which took a little longer because fox fur isn’t as stain-guarded as otter fur.

(Ryan just glowered, but Kosh snickered.)

And when I walked out finally, there was a slice of delicious deep dish pizza with pepperoni waiting on the counter. The fox there grinned at me and I bought a soda so I could leave him a tip, and that is how this fox was taught to top.

* * *

The gathering had broken up, leaving empty coffee cups, crumbs on small plates, and Lee, Brian, Liz, and Misha. Liz and Brian took the opportunity to grill Lee about the story.

“You never told me about that trip to Aventira,” Brian said. “I would’ve gone with you.”

“Yes, and met my father. There’s a reason I hid my pride jacket in my luggage, you know.”

“Cops can’t just leave their beat like that.” Liz’s eyes were narrowed. “And they can’t cuff people just for no reason.”

“It wasn’t for no reason, Liz,” Lee said, “or weren’t you listening to that part?”

“And he didn’t seem very eager at first, but then he had a whole routine worked out with the bathroom?”

The fox gave an exaggerated shrug. “I just lived it. I can’t explain it.”

“You tell a good story,” she admitted, “but what if some of those newbies believed it?”

“What if it was true?” Lee perked his ears.

Brian looked past Lee to Misha. “What do you think?” he asked the arctic fox.

“I think it was a pretty hot story.” Misha swished his long tail. “But you left out a lot of details.”

“Boys.” Liz shook her head. “If you’re going to ask him to tell it again, I’m going home. It’s past midnight.”

“I’m not that tired,” Misha said.

Lee gave the other fox a smile. “Want to go over to the diner and get some pie?”

“Oh ho,” Brian said. “Now I get it. That’s why you told that story.”

Lee circled his coffee cup on the wood table, brown fingers holding the white ceramic cup. “I’ve no idea what you mean.”

Misha reached down to pat Lee’s thigh. “Pie sounds great.”

Brian rolled his eyes and stood up. “I’ll walk you home, Liz. Let’s let these two have their ‘pie’.”

Liz got up, and so did Lee and Misha. The ferret at the counter gave them a weary look as they passed her on the way out the door, and followed them with the key in her paw.

“Closed the place down again,” Brian said, his breath appearing lightly white in the air as he spoke. Autumn had brought a chill to Forester and the trees were just turning colors, but everything looked pale yellow and blue in the light of the moon and sodium lamps. Even Lee’s red fur looked an unnatural orange, while everyone else’s stark black and white remained more or less the same.

“Worth it.” Misha flicked his tail against Lee’s, and everyone saw it.

“All right.” Brian put a paw on Liz’s shoulder. “See you two later.”

Misha smiled at Lee as they headed off in the opposite direction. “It really was a pretty hot story,” he said. “Do you like wristcuffs?”

Lee’s ears stayed up. He breathed on his paws and rubbed them together. “Maybe as a sometimes treat.”

“And topping?” Misha reached over and took one of Lee’s paws in his own.

“Mmm. I could get used to it.”

The arctic fox grinned, and kept hold of the chocolate-brown paw, swinging it between them as they walked on down the street. “Did you tell that story just for me?”

Lee flicked his tail over Misha’s as they rounded the corner and the diner came into view, three blocks down. “If we’re going to be spending more time together,” he said, “you’ll have to learn not to ask me why I do things if you’re happy with how they came out.”

Misha didn’t say anything, and Lee looked sideways at the arctic fox as they walked under a yellow street light. Misha’s eyes were golden bright and then faded to shadow as they walked out of the light. “Are we going to spend more time together?” Lee asked.

“Well,” Misha said slowly, “let’s see how the pie goes.”

They crossed the street in silence, and then Lee said, “You know, you can get pie with whipped cream or ice cream, or even cheese.”

Misha’s small ears flicked over. “Is that so?”

“Uh-huh.” Lee squeezed Misha’s paw. “But I’ll let you choose the topping.”

“Oh God.” Misha pulled his paw away. “If we’re going to spend more time together, you’ll have to stop the bad puns.” But his tail was wagging, and he couldn’t keep the grin off his muzzle.

The diner glowed brightly before them, the smells of greasy burgers and fruit pies joining the low murmur of all the conversation inside. “I guess we’ll both have a lot to work on,” Lee said with a smile, and held the door as Misha walked inside.

2

The Wallet Story (Dev)

This story also explores life prior to the bulk of the OOP series, this time for Dev. I wrote it because I’d grown interested in the concept of a “shaggy dog” story, which is a kind of story that claims to be about one thing as an excuse for telling a completely different story. Dev’s friend Charm seemed to be the ideal candidate to tell a sexy shaggy dog story, and so he did. This story originally appeared in Heat, issue #8.

* * *

I started the week as a third-string cornerback for the Hilltown Dragons. Four days ago, I got traded to the Chevali Firebirds. Ah, the life of a professional football player. I got assigned the kicker as a roommate on the road—he's a big stallion whose real name I've already forgotten, because everyone calls him Charm. When he found out I'm a rookie at the age of 23, he started calling me “Gramps," because he's been in the league two years and he's only 21. Seems like a fun guy, though.

It's weird being on a new team, because all the guys have their own cliques already. You can latch on with the guys you play with—in my case, the defense—but even though you practice with them, you don't automatically get to hang out afterward. Not that I had many great friends in Hilltown, either. The Dragons were 2-8 when I left, and that kind of losing atmosphere makes it tough to enjoy yourself.

The Firebirds are 3-7 when I arrive, which isn't too much different. The first game I'm there for is a home game, which we lose. We're going on the road for next week's game. I'm expecting the same kind of black funk that was in the Dragons' locker room, but this team seems more upbeat, nobody more than Charm. He takes me over before the game and introduces me to the only tiger starting for the team, Fisher Kingston. Well, hell, what football-loving tiger doesn't know Fisher Kingston? He seems like a real down-to-earth guy. He sure doesn't wear his two championship rings around. I wonder if he'd let me see them.

The only other guy I talk to much is Jeff Cameron, a cheetah who came over with me in the trade. Like me, he plays defense; unlike me, he starts. He's got a big attitude issue, which is why he was traded. Me, I'm just a throw-in because the Firebirds are thin at corner.

So me, Jeff, Fisher, and a couple of the other felines on defense are hanging out in the locker room after practice on Monday. It still feels stiff and awkward. Charm is there, too, going through his locker. He bangs a fist on it, making us all look over.

“Dammit,” he says. “I lost my wallet.”

Jeff mutters, “Horses,” so low that only I hear it.

I want to be helpful, since he's gonna be my roommate and all. “Where did you have it last?” I ask.

Fisher and the other guys sigh. One of them, a leopard, stretches. “Get comfy,” Fisher says.

Jeff and I glance at each other. Charm's leaning against his locker with a big grin. “Well,” he says, “lessee. I know I had it yesterday after the game, because I took that leopard over to Kelly's and bought her a couple Cosmos. Now lemme think here. I set my wallet down on the bar after I paid, and I was chattin' her up. She was way into me, too. Her tail kept grabbin' my leg.”

The leopard's tail curls around himself. Charm doesn't notice, or doesn't pay attention. “But I was keepin' my hand on the wallet, even when she got up nice an' close and put her claws up under my shirt. Did you guys see her?” The guys shake their heads, and I do too. “She only came up to here.” He holds one massive arm just below his pecs. “But she had this great voice, all low and sexy, and she smelled like a garden.”

“Like a fresh-mowed lawn?” Fisher says.

Charm ignores him. He taps a finger on his long muzzle, and it's clear now even to me that he's only pretending to think. “So she starts askin' me all these things about like do I have a girlfriend and what do I like to do. And then she like, licks her lips, and she leans in and says...” He puts on his best impression of a husky female voice. “I've got a very talented tongue.”

Fisher and the leopard are grinning. Jeff looks kind of uncomfortable. I'm trying to look interested because they all still think I'm straight. “She did not say that,” I say.

Charm pounds his chest. “Cross my heart. So I ask if she wants to go to the back room. Hey, Gramps, you know Kelly's has a back room, right?” I shake my head. “Sure, right behind the phones in the hallway. They keep kegs in there but he don't mind if you use it for fifteen minutes once in a while.”

“Lotsa bars have a storage room, Charm,” another cheetah, a starting wideout, says dryly.

“Door locks from the inside.” Charm grins. “So I show her the back room, y'know how it goes, and she musta had somewhere to be, 'cause she gets right down to business. I'm ready for her, too, so pretty soon I'm sittin' back on a keg and she's just suckin' away, pretty little spotty head bobbin' up and down.” He gives a sly glance at the leopard, who doesn't react. His tail's still tightly around his own hips, but a couple of the other tails in the room have stopped curling lazily as their owners get more into the story.

“So you left your wallet in the bar?” Even Jeff is kind of getting into it. I'm not surprised; I mean, I haven't had straight sex in a couple years and I'm still getting into it.

“Nah,” Charm says, “cause I remember I was sittin' on it funny and I stopped her to push my pants all the way down. Gives her paws somethin' to do, too, that way.” He winks and cups his balls.

“Well, where'd you go when you finished with her?”

“Oh, I didn't just finish with her.” Charm licks his lips. “Good thing that back room is loud. A/C was goin' the whole time. She took it slow. Had me kickin' a couple of those kegs. Was about fifteen minutes before I grabbed her shoulders, held her there,” he mimes this, “and let 'er rip.” He looks around. “She swallowed like a pro, too.”

“Did she charge like a pro?” The other cheetah, a temperamental wideout, sounds sarcastic, but his grin is surprisingly sincere.

“I ain't ever paid for it, and buyin' drinks don't count.” Charm leans back against his locker.

“So,” I say finally, “did you leave your wallet at Kelly's?”

“Well,” he says, so quick I know he was waiting for someone to ask, “I don't think so. I mean, she took off pretty quick to clean up, and I sat there a while just chillin'. It was that good. She wasn't lyin' about her tongue. Some gals, y'know, just drop their mouth down and don't got no imagination. But this one...she licked in all the right places, used her paws real good. I give her an A-plus.”

Now I'm fidgeting some, because my boyfriend is pretty good with his tongue too, and Charm's making me think of him. So I try to focus on his story instead. Even though I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the room. “But pretty soon I pulled my pants up, and I'm sure I had my wallet after that 'cause I was buyin' drinks for this coyote,” he cups his hands a foot in front of his chest, “who was just too much to pass up.”

“Is anything not too much for you to pass up?” A dry voice comes from behind me. I turn and see one of the veterans of the defense, a coyote linebacker named Gerrard Marvell. He’s an All-Pro and probably the best player on this team.

Charm pretends to think about that, too. “I mean, she was really too much,” he squeezes his imaginary chest, “to pass up. Coach.” He winks at Gerrard, who is not, as far as I know, a coach.

“Bet they weren't real,” Jeff says. His tail, which had stopped during the blow job description, is flicking again.

“Oh, they were real,” Charm laughs. “Listen, so I buy her a Port City Iced Tea, right, and she tells me she knows this other exclusive club where we can go. There's dancing and they make an awesome Zombie. Well, hey, I love me a Zombie, right? So we hang out for about an hour and then I say can we walk or should we take a cab, and she says let's walk, I need to change.”

“Into what?” Jeff says.

“That's what I say,” Charm says. “She looks awesome, y'know, got on this dress down to here, really brings out her hips. But...gals, what'cha gonna do? She wants to change, she can change. So I settle up—see, I know I had my wallet then. I remember her patting my ass on the way out and gigglin'.”

“Did she pick your pocket maybe?” The other cheetah is grinning.

“Nah, wallet was in the other side of my pants. I just remember thinkin' I was glad she got that side because she got a good feel of my ass that way.

“Anyway, she takes me down a few blocks and says this is her apartment and she just wants to change, and do I want to wait down here or come up?” He grins around at us. “She's got a real nice apartment. Small, but nice. Big couch in the living room, silk sheets on the bed.”

I shake my head. “You went right to her bedroom?”

“Course not! I wait in the living room. I got manners.” A couple of the guys snicker at this. “Only she goes in the bedroom and then says she wants me to come tell her which dress looks better on her. So I walk in. And she's standin' there holdin' up this pretty blue thing, and I say it looks good, and then she swaps it out for this shiny pink one. And I notice as she switches the dresses that she ain't wearin' nothin' underneath. No shit. Nothin' at all.”

He makes us wait. I lean back against my locker, just enjoying the story now. Fisher finally says, “So which dress did you pick?”

We all laugh. Charm says, “The pink one. But not right away. I told her I thought what looked best on her was me. And she says, well, get over here and let me try you on. So...” He stretches his arms above his head and grins, “I drop my pants and get on the bed with her. She starts out with her muzzle, and maybe she ain't quite as good as the leopard, but man, she knows how to lick it. I get my hands on those tits and push her down, and I'm fucking hard as a rock now. She moans, cause I'm pretty good with tits, y'know, and then I get on top and start givin' it to her.”

He rocks his hips forward and back. All the tails in the room have gone still again. “We're takin' our time with it, goin' slow.” He pauses to look at Jeff. “You know the ladies like it slow, right, Speedy?”

“Oh, I know,” Jeff says. “I got no trouble with the ladies.” He talks casually, but he's leaning forward pretty intently.

“Good, good.” Charm looks at the other cheetah. “Cause speed ain't always good. So anyway, I'm workin' in, workin' in, gettin' right in there, and she's good an' tight, and those tits, they're awesome. She pretty much knows when I'm gonna finish, cause I lean in and say, here it comes, honey, and so she starts thrustin' her hips up at me, wiggling 'round all crazy, and pantin'.

“When I shoot my load, I make a little noise, cause you gotta let 'em know how good it is or they feel like you don't appreciate 'em. But I don't think she's even payin' attention. She's makin' some noise herself, and it just gets louder and louder. You know how like you'll be hearin' a train come from far away and you think it's close, but it just keeps gettin' louder?” He looks around the room. “Yeah. Like that.”

He pretends to look around behind him. “So I don't even hear her roommate come in.”

“Ah, no way!” the wideout cheetah yells. I'm trying not to laugh, Jeff is just staring, and Fisher and the leopard are grinning like they're at a funny movie. A funny porn movie, I guess. “She's got a roommate?”

“And only one bed.” Charm winks broadly.

“So,” the cheetah says, “the roommate stole your wallet?”

“Hell, no,” Charm says. “The first thing I know is I see this big tigress and she says, what the hell is going on?”

“You're makin' this up.” Jeff says it flatly, but his ears are twitching.

I just grin. Of course Charm's making it up, but it's great, he's really into it. I can tell that the other guys have heard the story before, or something like it. So I say, “Shit, what did you do?”

He gives me a big smile, just for a second. “What can I do? I'm balls-deep in her roommate, and that coyote's still howlin' away. So I say, what's it look like? And she says, looks like fun. Right there in front of me, she starts unzippin' her dress.”

He mimes that, too, though his huge arms can't quite reach all the way around his back. “I tell her, give me five minutes to recharge my batteries here. Meanwhile, her roommate's panting and still moanin', cause I'm still playin' with her tits. I just can't let go. The tigress has to drag me off the bed, and she tells her roommate to just chill, we'll be back soon.

“She pulls me to the bathroom, where they got this big shower, turns the water on, and first thing she does is get her paws all over my cock. Soaps it up real good, strokin' up and down. I'm holdin' her sides, and I tell you guys, if I hadn't just busted a nut, I'da come all over her right there. But even my boys need a few to catch their breath. So once I'm clean, I kneel down and start cleanin' her out like a cat does. Big licks right up there between her legs.”

He sticks his tongue out for emphasis. I take advantage of the break to say, “Oh, I bet while you were in the shower with her, her roommate stole your wallet.”

“You'd think!” He shakes his head sadly. “Stupid of me to leave my clothes lyin' out there with a chick I barely know. But hey, that's my weakness. Can't resist a nice pair of tits, or a naked chick with soapy paws. Specially a cat. You guys can keep your claws in. Well, mostly.”

Jeff scowls back at Charm's grin, hiding his blunt claws. The other cheetah doesn't seem as annoyed by the remark. “Anyway,” Charm goes on, “nah, that ain't where I lost my wallet. I was in the shower a while, 'cause the tongue ain't my strong point. I like it, and she liked it okay, but she didn't start yowlin' until I was all ready again, and then I just picked her up and fucked her good an' hard against the wall, water runnin' over us an' everything.”

The leopard and cheetah are grinning; Gerrard looks like he’s in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Jeff is, I think, slowly catching on. Fisher's still attentive, his tail lashing again. I wonder if he's thinking of his wife. I think I remember that he's married. I wonder if he thinks I'm thinking about a tigress. I cast back in my head to remember one, in case they ask me about a name, and come up with only a high school girl I dated a couple times.

Meanwhile, Charm's giving us a couple more details about his third fuck of the night: her legs wrapped around his hips, clawmarks on his shoulder, which he shows off. And it does confuse Jeff when there are actual clawmarks there, a neat line of three scars in Charm's short fur. I can tell they're not a tiger's, because I know what my clawmarks look like, but I guess Jeff wouldn't necessarily know that.

“Then,” he says, “we finish up, and her roommate gets in again to clean up. We clean each other off real good, soaping all the parts that mighta got dirty,” he waggles his eyebrows, “and then they get dressed again. Coyote-girl puts on her pink dress, Tigress puts on some sparkly white thing, and I just get back into my jeans and leather jacket.”

“Good thing you weren't wearing your 'Two Girls Short' t-shirt,” the wideout says.

Charm waves him off. “Just 'cause you never got laid in that...Anyway, Tigress tags along to the club with us. I know I had my wallet then 'cause I bought us fast food on the way.”

“You sure know how to show a gal a good time,” Fisher says.

“They picked it,” Charm says. “They said Fat Tony's has great salads.”

No girl I know ever voluntarily went to a Fat Tony's. But it's Charm's story. I lean back and listen as he talks about this club, called “The Spot.” It's so exclusive, he says, it's not listed anywhere. “You gotta know where to go. Coyote-girl, she's a model, works for one of them fashion mags, and she takes us to this warehouse. They move the club every month, tear it down and set it up again. There's a guy, he does movie lights for Hollywood, he comes and sets up the lights once a month. And the music is insane.”

“Like, who was the DJ?” Jeff is now pretty sure he knows it's a story.

Charm grins. “DJs line up to play this club. Y'know the guy Emerald Jones hired to play her birthday party?”

“Yeah?”

The stallion makes a cut-off motion, a sweep with the flat of his hand. “Couldn't get in.”

Jeff goes from wide-eyed awe to disbelief to skeptical curiosity. “But—”

“I dunno the name of the guy who was there,” Charm says. “I lost Coyote-girl pretty fast. But I start dancin' with this cheetah, just spinnin' and jumpin', 'til I'm outta breath. She's barely winded. Turns out she was an Olympic hurdler. Reserve. Never quite made the team.”

He claps a hand to his back pocket as he's miming the dances, at which point the other cheetah says, “Oh, so your wallet fell out while you were dancing.”

“Maybe!” Charm pretends to think about that. “I dunno, 'cause I made out with the hurdler for like an hour. We quit dancin' and she had her tongue in my mouth pretty quick. I didn't even buy her a drink.”

The leopard, who's been pretty quiet up to now, speaks up with a quiet drawl. “I thought you said athletes didn't have good tits.”

“Yeah, she didn't,” he says. “S'okay, though, she had awesome legs and the tightest ass you ever saw. Or felt.” He squeezes air with his hands again.

“So, what,” Fisher says. “You just made out? Musta been pretty tired by then.”

“Four times in one night ain't nothin',” Charm says. “The kissin's pretty good, and I love feelin' her ass, and she rubs herself right into my junk. Like we're dancin', see?” We all nod as he looks around, letting him know that we do see. “Then she says she wants to get outta there, she's got a room around the corner and she wants to take me there so we can 'go the distance.'”

I keep my groan inward. Charm's so delighted by the pun that I can't bear to do anything but join Fisher and the other guys with their appreciative “ooooh.” The stallion loves the reaction, and says, “I liked that too,” as though it really were some girl who'd said it and not something he'd made up. “So we get outta there and walk over to her condo. Big luxury place. Dining room, living room. I don't see much of it, though. We go straight to the bedroom and she gets outta her dress while I rip my pants off.” He pauses. “Whew! I tell ya, if she'd been the first, I coulda kept up with her. But she's got me on my back, ridin' me hard. She's so tight, but she's already real wet. You could smell how eager she was, and she loved every bit of the ol' Charm she was gettin'.”

Jeff looks kind of uncomfortable, like he's not sure he should be enjoying it. Everyone's watching Charm closely now, so I don't think anyone but me notices. “I tell you, guys,” he says wistfully, “the way she slid herself up and down on me, those tight legs, and the claws...I ain't never had anything like it. I grabbed her hips, but I couldn't hardly hold on. It was like she was tryin' to escape, and I just had to keep...jammin'...her...down.” Each of the last words is accompanied by a thrust of his hips into his imaginary partner. “I thought it wasn't ever gonna end. But it was the best of the night, and if I hadda guess from the way she screamed, I'd say it was the best of her night, too. Prob'ly her month.”

We let the silence stretch on when he pauses. He looks off dreamily, and then says, “If only her husband didn't pick right then to come home.”

Jeff is so startled he nearly falls off the bench. The other guys, though they seem to have been expecting this, react appropriately, with “oh shit!” and “no fucking way!” I chime in with an exclamation of my own.

Charm gives us a knowing nod. “Yeah,” he says. “Cheetah-girl yells that she'll be right there. She pops right off me, jumps down, grabs my clothes, and tosses them out the window before I can even get off the bed. Quick, she whispers, get out there! She's pointin' to the window.

“Meanwhile, I can hear her husband movin' around in the dining room, fixin' himself a drink or something. Cheetah-girl is messing with perfumes, dumping 'em all over the bed, and she hisses at me to get out again. Well, hell, I think, we're only three floors up, and I hope there's a fire escape or something. I don't figure she'd have just thrown out my clothes, right? So I hustle for the window and squeeze through it. And it's about as tight a fit as my cock in her muff. Ain't near as much fun, though.

“I get through, close the window, and feel around. There's a fire escape, sure enough, and my clothes are there.”

“Oh,” Fisher says, “ya know, I bet the wallet fell out when she grabbed your pants. Happens to me all the time when I'm runnin' out the back door of my mistress's place.”

“Y'know,” Charm says, “I bet you might be right. I don't even notice, when I pull my clothes on, 'cause I'm watchin' through the window. The husband comes in, big cheetah in a business suit, and I think he's an athlete, too. I mean, when he sees her naked, lyin' in the big perfumed bed, he gets his clothes off pretty fast, and he's got a good bod.” He shrugs. “Athletic. So I watch the two of them fuck. I figure, I earned it, and a couple times Cheetah-girl looks toward the window like she knows I'm watching. So she don't mind.”

“Dunno,” Jeff says. “I can't watch other people having sex.”

“Y'oughta try it first.” Charm winks at him, which seems to unsettle the cheetah even further. Jeff shuts up fast.

“I almost jerked off there on the fire escape,” the stallion goes on. “I mean, she's goddamn sexy, even if she is pretty flat. But the boys deserve a rest, so I just enjoy the show, and when they're done, they go out into the living room and I go down the fire escape.

“I can't find the club again, so I just grab a cab back to my place and pass out. And you know,” he says, tapping the side of his long muzzle, “I reckon I didn't lose my wallet at her place. Cause I bought myself a coffee this morning.” He snaps his fingers. “Come to think of it, they just called me an hour ago to tell me I left it there.”

Jeff sputters a little. The rest of us burst out laughing. “Awesome,” I say.

“Woo,” the cheetah wideout says. “I need to go take a cold shower now.” He strolls off with Fisher, and Jeff follows them a moment later.

I stand up, and so does the leopard. Gerrard steps up to me and holds out a paw. “Gerrard Marvell,” he says, “middle linebacker.”

“I know,” I say. I shake. “Devlin Miski, corner.”

He looks me up and down. “Need to drop some weight to keep up at corner,” he says. “Carson, you up for dinner?”

The leopard nods, and the two of them take off. I lean back against my locker, doubts flooding my mind again. The pro game is so much faster, I don't know if I can keep up. I need to go home and call my fox, have him reassure me that I belong here.

But Charm's looking at me expectantly. I push those thoughts away and force a smile. “Great story,” I say.

He claps me on the shoulder. “Glad you liked it, Gramps. Want to grab a burger? I know this great place.”

“Sure.” We walk out of the locker room slowly. As we push through the door of the stadium to the cool air outside, I say, “Hey, is that club real?”

“Oh yeah. Read about it in a magazine once.”

“That'd be cool.”

“Hey,” he says, “you seein' anyone?”

I hesitate. “Not really.”

“All right. Next time I go out, I'm bringin' you.”

“I'm not really into the whole threesomes thing,” I say. On the Dragons, a couple guys used to go out to bars and drag me along. I had to pretend to strike out, and did that so much they started calling me “Whiff.” Which isn't a really good football name—you don't wanna whiff on a tackle. Do that too much and you get cut. Or traded.

“Wouldn't be a threesome,” he says. “Two twosomes. C'mon, I put the tigress in for you.”

“Not Fisher?”

He snorts. “He's married, he don't go for that shit.”

“I dunno. He seemed to be pretty into it.”

“He's really old. Not like us.”

I laugh. “You call me 'Gramps.'”

“Well,” he says, “you're old. Just not really old.”

“Fuckin' kids,” I say. “You're buyin' dinner. As long as you don't lose your wallet.”

He laughs and punches my shoulder, and we walk on down the street together. And when I think of it, the road trip and the season ahead don't seem so bad at all.

3

Halftime Entertainment (Jay Cornwall)

This one was not initially connected to the OOP characters, just happening in the same universe. It became connected as of Uncovered, but originally appeared well before that, in Ravenous Romance’s anthology Touchdowns in 2011.

* * *

It’s halftime of a pretty important game in the division. The Crystal City Sabretooths are top of the league, and us Yerba Whalers, just up the coast, are struggling to hold on to the middle. It’s my third year as a pro football player, and I’m finally in the starting lineup, if only as a change-of-pace back. Means I get about fifteen carries a game, on average.

I’ve had ten by the half of this one, because our starter needs a lot of rest. Crystal City’s defense is number one in the league, featuring a bear and a boar who are beasts at stuffing the lanes, and a lion on the end who is quick as lightning with muscles like thunder. The boar ain’t afraid to use his tusks, which do not have to be capped or blunted. If you manage to get through them, they’ve got two muscular coyotes and a wolf, faster than the lion, even, waiting to take you down. I’ve got a nice set of antlers—points capped per league policy, unlike the boar’s tusks, and you can call that unfair, but that don’t change the way it is—but these guys come at you from all angles. We’re down 14-0 at the half. I’ve gained nine yards total.

Our regular starter, a tough, compact wolverine, is sucking wind all during coach’s halftime speech, and so nobody questions me when I say I need to take a break. That’s our code for ‘go throw up somewhere quiet,’ and as long as you don’t make a big deal out of it, nobody else will. Everyone gets worked up for games, just affects some of us different from others. If you need to settle the stomach, better do it in the locker room bathroom and get it out of the way.

And I am pretty worked up. It’s hard getting amped up for a game when you sit on the bench most of the time, so I jump around on the sidelines. When I get into the game, I can’t wait to break out, but I also love gettin’ down in there behind my blocker, running into the line and straining forward for those precious few yards in the scrum, hugging the ball against my chest, antlers lowered. Any game of the season, I get a charge out of it. Today, it’s especially electrifying when I see that number 55 on the other side, his coyote’s grin waiting for me. He tackled me once in the first half, and as we were getting up, I got a smoldering look to go with his grin.

That look, that grin, are fixed in my mind as I slip out of the locker room. I don’t head for the visitors bathroom. I trot down the hall, getting more and more worked up as I go, only now it’s not the game that’s doin’ it. I see his grin, I feel his weight on top of me during that one tackle, and I’m getting hard enough that my cup is getting uncomfortable.

I pick up the pace. I’ll only have ten minutes and I don’t want to waste a second.

It’s only my fourth time here in three years, but I know just which stairs to trot down, the smell and look of the short, dim, hallway, and the sign on the door next to the stairway that says, “Supplies.” The hall is clear, like always, so I tap-tap, tap-tap-tap at the door. There’s a brief pause, then it opens into darkness and the smell of bleach. A radio’s playing, softly, the highlights of the first half we just finished.

I fumble for the light switch before I kick the door closed. “I can’t see in the dark,” I say, becoming aware of the smell of coyote in the air as I step in. My heart races.

“I don’t got antlers,” he says, and I can see the laugh even in the dark. “C’mon, we ain’t got all day. I got a game to go back out there and win. You tellin’ me you can’t feel your way?”

The door slams shut. I find the light switch. He’s taken off his pads, but he’s still got on his navy blues with the gold trim, the big number 55 on the back under his name, the snarling sabretooth logo on his sleeve, and his white pants down at his knees. The coyote tail wags over his bare rear. “Course,” he says, “you ain’t havin’ much luck feeling your way out there in the field.”

My cock gives another jump. I want to wrap my arms around him and never let go, not just pressing bare hips against bare rear, not just thrusting up inside him, but just to be with him, to be myself and be with him. “I got a feeling this hole’s gonna be easier to find,” I say.

His tongue lolls out when he laughs, even though it’s the same joke we always make. I yank my pants down, taking a precious five seconds just to stand there and look at him, the muscular, beautiful lines, the slightly spread legs. I dunno which I like more, fucking him or being fucked, but it don’t matter, ‘cause he feels the same. We worked it out like this: home team gets to be on bottom, visitor on top.

“Play clock’s windin’ down,” he growls, holding a bottle of lube in a backthrust paw.

“Yeah, yeah. Let me get my uni on.” I keep a condom in my pocket. It takes about ten seconds to roll it down over myself, another ten to grab his lube and coat myself with it pretty good. Then I step in behind him and get into position.

Later, after the game, there’ll be a quiet dinner in Crystal City’s gay neighborhood, where a big coyote and stag blend in pretty well with the rest of the gym rats from the beach. There’ll be a few drinks in a bar, maybe dancing in a club where the lights stay low and we can bump and shove without football pads between us. There’ll be time to undress slowly at his apartment, to look at each other and touch each other, to make comments on workouts and the injuries of the season, my sore shoulder, his sore knee. And there’ll be, maybe, a little time tomorrow morning before my team’s plane leaves. This moment here is all about the game and the sex, the need and the release, the here and the now, but it doesn’t stop me thinkin’ about the other stuff while I’m gettin’ my hands on him.

The highlights on the radio are all about the Sabretooths scoring now as I get into position between his cheeks. He chuckles and says, “Sweet,” and that might be about the pressure behind him, but the radio’s also just played the highlight of a passing touchdown. And I know him. Whichever one I assume it is, he’ll claim it’s the other.

It was a sweet play—70-something yards—but I don’t rise to the bait. I just reach around and find him as hard as I am. My slick fingers squeeze, rubbing up and down his cock. “Shut up,” I say pleasantly.

“Big talk,” he says, but he shivers and pushes back against me. I push myself inside him, a little roughly, giving his cock another squeeze as I do. He stiffens. I press my nose to his cheek and exhale through the fur. My blood’s racing like it does when I stand behind the quarterback, waiting to get the ball. Every muscle tenses and twitches.

The radio moves on to defensive highlights, choosing one where my coyote here broke through the line and dropped our wolverine in the backfield for a loss. “That run is stuffed,” the announcer yells.

I see his tongue lolling out again as he laughs. “How’s this for stuffed?” I growl, and shove myself into him, all the way up. He’s tight around my cock, and hot, too, with the exertion of the first half. I feel him relax to let me in, then clench again.

He growls. A moan escapes through them. “Good…penetration there…” he pants.

I wriggle, then pull out and start thrusting again, up and back, up and back, in a quick rhythm. He arches back against me as I wrap my other arm around his waist, holding his back to my stomach as my hips move back and forth, sliding my cock out and pressing it back in. I give him the same rhythm, stroking up and down his shaft, jerking him off the way I know he likes it. His squirming, panting response tells me I’m doing it right.

And he clenches around me the way he knows I like it, keeping it nice and tight as I press in. We’re both of us counting off the minutes in our head, and we know we’ve got maybe five left, then one to clean up and one to get back. So I don’t speed up too much, because I want to use up every one of those five minutes. It’s just a quickie, but I want to feel those legs back against mine, the shoulders against my chest, the muscles that can stop him on a dime, turn him to catch the ball carrier, and bring him down.

My legs strain against his, the legs that can push me past blockers and take tacklers with me down the field. I hold onto his chest with an arm, my other hand wrapped around his cock. For all the lube, I won’t let it out of my grip, not `til we’re in the end zone. He writhes and pushes back, both of us panting now, his whole body tight and hard as his cock, me crushing him against the wall, buried deep in him and thrusting faster despite myself, unable to help it.

It’s still not as fast as that one time up in Yerba where his team was losing at the half. Coach kept them three precious extra minutes, so he already had his pants off and the condom on when he jumped into the storeroom back there where I was waiting. I barely had time to gloat about our first half before we were both shuddering, coming together, and then he pulled out of me and yanked the condom off, and was gone, with a kiss.

I did gloat later that night, though. That’s the only game we’ve won against them since I joined the team, and even though I only got on the field to return a punt, it still felt good.

The radio says, “We’ll be back with the second half kickoff right after these messages,” and that’s our three-minute warning.

I speed up, both in front and behind. My arm pins him against me while my weight holds him against the wall. His rear works back against my cock, pulling it all the way in, so my hips bang up against him. I bite my lip and then grab his ear; he squirms and clasps my arm, shuddering as I go faster with my fingers, too.

His leg shifts. I feel the soreness in the quick movement, but he’s not going to complain, just like I’m not complaining about my shoulder. We know how the game is played. Injuries are for later. Nothing matters when the game’s on.

I huff harder against him. He’s tight in my arms, a compact machine of muscle with energy building, revving up like I am, hot and fast. A moan escapes his throat through his clenched teeth. He’s loud. I love that about him.

I hit that moment, that point of no return, when I break into the clear and there’s nothing but green between me and the goal line. My legs work, my hips work, and I let the momentum carry us both. We shudder and spasm, hard coiled springs letting their energy out in a contained burst, a warm, slick, moaning collision of two bodies straining toward the same goal. Heat and sweat and focus all come together in the moment, his warmth spurting out over my fingers, mine emptying into the condom inside him.

My antlers smack the wall in front of us as my head jerks forward. I squeeze his body and pump his cock; he squeezes his rear around me and my arm with his fingers. Together we rock, he moans again and I echo him as the last of the passion drips out of us. He sinks back into me and I grip him tight, his warmth spilling out over my slick fingers. My shoulder complains a little, a distant, barely-noticeable cry.

My breath comes hot against his ear, which twitches and flicks. I give it a five count and then pull out of him, through the tightness of him clenching around me the whole time. I lean back on a shelf and pull the condom off, knotting it up at the end.

He kicks a wastebasket toward me and wipes himself clean with a cloth he’s rubbed deodorant into, so the guys won’t smell the lube. I’ve got one in my pocket too, even though I don’t need it as much. My fingers and the base of my cock are slick, that’s all.

Still, he’s finished before I am, pants up, uniform all in place. He looks down at me, tail wagging. I draw the cloth up my shaft. He raises an eyebrow, licking his lips, but all he says is, “Lock up when you’re done. And try to get more than ten yards for the game. It’s just embarrassing otherwise.”

“You could let me through once in a while.” I pull my own pants up. My shoulder complains again. I ignore it, feeling mellow, and it goes away again. It’ll be sore for the game and tomorrow, but it’ll be fine after.

“What,” he says, “you don’t like when I land on top of you?” He winks, and blows me a kiss, a long one that takes three luxurious seconds to unfold. “See you tonight, hon.” Then he opens the door, swings his butt as he slips through it, and with a flick of his tail, he’s gone.

“Sure,” I grumble as the door closes. “It’s all ‘hon’ now.” But I can’t help my grin as I straighten my jersey and slide out of the little closet into the thankfully deserted hall. I think I have about five seconds to just stop, breathe, and get my grin under control, and I take every one of them.

Back up the stairs, back to the locker room full of white shirts and maroon numbers. “Cornwall!” yells the offensive coordinator. “Where the hell ya been? Get yer pads on and let’s get out there.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. I sit down at my locker and pull my jersey off, getting the pads out.

The wolverine next to me shakes his head. “Feelin’ better?”

I’m breathing good, not panting any more. I’ve got that great mellow feeling and I’m totally relaxed. I feel ready to get out there and play another whole game, if I have to. I could take on the world. “Much.”

“Coach put a couple new plays in.” He rattles off the plays. I kind of remember them from the playbook.

“Sure.” I attach my pads around my shoulders and fasten them quickly around my midriff. “Runs left, right?”

He stands, fully dressed now. He adjusts his jersey. “Yeah. Wants us to try runnin’ away from those coyotes in the backfield.”

I’m making sure all my antler caps are in place. I try to keep my voice even. “Y’know,” I say, “they always catch ya, in the end.”

4

Blessed (Colin Smith)

Villains have always fascinated me, and I wrote this story to get some insight into one of the villains of the OOP universe. This story has never before been published.

* * *

Q: Colin, would you say you have lived a virtuous life?

A: I would have to say yes, I have.

* * *

I was seventeen when Bob first came to visit. I’d been playing well in high school with God’s blessing, and for a year or so, a bunch of colleges had been in touch to have me come play for them. I was ranked as the fifty-first best high schooler in the country, and the fourth best cornerback, so a lot of the top schools were coming after me.

That was a blessing too, as my mom and dad said, because while we had enough money to get by, I have three younger siblings, and paying for college for all of them was going to be tough. Mom and Dad believed the Lord would provide, and they said as much when Coach Ricker visited us himself, on behalf of Ozark State.

That was a thousand miles away, in the heart of the country, and wouldn’t be my first choice. But Coach said that he had a friend in the area who’d gone to Ozark and wanted to meet me, and I remember it was April before my senior year when they came over.

Coach was a panther, black all over except when the sun hit his fur at a certain angle, and then you could see his spots. His friend was a red fox, and so we felt comfortable with him right away. He had a great smile and a real plain-spoken manner, and he introduced himself as “Bob, just Bob.” I had to ask him three times to tell me his last name, because he wanted to be friendly, but I just couldn’t call a grown-up by his Christian name. And when he told me his last name was “Abinson,” my mother laughed.

“Like the grocery store,” she said.

“Well, yes,” Mr. Abinson said, and his ears flicked back like he was embarrassed. “My family owns them.”

You never would have known it. He wore a pretty gold cross, but other than that he wore no jewelry, his watch was very simple, and though his clothes looked good, they didn’t look any better than Dad’s. He’d driven here in a pickup truck, too.

He proceeded to tell me about the great education he’d gotten at Ozark and how he knew a smart fox like me could find good opportunity there. I liked him right away, and when he told me about the chapel and how he’d donated some money to have it fixed up, I liked him even more.

He asked if he could have dinner with us the following month, apologizing for his busy business schedule, and he was genuinely sad to leave when he had to go.

There were a lot of other coaches, and some of them brought alumni round to see me, but I didn’t click with any of them the way I did with Mr. Abinson. When we had dinner with him that May, a week before my graduation, he took us out to the fanciest steakhouse in Allegheny and insisted on paying.

Dad looked at Mom, and pulled his wallet out. “I don’t think we’d better let you pay, sir,” he said. “Colin had a talk from his coach about taking money from schools.”

Mr. Abinson gestured firmly for Dad to put the wallet away. “I wouldn’t think of getting young Colin in any trouble,” he said. “Listen, have we talked about Ozark at all at this dinner? Did I tell Colin I wouldn’t pay if he decided not to go?”

“No.” Dad wet his lips, and his ears were cupped back, though not flat. “But…”

“Trust me, Mr. Smith,” the other fox said. “Coach Ricker had a long talk with me about what I was and wasn’t allowed to do. We both want Colin to have a successful career at Ozark. Now, I am allowed to take my friends out to dinner. We’re all friends here, right? We’ve broken bread together and said Grace.”

I remember sitting there and thinking how ridiculous it was that Dad was hesitating. “He’s just being friendly, Dad,” I said.

“And let me tell you,” Mr. Abinson said, “I’m not getting to know any other families. I wasn’t asked by Coach to help recruit Colin. Coach keeps tabs on his alums, and when he saw he was recruiting a fox in Allegheny, he thought of me. Sure, I’d love to see Colin go to Ozark. What alum wouldn’t want this kid suiting up every Saturday for his team? But I like you all. If Colin decides on Lakewood, I’m not going to stop being your friend.”

Mr. Abinson was true to his word through the recruiting process. Lakewood was one of the places coming hard after me, as was the U of Allegheny. Both those coaches, as well as three others, came to visit in person and pitch their school to me. One of them brought in a wealthy alum who flat out offered me a car. Dad politely asked him to leave. Another alum called me to ask what he could do to sell me on his school. I won’t say what schools they were because I don’t want to get them in trouble.

It came down to Allegheny and Ozark when I started doing the recruiting visits. I could’ve gone to Lakewood, too, but Dad asked me, “Is there anything they could say to push them ahead of the other two?” and I didn’t think there was, so he said it wasn’t right to take advantage of Lakewood, even if it would’ve been nice to travel to the other coast.

Well, there’s no mystery about where I went. Everyone knows I picked Ozark. The campus was breathtaking, and when I landed, I was escorted around by two beautiful, courteous, Christian vixens, one red and one swift fox. They took me to the chapel Mr. Arinson had told me about and we prayed together, and then they showed me around the beautiful brick buildings, with the forested hills in the background. Springtown is basically just the college, so it’s quiet and secluded. Not a lot of distractions, the girls told me.

They did have a state-of-the-art football facility, too, which was kind of like the Ritz (I imagined) if my high school’s facility was a cheap motel. We walked out onto the field and I looked around at the eighty thousand seats and imagined them full of yellow and black, cheering for me.

Allegheny had the advantage that it was close to home. I could see my family often, my parents and my little brothers and sister, and that was important to me, too. But it only took two hours for them to get crossed off my list.

Like at Ozark, two girls were assigned to take me around campus. One was a fox, a red, and the other was a jaguar, I think. It was a while ago. Anyway, they said they were going to make a quick stop on the way to the campus and they asked me to come up to their apartment while they changed. So I went up and sat on the couch, and the jaguar sat really close to me and curled her tail around my waist. I didn’t really like that, but I was trying to be polite. I didn’t want to do anything that would make the college give up on me, and I thought maybe where she was from, tail-wrapping like that was just friendly.

Then the fox came out of the bedroom holding up two dresses and she wasn’t wearing anything. “Which one do you like?” she asked.

I just sat there, frozen. I had no idea what to do. I was trying not to look at her, but I’d never seen a naked vixen, and she was pretty amazing. She was also pretty immoral. I think I just gaped, and the jaguar said, “I think he likes you without either one.”

Then the vixen came and straddled my legs and put her fingers on my cheekruff, and she said, “You’ve only had high school girls, right? I know lots of things they don’t.” Her tail swished back and forth between my legs and she grabbed my paw and put it on her body.

I closed my eyes, but her smell was all in my nose and then the jaguar started undoing my pants. I started to say a prayer, but I couldn’t remember the words, and then the jaguar reached into my pants and put her paw on my prick, and I remember being so embarrassed that it was hard, and then thinking that my eighteenth birthday was still a week away and wondering, Am I going to be raped?

That did it. I took my paws off the vixen and pulled the jaguar’s away from me. I was shaking as I tried to do up my pants. They both asked me what was wrong, and I just said, “Take me to the coach.”

I told Coach Belzec what had happened. He’s a big raccoon, and maybe it’s because I always feel like raccoons are smirking at me, but I just didn’t think he was serious when he said the two girls would be punished and not allowed to greet athletes. “Scandalous,” he said, but I don’t think he meant it. A couple years later, I met a guy who went to Allegheny and he said he’d had sex with three girls on his recruiting visit. When I’d been seventeen going on eighteen, that would’ve horrified me. By then, though, I’d grown up enough to realize that other guys, non-devout Christians, had lots of premarital sex, and that didn’t mean they were bad people. The system is just set up that way for athletes. You have to be pretty strong to resist it.

Mr. Abinson was always talking about the system that way, except a little different. He said that there was a system in place where athletes could get the help they needed, but the UCAA was there to make sure they didn’t get too much. He sold me a car, which at the time I was worried about, but he showed me the contract that said I would have to pay him the value of the car at a future time and he told me that in the case of people who needed a car in order to make the money to pay it off, he made this sort of arrangement often. It wasn’t just because I was a football player. Same with the meals—he did some kind of deal with Dad where Dad got stock in his company, which was just a between-friends things, and then Dad made enough that he could send me money for the meals the scholarship didn’t pay for.

I knew it wasn’t right to take money from guys affiliated with the college, or from agents, but Mr. Abinson was a friend by then, and he told me over and over that he knew the rules backwards and forwards. So I trusted him. And even when the story broke my senior year, and people started asking me about the financial transactions, I stubbornly insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong.

* * *

Penny was a huge help. I knew she was special when I met her in Bible study, our junior year of high school, and it wasn’t just that she was a red fox like me. She could sing like nobody I’d ever heard, and she was smart: we had the best conversations about Jesus and the Bible. Senior year, I took her to the prom, where I pledged to be her chastity partner until we got married. She admired me for that, because she knew how hard it was for a football player, and she enrolled at Ozark so she could be there with me and help me.

But she didn’t know the half of it, because I was scared to tell her about things like that recruiting trip. I was doing well avoiding drinking and smoking, things the coaches didn’t like us to do anyway. But the girls…the girls were everywhere. My freshman year, it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t play a lot, and my roommate and I just worked hard to make the team. Sophomore year there was more attention, but with prayer and Penny, I stayed pure (my three “Ps”).

Then junior year, I was interviewed a lot. Everyone thought I should come out professionally that year, that I should get my payday, but Penny wanted me to stay and finish my degree. I thought I should, too, also because I had a lot to learn in college still, so when we set up roommate assignments, I got a new roommate, a freshman weasel. I think Coach hoped I’d be a good influence on his character.

I got him to cut back on the drinking a little, but I couldn’t do anything about the girls. He kept a journal of them, and one night I flipped through it. It went back to his junior year of high school and there were over a hundred entries. A hundred different girls! I dropped the filthy book and went to wash my paws.

He got defensive whenever I told him he should ease back on the girls. Sex relaxed him, he said, and anyway, he never fooled around with another weasel without protection, so he wasn’t going to end up with unwanted cubs. Early in the season, when we had this argument, I called him a degenerate and he called me a self-righteous asshole. But we had to play together, and we both realized the other wasn’t going to change, so we called a kind of truce and actually got along for a while.

It was months later, this one night before a game when my roommate snuck a girl into the room. I mean, he did it lots of nights, but this time, well…

We knew each other’s habits pretty well, and I was always wound up and nervous before a game anyway, so I would go for a walk around the campus while he did his thing with the girls, and then I’d come back and spray some Neutra-Scent at his side of the room and go to sleep. Showing similar consideration, he kept quiet while I said my prayers and even accepted my help with some of the plays.

Anyway, this night. He came in with the girl, giggling a lot as she tried to get him to calm down, and he said he just had to sit down and then he sprawled on the bed snoring before I even had a chance to leave.

The girl, a pretty bobcat, looked disgusted. “I’m not going to stay here and see if he wakes up.”

“I’ll walk you out if you like,” I said from my desk. “I think he has a webcam set up, if you want to come back when he’s awake.” I was only telling the truth, but she laughed and sat in the chair at his desk. We talked for a little bit, and when my roommate didn’t wake up after ten minutes, the bobcat sighed. “I guess I should go,” she said, and extended a paw. “Is that offer still good?”

I walked her back all the way to her room. She talked about her philosophy major, and I talked about the game and how I was really nervous—this was against a ranked team, and it would be the biggest game I’d played in so far. It seemed like no time at all before we were at her dorm room, and she had the door open, and then her nose was next to mine and her lips brushed my lips.

“I’m not…uh,” I said. “I mean, you’re very pretty, and…”

She reached down to my neck and touched the cross there. “I admire someone with values,” she said. “You know, this doesn’t mean anything. I won’t tell anyone. I just like you and I want to help you out. How do you know this won’t relax you unless you try it?”

“Jesus…”

“He didn’t say a lot about sex.” She smiled. “That’s in other parts of the Bible. I know sex before marriage and all that, and if you want to go away, I won’t press. But if you want to stay, you can.”

She kissed my nose and walked into the room, leaving the door open. I stood there thinking about it. I was a starter on the football team, and literally every other player I’d gotten to know on the team had had sex more times than he could count. If I only did it once, here—well, that would be just as bad as them. I’d pledged to be Penny’s chastity partner, but as hard as it was to be celibate in high school, it was ten times harder here.

Still, it was something I prided myself on. Once I gave it up, I couldn’t ever get it back.

Q: Do you believe that chastity is more of the body or of the mind? Don’t you masturbate?

A: You know I do. I’m not proud of it.

Q: Does that break your vow of chastity?

“If you stand there too long,” she purred from inside, “someone will see you.”

That got me worrying about something else. What if I did run into someone on the way out? I stepped into her room and closed the door.

I didn’t intend to do anything except give myself more time to figure things out. But she started taking off her clothes, and the room was dark. She came up and pressed herself against me, and I thought again to myself, No one will ever know. And no one ever did. But see, it wasn’t my fault. She seduced me into the room and then I was tired and not thinking straight. Besides, I didn’t think about her at all.

I never told Penny that story, obviously. She believed in my purity and I believed in hers, and when she told me so, she made me feel more pure. And yet I could never quite forget that night, mostly because I played great the next day in the big game. That helped erase any misgivings I had about my breach of chastity. If God were really upset at me for it, I would’ve been terrible, and then I would’ve gotten the message and understood.

But everyone forgot about my play on the field when they started printing the stories about the rich alums giving money to football players. Mr. Abinson was one of the people mentioned, and my name came up in the article too, and then I had to answer all sorts of questions. And the more I defended Mr. Abinson and myself, the more I felt a little coil of dread inside me, and it reminded me of the memory of that bobcat that night. Because when I looked at what they were writing, even though I never told Penny, I thought that they were right. The things Mr. Abinson had done were against the rules.

I talked to him only once while it was going on, when he was visiting the campus and took me for a drive in his car. “Don’t worry about this,” he said. “You just worry about playing great.”

“But did you know you were breaking rules?” I asked.

He was quiet for a while, and then he said, “Colin, let me tell you something about rules. Most rules are there to help a system survive. If most people follow the rules, that’s good. But sometimes you have to know when to step outside the rules.”

I felt cold all in my chest, and I reached up to hold my cross, but it didn’t give me any comfort. “So you think you’re above the rules?”

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “Did Jesus follow the rules the Romans laid down?”

“You’re not Jesus,” I said. “I’m not stupid, Mr. Arinson.”

“No, you’re not.” He pulled the car over then in a rough clatter of gravel, out on a country road where there were not many other cars. I curled my tail tightly on itself as he turned to me, and I couldn’t look away from him. “Of course I’m not Jesus, Colin. I’m just one of His servants trying to do right the best way I know how. Is it fair that the college and the UCAA make millions of dollars off your performance while you are only allowed a scholarship that doesn’t even amount to a hundred thousand dollars if you took all four years? Do you know what Jesus had to say about rich men?”

I nodded and wrung my paws together. “But…”

“No buts,” he said firmly. “Listen to me. This is going to go away. We can’t talk after this, not for a few months, but I will always be your friend in Christian love, no matter how they try to deny that. And I swear I will not let you suffer while you work to make them money.”

When he put it that way, well—I knew it was wrong according to the UCAA. But we were wrong together, and, I thought, maybe not wrong in Jesus’s eyes. “Do Mom and Dad agree with you?”

He rubbed his whiskers and then pushed his finger over one fang. “The less you talk about this, the better. I know you’re close to your parents and they might understand, but they might also talk about it to other people. So you should tell them you’ve done nothing wrong and they’ve done nothing wrong and that I’m taking care of it.”

“All right.” I didn’t like it, but at the same time it made me feel good that Mr. Abinson trusted me with that secret.

“The world is complicated, Colin,” he said, pulling back onto the road. “Keeping Jesus’s word is tough, and sometimes you have to do things that don’t seem right in order to do the right thing.”

“I told you, I’m not stupid,” I said.

He was driving, and he didn’t stop, but he turned away from the road and snapped, “Then act like it.”

My ears went back, and a moment later, he had control of himself again. “Ah, I’m sorry, Colin. This persecution is really trying, you understand?” I nodded. “What I mean is, you’re smart. You’re probably one of the smartest players on that football team. So you can see which rules are right and which ones are there for the players who aren’t as blessed as you.”

It felt weird when he said it like that, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I mean, God gave me intelligence so that I could use it, and clearly this was a case where I would have to. I imagined Jesus interviewing me like one of the reporters on a sports show:

Q: Colin, did you accept money from Bob Abinson?

A: Well, no, he never gave me money directly.

Q: What did he do for you?

A: He just helped me get a few things I couldn’t afford, like a nice car, some meals on the weekends.

Q: Could your family have afforded those things?

A: Not without taking money away from my younger brothers and sister.

Q: So you were accepting his gifts so they would benefit your family?

A: Yes.

Q: Did he offer you those gifts to make you attend Ozark or to influence you in any way?

A: No, never.

Q: Do you consider him a friend?

A: …

Q: Colin?

A: Yes, he’s a friend.

Q: You know that it is okay to accept tokens of friendship from a friend, right?

A: Yes, I do.

Q: Do you think that when I told you I would provide for you, that I might have chosen Bob Abinson to be the instrument of that provision?

A: Yes, I think it’s possible.

Q: Do you think you did anything I would be ashamed of?

A: No, I do not.

* * *

I had another problem, though, and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, not even Bob—Mr. Abinson. After the bobcat, I didn’t have any sexual transgressions again my junior year. But I thought about sex a lot. It was hard not to; even my teammates who knew my beliefs talked about the girls they’d seen when I was in earshot (for a fox, earshot goes a long way, and some people just don’t understand that). They lit up when they talked about it, with a joy and energy that I couldn’t help envying even though I knew it was based on false pleasures and loose morals. The true pleasure awaited me in the future, and I couldn’t wait until I got married so I could enjoy it with my God-given wife. The joy of sex between a married couple is one of the great gifts of God, and I knew that Penny and I were going to enjoy it to the fullest.

But she didn’t want to get married while we were in college. She wanted a courtship, an engagement, and a big, fancy wedding, and I could see already that I was going to have to wait until I got drafted by the UFL to pay for the wedding she wanted. I wanted to give it to her; I didn’t resent it at all. The problem I had was that while a little bit of tension got me energized and motivated for games, a lot of tension did the opposite.

Of course I knew how to masturbate—I wasn’t one of those fools who really believes boys can completely abstain. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I’d done it a few times in high school while my parents were out (and once, thrillingly and terrifyingly, when they weren’t). In college, it was harder to find places to be alone, but I managed. I didn’t feel great about it, and I prayed for forgiveness every time I did. After the talk with Mr. Abinson, though, I wondered if that weren’t one of the rules he was talking about. After all, I knew masturbation wasn’t a substitute for a wife. But some people, without God’s law, might just play with themselves and never seek out the love of a female in whose union he could celebrate God. Anyway, God knew I was only doing it to relieve pressure on myself so I could show everyone the very best of the talents He’d given me.

No matter how I did it, though, it didn’t feel the same as it had with that bobcat. And after our first game my senior year, when I had two interceptions and shut out the other team’s star receiver, I should have been ecstatic. Coach said I was really living up to my potential, and Mr. Abinson—this was right before that story broke and the car ride—said that I was going to be a first-round pick in the draft that year if I kept it up.

Which was a blessing, and I made sure to thank God after the game in all the interviews. I felt like there was a bright future ahead of me, a career in the UFL and a marriage to my dear Penny, if only I could make it through the year ahead of me. Summer practice had not been too difficult to get through with prayer, but as fall brought more difficult games, more pressure, and more stress, I kept thinking about the bobcat and that one night she’d tempted me into.

Q: Colin, do you think you need some kind of release for all this stress?

A: I really do, Jesus.

Q: If you need it in order to reach the future I have laid out for you, then do you think I would be angry with you?

A: I hope not.

Problem was, how did I find the bobcat again? Actually, I didn’t want to find her again. If I started a regular thing, it was liable to lead to something like a relationship, and that would definitely be wrong. There was a guy on our team, one of the tackles, who just started sleeping with a doe, and even though he was a bear and they shouldn’t even be thinking about getting married, he’d proposed to her that fall. Everyone was happy, and I joined in with smiles even though God specifically tells us we should only join with those of our own species.

Would something like that happen to me? I made it through another game worrying about that, and another the following week, and then God delivered His message to me in the locker room that night.

I’d twisted an ankle—nothing serious, but the trainers wanted to wrap it up, and they took extra care with me because I’m one of the best players on the team, so it was pretty late by the time I got out of the training room. Then I had to shower, which took longer because of the wrap on the ankle, and after that I was praying at my locker for God to show me the way through the next week, to give me strength to be the best I could be, and I heard noises coming from the equipment closet.

They sounded like quick-breathing moans, and I worried that someone might have slipped and fallen while putting away some of the gear. So I walked over and opened the door.

The light was off, but I could make out two shapes, one leaning against the rack of pads, the other on its knees in front of the first. The kneeling one turned toward me, and I saw eyeshine gleam. “You want next?” he asked in a deep male voice.

“Next?” Stupidly, I stood there and still didn’t realize what was happening, even though the smell of sex was making its way through the cleanser and the leather and all the stuff in the closet. My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted.

The standing person was one of the wide receivers, a fossa, I think. He let out a long sigh and adjusted something at his pants—no, now I saw the shadows more clearly, saw his bare hips and his prick sticking out and, and glistening, and as I watched, the kneeling guy (I could smell now that he was a wolf) leaned forward and licked it again.

I said something—I’m not sure what—and closed the door, hurrying back to my locker. I was still only wearing a towel wrapped around my waist from the shower, but I didn’t get dressed right away. For one, I was afraid to take the towel off—what if they came out and saw me? For another, my head was whirling. I couldn’t keep a thought in my head, so I reached into my locker for my cross, but I couldn’t find it.

A: Jesus, are you there? Jesus?

“Hey.”

I spun around. The fossa was there, pants up now. He jerked his thumb back at the closet. “All done, if you want—”

“I don’t,” I snapped. “Just leave me alone.”

He blinked. I turned back to my locker, trying to find my cross, but he didn’t go away. After a second, he cleared his throat. “Uh, I dunno what you think…”

“I think your choices are between you and God.” I was bristled out, snappy, and when I turned to face him, I was pleased to see his conciliatory posture, ears back, paws out, his long, ropy tail curled back around his legs. “You want to live a deviant, immoral life, then—”

“Whoa, hey.” He got defensive. “You think I’m—hey, no.” He laughed. “I’m not gay.”

I pointed back to the closet. “That was another male, right?”

“It was just a blow job.” The fossa shook his head. “Fox, you don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, do you?”

“I know God’s word. ‘If a male shall lie with another male’—”

He laughed. “Lie with? Shoot, ain’t no lyin’ going on. It’s just a blow job. Relaxes you, don’t have to worry about any girls getting too much up in your business, and…” He winked at me and jerked his thumb back toward the closet again. “That guy, I call him ‘Kneepads,’ he’s really good. You long-muzzle types got great tongues.”

“I’m not interested,” I snapped.

He raised his paws, more at ease now. “Just seems like you’re pretty tightly wound. Might do you some good, but hey, if prayer does it for you, more power to you.”

With that, he sauntered past me and out of the locker room. I stood, fuming, then searched for my cross again without success. I started to take the towel off my waist, then stopped. What if that wolf came out and saw me? What if he thought I wanted him?

I should go tell him to leave. Then I could get dressed in peace.

Yes, that’s what I would do. I marched over to the equipment closet and there he was, sitting on the floor with his phone out, texting or something. He flipped it shut when he heard me, and his little ears perked up. “Just so you know,” he said, “I don’t kiss and tell. What happens in the closet stays in the closet.”

“I don’t want,” I started, but at that moment I reached up and found my cross, where it had been hanging around my neck the whole time.

Q: Did you think I had abandoned you, Colin?

The wolf, Kneepads, came forward. He was half a foot shorter than me, but he pulled me in and shut the closet door.

Q: Do you think this is a test? Or is it a solution?

He pulled the towel away easily, and set his paws on my hips gently. “Gorgeous body,” he murmured.

Q: Colin?

My prick was hard, hanging out of my sheath. I didn’t move as he rested one paw on it and then closed his long muzzle around the tip.

A: Oh…God.

I didn’t think I would finish, and then I couldn’t not, and I closed my eyes and let it happen. His warmth surrounded me, his long, agile tongue licking, and then he pulled back and chilly air caressed me. I fell to one side against the rack and leaned there, panting hoarsely.

“Wow,” he said, licking his muzzle. “Someone needed that bad.”

“I…”

He pulled a small paper from his pocket and pressed it into my paw. I curled fingers around it out of reflex. “You need me again, just text that number with a place and time. I’ll be there.”

He gave my prick one more lick, making me jump, and then stood and walked out of the closet without another word.

In my prayers that night, I realized that God might have shown me the way. Just as Bob Abinson had helped me by circumventing some of the rules, so too was this helping me in a creative way. I felt wound up, tormented, but once I prayed for guidance and realized that this wolf was God’s messenger, my whole body relaxed.

I avoided the fossa after that, but I did text the wolf several times that season. God’s blessing worked; my stock rose, and I was projected to be a second-round pick, the second or third best cornerback in the country. As Bob had predicted, the money scandal blew over; the university was reprimanded, but no punishments really resulted. He and I resumed our talks, and spring of my senior year, I signed with an agent and officially declared for the draft.

With the season over, I’d thought I wouldn’t need the wolf’s services anymore, but there were nights with Penny that were delightful and thrilling and ultimately frustrating. I often masturbated to relieve the tension, but as much as I hated to admit it, that was a poor third place in my experience to actual sex with a female and the attentions of Kneepads. Sex was out of the question: Penny and I had gotten engaged at the beginning of the year, with the idea that we would get married in the summer before I started my professional life, so I was saving myself for that. But what the wolf did to me wasn’t sex, and he had been as discreet as advertised.

So I texted him one spring night and met him in the deserted locker room. We barely exchanged three words between us, but I left satisfied.

Q: Why are you using God’s blessing when there is no game to prepare for? Isn’t this abuse?

A: There’s the combine and all the workouts for the pro teams, and besides that, I have to stay pure for Penny. Don’t You want me to be the best partner I can be?

Q: Of course I do, Colin. I just wanted to make sure you understood.

I didn’t abuse him, but he did come to Boliat for the UFL combine, where all the prospects work out and are interviewed by pro teams. Penny didn’t come, because I told her it was going to be all work. I told Kneepads he didn’t have to come either, but he said, “You think you’re the only boy I’m going to get my muzzle around? There’s a bunch of us going, anyway.” Although the thought disgusted me, it also made me feel better. He was just a public utility, like a gas station, and I wasn’t the only one pulling up for service. I saw him twice during the combine, and I aced the workouts, and I didn’t ask Kneepads how his workouts went.

On draft day, I went to Port City for the draft with Penny and my parents, because I’d heard that the Firebirds might draft me in the first round. My agent, a short and chubby red fox, filled out our table (I heard later that the announcers called it the “fox table,” like there weren’t any other same-species tables around)—Bob was watching from the audience because my agent wouldn’t let him sit with us, even though that whole story had gone away already. We held our breath when the Firebirds came up with the third pick, but as it turned out, the Firebirds took me at thirteen with another pick they’d acquired via trade.

“I’d like to thank the Lord Jesus Christ Fox for blessing me with the talent to play the game, and the Firebirds for showing confidence in me,” I said when I’d stepped off the podium and pulled on my Firebirds jersey. “I’m looking forward to working hard and making them a championship team.” Word for word, the script my agent gave me. I made him put in the thing about Jesus.

Everyone hugged me, and David Rodriguez, the Chevali GM, came over to shake my paw. The evening was a blur, but I remember Penny holding me and telling me how proud she was of me, and how the jersey smelled against my fur and how I held her against me and thought, this is a new beginning, and I am going to leave college-me behind.

One thing I definitely left behind was worrying about Bob and how the media would perceive our friendship. He celebrated with us that night, discreetly, and he continued sending me encouraging e-mails. He also introduced me to a fox who lived a couple hours from Chevali, a speedy wideout who was thinking about going to Ozark, and in fact the only time I saw Bob in person after my draft night was during the bye week in Chevali, when he flew down so he and I could visit the fox.

But that was months away, and before then, I had a wedding to prepare for and attend. My agent had told me when I could expect my first check from the Firebirds, and knowing that my wedding was important to me, he expedited the signing and the bonus. We’d arranged for late payments with many of the people around the wedding (I don’t know who they all were, but Penny mentioned florists, caterers, sculptors, designers, someone in charge of chairs, I think?), the church where we’d met back in Allegheny, where the wedding was to be held, and the Renaissance Hotel, where the reception would be.

I was rather surprised to get my signing bonus and see nearly half of it disappear to wedding expenses, but that still left more money than I’d seen in one place in my life. The wedding was worth every penny, too—forgive the pun, ha ha. My darling was as beautiful as I’d ever seen her, and I got to see the envious looks on my Ozark teammates’ faces, as well as getting congratulated by every relative I knew and several I didn’t.

And then there was the wedding night.

“Alone at last,” I said, locking the door to our Presidential Suite.

“At last,” Penny echoed.

I went to her and hugged her. “Mrs. Smith,” I said. “I want it to sound more beautiful. You deserve a prettier name.”

“I think Penelope Smith is about the prettiest name I can imagine,” she said, and kissed me.

Well, once we started kissing, our paws found each other, and then sought out the fasteners on our clothes. We fumbled a lot, but love will find a way, and soon enough our clothes lay on the floor and we lay together on the bed. In the moonlight, my love fairly glowed, and I wanted to touch her all over, to explore those lines I’d only seen (and sometimes touched) through clothing for five years.

“You’re beautiful,” I told her.

“And you are so handsome.” She wasn’t really looking at the part she hadn’t seen before, and her paws stayed very much above my waist, but I knew she was a virgin as much as I was. Likely more.

“Are you ready?” I asked, kneeling next to her, because I sure was, even if she wasn’t looking that way.

She nodded. “I heard it hurts, the first time.”

“I’ll be gentle,” I promised.

She lay back on the pillows, and I got between her legs and situated myself, and made love to my wife for the first time. I tried to be gentle, but once I was in, instincts kind of took over, and I finished pretty fast. I stayed inside her, tied, and kissed her nose. “Did you enjoy it?” I asked, because she hadn’t made any of the noises the bobcat had, years ago.

“Sure,” she said. “Did you?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, but guilt pushed the words out. I had to lie to her, because if she wasn’t very good, it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t have any experience, and that would come in time. Briefly I thought that if lovemaking truly was God’s gift to us, then He should have figured out a way to make the people we love better at it. Then I banished that thought. The bobcat was a slut who thought only of the physical, and the sensations I’d felt with her were hollow and meaningless.

“Maybe,” Penny said in a small voice, “we could do it again later.”

“It will take about twenty minutes for…for me to be able to be free,” I said, and she flicked her ears back. “And then maybe ten more minutes. But I can wait up. Did you not enjoy it?”

“Oh, no, it was wonderful.” She lay still. “It did hurt, a little.”

“It’s supposed to, your first time.”

“Yes, I know.” She looked up and smiled. “I love you, Colin.”

“Love you too, Penny.”

We did try again a half hour later, and though I managed to last longer this time, I didn’t really enjoy it much more. She said she did, and so I was happy to leave it at that.

But after spending a month together, I started to worry. Penny agreed to make love whenever I wanted, that first month, but she just lay back on the bed while I lay on top of her. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, and she said she did, but I wasn’t feeling the spirit of communion. And after mini-camp and the symposium, when I came back to spend two weeks at home, she didn’t want to make love except when her season was on. She’d been on suppressants all during college, but had stopped a month before our wedding. Even when she was in season, I felt the pull of desire, but she didn’t seem to, and our lovemaking felt—mechanical.

Q: What’s wrong with your wife, Colin?

A: I don’t know. I read that some females just can’t enjoy lovemaking. Would You have been so cruel to my lovely Penny?

Q: If I did afflict her thus, what message does that send you?

A: I don’t know, Jesus.

It bothered me through training camp. Was it something I was doing wrong? I couldn’t test that theory without betraying my marriage vows.

I was assigned a backup linebacker for a roommate, a coyote who used his nickname “Zillo” everywhere. Within a week, I’d forgotten his real name. He was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, and Christian as well, so he pointed me to his church in Chevali, and I started going regularly—more regularly than he did, although I was happy to see that when I got up on Sundays and dressed for church, he began to come along even if he was exhausted from the previous night.

After two weeks of intensive exercise and studying together, Zillo and I became pretty good friends. He walked me through the routines, and in a friendly way told me how jealous he was of the attention a first-round pick got. He’d been picked in the fourth round three years ago and hadn’t gotten beyond backup linebacker.

There weren’t many guys competing for his spot, though. At cornerback, we had a lot: the starters, Vonni DiCarlo and Norton Tyler, then one of last year’s backups (the other had been released), a tiger named Devlin Miski, and five hopefuls, including me. I wasn’t worried about Miski; he didn’t have the speed to be a starting corner. The hopefuls ranged from a ten-year veteran to two undrafted rookies, but I was confident I could earn a spot on the team.

So I wasn’t worried about that the way most of the other guys were. I was more worried about my wife. Zillo and I were relaxing on a rare night off, and he asked if I wanted to go into town to a bar. I told him I don’t drink and I’m married, and he laid his ears back and said with a grin, “Well, lots of guys are married.”

“I’m not the kind of guy who has girls on the side,” I said.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” he said, and his ears didn’t come up.

I felt bad, because I enjoyed his company, and we were going to be roommates. “It’s okay if you do,” I said. “ ‘Judge not lest ye be judged,’ and all. My roommates in college all went out and had a lot of sex, and as long as you aren’t raping them, I don’t care. I just made the decision for myself not to.”

Then his ears came back up, and he grinned. “You have a lot of willpower,” he said. “So, got married pretty quickly?” He indicated her picture, which I’d put on my dresser. “She’s beautiful.”

“Thanks.” I paused and tried to figure out a way to get around to what I wanted to ask. “So how many females have you been with, do you think?”

“What, ever?” He crossed his eyes and lay back on his bed. “Wow, uh. Maybe fifty? But that’s over like eight years.”

That wasn’t so bad. Six or seven in a year? “My one roommate, his sophomore year in college, had a book with over a hundred names in it.”

“That he’d slept with?” I nodded, and Zillo whistled. “Must have been one good-looking guy.”

“Not even,” I said, and laughed. “Some girls will just open their legs for anyone in a football uniform.”

“I guess,” Zillo said.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” He shook his head. “How do you know if you’re good?”

“At sex?” His brow creased.

I coughed and couldn’t stop my ears from folding back. “Um, yes.”

He laughed. “I’m sure you’re fine. There’s not much to it if you’re a guy. Is your wife not enjoying herself?”

I didn’t want to tell him the whole story, especially as I didn’t want him thinking about our sex life. “No, she is,” I said. “I just always wondered how, if you keep going from one female to another, how you can tell…”

He peered at me and took a moment before replying. “If you get off, then you’re doing it right. If she doesn’t get off, that’s her problem.”

“Have you ever been with someone who didn’t, er…get off?”

He shrugged. “Probably.”

The conversation, though slightly illuminating, left me without any thoughts about what to do. Penny wouldn’t tell me whether or not she was enjoying our lovemaking, and though I suspected she wasn’t, I couldn’t tell her how I knew that, and I couldn’t accuse her of lying to me, so I couldn’t help her figure out her problem.

“But hey,” Zillo went on, “don’t worry about it. She’s supposed to talk to her mother about sex.”

“Really?”

“He—heck, yeah. I mean, that’s what they do on TV.”

“I don’t know if Penny’s comfortable talking to her mother that way,” I said cautiously, trying to imagine the two of them talking about sex. I could barely even imagine Penny and me talking about sex, certainly not in the frank, open way Zillo and I were.

After training camp, we were given a day off before going to the pre-season, and I got to spend a day with Penny. She showed me what she was doing with the house, and we passed a very pleasant day sharing each other’s company. To be honest, the training camp had worn me out and by the time we went to bed, I didn’t really have sex on my mind. But she hadn’t been doing anything but setting up a house, shopping and decorating, and she’d been without me for most of a month—and yet she didn’t even bring it up. She felt a little apprehensive in bed, but relaxed when I just put my arms around her and didn’t undress.

It was a really nice day, and after attending church the following morning, I really felt that my life was very nearly all I could ask for.

Q: Do you believe everyone gets everything they ask for?

A: You told me if I worked hard, that I would.

Q: Do you think you’re working hard enough?

A: I don’t know what else I can do.

I didn’t play much in the first pre-season game, just special teams. The rookies get more playing time as the season goes on and the veterans want to rest more. But I was edgy to play, to prove that I could perform out on the field. And no matter how I tried to put the thing with Penny out of my mind, I couldn’t. Husbands and wives are supposed to enjoy each other’s bodies, are supposed to enjoy sex. That’s what they tell us when we see all the immoral fornicating in popular culture: if you wait until you get married, you can have that with God’s blessing. Bob had taught me that God always wants me to have the best of everything, and yet here I was, having done everything right—almost—and still missing an important part of the life that had been promised to me. I wanted to call Bob, to have him work some magic and make Penny better, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him about sex.

Zillo had been in a black mood ever since that cornerback tiger had gotten moved to linebacker, somehow ahead of him on the depth chart. He hadn’t been cut, so that was positive, but he’d really been hoping he would get a chance to start sometime this year. Gerrard Marvell, the middle linebacker, is semi-legendary and is also a coyote, and Zillo thought that Marvell would give him preference, but apparently that’s not how it works. I told him that if he worked hard, he would get what he wanted, but I felt ill after saying those words, and they weren’t what he wanted to hear, so we didn’t talk after that the whole evening.

I’d left Kneepads behind in Ozark, of course, but around the second week of pre-season, I started thinking about him. I couldn’t talk to anyone about him, but there must be guys like that around here, I thought. Only how could I find them? I had no idea where that fossa was, and I wouldn’t have asked him anyway.

But I did have Kneepads’ number. And he’d mentioned going with others like him to the combine.

I sat in the room I shared with Zillo one night, thinking about that wolf’s mouth on my prick and hating myself for thinking about it. I wondered if I could get Penny to do that, and just picturing that made me feel even worse. I got my phone out and looked at the number, at the “Send Message” entry in the menu. I was always careful to erase all the messages after I sent one, but I could see them clearly in my head.

Q: You’ve already worked out that he’s one of God’s blessings. What are you afraid of?

A: That the people who persecuted Bob Abinson will find out about it. That they won’t understand.

Q: Are you worried about what people think, or about what God thinks?

A: Well, God, of course.

Q: What do you think God thinks? What is God’s plan for you? Does He want you to be happy?

A: Everyone’s always told me that.

Q: So if you can’t be happy with your wife in this one important part of life, what should you do?

I typed out a message: Know where I can find someone like you in Chevali?

He wrote back almost immediately. Aw, I miss you too, sweets. Congrats on the big contract.

I don’t miss you, I wrote. I need another discreet mouth.

He wrote back a smiley face and then: I’ll see what I can do.

I lay back on the bed and clasped my paws over my stomach. I felt like I might throw up. When Zillo came back from working out, I pretended to be asleep.

In the morning, there was a message on my phone with an address. I copied it onto a piece of paper and then deleted all the messages and the phone number.

Two nights later, we had an evening off, and Zillo said he and the guys were going out to a bar. I declined, as I always did, but when they’d left, I pulled on a hoodie sweatshirt and some old jeans I hadn’t worn since college, since I’d bought a bunch of new clothes. I grabbed the address and took a cab down to somewhere a few blocks away, and I walked over.

The address led to a squat brick building with a rainbow flag hanging tattered over the door. A few people stood outside smoking and talking in low tones. I kept my paws in my pockets and stood staring at the building, at the posters on it, thinking how dangerous it was for me to be standing here. Did that wolf think I could just walk in with no repercussions? Outside, I could hear the music and I could smell the male sex. It disgusted me, but I would have to go in there to find what I wanted.

The people out front stopped talking as I walked up. I was used to being stared at on Ozark campus, but here they didn’t know who I was. I hoped not, anyway. I hurried past them and pushed through the door before I could change my mind.

I burst into a dim, loud room that stung my ears. A moment later, the thick smell of a lot of sexual males hit me. Cupping a paw over my nose, I made for an empty chair and slouched there, recovering while I tried to look around for someone who might be as likely and eager as Kneepads.

For forty-five minutes I sat there. I ordered a club soda and looked around at the horrible people talking to each other, holding each other, dancing and rubbing muzzles in some sort of twisted parody of God’s love. I hadn’t anticipated this. I’d thought that maybe, I don’t know, they would just be pairing off like we did at practice, looking around until they found a willing partner to go do unspeakable things with. I barely choked the club soda down. I wanted to punch them, to scream at them to stop being an affront to God’s sacraments, but I’m not stupid. I kept my head mostly down.

A little while after I’d finished the club soda, a fat mouse waddled up to me. “Hey, what’cha drinking?” he asked. “I’ll get you another.”

I stared at his huge incisors. “I’m fine,” I muttered.

“Care to dance?” He held out a paw.

“No,” I said.

He stood a minute longer and then waved the paw. “Fine.”

A weasel stepped up five minutes later and tried to make eye contact. I pushed my chair back, stood, and walked out of there.

How could I have thought that I could just walk in and talk to those people that way? I ran toward light and noise until I found a street where I wouldn’t be ashamed to hail a cab, and then I took it back to the dorm and I threw the sweatshirt and jeans into the bottom of my closet and I soaked myself in the shower for about as long as I’d sat in that place. By the end of it, I felt I’d almost washed the smell and feel off of me.

And then I lay in bed with my eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

Q: Colin, have you seen what I wished to show you?

A: That I do not belong in those places? Yes.

Q: Do you trust in God to provide?

A: …

Q: Colin? Do you trust in God?

A: Yes. I do.

* * *

Two days later, I left practice late because I’d stayed to work with the special teams coach. The other rookie fox, a wideout named Ty Nakamura, stayed with me, and we talked about running in the open field. As a corner, I don’t do a lot of that; wide receivers are more accustomed to it, but not from special teams formations.

Ty’s a good guy, I guess, but he’s not a Christian, or at least not a devout one like me and Zillo. I think he finds the idea that people still go to church kind of quaint. Then again, he sounds foreign, so maybe he’s whatever religion his parents are. Hindu? I don’t know what those Eastern foxes are.

Anyway, we weren’t talking religion, just football, and as we walked out of the facility, he pointed. “Hey,” he said, “check out that guy over by the girls.”

There were often a couple girls waiting outside the facility for football players, something I wasn’t used to from college. I guess in college, the cheerleaders knew where the players lived, and everyone could find out if they wanted. At least, my teammates never had trouble meeting girls. But here, the only place they knew the players would be was the facility.

I followed Ty’s finger and saw a slight fox, so foppish that at first I thought he was a girl. But then I noticed the flat chest, the slightly broader muzzle, the straighter hips. “That’s wishful thinking,” I said.

Ty laughed. “Can’t blame him for trying.”

I frowned. “I can. We should let him know that his type aren’t welcome around here.”

“Ah, leave him alone. He’s a kid, maybe he just wants an autograph.”

Maybe he did, but I didn’t think so. The autograph kids waited in a whole different area, and I knew why those girls were there. I had no doubt about why he was there.

Q: Do you trust in God to provide?

A: Yes, I do.

I got to my pickup and found a pen in the glove compartment, where I scribbled a note on a piece of paper: Here, in four hours. Everyone would be gone by then, but we’d been given access codes and keys and encouraged to come by late at night to use the workout or film rooms.

I folded up the note in my paw and stepped out of the truck. Ty was just driving off, so I waved and said, “I’m gonna tell him to get lost.”

“Leave him alone,” Ty said.

I shook my head, and he rolled his eyes and drove off.

Heart pounding like I’d just run sprints, I stomped over to the little group. The girls preened when they saw me, and the kid looked up with interest.

He was a red fox, which made me even more sure. His button-down yellow shirt hung straight down his slender chest, and a filmy pink scarf lay around his neck. Might as well have been wearing a button that said, “SODOMITE.”

I waved at the bunch of them. “Nobody else is coming out, so you might as well get lost.” A few of them tried to protest, but I ignored them and stepped up to the fox. “Especially you.” I bit back the word “faggot,” because you could get in trouble for saying it, even if it was true.

“Especially me, huh?” He had a lazy southwestern drawl and a lazy smile I wanted to punch.

I palmed the note and shoved him in the chest, pushing the paper into his shirt pocket as I did. “Especially you. Nobody here wants what you’ve got.”

I turned and stalked away, and I didn’t have to pretend to be furious. I felt sick and relieved and guilty and I sat in my pickup listening to Christian rock for five minutes before I felt calm enough to drive away. I didn’t even check to see if the fox looked at the paper. If God wanted it to happen, he’d be here in four hours. I drove out of the parking lot and I didn’t look back.

5

Sinful (Penny Smith)

In the first year of my Patreon, I wrote a bonus story every month about characters from my world. One month, the subscribers voted for a story about Colin’s wife Penny. Having already written about Colin, I was happy to find out what his wife was going through. An earlier version of this story appeared in my collection of Patreon stories, Twelve Sides.

* * *

Penny pushed open the door of the large mansion, her nose catching the smell of bear. “Hello?” she called.

No answer. Genora's car was still out front, along with two others, so she was definitely home. Penny was perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes early, but still. She let the door swing closed behind her and stepped into the cool foyer, the patterned tile chill on her feet.

Nobody in the dining room, nor the den. Maybe out back...oh, of course, Genora had mentioned something about a tennis lesson. So that was likely still going on.

There was a shortcut to the back that went out through the kitchen to a side patio, with stairs down to the yard and tennis court. She pushed the door open and stepped back out into hot sunshine, shielding her eyes as her feet navigated the warm wood of the deck. At the top of the stairs, she paused. The courts below were empty, though there were rackets and balls and an equipment bag lying there.

Only then did Penny's nose register the scent of bear and wolf, nearly drowned out by the lush flowery hedges that bordered the patio on either side. She turned, a smile ready. “Gen—”

The second half of her friend's name died in her throat. Her friend lay there on the deck atop a big brightly colored quilt and underneath a trim, fit wolf, neither of them wearing a stitch of clothing.

Penny made a little noise in her throat and her paw flew to the end of her muzzle. She and Genora stared at each other, and then the vixen scrambled down the stairs to the back yard because to get back to the kitchen, she would have to have walked past them. “Penny,” her friend's voice floated down, but no footsteps followed.

At the base of the stairs, she walked through the peonies to the basement door, in the shadow of the main patio, and leaned back against the cool glass. She could probably get back in this way, go upstairs, and hurry back to her own house.

And then what? Come back in fifteen minutes and pretend none of this had happened? She fingered the small gold cross around her neck. Confront Genora about her transgression? She closed her eyes and breathed in and out. All right. Genora was her friend. It was her duty as a Christian to talk to her, to help her. She must be doing this because she'd been tempted, and Penny could lend her strength.

She opened her eyes and looked out at the empty tennis courts, then flicked up toward the side patio, her ears cupping that way before she folded them down. Still, no sounds came from above, nothing over the droning of bees in flowers and the hum of the air conditioning unit a little ways away.

After a few more deep breaths, she'd composed herself. She turned and found the basement door open and made her way inside.

The basement was where Genora's husband, an offensive lineman for the Chevali Firebirds, kept a big-screen TV, a refrigerator, an old ratty couch that Genora kept trying to throw out, and a shelf with some footballs he'd been given after games. The room smelled like musk and beer, and Penny hurried through it and up to the first floor. She turned the wrong way at the top of the stairs and ended up in the movie room and then turned back and got to the foyer again. She had her paw on the door handle when the bear’s heavy footsteps sounded in the dining room and her friend called out her name.

Penny stopped and turned. Genora emerged from the dining room in a large blue flower-print dress—one, Penny noted, that could easily be slipped on (or off)—and held up a paw to the vixen. “Penny, listen. About what you saw...”

“I hope you're not going to tell me it wasn't what it looked like.”

Genora laughed. “No, no, it was exactly what it looked like.” She gestured to the dining room. “Want an iced tea?”

Penny's ears flicked around, and Genora caught the movement. “Raef is packing up his things. He'll go around the house so he doesn't bother us.”

Penny folded her arms. “Oh, come on,” the bear said with a broad smile. “Are you going to never talk to me again?”

Support and strength, Penny reminded herself—and the one other question that was growing in her mind. All right. So she followed Genora into the dining room and sat down at the large polished wooden table.

Genora brought in two tall glasses of iced tea and drank hers halfway down before setting the glass on the table. Penny sipped daintily from the tip of her muzzle. “Whoo,” the bear said, licking her lips. “Worked up a thirst there.”

Penny pursed her lips, and Genora's smile faded. “All right, all right. I keep forgetting you're new to this.”

“I've been with Colin for years,” Penny said.

“And I've been married to a football player for a decade, Pen. Didn't you hear when Marge was talking to all of us about the things she went through?”

“So you're saying that because you think Allen might be cheating on you, that justifies you doing the same?” Penny couldn't help the tightness in her voice, but at the same time didn't like it, didn't like the annoyance that flickered across her friend's muzzle.

“I'm saying that Allen and I have an arrangement. I don't ask him what happens on the road and he doesn't ask me what happens at home.” Genora picked up the iced tea and put it down again. “And for the record, I know he cheats on me. We just have one rule: no bears. No cubs.”

“So he knows about...” Penny waved her paw in the vague direction of the patio.

“Yeah.” Genora took another drink, then put the glass down and stared at the table. “I mean...he probably suspects.”

“How do you know what he's doing?” Penny held up a paw. “You know what, it doesn't matter. Even if he is cheating, you should be going to counseling together, not—two wrongs don't make a right, Gen.”

“Two wrongs?” Genora smiled again. “Honey, there was nothing 'wrong' about Raef, and I hope to God—sorry, sorry—I hope whatever pretty little thing Allen's dipping his wick in is just as right.”

“But you're violating the bond of marriage!” Penny cried. “And—and just so another male can lie on top of you and—and I mean, why would you risk everything for that?”

The bear's eyes widened. “Did you see him?”

“So take a picture with him!” Penny gripped her glass. The cold soaked into her paw pads. “You don't have to be—intimate with him.”

Genora leaned in across the table. “I know I don't have to. I just really wanted to. And he did, too. He said he likes big gals.”

“You really wanted to?” Penny shook her head. “You wanted more?”

“Allen's gone for ten days.” She raised her eyebrows. “So's Colin, for that matter. Are you just lonely?”

“I miss his company, of course,” Penny said.

“And...his intimate company?”

The vixen was uncomfortably aware that control of the conversation was slipping away from her. “I don't think that's your concern.”

Genora pushed her glass aside and set both paws on the table. “Pen. Level with me. Do you enjoy sex with your husband?”

“This isn't about me!” Penny stood up. “This is about you and your behavior!”

She'd only taken one step backwards when Genora rose, too. “Hey, don't go. We don't have to talk about that if you don't want.” The vixen stopped, trembling. “But then you have to admit that what I do isn't any of your business, either. Mmkay?”

Her fingers went to her necklace. “If you need support—to resist temptation—”

The bear smiled and held out a paw. “I promise you Allen and I are doing just fine. Okay? Now you want to play some games like we talked about?”

She was right; if Penny wouldn't discuss her own sex life, she had no right to ask Genora to discuss hers. Her mind squirmed around that logic—but I'm not doing anything wrong and she is!—but below that was the fear that gnawed at her that she was doing something wrong, only nobody would tell her. And she'd only been living in Chevali for three months, since Colin had been drafted and they'd bought a house near some of the other wives, and if she turned her back on Genora, well, that might be the right thing to do, but it would leave her even more lonely.

“Yes. Thanks.” She reached out and took Genora's paw, and managed to smile back at her friend.

Genora had taught her how to play video football, UFL '08, which she said she enjoyed because it brought her closer to Allen. Penny had learned initially hoping that Colin would play with her, and he had once or twice, but she played far more with Genora and Amy, a cheetah who lived in the same neighborhood.

Amy was more concerned with doing charity work, and Penny enjoyed that as well, so when the cheetah showed up with binders full of plans for organizing the next event they were putting on, Penny threw herself into that. By the end of the day, she at least felt normal again, even if she hadn't been able to scrub the image from her mind.

She said goodbye to Genora, hugged her, and said, “If you ever need help with anything, I want you to know you can come talk to me.”

“Funny,” the bear said. “I was going to say that to you.”

* * *

They didn't talk about it again, but two days later a package arrived for Penny from Amazon. She didn't recall ordering anything, and Colin didn't usually send her gifts without telling her to expect them. She tore open the cardboard and stared down at the book that lay there. “Sex Matters For Women”?

There wasn't a receipt or a gift label or anything. She folded the cardboard back over without touching the book and dropped it into a drawer in the credenza. A sex book indeed! Her mother had sat her down and taught her everything a vixen needed to know. And she and Colin had figured things out just fine. Mostly fine. He seemed to enjoy it, anyway, and her mother had said that the vixen didn't always, so that was fine. Just fine.

She called Genora. “Did you send me a sex book?”

“Oh, it got there.” The bear sounded pleased. “Look, you can throw it out if you want. I won't be offended. But it helped me out a lot like ten, eleven years ago, and Allen even noticed.”

“Well,” Penny said, “I mean, it's just—”

“Listen. I know it's none of my biz, but this way you don't have to talk to anyone about it. You can just read the book and see for yourself. Or throw it out! I promise I won't ever ask you again.”

Part of Penny wanted to say, “And if I read it, will that lead me to hire a 'tennis pro' and end up getting lessons in something else like you did?” But they had agreed that that wasn't her business, and regardless of what she thought or did with the book, Genora was really trying to help. “I probably won't read it, but thank you.”

“I go to church too.” Genora still had a little bit of pleading in her voice. “Doesn't the Lord want you and your husband to enjoy each other?”

“Of course,” Penny said immediately. “That's part of the covenant of marriage, but—”

“Then why not give it a try?”

“But it's not the most important part!”

“But,” Genora said, “does it get in the way of the other parts?”

Penny was silent for a moment. “Thank you for the gesture,” she said. “Are you still coming over later?”

“Of course. I bought some amazing peaches down at the market and I want to make a pie.”

So Genora came over and they made a pie, and then another one because there were peaches left over, and then they ate the last three peaches themselves while the pies baked and filled the house with the aromas of pie crust and cooked peach and cinnamon. All the while, a small part of Penny's mind remained fixed on the book in the credenza; every so often her eyes would flick over to it and then she would look away, ashamed. But Genora, good friend that she was, held true to her promise and never mentioned it, and if she noticed Penny's furtive glances or the slight tension in the curl of her tail, she didn't say a word about it.

“Amy's invited us antiquing tomorrow,” Penny said, reading a text off her phone as they were packing up Genora's pie for the bear to carry home.

“Lovely!” The bear beamed. “Can't wait. Meeting at her place?”

Penny nodded. “I'll walk down with you.”

So Genora left, and Penny poured herself a small glass of wine. Colin called half an hour later and told her about Crystal City, how beautiful and dirty and incredible it was all at the same time. “You should come out here sometime,” he said.

“When do you play there again?”

“Not this season.” He laughed. “But we could come here in the winter. It's probably nicer then. Right now it's hot and the air smells.”

“I'd love to go,” she said. “Good luck in your game. Miss you. God bless.”

“I miss you too,” he said. “See you Monday night.”

She put the phone down and tried to watch her show, but even the inhabitants of the advertising offices of Madison Avenue couldn't completely distract her. And then in the middle of it, there was a sex scene—edited for TV, of course, but it captured Penny's attention anyway.

She'd always turned up her nose at the actresses in those scenes, the way they threw their heads back and gasped, moaned, clutched at sheets as though in the throes of unendurable passion. They were actresses, she always reminded herself. They were paid to make sex look appealing, to entice teenagers into watching the show, no matter whether it then also enticed them to try it themselves and end up pregnant. But now she watched a pretty vixen on the screen gasp and clutch her husband to her and kiss him hungrily, muzzles locked together, flashes of only barely identifiably furry curves flicking past the camera in between shots of the kiss.

She'd kissed Colin at their wedding with what she'd thought was a passionate kiss, and had kissed him many times since, but never like that. What if...

Her ears flicked back toward the credenza.

On the screen, the male fox had finished and was taking a call from the office, sitting on the bed in his underwear while his wife lay behind him stroking his tail. “Of course I can sell them tuna paste,” he said, and then glanced slyly at his wife. “I could sell sex to nuns.”

Blasphemous, Penny thought, but the thought was weak. And when the show ended, she went to the kitchen to refill her wine. For several moments she stood with the glass in one paw staring down at the credenza, at the candlestick on it and the little glass figurines, the fox husband and wife that Colin's parents had gotten them as a wedding present.

She opened the drawer, took the book over to the couch, and began to read.

* * *

She didn't talk to Colin about the book that week, nor the next. At first she thought it was just something she should be reading and Colin wouldn't have to worry about it at all; only a few chapters into the book, though, it became clear that the husband was expected not only to be involved, but to be enthusiastically involved.

This could be tricky. She and Colin had actually made love more times than they'd spoken words about it. When he was home, they didn't say any of the things the book suggested couples talk about, like asking what each other wanted to do, or what each other liked, or (Heaven forbid) what new things they might be interested in trying. They didn't even talk about their bodies at all. What happened was they would have a lovely evening together, maybe with friends, and then they would retire to the bedroom. Both wearing pajamas, they would slide under the covers, and then Penny would wait for Colin to reach across and touch her breast. If he did, then they would push the pajamas around and make love. If he didn't, then they just went to sleep.

She had liked the evenings when they just went to sleep the best. Now, reading the book, she began to wonder what the other evenings could be like.

Colin wasn't making it easy though. One night as they were going upstairs, Penny began to speak timidly. “Colin...” His ears flicked back toward her. “Do you think you're...I mean, are you in the mood to...”

“To what?” He didn't turn until he'd reached the bedroom. Then he stood at the door very properly and let her enter.

“To...to make love?” The words caught in her throat and she couldn't say anything more.

Colin turned away and shrugged. She thought he was going to respond, but he just went into the bathroom and shut the door. When he emerged, he took off his shirt and climbed into bed without saying a word, not even when she climbed in beside him and said, “Good night.” And he didn't reach over to touch her that night.

So in the next few nights they were together, Penny didn't say anything at all for fear of upsetting him. And on the nights when he wasn't home, she worried about who she could possibly talk to.

Her mother had always said that Penny could call her with any marriage problems. But when they'd talked about sex, all her mother had said (beyond the usual conversation to make sure she understood the mechanics) was that she shouldn't expect to enjoy it. So here, again, she wasn't sure how to start the conversation.

The last week in September, though, she called her mother to tell her about the markets and to ask if she could come down to visit, and her mother said that her father was going on a business trip in November and that that would be a good time, and made a joking comment about getting some time away from him. Penny took a breath and said, “Mom, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, honey.”

Penny held the book in front of her and looked down at it. “Did you ever enjoy...you know...'wifely duties'?”

Her mother didn't respond immediately. After a short silence, she said, “Is Colin treating you well?”

“Oh, yes, fine! I'm just curious because, you know, like you told me...” She trailed off and then read the title of the book again. “I mean, a friend got me this book and it says that women can enjoy...”

“Oh, I had friends like that too.” Her mother's tone became brusque and dismissive. “Always telling me that the Lord wants us to enjoy our relations and that if God truly blesses a marriage—ridiculous! If God blesses a marriage, there are cubs, and the most enjoyable wifely duties I had were raising you and your brother into the wonderful young foxes you are today.”

“Yes,” Penny said. “But—”

“When is your season due? Soon, isn't it? You make sure to have time with your husband then and all will be well.”

“Mid-October.” Penny had it marked on her calendar. That was another thing the book had said; there was a whole chapter on female seasons, when (the author said) the drive for and enjoyment of sex was at its peak. But her last season had come in late June, just a week after the wedding, in fact, and while she had at least felt relieved after making love to her husband, she still hadn't enjoyed it.

Then again, she'd spent six years practicing abstinence and taking pills to reduce desire (though not fertility; for some reason the Church frowned on that even in its young, unmarried female members), and had gone off the pills in anticipation of her wedding. Perhaps there was some residual effect, even though the label said that all the effects would be gone within two weeks.

There remained, though, one person with whom she might be able to talk, and that was the friend who'd gotten the book for her in the first place.

Genora and Allen had invited Penny and Colin to their local church, and even though Allen and Colin didn't play in the same position groups on the Firebirds, they both took part in prayer circles before and after games. When they were home, they hired a caterer to come barbecue in the backyard, and several other players and their families came over. Penny enjoyed those events, and enjoyed being with Colin at them. He talked about the charity work she was doing and her scrapbooking hobby, with as much pride as she told people about the work he was funding back at their alma mater, Ozark State. At times like that, she really felt they were a team, a good married couple in all the right ways: Colin worked hard and Penny managed the house, and they came up with good things to do with his money. She managed their engagements and he showed up, and she bought clothes for both of them and he told jokes.

“If we could only be married during the day,” Penny sighed, “it would be perfect.”

* * *

She invited Genora over for a glass of wine one afternoon when their husbands were away in the northern Midwest somewhere, Hilltown, Penny thought. One glass of wine had led to another, and another, and Genora's stories of her college days (which sounded much more entertaining than Penny's, if not quite as academically sound) had led to Penny's stories of her cousin on the West Coast, the one whose e-mails she always tsked at but, she'd confessed, also felt a little bit jealous of.

And then she'd taken a drink of wine, and Genora had asked about the book, and that thought about only being daytime spouses had come spilling out. She'd said the words and then her ears got very warm and she folded them down and she looked at the burgundy-colored liquid in the lovely crystal glass, the narrow goblet designed for fox muzzles. Genora stayed quiet, so Penny lifted her glass again and tipped it to the end of her muzzle. “But,” she said, “I suppose God sends us trials beyond what—no, that's not right. I mean, God never sends us what we want. No. God never sends us trials beyond what we can bear.”

And then she looked up at her friend the bear and laughed because she'd just said, “Bear,” but Genora just reached over and wrapped her large paw around Penny's wrist. “Are things still not good with you two?”

“Oh, it's really such a little thing when you think about it.” Penny set her glass down. “It's not important really. We'll have cubs, and Mom says that married couples with cubbles—cubs—stop having relations,” she whispered the word, “anyway. So really it's only for another month or two.”

Genora didn't relax her grip. “It's important to you. You think Colin isn't out there—well, you know, never mind about that. You think he doesn't enjoy your 'relations'? It's a lot easier for males to enjoy sex.”

“I don't know if he enjoys it.” Penny rested her paw over her friend's. “I really don't. He doesn't want it all the time, and he never says anything. I mean, you told me Allen yells...”

Genora's broad muzzle broke into a grin. “'Praise the Lord!'”

“Yes.” Penny looked down. “If Colin did enjoy it, wouldn't he say something about it?”

The bear squeezed. “You've got to say something to him. I know it seems like just a little thing, but it can be so important. Did you read the part of the book about what the husband can do?”

“Yes.” Penny's ears flushed again. She'd felt more aroused while reading that than she usually did with Colin. Imagining him doing some of those things... “He never will, though. I mean, he won't even...when we kiss, he doesn't...”

“Marriage is a two-way street,” Genora said firmly. “If you're going to make him happy, he should be willing to do it for you. At least once in a while.”

“But how do I...” Penny looked to the side, where the bottle of wine waited temptingly on the sideboard, but her paws were occupied. “How do I even bring it up? Last time he just ignored me.”

“Same way you brought it up with me.” The bear followed Penny's gaze. “Wine can be a wife's best friend.”

“Oh, I don't know.” Strong wine smell filled Penny's nose. “We don't—we don't sit around drinking wine.”

“You don't say.” Genora patted her wrist. “Three glasses and you're already dizzy. But that's good. You won't have to get more than two into him.”

* * *

Getting two glasses of wine into Colin proved easier than Penny would have thought. He came home from the Midwest road trip in a terrible mood. The Firebirds had won one and lost one, but the real reason for his mood was the distraction of one of his teammates, a tiger they'd sat at dinner with during the banquet to kick off the season. Penny remembered him, a pleasant fellow, but she wasn't really interested in whether or not he was a homosexual. Yes, it was against the Bible, but that was the tiger’s problem, not hers.

Her season had started the day before Colin came home; she could always tell because she woke up feeling warm and suffocated by the covers. Even when she was on the pills, she'd wake up warm every day of her season, and the fur around her hips would itch. Nothing she couldn't ignore, but the signs were unmistakable.

Now that she was off the pills, she became aware of another sign: when Colin was around, she couldn't stop thinking about how attractive he was, couldn't stop thinking about the things she'd read in the book and imagining him doing those things: his fingers, his tongue, his body. Wine helped dull those thoughts, and also helped him calm down.

In public, he didn't rant so much about his teammate, but once he and Penny were alone and the evening was growing dark, he wouldn't stop talking about it. “It's bad enough we only get eight out of fifty players in our prayer circle,” he said. “Now there's this degenerate actively opposing the things we're doing.”

“It's terrible,” Penny murmured, refilling his glass. He barely noticed, though he did go on drinking.

“And he is completely unrepentant. It's sickening to see so many people following him into sin, encouraging him, making him feel good about his spiritual decay.”

“But you said he might not be?”

“Whether he is or not, that's not the issue.” He took another gulp of wine, and wiped a drop from his chin, leaving a red stain behind. “Nobody's telling him that he needs to worry about his soul. They're talking about how he's a part of the team no matter what and the implication is that even if he is, it's no big deal.”

She let him go on like that through his second glass of wine, and midway through the third, his energy ran down. “I'm sorry to go on like this,” he said, “but it's nothing I was prepared for. Covering the best wideouts in the game, sure. But I only have so much energy to spare.”

He put his glass down and took her paw. Penny finished her second glass and set it down as well so she could hold both of his. “You haven't heard anything about this, have you?”

“No,” she said.

“Good. I'd hate to think it had gotten as far as our church.”

He relaxed but held on to one of her paws. She squeezed it back. “Colin.”

His ears came up. “Hm?”

“My—my season started.”

He stared. “Wha—how did I not notice?”

She lowered her ears. “I'm wearing some Cardiana #5 to cover it.” That was what her mother had told her to do during her season when they were entertaining or visiting. One didn't want other husbands to notice and get over-excited.

He leaned in close and sniffed, and his eyes widened. “So we can start a family?”

“We can try.” She smiled. “But can I—oh!”

He'd crouched down and lifted her in his arms. “Then let's go try,” he said.

Ask him, her mind said all the way up the stairs. Ask him ask him ask him. But still the words didn't come, not when he deposited her gently on the bed, not while he was in the bathroom and she struggled to get her clothes off, not until he came out of the bathroom in his pajama bottoms and stopped, staring, then averted his eyes.

“Penny,” he said. “Put on your pajamas.”

“Are you ashamed of my body?” She rubbed a paw down her stomach.

“Of course not, but...” He took a breath and looked at her. “There's no reason to be naked.”

“Weren't the First People naked? A husband and wife may be naked together, mayn't they?”

He licked his lips and nodded slowly. “They may...”

“Do you not like to look at me?” She wished she could read his expression better, but he was remaining very neutral, his ears up, tail still, and—she risked a look—at least there appeared to be a little bit of a bulge in his trousers.

“I do,” he said. “Very much. I mean—well, how would you feel if I just took off my pajamas?”

“I don't know.” She looked at him. “Why don't we find out?”

He gaped. “What's gotten into you?”

“I want to make love to my husband. What's wrong with that?”

“What's wrong with the way we used to do it?”

There it was, the question she'd been waiting for him to ask. The wine bubbled around in her and before she knew it, she was telling him all the things the book had recommended, and she was telling him about the book, too, and about all the things that a husband should do to make his wife enjoy their relations, and all the while he just stood there listening.

When she ran out of wine-fueled energy, she stopped talking and still Colin just stood there. “Colin?” she said.

He took a breath. “So I've been neglecting you, is what you're saying?”

“Oh—oh. No, darling, I—”

“Then what is all this about a book, and all of these—these—I don't even know what to call them. Perversions? Who gave you this book? Where did you get it?”

She swallowed and shook her head. “No, I just—Genora gave it to me, but—”

“Genora? Allen's wife? You told her about our marital life?” Now his ears were going back, his brow coming down.

“No!” Penny faltered. “She—she asked, and—we were just talking—”

Colin approached the bed slowly. “I love you,” he said. “But our life in here,” he gestured around to the bed, “this is our business and nobody else's. That clear?”

She nodded, aware of pressure behind her eyes, trying to hold it back. “I'm sorry, but—”

“God has a plan for us. No neighbors, no books, nobody else knows what it is. It's up to us to figure out. Right?”

“Yes!” She brought a paw to her eyes and tried to rub the moisture away. “That's why—I just thought it would be nice to try, to experiment, to see if there are things we can do. You know, to make it...different.”

“Different.” He knelt on the bed, looking down at her. “You want things to be different? Are they not good enough?”

“No, darling, they're fine, but...”

“I'll tell you what.” He put a paw on her stomach. “If you want to come to bed without pajamas once in a while, I think I can get on board with that. How's that sound?”

He was so lean, so muscular, so attractive. She wanted him on top of her, inside her, to scratch that itch that her season had brought with it. And she'd tried so hard, she really had, and he wasn't listening to her at all. So she swallowed her disappointment and pushed the corners of her muzzle up into a smile, and she nodded. “Thank you, darling,” she said.

He returned her smile and reached over to turn out the light. “All right,” he said, and positioned himself atop her. “Then let's start a family.”

“Yes,” she said, and she closed her eyes.

* * *

The Firebirds played three weeks in a row at home and then had a week off, so Colin was around—as much as a football player ever was—for a month. They did not talk about that night again. Once she did find him snooping in her dresser, and she suspected he was looking for the book, but she'd hidden it in one of her hat boxes. If he'd asked her for it, she would have given it to him (and then bought another one after he threw it out), but he never did.

Similarly, he grew slightly cooler toward Genora, but he never forbad Penny from seeing her or talking to her. Genora asked Penny once how it had gone, but Penny just said, “Terrible. I don't want to talk about it right now,” and the bear let it drop.

They went to the home games and Penny and Genora and Amy sat together and talked about church and charity and video games, and whenever Penny wasn't in bed, it was a nice life, all in all.

But every evening reminded Penny of what she might be missing, and even when her season passed, she lay awake for hours thinking about it. One night when Colin was out late, she tried one of the things the book said a wife could do on her own. The initial flush of guilt and shame as she tentatively explored her privates with her fingers gave way to a warmer flush, and then a still warmer sensation.

After twenty minutes, she still wasn’t sure she’d gotten to what the book described as a “female orgasm,” though it also said it varied from person to person. When Genora had talked about it, though, she’d described a feeling of completion, and Penny didn’t quite have that. What amazed her about that was how good she did feel, and the possibility that there might be something even better.

This was what Colin had been talking about, she thought, the “blessing of marital relations.” Her book told her that anytime a male finished, they had a feeling like this, and for the first time she was angry at Colin. She’d assumed that he felt the same as she did, a faintly pleasurable sense of doing something with her, not this warm, growing all-over delight. Every time? He’d felt that every time, while she lay there and he pushed his thing into her and with just a little effort he could’ve made her feel the same way he did?

The next afternoon, she tried again, and this time she thought she got closer. Some females, the book said, needed extra stimulation, and it suggested that if possible, she should apply her tongue, or maybe buy a device that vibrated. Penny couldn’t bring herself to use her tongue, but she did take the little electric mixer she’d bought to make salad dressing, which seemed to vibrate well and fit nicely in her paw, up to the bedroom and oh, oh, yes, that did it, and now she knew what the book was talking about.

She washed the handle of the mixer carefully and replaced it in the drawer, and that night tried once again to convince Colin to do a little more work. Again he bristled and asked defensively if something were wrong, and Penny’s anger was no match for his. But her anger didn’t go away, even though Colin tried to pacify her by initiating lovemaking. Now she knew that he wasn’t just making it seem pleasurable in the moment, the way she had.

* * *

Colin left at the beginning of November to play a few games on the road, and he put a paw on Penny's stomach. “You'll call me as soon as you find out?”

“Of course,” she said, and kissed him good-bye.

When he'd gone, she sat in her living room with her phone out for a long time, staring at the number. Genora was a good churchgoing wife, and Penny’s closest friend. Of all the people in Penny’s life, she was the only one who had looked out for Penny’s well-being. Having tasted a little of what she’d been missing for all of her life—but especially the six months of married life—Penny wanted more.

But of course it was wrong, and a betrayal of Colin’s trust. And yet…hadn’t Colin betrayed her trust by not looking out for her interests? And if she couldn’t trust him to talk to her about intimate subjects, could she trust him in other areas? Like what he might do while away from home? What he might do that night? Even Amy, who believed her husband to be faithful, said things like, “I mean, I can’t know,” and then laughed.

She could always go back to the kitchen and get the mixer again. But that felt dirtier somehow, shameful, the poor football wife who needed a kitchen appliance to satisfy herself. Genora had looked so fulfilled that afternoon Penny had caught her, and at the time Penny had thought it sinful, but now she thought it was simply pleasure.

Her body had a few days left in her season, when all the sensations would be heightened. She wouldn’t do anything with another fox, of course, and she wasn’t going to leave Colin, but if she really wanted to experience sex, then…maybe just during her season, maybe just once…

Finally she dialed, and brought the phone to her ear. “Hello, Genora?” She took a breath. “I wonder if you could help me schedule a tennis lesson.”

6

Slowing Down (Coach Samuelson)

This story was also written for my Patreon subscribers. I enjoyed exploring the early life of Coach Samuelson and looking at Dev’s problems in Out of Position from another angle. This story appeared in my collection of Patreon stories, Twelve Sides.

* * *

“Coach.”

I raised my head from the desk in my office in Chevali, still thinking about the flight and hotel plans proposed by Kerny for the Aventira game,. Mikilios, the linebackers coach for the Firebirds, a cougar hired years before I got here this season, was standing in the doorway. “You see the Internet?”

“What, all of it?” I glanced down at my open laptop. “Just the parts with porn. Don’t tell Charlene.”

He didn’t laugh. Bad sign. “Search ‘Devlin Miski,’” he told me, and sat down, his tail curling into a circle and hanging there.

“Is this about that report that he assaulted someone last night in Hilltown?” My fingers opened a browser tab, searched.

“Not him. Kingston.” Mikilios waggled his finger at the computer. “But no.”

I got it right away, the rumors that he’s gay. Some blog, a strenuous public denial from his agent, and a slow sports news week. “Fuck,” I said. “Is he?”

Mikilios shrugged. “Who cares?”

I exhaled. “And why didn’t Vince tell me about this? Fine. Get him in here.” As he got up I said, “Wait. How’s he doing?”

The cougar looked at me and shrugged again. “Good.”

A month ago, I’d have had to ask him what that meant. Now I knew he thought highly of Miski, enough that it was worth keeping him, so I waved the cougar out of the office and thought about number 57. Big tiger who’d come to us from Hilltown, where they didn’t know what to do with him. Cornerback in college, but too bulky to do it in the UFL; the game would never slow down enough for him to catch up to it. I sympathized with that. Corners can transition to safety pretty well, but we were stacked at safety, and Mikilios thought he could be a good linebacker.

He’d been pressed into service when Corey Mitchell got his shoulder gored. I hadn’t noticed much dropoff in our linebacker play and Mikilios hadn’t come to me to tell me I needed to call Rodriguez about getting another linebacker, so I assumed all was okay. I’d been meaning to make time to talk to Miski, but it was way down on my priority list and it hadn’t happened yet. And I was going to call him to find out what happened in Hilltown, but I’d only heard about it last night when the team’s media liaison called me.

I stared at the open doorway and thought about him, wondering whether the game was slowing down for him. It was a tough league for rookies.

* * *

When I joined the Port City Devils, a bushy-tailed rookie wolf only just old enough to hoist a celebratory beer, the veteran quarterback was a white wolf named Ketka Loqit who’d been in the league nine years (though only two of those with the Devils). He told me a lot of things that turned out to be true (never trust the Port City media, immediately forget the last play and focus on the next, never be without a condom) and a couple that turned out to be not so true (all rabbits are conniving shitheads, all foxes are great lays, no coach cares about you more than about his job). But the one thing he told me that was truer and more valuable than any other was this: first the game slows down, then you slow down.

All the rookies who make it in the league will tell you the same thing. When you first get onto a UFL field, the game comes at you with blinding speed. Everyone in the pros is faster, stronger, better than in college. It takes you a few games to acclimate to it, sometimes months. But eventually you get used to the speed of the pro game, you become part of it, and next year when the new crop of rookies comes in, you watch their glassy eyes as you rush toward them.

I set a passing record at Dorvaris College, took them to bowl games in two consecutive years, and was drafted by Port City in the second round of the draft. Scouts had questions about whether my success was due to the system, about whether my mechanics would work in the NFL. A couple draft previews said I could be a starting QB; most said I would be a competent backup. The Devils took a chance on me—probably because I nailed the interview with them and because my coach at Dorvaris knew the offensive coordinator on the Devils and put in a good word for me.

In the fourth game of the season, Loqit went down with a concussion and I got my chance. I went into the game against the Tornadoes thinking I was prepared because I’d done well in practice.

It wasn’t a complete disaster; a couple of the plays worked as designed, and with some nifty running from our white-tail receiver after I dropped a perfect spiral into his arms, I even got a touchdown. The Port City media fixated on the two interceptions and the two sacks, with the four major columnists evenly split 2-2 on whether I was a complete bust or should get at least two more games to prove I wasn’t a complete bust.

“It’ll slow down,” Loqit told me, but it never did. I was the one who was too slow, my career set before it had even started.

Oh, I finished out the season, and most of the next one before a 300-pound boar rolled on my ankle. I survived because I studied film every night, including weekends, because I was desperate to unlock the secret of slowing down the game. As I learned the game, it did slow down a little, just enough for me to realize that the problem was not and would never be in growing accustomed to the game. The problem was that I knew the game too well, that I waited an extra half-second to be certain of what I was looking at, and that half-second closed passing lanes or got me sacked. One time I’ll never forget is when a big lion safety, guy named Kat, knocked me down and said, “Thanks for waiting for me,” as we were getting up.

I couldn’t break that habit. What I could do, the reason coaches kept me around, was that the guys would listen to me. They’d play their hearts out for me and often they’d buy me that one extra second to make the right decision. I finished my time at Port City with a record of 15-11 as a starter, something I’m still proud of.

Then I went to Hilltown and shepherded a mediocre team to three years where our best finish was 8-8 and our worst was 6-10, never good enough for the playoffs, never bad enough for a high draft pick. Eventually they cleaned house, brought in a high-priced leopard who could sling the ball the way I couldn’t (he was an asshole; I got almost nightly calls from my former teammates for a while saying, “if I break Logan’s leg, will you come back?” or variations on that theme).

I stayed in touch with Loqit, too, now retired, and he got me the backup job in Kerina, a place he’d been before. I impressed the guys there, and that’s where I got my championship ring, in a game I spent entirely on the bench.

This one fox, Alan Marquez, was the quarterbacks coach for Kerina, but at the end of my seventh year in the league, he was promoted to offensive coordinator. He asked if I would be interested in taking over his old job. “The guys like you, and more important, they respect you,” he said.

When I hesitated, he told me the team was going to let me go after the season anyway. I discussed it with my fiancée Charlene: I could definitely kick around the league for a couple more years, but at this point in my career the game was never going to slow down; only I would. The pay for a quarterbacks coach wasn’t great—not even as much as I’d made as a rookie—but we had some money set aside and Charlene had just finished law school, so she’d be starting with a practice. “The key,” she said, “is whether you think you want your next career to be in coaching. If you want to do that, might as well start here.”

So I did. And in coaching I found myself more comfortable than I’d ever been on the field. I was advising young guys who could do the things I no longer could, and in some cases had never been able to. That first year I learned so much more about the game that it reminded me of my rookie season, the dizzying sense that I was diving into a pool with no bottom. But unlike on the field, in the film room the game did slow down. I got a handle on what my guys were doing wrong and where they needed to improve, and slowly I started making a difference.

My second season, we got to the championship game and lost; the next year we won. I got offers from several teams and took an offensive coordinator position at Highbourne. Didn’t lead to any championships, but it did lead to my first head coaching position, with the Aventira Chimaeras.

I had a reputation as a players’ coach, whatever that means—I guess in contrast to guys like Kewan, who I coached for at Gateway, who was a real strategy guy. My guys there used to complain about him, but they also respected him. Me, though, they loved. I had natural bonds with the quarterbacks, but as I coached the rest of the groups, I got close to the linemen and the wideouts as well. I had a talent for keeping the guys happy, making sure the wideouts all got their touches, balancing the attack so the QBs got their stats, oh, and also matching up against the defenses we faced.

The trick with Aventira was learning to reach out to the defensive guys. As a former QB, they didn’t trust me right away, but I spent a lot of time with them. My defensive coordinator was a good guy and helped a lot with the transition.

We did well there for a few years. Made it to the playoffs four out of seven years, won a couple of the games one year and got to the championship, only to lose to Port City. After that, Rasim Sharif, the owner, told me they were going with a different philosophy and I opted to move on rather than stick around and try to adapt.

So I kicked around broadcasting for a year, but I couldn’t stay away from my friends on the sidelines. And yeah, I was two and five in the playoffs, but when Yerba canned their coach, I interviewed for that job and got it. A year later I brought over my defensive coordinator, and he really helped with the transition.

What didn’t help was the general manager. I’d tell him the kind of personnel we needed, and he would go out and get a bunch of guys who were talented, but couldn’t do the kinds of things I needed them to, or (more often) couldn’t do anything. We lost and lost, and after a couple seasons of that, the players didn’t trust me anymore. Four years of this and I finally got fired for the first time after a 4-12 season.

It sucked. It ate at my heart because I knew I didn’t deserve it, but mostly because the team was a great bunch of guys. They deserved better, and I felt like I’d failed them.

My defensive coordinator was fired as well, and he and I talked for a bit about the one head coaching job there was: the Chevali Firebirds. “It’s a lousy team,” Lew said. He’s a coyote, canny and thoughtful—one of those X’s and O’s guys. “But if you turn it around…what a job, huh?”

“You think we could?” It’d be him and me for sure; I’d told him that.

“Any team with Gerrard Marvell has potential. On offense…no idea. But if anyone can turn Aston into a productive guy, you can.”

“Shit.” I’d followed Aston York the three years he’d been in the league, and the book on him was pretty straightforward: bring pressure from his left side and make him scramble, get him uncomfortable, and he’d make mistakes. But even as Lew said the words, I was thinking, if I just teach him to read the safeties, if we dial up some slants for him and put in a hot route he can dump off to, well, he can make those short passes.

I interviewed. Told John Corcoran that I thought he had a talented group, that they were players, some of whom I’d known in Yerba, who responded better to a coach who tried to relate to them than a drill sergeant. I outlined the plan Lew and I had talked about, for York and a dozen other parts of the team, and I told him I would see a championship banner flying over his stadium.

The fox gave me a wry smile at that. “If you can accomplish that, Samuelson, then…” He stopped at looked at me. “Wait. You really believe that.”

I kept my ears up and my eyes determined. “I do.”

I got the job, and brought Lew with me. I’d been coaching for almost fourteen years, and I thought I knew what to expect, but this Miski thing—this threw me.

* * *

Miski was smart, I could see that right away. I asked him about the Hilltown thing and he stammered his way through an innocuous answer. “My friend works for the Dragons now, so he came down to say hi. And this guy, Brian, he, uh, he and my friend used to date but they broke up, and now he thinks we're going out. So he came down to spy on us, and Fisher caught him.”

Mikilios leaned forward. “What about “property damage”?”

Miski inhaled and breathed out slowly. “He had a video camera. Fisher took it from him.”

He seemed sincere; at least, my nose said he was, and I trusted my nose. “Christ Wolf. All right, we'll talk to Fisher. So far, this asshole hasn't filed assault charges, at least.” I didn’t want to ask if he’s gay, not outright, so I just gave him my best ‘you better not fuck up again’ look. “That's the whole truth?”

He said it was, and so we let him go. I told Mikilios to close the door. “You think he’s telling the truth?”

The cougar eyed the chair in front of my desk, and I could tell he was wondering how long this conversation would be. Finally he dropped into the chair and let his tail hang down. “About the camera, yes.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“What do you think?” His expression didn’t give away anything.

I exhaled and lowered my voice. “I think that a gay guy terrified of being exposed wouldn’t tell his position coach and his head coach if he was afraid it would cost him his job.”

“Would it?” Mikilios raised an eyebrow.

“I meant what I said when I told him I don’t give a fuck what he does outside the game. Is he worth keeping? I can tell Rodriguez to see what other linebackers we could get.”

The cougar tapped his claws on my desk, but only for a second. “He is worth keeping,” he said. “Other linebackers in the league might be better, but none who are available, none who know our system, none who will let Marvell lead them. Miski is the best we have.”

“Until Mitchell comes back.”

Mikilios didn’t reply to that. I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

He waved a paw. “Possible. He improves every week. Marvell likes him more, means he plays better too.”

Improving every week. I thought back to my own rookie season and about the guys who gave me a chance. “Is he working hard?”

“Hard as anyone.”

“All right.” I needed this off my plate. “I don’t like people lying, but if it turns out he is gay, I understand why he wouldn’t tell us. We’ll keep him unless he makes it impossible.”

Mikilios got up and gave me a smile. But as he closed the door behind him, I couldn’t help but feel like this game, too, was moving too quickly for me. This thing with Miski wasn’t over, and I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing at all.

* * *

I dreamed that night that I’m back on the field, only I’m running a team of guys from all through my history: Lew is one of the guards, Loqit is a running back. They’re all looking at me for the play and I don’t know the playbook, so I bark out a couple words that I remember are one of our plays. We all line up, and then I see that the defenders are all scaly monsters with glistening fangs. They’re huge, and the field is muddy and slippery. If I yell for the snap, they’ll attack us. But I can’t just sit and wait. We’ll get a penalty.

I call ‘Hut!’ and my longtime center Rigby shoots the ball back into my paws. I drop back to pass and go through my progressions. Down the field, a wide receiver falls as a monster tackles him. It bites his arm off. In front of me, my friends are screaming, bleeding, dying. There, across the middle, a rabbit darts. I can get him the ball. I cock back my arm to throw, I let it go—

I’m tackled and gleaming teeth frame a maw inches from my face. Somehow I see the ball land in the rabbit’s paws, but when he cuts to go up the field, another monster is there and its jaws sink into his legs.

I woke up in a cold sweat. Charlene’s paw was on my shoulder. “Hey, honey.” She nuzzled my ear. “You okay? You were yelling.”

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes and panted. “The Godzilla dream again.”

“Wow. It’s been years, hasn’t it?”

I nodded and leaned into her, breathing in the warm scent. My heart slowed. But the feeling stayed with me all the way to Aventira for the game that week.

It was a habit of mine to take time to meet with the guys one on one for lunches, breakfasts, five-minute chats after workouts. There was tension in the team, I knew, but nobody I talked to mentioned the issue, not Omba who played next to Miski on the line, not Colluti the offensive tackle, not Norton the safety. And when I circled back with Mikilios, the cougar assured me that nothing was boiling over. “Some argument good,” he said in his laconic way. That didn’t change the fact that every conversation I had with anyone on the team left me picking through it afterwards for clues about whether he was or wasn’t okay with Miski being gay—maybe.

Two days later, Miski himself came to tell me about the tension. I liked that; it showed he cared about the team. I told him to go out with Fisher and think about how he was going to handle this distraction, and he went. My sense of being in over my head grew stronger, so I fought it off by focusing as much as I could on my work, getting the team ready for our Aventira game. That didn’t get rid of the feeling that events were ramping up, spinning out of control far off beyond where I could see them, but at least it kept me distracted.

But that night Charlene reminded me about Tony Calhoun. “I haven’t thought about him in…” I shook my head and pushed my dinner plate aside. “How long’s it been?”

“Sixteen years,” she said. “I tried to look him up in case you wanted to talk to him about Miski, but he’s not easy to find. If he’s even still alive.”

“Okay, but he was…he didn’t get along with the guys as well…” I reach back sixteen years to my first year at Highbourne as the offensive coordinator, remembering now the big bear, soft-spoken and reserved, and the guys telling me they thought he was looking at them like that, claiming he was a distraction. How I’d talked to Calhoun and he hadn’t denied it or anything, just said he didn’t mess with any of the guys and if he mentioned his boyfriend, how could that be a problem? The head coach then had a talk with him and he was released at the end of that season. A couple guys called me to ask what was up with him and I was honest with them, told them he never denied being gay and it made the rest of his line uncomfortable. “Where’d he end up playing?”

“After Highbourne? Never got another job. He just faded away.”

“Well, shit.” Sixteen years of guilt dropped onto me. “Look, he was a distraction. If I’d hidden that from the guys…the ones I talked to…they’d have found out, and I’d never have…” I took a breath. “One of those guys who called about him ended up hiring me in Yerba later. You think that happens if I’d lied to him about Calhoun?”

A sketchy connection, a tenuous defense, and Charlene the lawyer doesn’t shred it because she also loves me. “You lived in a different time. Nobody would fault you for what you did then. The question is, what are you going to do now?”

“Shit,” I said again. “He might not even be gay, you know? It’s all rumors.”

“Okay.” She slid her chair around next to mine and rested a paw on my shoulder. “But even if he’s not, someone will be. Times are changing, Vern. Are you going to change with them?”

“What should I do?” I looked up at her hazel eyes.

She laughed. “Oh, no. I don’t get to run your team, remember?”

“This isn’t—I’m asking you for help.”

She kissed me. “You’ve got to do what you think is right. I’m not going to tell you what’s right.”

“Okay, then.” I exhaled. “Do you think a gay guy can be a successful football player?”

Her eyebrows rose. “Do you?”

“Dammit!” I pushed my chair back and stood, pacing around the dining room. “I don’t know! It shouldn’t be my decision to make. It’s a…It’s not just my team, it’s the whole league, it’s society, it’s the world! Why do I have to figure out this thing? Ask me how to beat Aventira’s Cover Two and I’ll come up with six different schemes we can run. Ask me how to compensate when Jaws sprains his ankle and I can tell you the three players who might take his place and which one gives us the best chance against which team. Who the fuck cares if one of them is gay?”

I stalked back and forth as I ranted, while Charlene kept her paws on the table and her eyes on me. When I stopped, she inclined her head to the side. “It sounds like that’s your answer, then, isn’t it?”

My tail stopped its switching back and forth. “Is it really that easy?”

“Look,” she said, getting up to hold my paws. “I know that you think everything has to be complicated. You live in a complicated world inside of a game where everyone is trying to outguess and outsmart you.”

“So do you,” I pointed out.

“I do. And sometimes you find that people aren’t playing a game, that what they want is really very simple. You can try to outguess them, but you’d only be outguessing yourself.”

I touched my nose to her and then kissed her. “I knew there was a reason I married you,” I said.

When we broke the kiss, her eyes sparkled. “Only one?”

My paws slid down her ample curves and pulled them against me. “Maybe only one at a time.”

* * *

Charlene had settled me down, but it proved a lot harder to put her advice into effect than it had been just to listen to it. I had my strategy set, but I didn’t know what the rest of the team was going to be doing in the meantime. Should I talk to everyone again? Should I tell them that the Firebirds would be proud to have the first openly gay player? What if Miski wasn’t gay? What if he was just the target of rumors? Wouldn’t be the first time for that either; Aston’s been featured in more than one photo manip on the Internet. If I gave a speech to the team in support of a guy who isn’t even gay, it might make things worse, might make people think he is.

So I kept quiet, and Thursday and Friday my mind was absorbed by practice. I talked to Aston, to Ford and Rodo the wideouts, to Ferrix the backup QB, and to Lopez, one of the safeties, as well as Delacruz, a big bear on the defensive line. None of them said anything about Miski. Aston was focused on the game, but I got the others to open up about their lives a little.

It helped remind me that everyone has problems. Omba’s grandmother, Ford’s pregnant girlfriend, Ferrix’s friend with the investment scheme (seriously, do any of these guys listen in the rookie seminars?). I was thankful again for Charlene, whose idea of an ideal life meshed almost exactly with mine. We neither of us wanted cubs (a football team is plenty for me to handle, and she’s just not interested) and loved to keep busy. When one of us was having trouble, like me then or her with that damn Renkage Industries case two years before, the other always found time to be supportive.

So I got through Friday thinking that we were going to make it, that this whole Miski thing was going to blow over. Then as everyone was showering and I was on the phone with one of the media guys who wanted to talk about Miski (and who hadn’t given up two days before) basically telling him there’s no story, I heard a commotion from the locker room. “Sorry, Jeff, I’ll have to get back to you,” I said.

“Let me listen in!” he said, but I’d already hung up.

Outside in the locker room, I walked in on the team standing in a semicircle around Miski, with Kingston standing beside him. Partchan, big bear who plays defensive tackle, was saying something about Miski checking him out in the shower, and Charm, the big stallion kicker, was giving him shit about it.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened, which was good because it meant I could get a handle on it. As Miski said that he just wanted to prove himself on the field and Marvell backed him up, the smell in the room and the tension in everyone there left me with no doubt that Miski had just come out to the whole team.

And it was my move. If I didn’t do anything, if I made the wrong decision, I risked losing the team. They wouldn’t respect me or like me anymore, they wouldn’t play for me, and I’d be done here in Chevali before I even had a chance to start. We were heading in the right direction and this could unravel everything.

The guys were paying attention to Marvell right then, so I pushed my way toward him specifically and said, “You wanna run this team?” He deferred to me as I knew he would, and with the attention of everyone, I told Miski, “My office, five minutes.”

He was scared, I could see that, but he held it in and nodded. I turned to the rest of the team with little idea of what I was going to say, but I remembered what Charlene had drawn out of me and I trusted myself. I started with Marvell, because he’d been right.

“Marvel's got it dead on. In this building, out on that field, we are a team. We have to be able to trust each other out there.” I was looking out at the field, and then pointed at the exit. “Out there, I don't care. But I'll tell you, I've been on a couple championship teams, and what they had in common was a group of guys who believed in themselves, believed in each other, and played together, as a team. I've told you that before, but you haven't been tested. This'll show what kind of character you have.”

I gauged their reactions. They were nodding, quiet, accepting. The veterans agreed and the rookies were listening. Nobody challenged me, though Smith, the rookie fox corner, wouldn’t meet my eyes, just raised his fingers and played with the cross around his neck. “Now, the rest of you, hit the showers. See you in a couple hours at the airport.”

On the way back to my office, I found Marvell, with Mikilios standing next to him. “You tell me if there are any problems. Any. You got it?”

They both nodded, and I went in to deal with Miski.

I closed the door and left him standing in front of my desk as I walked around it. Sat down, let him sweat a little more. I wanted to chew him out for lying to me, but I remembered what Charlene had said, and I thought about Calhoun, and most importantly, I took a good look at Miski. He was definitely scared, but he was putting a hell of a brave face on it. His tail and ears were up and he was looking right at me. So I let him see a little of my exasperation. “Fuckin' hell, Miski, I am runnin' out of linebackers.”

Not strictly true. Mikilios and I have a list of three guys who could step in and fill his spot, starting with Zillar the coyote. None of them would be as good, though.

“Yes, sir.”

I picked up a pencil and chewed on it. Time to let him know he’s not screwed. “You feel like you can play Sunday?”

He reacted like I’d flipped a switch. Energy crackled through him and he jumped forward, putting his paws on the edge of my desk, eyes bright, ears perked, and a huge grin on his face. “Hell, yes!”

That was all I needed to know. I matched his grin. “Hell, yes you can,” I said. “We'll deal with this other crap after the game.”

Get his mind off the issue, reassure him he’s still my guy: that’s what I was thinking. It worked, or at least it appeared to.

I called Charlene before calling Jeff back. “Hey, hon,” I said. “It blew up today, but just in the team.”

“You handle it okay?” She didn’t have to ask what I was talking about.

“I think so. I guess we’ll see.”

“Tell me more from Aventira.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

It wasn’t until we were getting on the plane and I was thinking about her again that I thought to text her, BTW, he is.

She replied a moment later. So?

I thought about that. Gonna take care of him, I sent back.

Good, she wrote.

* * *

Was it? Had I done the right thing? I weathered Saturday and Sunday morning, the flutters in my stomach dying down as I was consumed with game prep. The ritual of game day took over my life and I didn’t even think about Miski’s situation until I walked out onto the field and saw the signs up there in the crowd, HOMO-SKI and shit like that.

In football, you know right away if you did the right thing. The play works or it doesn’t; you complete the pass or you throw an interception; you get a first down or get sacked. But in life, sometimes it takes weeks or months or years. Sometimes you never know.

I watched Miski come out onto the field and let Mikilios take care of him. He saw the signs; that was clear. He didn’t react more than with a pause and a look around, and then he went out again. But he wasn’t right on the field, that was clear too. He was slower to react than normal, and he misjudged a play badly, then lined up out of position. On the next series, he was still preoccupied. When he missed another assignment, Marvell sent him to the bench.

I let him sit. I had a game to manage. On the way into the locker room at halftime, though, I grabbed him out of the line of players. He mumbled an apology and I snapped at him. “Don’t apologize. What I need to know is if you can take this. Because if you can't, you better hang up your uni and go home right now. We'll buy out your contract. It ain't gonna get any better, and it sure as hell might get worse.”

Then he said, “What would Tony Calhoun have done?” and I had to hide my surprise. How the hell did he know about Calhoun?

But I told him how Calhoun wasn’t the only one with a secret to hide, and after answering his question, got back to my point. “I need guys on this team who can play football. I can't make the other team stop talking. I can't get rid of those signs. I can't even make everyone on my team like you. What I can do, the only thing I can do, is put a team on the field that can play the game. So if you're gonna play, let me know. If not...” I looked to where the team was waiting for my halftime speech. “We got someone who can stand on the field in your position. Believe me when I say I'd rather have you out there. Corey's a little better, but the dropoff after you...”

I let that sink in. I gave him halftime to think about it and then went in to rouse the guys, to tell them that being down 0-3 wasn’t nothing we couldn’t get over, and I forgot about Miski.

Until we came back out after halftime. I found him on the bench then. “Well? Am I sending you in?”

He gave me a weird look and said, “Where’s section one-sixteen?”

That was a new one on me. “You need to know that?”

“Put me in,” he said, “but where’s one-sixteen?”

I coached in this stadium for years. I point out the section to him and his eyes go right there. “Don’t go climbing up there,” I told him, and walked back out to tell Ferrix what play to call out to Aston.

Sometimes, like I said, it takes a while before you know you did the right thing. Sometimes it happens in an instant.

Miski went out and played well on the first snap. Then on the second one, he leapt in front of a pass, grabbed it out of the air, and charged down the field. They tackled him almost in the end zone—it wasn’t quite a touchdown, but we got the ball on their three.

As Miski came back to the sideline, I caught his eye. “Nice job,” I told him, and he just smiled back at me, full of confidence, full of life.

Not so bad, old wolf, I thought. Maybe this coaching game is slowing down for you after all.

7

False Dawn (Lee)

While the first half of Out of Position alternates between Dev’s and Lee’s perspectives, the second half is all Dev. Lee has some important things happen, so I thought it would be good to write up one of them from his perspective. In later books, I managed the alternation of perspective a lot better.

I’ve promised that for every book that sells a thousand copies in the first year, I’ll write a bonus story. Out of Position was the first book to meet that goal and this was the first story I wrote as a result. It originally appeared in the hardcover of Out of Position and then in the e-book.

* * *

It feels weird getting on the plane to Chevali and not talking to Dev about it. The airport, the terminal, all that is so familiar, and yet there’s that one piece that’s lacking. It’s like going home and forgetting my favorite tail brush at college. Or, more appropriately, it’s like going home and finding a completely different family there.

I lift the white cloth mask to my nose one more time as I walk off the jetway, then drop it in a pocket of my overnight bag. I stock up on NeutraScent because the planes are just hell otherwise, but I’m not one of those canids who’s rude enough to wear one of their masks out in public. You might as well be one of those high school coyotes with the t-shirt that says, “You all smell like sh*t.” On a plane, you’re crammed together for one, three, six, fourteen hours, and even then it’s kind of rude.

But if I can have a spotted skunk as a best friend for three years, I can take a couple hours on the plane with only a discreet sniff at the NeutraScent now and then to clear my head. One of the reasons Brian and I got on so well together is that we’d both had people stare at us and then press their noses quite obviously into a NeutraScent. Happened on the way home from that first FLAG meeting. Usually it’s stags and cats that are all snooty about odor. Brian and I used to crack up about ’em. You have to laugh, or you just want to hit them.

Brian and I helped each other laugh a lot. Besides that, we got on well together because we both loved football and cocksucking, not necessarily in that order. I hope there’s something else to our friendship, because neither of those is on the agenda for this visit.

He’s leaning against a pillar in the airport when I come through the security area. The grin on his black-and-white muzzle doesn’t change much when he sees me, but his tail twitches behind him. His customary silk shirt is open like it never was in Hilltown, but I notice that he hasn’t quite copped to the local tradition of wearing shorts.

“Still in the slacks,” I say, walking up to him.

He looks me up and down. “Still in the jeans.”

I stick out a paw. He looks at it and then steps forward into a hug. “We’re not gonna start this with a shake, Tip,” he says.

I hug back as noncommittally as I can. His scent is familiar, but a little different. Sharper, maybe. I shrug it off. People change. “What exactly are we starting?”

He doesn’t offer to take my bag. “You got any checked luggage?”

I shake my head. “Travel light. I’m only staying the one night.”

“One night with me and one with him?”

Before I can get a good look at his eyes, he’s turned, leading me through the airport to the parking garage. So I take him at face value. “Just you, Spotty.”

“I feel so special.”

Now this is familiar for Brian, but jarring in the Chevali airport. I follow his feathery black-and-white tail amidst the crowd of people. “I thought it’d be easier face to face.” Saying it now, I wonder whether it will be.

He doesn’t ask what will be easier, probably afraid I’ll tell him. We trot down a staircase, past a crowd I recognize from my flight, standing around the baggage claim. I hug my bag to my side as Brian leads me past them and outside.

The heat hits me worse than the scents on the plane, a buffeting of sun and temperature like opening an oven. Brian takes out a pair of black designer sunglasses and flips them open as I gasp. He doesn’t turn for my reaction to the heat, but he must know, because as he slips the sunglasses on, he says, “Keep your ears up. Helps dissipate the heat. Hungry?”

I put them up, even though the inside of them already feels almost unbearably sticky. I can’t help panting as we stand waiting for the light to cross to the parking garage. Next to us, a cougar glances our way and then buries his nose in a NeutraScent handkerchief. He doesn’t seem to care that I’m watching him do it. “Sure,” I say. “You got a favorite place here?”

“Have I ever.” The light changes. We cross and take the elevator up two levels. He walks me to a late-model convertible and puts his paw on it, looking back at me with a smile.

I toss my bag in the back and run my paw over it, too. “Nice. How much did it set you back?”

“One phone call a week.” He slides into the driver’s seat, curling his tail around his legs, and rests one arm on the door.

I stand and look down at him, lounging in his convertible with his shirt open. I’d almost swear he was straight. “How is the family, anyway? Do they know you’ve gone native?”

“Dad visited last month,” he says. “They’re the same as ever. All investments and properties and crap. Get in, already.”

The leather is surprisingly cool against my fur. I take out my own sunglasses—narrow, cheap, rectangular—and slide them on. Brian tools out of the parking lot with a lot of showing off of his car’s engine.

The air rushing past me feels like the roaring of the desert, a hot, dry wind that pulls the fur from my face. I hold up a paw to shield myself from the worst of it and yell over the noise, “Thanks for letting me visit.”

“Letting you?” Brian yells back. He laughs. “Tip, I should be thankin’ you for bestowing the favor of your presence on me. And all I hadda do was stalk your boyfriend, snap a pic of him with his fake girlfriend, and threaten to out him.”

That’s enough to shut me up. “What’s the matter?” Brian yells a couple minutes later. “Thought you came here to talk?”

I did, but not to yell. The wind is like a radio turned on full to static in my ears, and my throat’s already dry from the wind. So I just wave a paw to signify, “Later,” and fix my eyes on the distant hills.

He lives in a suburb with parks and trees, about ten minutes from the airport. The houses have flower gardens, some of them, and meticulous landscaping. “You guys use enough water here?” I remark as we roll down the main street, past boutique furscaping stores and fashion clothiers and gourmet food shops.

“I guess,” Brian says. He turns down a side street. “Whatever it takes.”

“Right.” We roll past a school, a nice one, with expensive-looking equipment out on the athletic field and well-groomed cats and rats—and one fennec, I notice—out doing some kind of organized activity on it. It’s September, but it’s still too hot for me to think about running around outdoors, at least here. “Nice neighborhood, anyway. Daddy knows his real estate.”

“I picked it.” He snaps that, then settles. “It’s not that pricey. We get airplane noise sometimes. They change the flight paths when the wind kicks up. But there’s a theater group just down that road.”

“Course there is.” I allow myself a bit of a smile. We turn the other way from where the theater group apparently is, onto a shady street of condos. Brian parks in a garage and puts the top up. I lean against the shady concrete, still panting. “Not quite crime-free?”

“Why tempt fate?” He flicks the remote to lock it, with a chirp of the alarm, and leads me upstairs.

Why, indeed? Why am I here in the desert instead of in downtown Chevali with Dev, or at home in my loft bed sifting through player rankings for work?

“I picked up a six of diet for you.” Brian fills a glass of water at the door of the gleaming chrome fridge. His apartment—condo, I guess—is air-cooled to a comfy sixty-five or so. The kitchen floor is cool ceramic under my paws. The brush of air circulation against my ears everywhere I go tells me why his smell isn’t as strong as it had been back in his college dorm. Also why I can’t smell anyone else in here. Posh place, then. Or else he’s just been really antisocial since moving down.

“Actually, the water looks good,” I say.

Brian shrugs and gives me the glass he’s just filled. I wander into the living room and park myself on the comfy fabric sofa. The glossy wood coffee table is stacked with sports magazines, but I can’t see a remote, so I just drink my water and lean back. The posters here are the ones Brian had in college: famous Port City productions, professionally framed. Something about the room nags at me. I look around, trying to put my finger on it.

He sits on the couch next to me, sets his own glass of water on the side table, and takes out his phone. “You want to see your tiger with his black panther?”

“Seen it.” I take another drink and stare at the blank TV. Is it the posters? Where have I seen them before, other than in Brian’s room at Forester?

He holds the phone in his paw and then puts it away. “Okay. What do you want to eat?”

My stomach does growl, then. Maybe it’d be better to get some food and drink in me before having this discussion. I give up trying to figure out the living room, for the moment. “What’s good around here?”

“Besides me?” He smirks. I don’t react, so he lists his two favorite places, and I pick a nice-sounding Sonoran restaurant. We chill a bit longer, while he talks about his theater group and I rehydrate myself with some of the diet soda he got for me. The theater group, of course, is far below his skill level, he tells me. Just a community theater, but he’s doing all he can. It’s really much better for them to have him, but he gets what he can out of it. I nod sympathetically.

Over dinner, he does ask me about my life, for a change. I tell him about my job scouting for the Dragons. I tell him about Hilltown, how little it’s changed in the few years he’s been gone. Just a couple friends catching up, avoiding the elephant—or tiger—in the room.

The food’s as good as he claimed. I’m still eating the chips and salsa even after my tacos have vanished. You don’t get this kind of food in Hilltown. Brian watches over the rim of his second margarita. I’ve limited myself to one, though they’re good, too. “You going to be okay to drive home?” I ask him.

“I figure you can drive.” He hefts the glass, toasting me, and drains it.

“Really.” I’m not sure what to make of this. Perhaps he thinks it’ll win me over, letting me drive his expensive convertible. Maybe he thinks putting himself under my care will make me feel more protective of him, more inclined to help. “Shouldn’t you be getting me drunk?”

“Oh, Tip, we’re beyond that.” He sets down the empty glass. “We’ve had ample opportunity to take advantage of each other.”

“Mmm.” I sigh. On the few occasions when Dev and I talk about Brian, Dev insists that he wants to fuck me, or wants me to fuck him, even though I keep telling Dev that Brian and I never did anything more than hug. He regrets that, Dev says. I tell him he doesn’t know Brian like I do.

“This is nice, isn’t it?” Brian leans over the table, just a bit. “Couple friends out for dinner, right?”

“Sure,” I say.

“You should come visit more often.”

When I don’t reply, he holds up a paw. “I know, I know, the photo, the whole ‘outing’ thing. Look, it’s not...” He bites his lip. “It’s not personal.”

“Right. If he were just anybody’s boyfriend...”

“Hey, you saw all that nice shit I wrote about him yesterday, right?”

“After I agreed to come down here.” I toy with my silverware. “Also doesn’t hurt for him to be more high-profile once he’s outed, does it? Makes it more likely he’ll stay in the league.”

“You overestimate my influence. Really. I’m sure there’s some other gay football player out there trembling in his tight-fitting uniform that someone will see him and his darling together. I just don’t know the darling. My options are limited.”

His voice is a little loud, but nobody looks around. “You shouldn’t be interfering at all,” I say, keeping my own voice low.

“Interfering.” He shakes his head. “I should support the status quo, huh?”

“You should support my status quo.”

His muzzle sways back and forth. “What is your status quo? Furtive kisses under the bleachers? Night after night at home, never going out, watching him on TV with that black panther?” He leans forward. “Isn’t that what we promised to fight?”

I fold my ears down. To avoid answering, I pick up my margarita glass and lick out the bottom. The sour tang and sharp tequila sting wash over my tongue. “I didn’t know, then,” I say. The words to make him understand elude me. All I can offer is my own ignorance.

“How trite.” He smiles, with some sadness. “Does he really love you?”

“Yes!” That, I know.

“Then what’s the problem?” Brian rests an elbow on the table and leans his head into his paw. “Would he give up football for you?”

If I say no, Brian will feel he has to force Dev. If I say yes, he’ll feel justified in whatever he does. “Would you give up the theater for—for someone special?”

His little smile vanishes. “Sure I would.”

“I don’t just mean this little community theater.” I wave a paw at the window. “I mean everywhere. Acting, writing, all of it. If I—if your boyfriend asked you to give it all up to be with him, would you do it?”

He straightens, lowers his paw to the table. His eyes are serious, and not at all drunk. “I promise you I would.”

It’s very convincing. I don’t know where the acting ends and the real Brian begins.

I drive back to his place, while he sits in the front seat and directs me. He tries singing a song from one of the musicals he did back in college, a little number called “Under the Moon,” which goes, in part, “Two of us under the moon, our paws in time and touch, this night will end too soon, I love you far too much.”

“What musical is that from?” I ask, as much because I don’t remember as to stop his singing. It’s not that he’s bad—he’s not—it just isn’t what I need to hear right now. It’s making me think of Dev in his apartment, looking out the window at the moon, thinking I’m at home in Hilltown.

Brian stops and leans against the door, looking across the seat at me. He grins. “It’s ‘Win Some, Lose Some.’ Freshman year.”

“Right.” Dev never leaves my mind completely, but for a moment I’m an eighteen-year-old fox again, in a cramped, hot student theater. “You were the stockbroker. You didn’t sing that song.”

“Not in the play. But it got me laid a half-dozen times.”

“Only that many?”

“I had a bunch of songs.” He rests his arm on the door and looks ahead. “Turn here.”

I turn, looking up at the old stone building, and my mind is back with my tiger again. I’m doing this for him, I remind myself.

Brian stops me when we get to his garage. “I’ll pull it in,” he says. “Don’t want you to scrape the paint and then feel guilty.”

“I wouldn’t,” I murmur as I get out and wait, but I don’t think he hears me. He manages to get the car into his space without touching either of the cars next to it, then hits the button to put the top up and tries to vault out of the car without opening the door.

There are times when you know something’s a bad idea a split-second before it happens. I feel the beginning of the urge to yell at him not to do it, but my muzzle is not even open when his foot catches on the door. His body twists in mid-air as though someone had hit him. He smacks into the car next to his before dropping flat to the concrete with a sound like a hard tackle on the football field.

The rag-top keeps closing with a mechanical whirr. I hurry forward to him. “Teeth and tail, are you okay?”

“Fine,” he slurs. “Just banged up.” But when he lifts a paw to wipe his muzzle, I smell the tang of blood.

“Come on,” I sigh. “Let’s go upstairs.”

He limps along until I help him, over his protests. I’m a little taller than he is, but by stooping, I can support him with his arm over my shoulders. It’s not that uncomfortable, and it gets him up the stairs and to his door. After that, he collapses on the couch while I get a fresh cloth.

“Feel like an idiot,” he murmurs.

I sit next to him and wipe at his muzzle. This is ‘taking care of him’ on a whole new level. “You look like an idiot,” I say.

His tail flips across the sofa, away from me. The cloth comes away bloody, but by the third time I swap him, it’s clean. “Did you think you were going to impress me, jumping out of the car like that?”

“Wasn’t room to open the door,” he says.

“Seriously,” I say. I get up to toss the cloth into the hamper in the bathroom. When I come back, he’s put on a DVD of “Win Some, Lose Some,” the Port City production. It’s a little loud for the room, but perhaps not as much for him as for me. I fold my ears back, give him a clean cloth, and sit in the armchair next to the couch.

“I remember seeing you in the audience,” he says, not looking at me. “Remember those first meetings? FLAG, with, um, what was his name, the arctic fox?”

“Misha?”

“No, not Misha. The one who was running the group then.”

“Oh!” I search my memory, but all I see is Misha’s amber eyes and short muzzle. “Can’t remember.”

He takes the cloth down and puts it in his lap. “We laughed at him, I remember.”

“But we missed him later.”

“Lion Christ, yes.”

“Keith was such a tool.”

He frowns. “When did Keith...” He realizes it in the same moment I do.

“Yeah, that was...after.”

He stares down into his lap. “I shouldn’t have left,” he says.

I didn’t expect that. I rest my paws on my knees and look at him, at the white cloth in his lap. “It was a while ago,” I say. “You were scared.”

He shakes his head sharply once, then stops, as if thinking about it. “Maybe. Dad was more scared.”

But he wouldn’t have moved you out of Forester if you hadn’t wanted it. The old argument surfaces, and I swallow it before it gets past my throat. “You’re safer here.”

“Somewhat.” He snorts. “It’s not exactly a gilded cage. Maybe a silver-plated one.”

“Poor, poor, pitiful me. Poor little rich drama queen. You know this place is like three times the size of mine?”

“Why doesn’t your boyfriend get you a better place?”

“Why don’t you get a job?”

At that, he looks up. “If I wanted that lecture, I’d have asked my Dad down for the weekend.”

I wave a paw. “You sit here and complain about things, but—”

“What am I qualified to do? With a theater degree?” His tone sharpens. “Answer phones? Make telemarketing calls? Fast food server? ‘Prithee, good sir, wouldst thou like fries with that?’ I’m not going to do that, Tip. I’m an actor.”

“Fine,” I say, pulling my knees up to my chest and curling my tail around them. “So act. But don’t go around complaining like there’s this big piece of your life that’s missing.”

He shrugs. “There’s no gay scene. Nothing.”

“Not even the theater group?”

He snorts. “They all act kind of queeny. But none of them even have a sniff of interest. There’s a gay area in downtown Chevali. It’s pathetic. Half a block. I went there once and got so depressed I listened to ‘Hello Dolly’ all the way home.”

“So you are trying to...what?”

“I don’t know.” He seems to cave in on himself, shoulders falling in, head dropping. “I just want to do something worthwhile.”

“You can. You’ve got so much going for you.”

“Like what? Come on, throw me a bone. List my good qualities.”

We share a grin. I tick them off on my fingers. “You’re smart, you’re attractive, you take care of yourself, you’re endearingly stupid sometimes, you’re a great actor—”

“All right, all right. Consider my ego assuaged.” He doesn’t sit up any straighter, though, just rubs the spot on his muzzle that hit the ground. “I just don’t have anyone to talk to.”

“You have the whole Internet.”

“Not the same.”

He wants me to come sit next to him. Less sophisticated guys than Brian have tried that hangdog ‘I need an arm across my shoulders’ routine. But it’s precisely because it’s so transparent that I can’t believe he doesn’t actually mean it. “I don’t know what you want me to do. You want me to chat with you more?”

“That’d be a start.”

“So stop threatening my boyfriend.”

He sighs. “I don’t wanna talk about him.”

I drum claws on the arm of his armchair. “Well, that’s too bad, seeing as how that’s the whole reason I came down here. We’re gonna talk about him sooner or later.”

“Gosh,” he says, without a smile, “and here I thought you came to see me.”

“Is it really that bad?” I flick my tail against the chair. “You can’t find anything better to do than out famous people?”

“Not so bad a hobby,” he says. “Maybe then someone’d pay attention to me.”

I can’t help it; I laugh. “You can’t get people to pay attention to you? No wonder you’re not getting along with the theater group.”

“It’s so easy for you,” he says. “You’ve got a great job, you’ve got a boyfriend. Don’t need poor old Spots now you’ve got your Stripes.”

“Hey,” I say. “That’s not—”

He waves the paw holding the white cloth. “I know, I know, I left. But you never gave me a chance to make it up.”

I spread my paws. “I’m here now.”

He sighs and gets up. “Yeah. Want a beer?”

“No,” I say, but when he comes back from the kitchen he has two bottles. He holds one out to me. “I said, no, thanks.”

“It’s non-alcoholic.” He keeps it extended toward me even when I wave it away.

“Then what’s the point?” But I take it, mostly so he’ll go sit down again. It’s not bad; cold, at least, and not too foul-tasting. Kind of watery, more than anything else, like it’s mostly meant to remind me of what beer is.

“Point is to feel cool without losing control, right?” He sits in the middle of the couch again, turning to face me as he hefts the bottle.

“If you say so.” I take another drink. “So, look, can you just drop it with Dev?”

He shakes his head. “You don’t see how it all connects, do you?”

“Enlighten me.”

“I’ve been trying.” He takes a drink himself. “I’m just a symptom. The isolation here, it’s all because of the barriers in our society. If I can knock down those barriers, then maybe I have a chance to find some companionship.”

Underneath, you know, people don’t really change that much. To Brian, life’s just a morality play, with him at center stage. “It’s not society that’s keeping you alone,” I say. “It’s your sparkling personality.”

He takes another drink and gives me a baleful look. “That hurts.”

“Really. How many friends did you have in college, besides me?” He opens his muzzle. “Not counting your one-night-stands.”

He sniffs. “You, Liz, Allen, Jake.” He thinks. “Randy, I guess.”

“Everyone from FLAG.”

“Exactly.” He points a finger at me. “Exactly.”

I swig the non-beer again. “Brian, it’s only because you never really made an effort to hang out with anyone else. Nobody from the theater outside the shows. Nobody from your classes.”

“Beatrice called me a couple times.”

“Who was she, your acting coach?”

“So I don’t always have a lot of friends.” He looks at the bottle in his paws. “I always really cared about the ones I had.”

Did you? I wonder. But I keep quiet. After a moment, he goes on. “It just sucks down here. I mean, I know I’m a big ol’ fag and all, but sometimes I just want that contact. I can curl up in bed, I can jerk off, but it’s...”

He sighs. And even though part of me recognizes that it’s manipulative, the weight of all our years behind us and his vulnerability now push me out of the chair. I can’t just sit next to him, though. I have to accompany it with a smart-ass remark. “Gee, don’t they have male prostitutes down here?” I say, as I plop down next to him, sweeping my tail around to the other side.

On the screen, a somewhat grainy hunk and hunkette are singing a duet. Brian relaxes and leans toward me, watching them with me for a moment before he responds. “Yeah, but they’re all these intimidating bodybuilders. More your type, really.”

“You never did figure out what my type is.”

“Neither did you.”

Our shoulders bump and press together. Even with my winter fur starting to come in, just the feel of being next to someone is nice. It’s so hard to spend weeks away from Dev, and I imagine that stretching on into months, years. “I know my type. He’s smart, funny, and cares about me. And,” I say as Brian opens his muzzle, “he listens to me.”

“Ah,” he says. “So close.”

“Not really,” I say lightly.

“Really?” He sounds far unhappier than I would’ve thought. “Why not?”

My ears flick back. I try to process the question, and the question behind the question. “I dunno, it just never really would’ve worked, would it? We’re both too similar, isn’t that what we always said?”

“That ‘opposites attract’ bullshit is just—bullshit.” He finishes off his bottle and puts it down. “We had such great talks.”

“Yeah. Corrigan Hall, second-floor lounge.”

“The roof of my apartment building.”

“The dining hall.”

“Where we figured out how people would never have to worry about sex again.”

“Not meaning it would go away,” I echo Jake’s comment when we’d said that at lunch.

Brian chimes in with the rest of the response, “just that we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

I laugh. He leans against me a little. “How did that work, again?” he says.

I shake my head. “Can’t remember. Something about safe sex and college dorms and...” His paw brushes my wrist. I move my arm, but then his fingers drop to my leg. He doesn’t seem to be making a move or anything, so I let it go. After all, in our talks in college, in our dorm rooms, we’d brush each other’s legs and not think anything of it.

And that’s when it hits me, why this room is familiar. The smell is different, the TV is bigger and shinier, the coffee table newer, but the same style, but as soon as I realize it, my ears flick back. It’s not just that the posters are the same ones that were in Brian’s dorm room. From this angle, sitting on the sofa with him leaning against me, I can see that the posters are set up in exactly the same configuration around the TV. The couch is the same size, the coffee table the same size, the beer bottle just where Brian used to put his bottles back in college. And the armchair, now that I’m not sitting in it, looks almost exactly the same.

I guess it’s not so strange for someone to keep going with a room that works for them. But the memory of Brian’s college room comes back so vividly that I start to feel a little unnerved by it. It’s like he wants to go back to his college days.

“It’s a good theory.”

I’ve forgotten what we were talking about. “What?”

He laughs. “Not worrying about sex. What the hell do you think?”

“Oh.” I try to recapture the thread of the conversation. “Couldn’t get anyone to buy into it,” I say.

“How is it with your guy?”

“Jesus, Brian.” I shift, start to get up.

“Oh, don’t be like that.” He presses on my leg, trying to pull me back down. “We used to talk about boyfriends all the time. Does he play rough? Does he like it rough?”

I stay halfway between sitting and standing. “We never threatened to publish things in our blogs, back in college.”

His paw rests on my leg, but he stops the pressure. “I wouldn’t do that,” he says.

“I didn’t think you’d publish his date with Caroll, either.”

“I never promised not to do that.” He grins. “Besides, I’m an activist. Like you used to be.”

I sit back down. “Does that mean you’re promising not to post anything we talk about tonight?”

“Cross my heart.” And he does. “Come on. If I’m not getting any, at least I want to hear about someone who is.”

I lean back into the couch. The truth is, I don’t really have anyone else I can talk to about Dev. I call Salim every now and then, but it’s not the same. “It’s really great,” I say. “I mean, you know how I used to say Misha knew just what to do?”

He gets comfortable against me. I don’t stop him. “Yeah.”

“Well, Misha only had, like, three moves.”

“So this guy’s a real freak?”

I grin. “No. He’s got about four moves, but they’re good ones.”

“Uh-huh.” His short muzzle dips a bit, showing me his ears, a habit he picked up from me. “Is it the muscles?”

“Part of it.” I chuckle. “You remember the guy you went out with?”

“Ken.”

“Yup.”

“Mmmm. But he was just a one-night thing.”

“Okay.” I stretch my arm back over the back of the couch, and he kind of settles against me. I’m not really paying attention to the TV any more, barely hearing the song the lead female is singing with her younger sister. “So imagine Ken’s body and, like, Allen’s mind.”

“He’s that smart?”

I flip my tail against the side of the couch. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“He’s a football player. You know what they’re—”

“Like I keep telling you, he’s different.”

“Right.” His paw rests on my leg again. I know I should have him move it, but there’s no harm in leaving it there. He’s not gonna do anything, and we’ve cuddled this close before without doing anything. “So whose sense of morality and relationships does he have?”

I flick my ears, leaving my arm on the sofa rather than putting it around his shoulder. “Mine.”

He sighs against me. “Sounds pretty good.”

“It is.”

We sit like that. He moves his fingers up and down along my leg, making it tingle. I’m about to tell him to stop when he says, “So why don’t you want to be able to be with him in public?”

I lean my head back to stare at the ceiling. “It’s not that easy.”

“You wanna know one of the things I learned?”

“You mean there’s something you haven’t already told me?” I lift my right leg a bit, trying to gently dislodge his paw, but it stays where it is.

“In the whole thing,” he says, head against my shoulder, his voice vibrating against my chest, “with me leaving Forester and moving down here, I learned that I...that we...overthink things.”

I let out a bark of a laugh, bringing my head down. “You think?”

He grins. “I know, I know. I mean, I shoulda stayed at Forester. I wanted to. But I kept thinking about what it was gonna be like there, with the whole victim thing, and the FLAG people and the theater and the football, and it just freaked me out.”

He sounds small. I drop my paw to his shoulder. “It was a freaky thing to go through.”

“And I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it.”

I don’t say anything to that. His paw tightens on my leg, then lifts. “We just talked about revenge,” he says. “We never really talked about what happened. What it meant.”

“I guess,” I say. His scent is a little stronger in my nostrils. “I mean, you didn’t seem to want to. And then...”

“I ran out,” he says.

I’d never heard him admit it before. I pull him a little closer. “Yeah, well...”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he says.

“I tried to get revenge for you,” I say.

He turns his head, looking up with one shiny eye. “Is that what you call it?”

“Yeah.” I grin. “Worked pretty good, too.”

“I’m touched,” he says. “What’d you do?”

I start to tell him, tail wagging against the couch, but just then his paw strays a little further in, brushing the crease of my jeans where my sheath is. “Hey,” I say. “I thought you were the one who was touched.”

I reach down to move his paw, but he’s quicker, pressing it against me. “Figured I’d even things up,” he says. “Anyway, feels like you don’t mind.”

I’m half-hard, sure, but sitting so close to someone and thinking about Dev will do that. I grab his paw and lift it away. “I didn’t come down here to...”

“To what?” He lifts his head and looks at me.

“To do that.” I take my arm from around his shoulder.

He sighs, leaning against my shoulder. “It’s just been so freakin’ long.”

“We saw friendships get ruined by relationships. We promised that’d never happen, right?”

“Hasn’t it?” He looks grim and forlorn all at once. I want to reassure him, to tell him that those days in the dorm lounge can come back again, but the truth is, I’ve moved on and he hasn’t. “Come on,” he says. “Where’s our friendship now?”

“I’m not leaving Dev.”

“I’m not asking you to.” He grabs my paw and presses it right to his pants. “I’m just asking you to help me out. Just a little bit.”

He’s hard and warm through his slacks. I don’t rub or anything, just try to pull away. “Jesus, Brian, if you wanted a quick paw job you could just go down to whatever Chevali’s version of Nineteenth Street is.”

“I don’t want it from just anyone.” He’s pretty insistent, keeping my paw there. “If I felt less lonely...”

I yank my paw free and stare down at him, our muzzles a couple inches apart. From this distance, the gleam in his eye is unmistakable. So this was all an act, all of it. The remorse, the vulnerability. The friendship? “If you want me to jerk you off,” I say, “just come out and say it.”

“Aw, Tip,” he says, “I kinda thought sticking your paw on my dick said it for me.”

“And if I do...”

He takes hold of my paw again. “I’ll feel a lot better about our relationship.”

Dammit. I wouldn’t consider it normally, but if it’d get him off Dev’s case...I pull my paw out of his. “You wanna do it here on the couch?”

He turns off the TV and gets up, grinning over his shoulder as he walks into the bedroom. I sit on the couch and stare at the blank screen, thinking, do I really want to do this? What would Dev think? We are pretty exclusive, but a hand job doesn’t count, does it? If it would make Brian keep out of our business? I press my paws to my eyes. All I can think is that if I don’t, it’ll definitely make things worse. I shouldn’t have come down here at all. But it’s too late for that.

By the time I sit down next to him on the bed, he’s already got his pants down. I’ve seen him naked before, a couple times, but I’ve never seen him out of his sheath. I try not to look, try to treat it like a job. Quick strokes, like you’re jerking yourself off, don’t think. He arches his back and squirms and moans, and tries to grab me back through my jeans, but I angle my hips away from him. He doesn’t insist.

For someone who hasn’t had any in a while, it’s sure taking him a long time to come. I slide my paw up and down while the smell of skunk gets stronger. “You got a nice paw,” he says, and when I don’t respond, he goes on. “Last guy to jerk me off had sharp claws.”

“Shut up,” I say, without breaking my rhythm, and he does.

I’m a little aroused just from jerking off someone, and the smells of fox and skunk are pretty strong, even to my accustomed nose. My paw’s starting to get stiff, and so I speed up a little. He bucks into the stroking, and ten short minutes later, he finally shudders, gasps, and spurts warmth all over his stomach and my paw.

As soon as I feel it’s okay, I take my paw away. Holding it awkwardly in front of me, trying not to smell the mess all over it, I avoid looking at Brian. “I’m gonna clean up,” I say.

His paw reaches out for me. “What’s your hurry?”

I hesitate. But only for a second. Even if I wanted to, I’ve made a promise to Dev about not coming ’til he did, an explicit promise as opposed to the implicit one I just broke. “I’m gonna clean up,” I say again, and get up before he can do anything else. Without looking back, I walk to the bathroom and close the door.

To my surprise, my paw doesn’t smell all that strongly of skunk. And Brian has lots of strong soaps to cover the scent. After a couple washes, I can’t even tell he came on my paw, which is pretty impressive. I do, however, smell like I stuck my paw into a jar of orange cardamom.

I’m not only taking my time to try to get rid of the smell. I’m also trying to figure out what I just did, how it affects my relationship with Brian, and with Dev. I’d really be happy if Dev never found out about that. He might ask why Brian’s easing up on him, but I can hopefully tell him Brian did it out of respect for our friendship. He’ll be suspicious, but Brian and I never did anything sexual before. There’s no reason this should’ve been different.

Except it was. And no matter what Brian says about feeling a little less lonely, about that being all it is, I am starting to feel that there’s more. I think he wants a relationship, wants me to leave Dev and come live with him. And all his posturing this evening, all the little things he did to get me to feel bad for him, all that was just acting. Wasn’t it?

By the time I get my paws clean, my erection’s gone down, too. That temptation won’t be a problem. I’m still annoyed that I hesitated when he reached for me. And now I’m starting to think about it more. Just a paw job, right? No big deal. I pawed off probably fifty guys through my college years. Never meant anything.

So then why didn’t Brian and I ever do it? And what will Dev think of it if he finds out? When he finds out?

I shove aside the growing nausea of guilt in my stomach and chest. I can’t even think about Dev this soon. It’s either thinking about him finding out, or about me hiding it from him, and neither alternative is more palatable than the other. So I just think about Brian. Nothing really has to have changed, right? Not unless he wants it to.

He’s still lying on the bed with his pants down when I walk out. I can’t really obviously avoid looking at him, but he knows me well enough that I don’t need to. “Something wrong?” he says.

“I’m kinda tired.” I stand awkwardly between the bathroom and the bed.

“It’s not even ten.”

“It’s eleven where I live.”

“Still.” He swings his legs off the bed and looks up at me. “Sure, whatever. I’ll clean up and we can go to bed.”

I jerk my head toward the living room. “I’m sleeping on the couch, right?”

He doesn’t reply right away. His eyes glitter with reflected light. “You don’t have to,” he says softly.

“I think I do,” I say, and just then my phone rings.

His eyes narrow. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

I don’t have to look at the number, but I do anyway. “Yeah. Be right back.”

“Tip—”

But I’m already out in the living room, hitting the green Accept button, making my way out the front door to the hallway. “Hi,” I say.

“Monday practice sucks,” Dev grumbles.

“So win next time.”

“Like I can do anything about it, stuck on backup.”

“You’ll be starting soon. Right?”

“I’d better,” he grumbles. “Already starting to get uncomfortable around Caroll.”

“Uncomfortable like...”

“Ah, I’m just teasing.” He sighs. “Don’t know how I’m going to beat out ‘Killer.’”

“People are noticing,” I tell him. It’s so refreshing to be able to talk to him. The air’s cooled down with the evening and the night is cool. I can’t see Chevali from here, but it helps to know he’s close. Faintly, I hear the rumble of an airplane getting closer, and it reminds me I have to go home tomorrow.

“Did you see this thing ESPN wrote about me?”

“You got half a paragraph there. The guys at High and Bright did a whole paragraph.” I printed both out, stuck them on the wall over my loft so I can look at them when I wake up in the morning.

“Brian wrote nearly a whole article.”

My jaw snaps shut in surprise. I think about Brian, back in the apartment. It is pretty rude of me to be out here talking to Dev, no matter how good it feels. I say, “Yeah,” and then, “Look, Dev, this isn’t a really good time...”

He goes on about the article and I put him off again, telling him I’ll call him tomorrow, that I have a big meeting at work that got moved up. The plane is closer by that point, a droning reminder, and finally I get him off the phone. I stand there on the balcony, holding the phone, missing him. And just to be spiteful, I don’t go back in for another five minutes.

Brian’s cleaned up by then, sitting on the couch in his boxers, not watching TV. The images just flicker over the white spot on his nose, there in the center of black, as if I can see his thoughts flickering out from his eyes. I walk to the kitchen and get another one of the diet sodas.

“How’s he doing?” he says, without turning.

“Good. He liked the bit you wrote about him.”

He raises a fist. “Tree Pride.”

“Yeah.” Nobody except the team and announcers called the Forester team the Rangers. The logo is a big pine tree, so the student body all calls them the “Trees.” “Dumb as a plank and twice as thick,” Brian used to say. Okay, I did, too.

I stand behind the sofa, watching Brian not watch the TV. The diet soda is cold in my paw, cold against my tongue, leaving the artificial sweetener taste after it goes down. “So,” Brian says, “you sleeping out here?”

“Are you feeling less lonely?” I ask. I need to know if what I’ve done is worth it. “Or do you need someone to tuck you in?”

He half-turns then, with a smirk. “I think I’m feeling even more lonely now.”

I fold my arms. “Just because I have a boyfriend doesn’t mean I’m not still your friend.”

“Are you?” He turns back to the TV.

“I dunno,” I say. “How are you defining friendship? Is a friend someone who’d screw over his boyfriend for you? Someone who places you above everyone else?”

“Used to be that way.”

I look down at his small black ears, the white patches on them and on his face. It feels as though I’ve stepped back in time to our dorm, with a nicer couch and TV. The easy, the kind thing would be to acknowledge the bond that’s still there. After all I’ve done already, I only have a few hours left to spend with him.

I’m just about to say something nice when he gives a little sigh. And it’s that little dramatic touch, so perfectly Brian, that irritates the hell out of me. He was lonely and wanted a paw job; I gave it to him. He’s still lonely and wants me to curl up with him. And there’ll be more advances then, more hurt when I reject him, maybe another paw job in the morning. After I leave, he’ll be pestering me for another visit, the way he did when I started going out with Dev.

College is his Golden Age. He’s wandered down a dead end in the maze of life, only he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. He wants to go back to where he made that turn, or else get an airlift out by doing something striking like outing Dev. So he’s trying to get me to go back with him. And he’ll keep trying.

Thing is, I think I made some good turns. I like where I am. There were good things about college, but the phone call from Dev reminded me that there are lots better things now. I don’t pretend to understand how this works, how two people so different can share a point of view, can depend on each other, can make each other’s lives so much better. So I can’t really begrudge Brian his lack of understanding.

But I can begrudge him his stubborn refusal to accept it, his manipulative acting all night to get what he wants out of me. Some of it I resisted, some of it I didn’t. But it’s not going to stop, not unless I stop it.

“It was never like that.” I say it quietly, with my own sense of drama.

“Don’t be sour,” he says. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I never had a real boyfriend in college,” I say. “There were guys I went steady with, but I didn’t know how to be serious with them. We didn’t have a life together. We just agreed not to date other people. Sure, my best friend comes before those guys.”

Now, now he turns. Watches me. “But Dev’s different.” I look back down at him. “He’s different. He makes me...”

“Complete?” He smirks.

“Happy.”

“You were happy all the time, back in college.”

I shake my head. “He cares about my life. All of it. I care about his. He listens to me, he likes that I care. He accepts what I am, and he is what he is, and when we’re together, I feel like we can do anything.”

“You were an English major?” He sniffs, but the facade is cracking. “That’s terrible. Give me Keats, give me Wordsworth.”

I take a breath. “I sail’d in darkness, blind ’til the false dawn/ Reveal’d her beacon, shin’d in the distance/ Believ’d I, foolish, ’twas my ain true guide/ Until your sunrise show’d true light, true love.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Donnigan?”

“Stuart. Not very well known.”

“I can see why. ‘Ain’?”

“It’s archaic.”

“So is true love.”

I stare back at him, levelly. “If you really think that, and you can’t be happy for me, then I guess we don’t have much to talk about after all.”

“Come on,” he says. “I was joking.”

I flick my ears back and take another drink of the diet soda. It’s warm, not as refreshing, and the artificial sweetener is losing what charm it had. “You wanna put a movie on or something, or you ready to go to bed?”

“Are you ready to go to bed?” He tries to make it into a leer, but I just walk over and sit in the armchair.

He watches me and then gets up. “I’ll let you get some rest, then. Night.”

“Night,” I say.

For a moment, we look at each other. Then he walks into his bedroom.

No sheets for the couch, no blanket, no pillow. I turn off the TV and the lights, and that’s when I notice that Brian’s left his bedroom door open, a soft light on inside. I close my eyes and lie down on the couch. This could be Brian’s old dorm room, just fancier: nicer couch, framed posters. The smell of skunk is the only thing that’s close to the same, and even that is subtly different. A person’s scent changes with him over the years, and while Brian’s is as strong and as defiant as ever, there’s a bitter tinge to it that wasn’t there before. I’ve got some NeutraScent in my bag, but that doesn’t seem fair, somehow.

So I breathe in fox and skunk, modern day, and let my mind wander back, just for tonight, to the fox and skunk that used to be. Just because they’re gone doesn’t mean they weren’t important, but it’s a mistake to try too hard to hold onto them. Brian’s got to be who he’s going to be, and I’ve got to be who I am. And I wonder, staring at the ceiling, if this is how all friendships go. I’ve had relationships come and go, high school best friends fade into the past like ripples in a pond, slowly receding until they’re gone. But Brian and I were close for a long time. When we’re apart, the distance between us isn’t as noticeable. Here in the next room, it feels greater, an unmanageable chasm.

Is this where Dev and I will be in a few years? Will he lose himself in his professional world, will I grow apart from him the way I’ve grown apart from Brian? Will there be some kind of incident that will pin him in one place while I move on, or something I won’t be able to get past while he moves farther and farther away?

If you’d asked me, sitting in the lounge of the dorm in college with Brian, I would have told you that we’d withstand anything. Getting sent to the hospital, sent to another college—we’d always be together, brothers in arms in the war on injustice. My attempt to take revenge for Brian’s pain now, in retrospect, seems to me an attempt to accomplish a feat he couldn’t ignore, that would rekindle our friendship. I never considered that the war might change, that the people we saw as targets would become real to me, that I would find someone who wrapped himself in the core of me so much better than Brian did.

That thought, the memory of Dev’s voice on the phone, his paw on my chest, relaxes me. Love can fade, love can turn, but you can’t shy away from it because you’re afraid it will become something else. Brian’s lesson to me, here today, is not that all things wither and die, but that all relationships are even more valuable because they are impermanent. Perhaps one day I will be able to lie on a couch anywhere in the world and not be wishing with an ache like a vise that Dev were here with me. Perhaps. But I can do my best to make sure that that doesn’t happen. And in the meantime, I can enjoy this feeling, this closeness, and be happy every day I have it with Dev.

I feel sorry for Brian, and I think I feel some of his pain in his attempt to twist what Dev and I have. I know why he wants me back as more than a friend, and is willing to gamble away our friendship on the chance that I’ll go with him. If I didn’t have Dev...

The air circulation carries away the scents of the room. Brian’s is noticeably fainter now. I breathe in again, his current scent melding with the one from my memory. No matter what, the friends we were are a part of who we are, and always will be.

It’s important that I remember that. If I don’t, I’m just going to walk into his bedroom and punch him in the face.

8

Heart (Hal)

Heart was written after Isolation Play reached the thousand-book threshold. It was the first canonical OOP story to go outside Dev and Lee’s perspective, and originally appeared in the Divisions hardcover, later in the Divisions e-book.

* * *

In the sixteen (eighteen if you count Yearbook Club) years I’ve been a reporter, I’ve developed instincts for a story. You pick out the key part of it, the pitch, first. In this case: recently out gay football player’s struggle to make peace with his family. Then you build out the story with the details that make it unique. You include the boyfriend, and the adorably stupid things he does to try to help. The boyfriend’s family, which might maybe explain the adorably stupid things. The way the stupid things turn out, which is perhaps not such a surprise when you figure that all the people involved are supposed to love each other. And then finally you get to some conclusion, which ideally will leave the reader with a good feeling. The guy’s family comes to accept him, everyone’s happy. They don’t come to accept him, but he’s got his boyfriend and he’s okay. The mom accepts him but the dad doesn’t; there’s hope. Something like that. Doesn’t matter what happens later as long as it feels like the end of a movie.

So I’ve got all that down. I’ve got everything I need for this story. Except the most important part: the heart. Why do the people involved do all this? I could just say “love” and be done with it, and honestly that’d probably be good for most of the people who will read this. But it wouldn’t be good enough for me, because I’ve been married. I know what you’ll do for love, and what you won’t.

I’ve taken lots of notes on the plane ride from North Hicksville to Hellentown, and I’m sitting with the boyfriend and his father (boyfriend’s father, not the player’s) in the owner’s box at Yonder Field (It’s technically called Blue Yonder Field for Blue Yonder airlines, but all the reporters love to stand outside and say “let’s take in a game at Yonder Field.” Reporters are weird.). The owner, Demitrios Ponaxos, is up front with a bunch of his family and business associates, lots of cougars with some weasels and a mouse mixed in, and he let us in at the request of the visiting team’s owner, on condition that we stay in back and “don’t root too loud.”

As the teams come out onto the field, they all cheer, and we three foxes keep our cheering muted. Lee, the boyfriend, and Brenly, the dad, are red foxes. Me, I’m a swift fox. More subtle in a lot of ways, not that the reds would see that as a plus. But anyway, they’re watching Devlin Miski, the Siberian tiger who’s sleeping with young Lee—

Shit, that sounds bad. He’s not a teenager or anything. He’s like twenty-four, I think. Miski’s twenty-four and they were in the same class. But at any rate, they’re watching Devlin and the Chevali Firebirds take on the Hellentown Pilots. Big game. The UFL South might as well be a two-team division, and these are the two teams, coming in tied. It’s only mid-season, but bragging rights and tiebreakers are at stake here.

So everyone in the box is watching warmups, and I’m kind of half-listening while I try to work my notes into a story. Like I said, I’ve got all the elements, and I can write this thing and sell it, no problem, but that damn heart is still bothering me.

I didn’t realize I was missing anything until I was asking Lee why he went all the way up to North Bumfuck to confront his boyfriend’s father, and his ears went splayed and his eyes got this kind of gleam in them and he said, “I had to.”

So now I’m sneaking a glance at Lee, in his too-big Firebirds polo shirt that he changed into on the jet—the owner, Corcoran, keeps a small stack of ‘em for, I guess, occasions like when one of his passengers might’ve spent the night in jail in a torn shirt and not had time to change. Even with the baggy shirt, which hides most of his waist, Lee’s visibly in good shape, better than either me or his dad. He’s probably the one with the least reason to be excited about being in an owner’s box—as a recently fired pro scout, he’s been on the sidelines of games more times than I have, and more times, I think, than his father’s been to any games, period. But he’s still on his feet, craning his neck to look down at the field, and when he spots his tiger, his tail goes thwack back and forth and he gets this huge grin on his muzzle and he nudges his father. “There he is, number 57.”

“I know his number.” His father’s tail is wagging too, sympathetically, and he sounds amused.

So that’s the thing, right? I’ve interviewed gay athletes before. Talked about relationships with a lacrosse player who’d had one and a basketball player who’d had a dozen, by his count. And at the time, I thought about their relationships the way I thought about mine: physical attraction supplemented just enough with mutual tolerability.

I don’t get the physical attraction part, but I don’t expect to. Not how I was born. I look at Lee and I think, good-looking guy. I don’t picture him naked, I don’t want to picture him naked. He reminds me a bit of Cimarine, but then I just picture her naked (one of the memories of her I’ve worked to keep), and that’s it.

But the way he’s acting, it’s like those teenage crushes they write songs about. And I realize I never thought about gay guys having that. Hell, I never really thought most guys had that. Thought it was a girl thing, mostly. Certainly Miski didn’t seem quite that affectionate, but maybe he’s just restrained, maybe he was just nervous about the game.

So it nags at me. To really get across their relationship in this article, I feel like I need to understand that. When Lee talks about his boyfriend to his father, I listen.

“They’re almost a top ten defense this year. He’s not the biggest playmaker, but he’s really making a difference.”

This gets one of the weasels to turn around. He sizes up Lee’s Firebirds shirt and sneers. “Sure, when you play bottom-ten offenses, it’s easy to run up the stats.”

“You guys think you’re a top ten offense?” Lee jibes back.

“Ninth in passing yards, eighth in passing touchdowns.”

“Sixteenth in rushing.”

The weasel waves a paw. “You guys can’t stop the run anyway.”

“We held Bixon under a hundred yards. Only time anyone’s done that all year.”

“We’ll take care of him, no problem.”

Lee laughs. “Good luck. He’s brutal. You guys need a better inside presence if you’re going to have any chance.”

I just grin. Football is always like this. The two teams rack up their statistics, they have good days and bad days against other teams, but until they get onto the same field, you never know how it’s going to turn out. That’s why they play the games, like we say in the “Cliché Tribune.”

“Inside presence.” The weasel’s smugness flickers. “We got a lot of inside presence.”

“Sure.” Lee grins at his father. “Who’re your starting defensive tackles?”

“Bowman,” the weasel says. “And LeClair.”

“Bowman,” Lee says. “Second year. Drafted too high, starting because you have a lot of money tied up in him, not because he has starting talent. You’re probably already talking to teams about where you could get anything back for him in the off-season. I’d try Pelagia, personally. And LeClair’s okay, but he’s on his ninth season and he’s had four concussions. He’s lost a step.”

I know the stare and false bravado the weasel gets now, the feeling when someone realizes he’s overmatched, that the game isn’t turning out the way he’d predicted from the stats going in. “We won the division last year.”

“You won a shitty division last year.” Lee grins.

“We’re leading it again.”

“Tied. For another…” Lee checks his watch. “Hundred and ninety-one minutes. Give or take.”

“Want to put a wager on that?” The weasel reaches for his wallet inside his suit jacket.

“Ah, you got me there.” Lee spreads his paws. “Just got out of jail this morning. I’m broke.”

He looks our way while the weasel tries not to look shocked, but his father doesn’t make a move toward his wallet. What the hell, I think. I pull out a twenty, reach out and hand it to him. “Here,” I say. “I owe ya. For that thing that time.”

He flashes me a grin. “Sure,” he says, taking the bill and holding it out to the weasel. “There. Twenty?”

The weasel looks at it like he ordered filet mignon and Lee handed him a hamburger. “Lemme see if I have anything that small,” he says, and eventually fishes a twenty out of his billfold. “Hardly worth it,” he mutters.

They put the twenties together up on the edge of the counter by the small sink in the back of the box. The weasel goes back to his seat to brag to his friends about how he took down that uppity Firebirds fan, with a jerk of his thumb and a sharp laugh.

Lee just sits back and stares down at the field. After we stand for the national anthem, he sidles down the side of the box, trying to get a better view of the field and the starters. This is part of it, I think, part of what holds him and his tiger together. But it’s still eluding me.

I take the chance to plop myself down next to his father. Brenly’s in his mid-forties, if I judge the slight grey on his muzzle and ears right. “Good kid you got there,” I say.

His look is suspicious at first, but he wipes that away with a smile. “Yeah, he is. Don’t know how much credit I can take for that.”

“At least some.”

“You have kids?”

I shake my head. “Cim always wanted to wait ’til we were stable. She’s got a cub now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay.” I wave it off. “Not sure what I’d do with one anyway.”

He laughs. “That’s what I thought. You figure it out.”

“Has he always been…” I gesture toward Lee, ears perked down even though the glass is so thick even us foxes can’t hear through it.

Brenly raises his eyebrows, and twitches his ears toward me. “Interested in football? Gay?”

“Sure, either of those.” I watch Lee’s total absorption, one paw on the glass, his tail flicking back and forth.

“I got him into football early on. I used to watch with my father, and I thought it would be something he could enjoy that would give him something to talk to the other boys in school about.”

“One of those kids.”

Brenly nods. “He took to it pretty quickly.”

“He’s a smart kid.”

“Yeah.” There’s pride in that one word, so I guess Brenly takes a bit of credit for his cub. “As for the other thing…I didn’t introduce him to that.”

I laugh. “That’s good. This’d be a very different kind of story, then.”

He smiles. “No, he just…he came back from college and he was very…flamboyant.” He taps his muzzle. “No, that’s not the right word. He was just…open. Wore pink triangles all over, dressed a little more flashily. But he didn’t lisp or anything like that.”

“Most gay people don’t.”

“I know.”

There’s a short silence while we try to gauge which one of us won the “see, I’m not homophobic” battle. I think he has an edge on account of he’s here with his gay son. “So you don’t know what triggered it?”

“Never talked to him about it.” Brenly flicks his ears toward Lee, then back to me. “I suppose you just know, don’t you?”

“I don’t,” I say. “But that’s how I understand it. They were really sweet on the plane, weren’t they?”

A flicker of a smile, a short nod. He waits until he realizes that I’m expecting him to say something, either in agreement or disagreement or just acknowledgment. So he says, “I’m glad to see him happy.”

“Is he a happy kind of guy?” I flick my own ears toward Lee, at the glass. He’s keeping still, but…I guess “quivering” is the right word. Tail twitching, ears flicking, barely restraining himself from jumping up and down. “In general, I mean.”

Brenly follows my gaze and watches his son thoughtfully. “I don’t know that I would say that. He was angry a lot of the time. But, well.” He taps the armrest between us. “He’s a fox. He turned that anger into action and he has ways of getting what he wants.”

“Now that he knows what he wants.”

“Exactly.”

On the TVs around the box, we see the coin flip. Hellentown wins, and Lee cheers with the rest of the box. “We get the ball first,” one of the cougars says, and of course Lee’s happy. His tiger will be on the field first with the defense. Brenly and I stand to get a better view of the first few plays rather than watching the screen.

I admit I haven’t been keeping up with the whole league like I did when I was full-time. But the Pilots haven’t changed much. Still got a top-five QB, a lion who can create plays when he needs to. Still got an effective running game, splitting time between a power back and a finesse back (elk and deer). And they’ve got a new tight end, a young rabbit, first time I’ve seen a rabbit play that position.

The Firebirds’ defense has stepped it up this season, though. I’m not ready to give Miski all the credit for it, whether or not he is the main difference between this year and last. The rookies on the D-line miss their assignments sometimes, but they make up for it with energy and enthusiasm, and if you ask any coach in the league, they’ll say they’d rather have that problem.

Not to downplay what Miski’s done. Since replacing Mitchell after that leg injury, he’s really grown into the starting linebacker role, to the point that some people say he’s one of the better outside linebackers in the league. Others want to wait and see. Pretty much everyone agrees that if he keeps up this level of play all year, he’s going to have some big contract negotiating to do in the off-season.

I watch him on the first two plays, where the Pilots try to establish the run; he joins the Firebirds’ star linebacker Gerrard Marvell in the pile that limits the running backs to two and three yards. Third down, the lion drops back to throw and lofts the ball halfway down the field. The Firebirds’ corner swats the ball away from the receiver, and the Pilots punt.

Chevali’s quarterback—Aston, the wolf—is not top-five. But he doesn’t turn the ball over a lot and he’s got a good arm. He’s not accurate, but his misses are usually low or out of bounds, not the kind of misses that turn into picks. The wolverine at running back gets compared unfairly to Gateway’s wolverine (Bixon, the one Lee was talking about), which is kind of like comparing me to the star of that new vampire movie because we’re both swift foxes. But Jaws is better than average, and when you factor in his durability, he’s probably top-five in the league. Maybe number six, depending on if you count Yerba’s tandem as one.

Aston marches them down the field and then the drive stalls. But they punt with good field position and pin the Pilots back inside their ten, and it’s on that series that Miski gets to make a play.

It’s second and four, and the quarterback zips the ball to the tight end. The rabbit grabs it cleanly and turns to run upfield—

—and Miski is right there, wraps him up and drives him down to the ground. There’s a hiss from near the front; I look up and see Lee at the end of a fist-pump, and realize that the hiss was the end of him saying “Yes!”

He catches my eye and grins, and I can’t help but grin back. His eyes sparkle and he walks over. “If you want to make another easy twenty,” he says in a fox-whisper, “go lay some more money on the Firebirds. We’re gonna win.”

And I remember the fierceness with which the tiger said good-bye to Lee, the hug, the touch of the muzzles that was more intimate than a kiss. I heard Lee tell him, “Win that game,” and Miski’s determined smile in return.

“Thanks,” I think about the two twenties left in my wallet. Wouldn’t mind leaving here with four. And hey, I’ve still got eighteen bucks if I lose the bet.

So I walk up behind that weasel and I say, “Hey, if twenty’s not rich enough, you want to lay another forty on your losing team down there?”

He bristles and then laughs, puffing himself up for the guys around him who look his way. “Hate to take your money,” he says. “Looks like you need it.”

“Hey,” I say, standing up, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t put a dime on those bums. They can’t do shit.”

“They’re feeling each other out,” he says.

“Whatever.” I start to back away.

He bites. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take your money. Just said I hate to.” He fishes around in his billfold and takes out two twenties, hands them out to me.

The owner turns around as I’m getting my own wallet out. “Boys, no betting in my box, right?”

The weasel’s already shoved his bills in his pocket. I do the same. We look at each other, and then he sticks out his paw. I shake it. “Pleasure doing business,” he says, and goes back to his friends. They all laugh and look at me over their shoulder. I smile amiably and sit back next to Brenly, following the game on the screen.

Whether it’s Miski or just the whole improved defense, the Firebirds are letting nothing through. They get the ball with good field position on their first three drives; on the third, Coach Samuelson realizes that the Pilots don’t have a great run defense and calls five rushing plays in a row. On the fifth, Jaws breaks through the line and makes it down to the four. Two plays later, he walks pretty much untouched into the end zone.

Lee pumps his fist again. Brenly and I fistbump. Quietly, of course. The weasel doesn’t look too worried about his money.

I figure Lee will sit down now, but he stays next to the glass, staring down. During a commercial for Cialis, I talk to Brenly again. The couple times I mentioned his wife on the trip down, he got pretty tense. I don’t know if Lee noticed, but I did. So I’m thinking that Lee didn’t learn about healthy, happy relationships from his folks. But I’m also curious, because Brenly seems like a pretty good guy. So I say, “Lee’s lucky to have supportive parents.”

The tension comes back, just for a moment. He forces himself to relax and says, “We do what we can.”

“Flying to Hellentown on a moment’s notice is pretty supportive. Your wife doesn’t mind you being gone? I know when I went on trips, Cim had to know where I would be, when I’d be there, when I’d be back.” I laugh. “She used to call me to make sure I was on schedule. I told her, ‘Nobody worth cheating on you with would look twice at me.’ But she had that bug in her head.”

Brenly doesn’t laugh with me. “Eileen’s fine with me traveling. She just wants to know whether she can go out to dinner or if she’s staying home.”

“That’s great, that kind of trust.” Maybe I’m laying it on a little thick. “See, I never really had that. I can see where Lee gets his ideas of a relationship from.”

Brenly watches his son, rubbing his chin with his paw. But the game’s back on by then and the Pilots are driving, so the box gets a little loud and we get distracted and he never does respond.

Hellentown gets close enough for a field goal, after two incomplete passes. “Hey,” I say, loudly enough for the weasel to hear, “you guys really miss that cheetah at wideout, huh?”

“Fuck that guy,” the weasel mutters.

I grin and sit back. Brenly raises an eyebrow. “You just like to rile people,” he says in what is almost a fox-whisper, soft enough for only sensitive ears to catch.

“I’m a reporter,” I say. “You get the truth when people are upset and don’t have time to think.”

He leans back. “You picked the right topic. I’m glad that guy didn’t play for the Dragons.”

“Strike? He’s on the Devils now. Almost as bad.”

Brenly shakes his head. “Nothing’s as bad.”

I chuckle and wave down to the field. “C’mon,” I say. “If you’d told me last season that the Firebirds would be playing for the division lead a week before Thanksgiving, I’d have told you to take your Prozac and call me in the morning. A club can turn around just like that.”

Brenly smiles and looks up at the screen. The Firebirds are on defense again. “We had Miski,” he says, and then, changing the subject, “They play the Devils next week.”

“Yeah, but Miski won’t have to cover Strike. They’ll put one of the corners on him.”

“Wonder what color he’ll dye his fur for that game. What is it this week?”

“Dunno, I haven’t seen.”

The weasel cranes his head back. “Silver,” he says.

“Aw, that’s what it was last week,” I say. “He’s getting stale.”

“Not scoring as much, either,” one of the weasel’s friends says, laughing. “Serves him right. Hope he’s throwing lots of boat parties up there in last place.”

“That whole club’s a mess.” The weasel isn’t too upset about that, and can’t say as I am either. Devils fans are insufferable when they win, about as bad as the baseball fans up there when the Demons win, which thank God they haven’t for almost a decade now.

“Yeah, but—” My commentary that Strike isn’t helping by loudly pointing out the club’s problems in the media is interrupted by a yelp from Lee and a smack as his paw pads hit the glass. A moment later, one of the cougars yells, “Get him! No! God damn it!”

I snap my attention to the screen, where a tiger in Firebirds red and gold-trimmed white shirt is falling to the ground amid a pile of bodies in brown and gold. When you’ve seen more than a half-dozen football games, you recognize the signs of a fumble or interception, and in this case, watching Lee’s tail sweep from side to side, his body bounce on his feet, I don’t have to ask who made the play.

Brenly and I watch the offense take advantage of the turnover. On the first play, Aston fires a pass to the corner of the end zone. It sails inches past the paws of Ford, the fox who wears number 81.

“Nice throw,” Brenly says.

“Okay throw.” I shrug. “They should’ve run it.”

On the next play, they do, and they make me look smart when Jaws bulls through the Pilots defense for twenty-three yards. They stall him at the five, but on second down, the tight end runs a nice crossing pattern to the back of the end zone, and Aston finds him for an easy six. They get aggressive on the extra point, tipping it just enough to knock it to the side, and it stays 13-3.

Hellentown adds another field goal before the half, but the owner’s box is quiet all through halftime. The owner and his family leave, probably off to some place with nicer food or to meet up with friends. The weasel and his friends stick together, and Lee finally comes back from the glass to sit with his dad and me.

“It’s going great.” His tail is still wagging, and he can barely sit still. His eyes—and keep in mind, I’m straight—sparkle. I feel the need to play devil’s advocate.

“Coach Morales is great at halftime adjustments.”

He waves that off. “Dev’s hitting all his assignments. Gerrard’s playing like his tail’s on fire. Carson’s got two sacks. And the line is holding up great. We might end up giving up a passing score, but I’d bet they end with sixteen, and we’ll definitely get at least one more field goal.” He pumps his fist. “Seven and three, all alone on top of the division.”

I have to laugh. “You’re so young. You still don’t believe anything can go wrong.”

He holds up his left paw, the one that was in a cast until a few days ago. “Don’t I?”

His father shakes his head. “Just don’t go down to the sidelines and insult the Pilots. Or stay up here and insult the owner, for that matter.”

Lee scoffs, without losing his wide grin. “I’d put money on them not going over…well, let’s say twenty to be safe. You want to bet?”

He asks me, not his dad. I shake my head. “One of the first things they teach you in journalism is never wager with the people you’re writing about. Because they probably know more than you, or else you wouldn’t be writing about them.”

Not strictly true; the first thing they taught you in journalism school was “always double-check the things you write.” They didn’t really cover betting. But it sounds good, and anyway, I would never bet against this kid where football is concerned. I know he won’t be right all the time, but he lives the game as much as you can without playing it.

He grins at me and then turns to his father. “Are you staying for dinner? Can you?”

Brenly looks my way. “I haven’t figured out how I’m getting back yet. But I’ll stay for a while if I can.”

Lee’s grin just gets wider. “Did you think when you woke up yesterday that you’d be in the owner’s box in Hellentown?”

His father flicks his ears around. “When I woke up yesterday, there were a whole lot of things I wasn’t thinking.”

Because I’m watching Lee, I see the twitch of his whiskers, but he keeps the smile. “Glad I could help broaden your horizons.”

I excuse myself to find a bathroom and leave the two of them to their conversation and go out into the hall. After finding the restroom, I slouch against the wall nearby and call up the Firebirds’ owner, Corcoran. Yeah, I have his number in my phone. I never get rid of a number, because, well, you never know.

It goes to voicemail, of course; he probably doesn’t recognize my number, and he’s watching the game with family. So I just say, “Hi, John, it’s Hal. Just wanted to let you know that your rising star tiger is doing great, which you know,” stupid, of course he knows that, “and his boyfriend and father are here with me in Hellentown watching the game. Thanks for calling Ponaxos and getting us into his box, by the way. The reason I called is I almost got this story ready on Miski and just wanted to know if I can mention that you flew the boyfriend and father to this game. Thanks.”

No matter how well you plan out what you’re going to say, you always end up going off on some stupid tangent. At least, I do.

I stare at my phone and then put it back in my pocket. Lee and Brenly can use a couple more minutes alone to chat, so I wander around the hallway. Nice soft carpeting in the Pilots brown and gold colors, abstract triangle patterns that catch my eyes, losing me in the pattern for a moment. A gold stripe runs along the white walls, with the Pilots logo every couple yards or so. The whole corridor smells of cougar, with a flair of sterilizer, as though it was brushed casually but isn’t so important in this part of the stadium as it is down where thousands of people walk around every week. That’s what it means to be rich: you don’t have to clean up after yourself.

I think about that for a while, about all those kids down on the field, most of them making more in a year than I made in the last ten. But when you cover sports, you can’t dwell on that because it’ll get into everything you do, everything you write. You’ll find bitterness tinging your articles about athletes’ lives, you’ll snap when talking to them. It’s just a bad idea.

My phone rings. I pull it up and it’s Corcoran. Well, I’ll be.

Over voices and party noise in the background, he tells me he appreciates the thought, but he doesn’t want people to think he traded the use of his private jet for control of the story. Which is what I knew he’d do, but I had to ask. I thank him and let him go. Nice, I think, putting the phone away. Made time for a two-bit reporter and a player’s extended family. But Corky’s always been like that, even as he was building up his empire of furniture stores: family first. He grew up poor and never believes he has enough to provide for his kids: that’s what drives him.

And those kids down there are pushed by something too. It’s easy to dismiss them, to say that they were just born with speed, with strength, with hand-eye coordination, but the country’s full of people as strong as these kids, as fast as these kids, who flame out of sports if they ever pick it up. The country’s full of businessfolk who started in the same or better circumstances as Ponaxos in there, who never made enough to buy this box, let alone a football team.

I pace up and down outside the corridor, thinking back to something Cim used to say, about how I wasn’t gonna go anywhere because I didn’t have that fire in me. I told her I didn’t need her making excuses for me, but maybe it isn’t about that; maybe it was never about that. Maybe she was right. I said it was ethics holding me back; she said it was lack of passion. She cited other cases of lack of passion too.

The crowd roars, and the door of the owner’s box opens again. Brenly pokes his narrow red muzzle out, scans the corridor until he finds me. “Hal,” he says. “Coming?”

“Yeah.” I scuff at the carpet and join them back in the box.

Lee’s already back up at the glass. The third quarter gets under way with the Firebirds on a good offensive drive. The box stays quiet as they get into the red zone, and then Aston tosses a screen pass to the cheetah wideout, Zaïd, number 83. He turns upfield and is drilled by one of the safeties, a grey fox, immediately.

And the ball comes loose. Hellentown recovers.

The box goes nuts. The weasel and his friends jump around, the owner’s family are standing, pumping their fists. Lee stands dejected by the window. Hell, I’m not feeling too good myself.

It gets worse on the first play from scrimmage. Everybody knows the offense goes for a big play after a turnover. But how the hell do you guard against that? The Pilots QB drops back and launches a ball fifty yards out of his own end zone. It drops perfectly into the arms of a mule deer two steps ahead of the fox in the Firebirds uniform, and there’s nobody else between him and the end zone. It’s tied, and now most of the box is standing and cheering, high-fiving.

I know that feeling, though can’t say as I’ve ever felt it at a football game. It’s the feeling of the favorite, in the middle of what looks like an upset, as order appears to be restored. It’s the windstorm dying down and the rattling of the barn door quieting down, the car coming off the patch of ice, out of the skid. It’s the feeling of regaining control, even if you never had it to begin with.

And we lifelong Firebirds fans, we never had any kind of control. Our feeling is more the feeling you get after four matches when the fifth and sixth lottery numbers come up wrong, the feeling when the bank error isn’t really in your favor, the feeling when the guy who jumped you to the front of the line at the DMV says he made a mistake. It’s the feeling of the natural order reasserting itself and you finding yourself back where you belong: on bottom.

I don’t say anything, of course, but a look at Brenly confirms that he’s got that same feeling. Dragons fans this last decade, yeah, we’re partners in misery. At least they’ve got the glory days of the fifties and seventies to look back on. The Firebirds have been to the playoffs exactly four times since I’ve been a fan, only once to the championship. They got trounced by the Devils, 48-12.

But Lee, Lee doesn’t leave the glass. He turns around when the weasel says to one of his friends, “Been a while since I bet less’n a hundred on a game, but you know, I don’t mind winning pizza money, too.”

And Lee just grins at him, a long fox grin, and he says, “Did you lose when you bet more than a hundred, too?”

The weasel kinda scoffs, but you can tell he doesn’t know what to do with that. Lee’s the one who should be cringing, who should be dreading the next twenty-five minutes of game time, and instead this young fox is acting like his team’s favored by ten. So the weasel just turns to his friends and says, kinda loud, “Twenty-three or twenty-two to sixteen, that’s what we’re looking at.”

“You want to add a bit to that sixty?” Lee asks, low so Ponaxos doesn’t hear.

The weasel has to look at him then, because all his friends do. He laughs and turns to his friends. “You believe this guy? Nah, I don’t want to take your bail money,” he says.

“You wouldn’t be.” Brenly fishes in his pocket. He pulls out his wallet and hands two twenties to the weasel.

Lee lights up. Well, he was already pretty lit up, but his smile gets wider and his tail thwacks the wall below the window.

The weasel just shakes his head. Then one of his friends says, “I’ll take that bet,” and the weasel says, “Hang on, hang on, he asked me.”

He glances at the front of the box, waves Brenly’s money back, and they settle the bet with a shake of the paws just as the crowd cheers: Aston’s thrown incomplete on third and five, and the Firebirds have to punt.

But Hellentown, even though they stage a pretty five-minute drive, stall at midfield when Marvell charges through the line and drops the running back (the elk) for a loss on third down. They punt with three minutes left in the quarter and the Firebirds take over again from deep in their own territory.

Jaws runs it forward on the first couple plays for about six, and on third and four, Aston drops back to throw. He tosses it to the cheetah again, but the cheetah fumbles it into the air, directly into the waiting paws of a Pilot cornerback, a rangy coyote who speeds twenty yards down the sideline, dodges Aston’s game attempt to tackle him, and dances into the end zone. Nineteen-thirteen, Pilots, and this time, it’s the Firebirds getting a good jump to keep the extra point out of the uprights. Still only down six.

“How you like your boys now?” the weasel cackles, his friends joining in. Ponaxos and his family, more restrained, still slap paws and relax, their ropy tails unclenching to relax behind them. All I can see is the black and white tips, suddenly gliding back and forth under the chairs where they’d been tight and immobile for most of the rest of the game.

Lee’s got one paw on the glass, and both eyes on the field. His tail’s wagging still, and a moment later, when the weasels have forgotten about the offhand comment that wasn’t really a question, Lee says, “I love ’em.”

Or maybe he says, “I love ’im.” Hard to tell, even for a big-eared fox.

The weasels kind of stop, and the betting weasel says, “Live and die with the team, huh?” He raises his beer. “Good on ya.”

Lee nods, a tight, focused nod. Everyone quiets down as the game goes on.

The Firebirds take it down the field, get some good field position, but have to punt. Hellentown has it back at the end of the quarter, and the score stays 19-13.

“Dragons always do that too,” Brenly says. “Get up on a team and then give it back in the third. Like they don’t believe they deserve it.”

“Yeah,” I watch the TV. Fourth quarter coming up. Time for the Firebirds to struggle to get a field goal, get within three, and fall short. Time for the miracle season to start its slow, inevitable descent back to earth. Once you’ve seen the movie a few times, it gets predictable.

Lee slaps the glass in frustration. I watch the young, passionate fox stare down through glass. And I think, talk about predictable movies. His tiger’s about to hit it big, hit it huge. Whatever happens with the Firebirds, Devlin Miski is going to be in demand, and at the end of this season he’s gonna have good teams sniffing around him. He’s gonna sign a good mid-level contract, something like four or five years at, say five mil a year. Maybe seven if the linebacker market is thin. And he won’t need the trouble this boyfriend is going to cause him.

Hell, any boyfriend would be trouble, just because of the gay thing. I noticed Miski isn’t exactly embracing it. But Lee, smart kid, great kid, is double the trouble because he’s outspoken, he’s—not flamboyant. Like Brenly said, that has the wrong connotation. He’s impossible to ignore. And that just doesn’t fly, not in the football world.

That makes me sad to think about, which I don’t expect. So I shove the thought away and I watch the game, which I think is just going to make me more sad. But sometimes, sometimes, the natural order laughs at you.

Hellentown’s running back, the deer this time, fumbles on the drive. Marvell is there to pick it up, and somehow Miski is too. The coyote ends up with it, but Miski was instrumental in keeping the Pilots from getting it back, even though it was nowhere near his coverage assignment. Good play, good player. The box groans; Lee pumps his fist but keeps quiet.

The Firebirds, like the Pilots before them, go for the long bomb on the first play after the turnover, but with less success. Ford, the fox, can’t quite catch up to Aston’s throw, and they hand it to Jaws to get them a first down. They march down the field, eating clock, and get down to the twelve with six minutes left. From there, they eat up three and a half minutes with seven straight running plays, the last one a sweep right that leads Jaws right to the corner of the end zone. He skips across and plunges the stadium into dead silence as the scoreboard rolls up to 19-19.

The Pilots line up pretty determined for the extra point, but Charm is a terrific kicker and he’s ready for them this time. He boots it almost straight up, over even the tallest defender. It comes down into the net on the other side of the uprights and we’re ahead.

Nobody in the box is making a sound now. The Pilots start on their twenty with just under two and a half to go, and the Firebirds defense is jumping around, excited. Marvell yaps at them, calming them down, and it’s the Pilots who jump. False start, five yards back.

They’re just throwing, throwing, throwing now, that lion in command of the offense, and Miski’s assignment is the slot receiver, a fox. They throw to him once for four yards, and Miski’s got his arms around him, driving him down before he can gain any more.

“Wonder if Lee’s jealous,” I murmur to Brenly in a fox-whisper, just because there’s nobody else to say it to.

He snorts. He’s trying to act casual, but his foot taps and his tail twitches and he doesn’t look away from the TV. None of us do.

The Pilots get to the twenty-eight by the two-minute warning. They probably need to get thirty-two more yards to be in field goal range. We spend the two-minute warning silent (us foxes), murmuring quietly (the cougars), or talking loudly about how much we love claw-chewing finishes (the weasel and friends). Lee stays out there by the glass, opting not to come back and talk with us, as though worried someone will steal his spot.

The Pilots hit short throws, short throws. The fox is targeted twice more, and once Miski knocks the pass away; once the fox catches it and Miski drops him right away. Great coverage. Can’t ask for more outta the guy.

The only big play they get is an end-around to the rabbit tight end, a risky play with the clock winding down, because if he’s tackled on the field, time keeps slipping away. But it catches the Firebirds off guard, and the rabbit skips past the sidelines at the Firebirds’ thirty-nine. The crowd goes berserk, most of them on their feet now.

The Pilots are right at the edge of their field goal range. They try a run on second down and get stuffed. The crowd doesn’t care. They’re yelling at them to go for it. In the box, the cheers are quieter, and mixed between “we’re in range” and “a few more yards to be sure.”

On third, Marvell leans in to Miski as the offense is setting up and yells something. Miski listens, nods, sets. The linebackers and safeties get into their set, and when the ball is snapped, that fox receiver comes across again. And this time, Miski lets him go. The big tiger charges straight through the line.

The Pilots got so used to him covering the fox that this catches them off guard. Their quarterback is good, though; he realizes right away that this means the fox is uncovered and cocks to throw in that direction.

And Marvell is right there, pacing the fox stride for stride. The quarterback hesitates, moves to his second read, and then he has to dodge out of the way of Miski to avoid being sacked.

He doesn’t quite make it.

The crowd goes as still as their quarterback, and then, like him, they get up again, cheering their team on as they line up for fourth down. There’s no question of a field goal now; they need to get a first down. The quarterback lines up in the shotgun, takes the snap, drops back to pass. And the Firebirds are blanketing all his receivers, all of them. Miski sticks to the fox like glue. The corners and safeties jostle with the wideouts. And here comes the leopard, Carson Omba, the other outside linebacker, escaping his blocker and charging the quarterback.

Gamely, the lion tucks the ball down and tries to run, but he has nowhere to go. He runs into his own line and the leopard grabs him and he falls and he’s on the forty-four of Chevali and it’s Firebirds ball and that’s it, that’s the ballgame. The Pilots don’t have enough timeouts to stop Aston from kneeling and running out the clock, and the final score stays up there on the scoreboard no matter how much we rub our eyes: 20-19. Firebirds win.

I can’t believe it. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen.

Lee runs past me, out of the box. I get up just as the door swings shut behind him, but I resist the urge to follow him. Instead, I just put my ear to the door and listen. Brenly gives me a disapproving look, so I smile back.

All I hear at first is gasping, and then there’s laughing and then, finally, a long, sustained cry of “YEEEEEESSS!” A thump, like a body slumped against a wall in relief, and a high-pitched sound like tension being vented through a steam whistle.

I chuckle to myself and leave the kid to celebrate. “I’m curious,” I say to Brenly as I sit down. “It’s why I’m a reporter.”

“You’ve certainly got a passion for it,” he grumbles.

The weasel and his friends stand, packing up their stuff. They thank Ponaxos for the seats, talk about when they’ll see him again, and file past us without saying anything. As the weasel passes us, he drops a clump of bills into my lap.

“Thanks,” I say, but he doesn’t even turn.

I give Brenly his forty just as Lee comes in from the outside, his smile as big as I’ve seen it. “Perfect end to a perfect weekend,” he says.

He’s been in the hospital, in jail, and this is a perfect weekend? Brenly’s last comment to me echoes in my head, and it clicks, then, the heart of my story. It’s the passion—not just the attraction to each other, but Lee’s passion for life, Miski’s passion for football. That’s what binds them together. That’s what Cim and I never had, that’s what got Miski to come out on TV and Lee to drive five hours to pick a fight with a tiger twice his size and Miski to fly up there to get him and Lee to stand here pressed against glass for three hours devouring every scrap of action that happens on the field. It’s a passion for life, when you get right down to it.

With that realization comes jealousy. I’m older and wiser, I tell myself. That makes up for it. But there’s no getting around the fact that this kid feels something I’ve never felt before, akin to what the kids down on that field feel every week, or what the cougar walking past us out of the box feels with his business.

But just because I haven’t felt it doesn’t mean I can’t write about it. I’ve got my story now, and I’m already composing the end of it in my head as I stand with Brenly.

“Lee,” Brenly says. “Coming?”

The kid puts his paw up and exhales, fogging the glass around it. He turns before it dissipates, leaving an outline of five fingers, slowly fading. “I can’t imagine a better game to watch from the owner’s box,” he says. He bounces across the room to join us, stopping to get his money behind the ice bucket on the way. “God, I want to write about it right now.”

His tail’s wagging up a storm, and sympathetically, mine starts going too. It was a hell of a game, and as a reporter I’m pretty excited about seeing the changing of the guard.

Maybe that’s another angle for the story. New ways, new thoughts, new traditions. The team accepting the gay teammate beating the team that, well, it’s not really fair to cast the Pilots as standing in the way of progress or anything. They were all professionals there. None of them spit on him or anything, not that we could see.

Times are changing, that’s the angle. And changing for Lee, too, I think as I follow father and son down the hall. He’s going to be moving in with Miski, and that’ll be—well, I don’t know how that’ll be. Can’t ever predict those kind of things ’til they happen.

I hope it goes well for them, I really do. The odds are stacked against ’em, but I hope they beat the natural order. Hell, if the Firebirds can be leading the division in the middle of November, anything’s possible.

9

Getting to Sleep (Brenly)

This was the bonus story for Divisions, originally published in the hardcover of Uncovered, and later the e-book. Here is the origin of why Lee’s mother calls him by a different name than everyone else, a little quirk that arose in the first book.

* * *

One of the things I didn’t expect as I got older was how much I would learn to value sleep, and how elusive it would become. Nights like tonight, I lie in bed and feel as though I am being taxed a minute of wakefulness for every one of my forty-seven years. Forty-seven: not so old. But some nights it feels older than others.

It’s not just the empty bed, either. I’m used to that. I can tell you with some measure of precision that the last time Eileen and I shared a bed was one and a half years ago. We were visiting Forester College to attend our son’s graduation and instead ended up meeting his gay lover.

I’d requested a single king bed with the hope that being forced to share would perhaps rekindle some of the affection that had evaporated from our marriage. Eileen viewed the king bed as a spacious canvas on which she could have her side and I mine. Until that last night, the one after the meeting in the restaurant.

Devlin was very nice, very courteous, and nothing I’ve seen of him since then has changed that impression. But at the time, it was something of a shock to both of us. We knew Wiley was gay, of course; there was no denying the denim jacket with the pink triangles, let alone the pride posters, the way his ears flattened and his fur bristled whenever Eileen mentioned marriage and cubs, the way he took phone calls from his boyfriends ostensibly in private, near enough the door that we could hear the affection in his voice for others that rarely surfaced for us anymore. But Eileen held out hope that this was a phase, because we had not seen the physical reality of his homosexuality. Wiley had never forced his boyfriends on us.

(Not that he did this time. He claimed Devlin came over of his own accord, and I believe that. Eileen did not then and does not now.)

I’m not proud of it, especially now, but I admit that after that dinner, my mind was filled with images of my son and Devlin, imagining them kissing, imagining them doing…other things to each other. Not that I wanted to; I couldn’t seem to help it. (I’ve since read that this is not an uncommon reaction when parents are first faced with their gay sons.) So when Eileen suggested we stop at the hotel bar before going to the room that evening, I agreed quickly.

We were about two hours past sober when we staggered back upstairs. Both of us could navigate being drunk pretty well by that time in our lives, but we’d gone past our accustomed limit—blown past it like we were teenagers again. And like teenagers, we pulled about half our clothes off and tumbled into bed. She had been crying; I remember the tear tracks in her fur and the shine in her eyes. Her nose inches from mine, her body warm in my arms, she breathed, “Let’s have another one. We’ll do it right this time.”

And that was the last time I made love to my wife. Ex-wife, now. We didn’t have another one, of course. It was the wrong time of year for her, first off, and second, she had been taking birth control for two decades. Even if she’d stopped that morning, her body wouldn’t have been ready in time. But I think back on that night often, sometimes when I’m lying in bed like now, and not just to remind myself what it was like to hold and make love to a beautiful vixen. What if we’d had another cub, as ill-advised as that might be this late in life? It’s hard to imagine even the miracle of another cub preserving a family that had already splintered, and harder still to imagine the poor cub growing up with the weight of that responsibility. No, even if by some miracle Eileen had become pregnant, I think we would have made the sober decision not to have the cub. Her health would be at risk, we would have decided, and we would be too old to be parents. Wiley wouldn’t fill in as a third parent to his little brother or sister; he might not even be a brother. In the end, we would have ended up in the same places we did yesterday, only with one more stick to throw on the fire, one more horrified spectator watching mother and son scream at each other.

It’s past midnight. I stare at the ceiling. Wiley left for Chevali this afternoon, back to his tiger, back to his life. I am proud of him, really I am, for his courage and his success, and I wish I could do more to ease his path. The explosion at his mother was about more than just our family, but I can’t ask him whether things are okay with Devlin, because he’ll bristle and snap that they’re fine, and that’s fair; I never talked to him about the problems his mother and I were having.

I think about Eileen’s face as we left. Mrs. Hedley remained as cold and un-otterlike as ever, but Eileen showed the strain of the day in her ears, her avoidance of my gaze, the distracted way she answered me. I don’t think she ever expected Wiley to explode at her the way he did, because that’s not how our family ever settled arguments.

Then again, we never burned each other’s things, either. I don’t know what to think about that.

It’s an hour earlier in Chevali. I could call Wiley, see if he’s doing okay. If there’s one thing I am pleased with over the past year, it’s been rebuilding the relationship with my son.

But no, reaching out would be a gesture of insecurity on my part. I can hear him now, “Why are you calling? Are you all right?” Or else I’d interrupt him in the middle of making love to Devlin. I like to think he wouldn’t answer the phone in that case, but at this hour, he might think it an emergency. Or he might answer just to be provocative. “Make it quick, Father. Dev’s got his paw on my—”

No. He wouldn’t do that. He might think it, but he wouldn’t actually do it. I grimace and turn to the side, looking for something to stop me imagining my son having sex.

By the side of my bed there’s a picture of him and me at a Dragons game. I don’t know whether he remembers that day, but I do. It was just the two of us, because Eileen never liked football, and if this were a story in a literary magazine I would say she was off doing something that day that portended our future troubles: a church bake sale, a National Organization of Wives meeting, something like that. But truthfully, I don’t remember what she did. I suspect she was writing an article for a local magazine, which she did a lot in those days.

The Dragons lost—they did that a lot in those days—and it didn’t matter. Wiley and I had the best time. I loved how quickly he took to the game, how he saw the patterns in it and could tell me which players were doing well. There was a portent for the future, if there were any on that day. I hope the smiles and the way we have our arms around each other may be a portent too.

A buzz hits my ears, low; it takes me a minute to identify the vibration of my cell phone. Maybe Wiley’s calling to tell me he got in okay, that he’s doing fine.

But no, it’s not his number on the phone. I breathe and pick up the call.

“Oh, Harold.”

Her voice is thick with sobs and, I think, liquor. She says my name with possessiveness out of habit, or perhaps I’m imagining it because I’ve always interpreted that little affectation of hers as possessive.

When we first met, at that gala where I was interning for her father’s company, I’d gotten her a drink and flirted successfully enough that she asked my name.

“Brenly,” I said. “Brenly Farrel.”

She sized me up and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “That won’t do. Do you have a nickname?”

“Er.” I didn’t know what to make of this. “My middle name is Harold.”

She turned her smile full on, and believe me when I say that twenty-year-old Eileen could smile with the best of them. “I’m Eileen,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Harold.”

I don’t think she’s ever spoken my first name, not in twenty-seven years. I once asked her what she had against it. “It doesn’t suit you,” she said.

I thought that charming at the time, that she saw something in me nobody else did and wanted to put a name to it. Now I think she wanted to make me into Harold rather than Brenly, and ultimately I disappointed her.

But right now, the miniature of the history of “Harold” is not relevant. “How are you doing?” I ask, inane question that I already know the answer to. But I don’t know how much she’ll tell me.

“How could he say those things? How could he accuse me—” She gulps. “He didn’t give me a chance.”

“He wouldn’t be that upset if he didn’t still care,” I point out.

“How can you say he cares? He called me names, he insinuated that I wanted to see him dead. He talked about that other person, that King person, some cub who died? Celia says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“I know.” And in the back of my head, I’m thinking, you burned his jacket. But she’s still upset, so I just murmur palliatives until she calms a little.

“Why did you call me?” I ask, again more to hear what she says than to find out the answer I already know. I wonder whether she’s lying in bed like me, or walking around the kitchen, or sitting alone on the big sofa in the living room.

She sniffles. “I couldn’t sleep. I knew you’d be up.”

Fair and honest, probably. But also behind it is this: I know our son as well or better than she does. Not that I think she’s looking for me to explain his behavior. She just wants someone sympathetic to complain to.

Looking back, it’s probably foolish to ascribe too much importance to one conversation, but there is one I remember clearly, and now I wonder whether Eileen mistook my comment about his belligerent, ostentatious dress for a comment about the sexuality it was displaying:

“I don’t see why we need to do anything about it,” I told her, when Wiley came back from college with his sexual preferences plastered all over his clothes and his attitude. “It’s adolescent behavior. He’ll grow out of it.”

“We can’t wait,” she said. “Beth Wornstead waited for her son to grow out of his drinking and now he’s in jail.”

We were lying in bed, keeping our voices down even though the white noise machine was on, and Wiley’s music was audible through the walls. I’d already stopped expecting that just because we were in bed together, we might do anything but sleep or argue. “He’s in jail for theft, and Wiley’s not doing anything harmful. He’s just acting out, wanting attention.”

“He stole that car while he was drunk.” Her ears were flat; I remember thinking how they always seemed to be down for one reason or another, but when Wiley was home that weekend, they never rose above the level of the fur between them. “What if Wiley gets worse too?”

“I don’t think he’s going to steal a car to go to a Gay Pride rally.” I was trying to be funny, because that usually worked with Eileen.

“I mean,” she snapped, “what if he actually acts on this? What if he catches one of those diseases?”

The worst disease gay kids were getting was the same worst disease straight kids were getting. That didn’t stop people who wanted to demonize gay sex, a group I had not previously counted Eileen among.

“I don’t like thinking of that either, but Wiley’s smart. I’m sure he’s being careful.” And here I tried to end the conversation, because I didn’t want to hear where it would go. “We can’t order him around anymore. He’s grown up, he’s out of our household.”

“He’s still my son, and I will not let him ruin his life this way.”

Well, I was restrained enough to hold off on voicing the thought that remark brought to mind. For about ten minutes. Then she said something else along the same lines, and I said, “You realize you sound like your mother,” and then we weren’t arguing about Wiley anymore.

“Is that temper something new?” she wants to know now, five years or so later. “Is that why he was in jail?”

“No, he was in jail because…well, he couldn’t leave something alone. He provoked a fight.” It’s hard to describe the fight without mentioning Devlin or his parents, so I don’t try.

“He never used to do that.”

When he was straight, she means, but the statement is so ridiculous that it defies response for several seconds. I want to ask whether she ever actually talked to our sharp-tongued, quick-witted son, whether she sees that his refusal to accept the world as presented to him comes directly from her own fiery nature. He’s our son, and maybe he doesn’t have the best of both of us, but… “He’s doing the best he can,” I say. “He’s got a tough situation.”

“Well, he won’t accept my help.” I stay silent, and Eileen barely waits for me to respond anyway. “He never used to turn away from me like that. I should have insisted he stay at home for college.” The sharpness melts out of her voice. “And now he’s screaming at me and calling me—”

The sentence ends in a choked cough, or a sob. “He shouldn’t have used that language,” I say lamely. Twenty-five years of conditioning make me long to reach out and hug her—well, no. Saying ‘conditioning’ discounts the emotional bonds that are still there no matter whether I want to acknowledge them or not. I want to hug her and make her feel better because that’s what we’ve done for each other for the majority of our lives. Because I still care for her, even if I don’t love her.

“You were there.” She never slurs when drunk. It shows in other ways, in the excess of emotion bursting through her inhibitions. “You could have stopped him.”

“I did stop him. I took him out to the car.”

“You shouldn’t have brought him in the first place.”

“Eileen, how much control exactly do you think I have? Wiley is a grown fox. He makes his own decisions. If I hadn’t brought him, he would have come on his own.”

“He listens to you, for some reason. You could have told him to behave. You could have told him to give up this lifestyle.”

She’s hurt, I remind myself. She’s hurt and she’s been drinking. “It’s not a lifestyle. It’s the way he is, and—”

“The way he is isn’t what I’m talking about. God challenges us all and judges us by how we meet those challenges. His burden is these…feelings…but his lifestyle is his choice. He can change it. He can prove himself worthy of God’s love.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.” I let the words out before I can help it. “Neither does burning his clothes.”

Again, she’s silent. “Eileen?” I say finally.

“I did everything I could. He’s gone. What else can we do?”

I exhale past the phone. “I think the only thing we can do is remember that he’s our son and try to love him.”

“Not you and me, Harold,” she says. “You’re not being any help at all. You just want to let things go and trust that they’ll all work out in the end.”

Hurt and drunk. Hurt and drunk. “It causes a lot less stress on the heart.”

“Yes, well, that’s how you approached our marriage, and look how that turned out. Do you want our son to go the same way?”

I grit my teeth. “I won’t take the blame for our marriage. Not more than half of it, anyway.” I don’t add: which one of us still relates better to our son?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I’m just so—I want him to see how unhappy he’s going to be.”

“Why don’t we let him judge that?” Just as we ourselves judged our own happiness in the face of her mother’s icy disapproval.

“He’s still going through a phase.” Before I can respond, her voice cracks. “But he can’t take back the things he’s said.”

“Eileen,” I say, “he’s hurt just as much as you are. If you could just see that…”

“If he wants to show me,” she says, and now she’s just crying into the phone.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Hey. Look, it’s going to be okay. Hey.”

It takes a few more heys to get her to talk again, and then she hurries the words out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to break down like that. It’s…”

“You need your sleep.” And so do I.

“That’s a good idea.”

“Are you in bed?” I ask only out of concern. Any prurient interest I have in Eileen is only in my memories.

She sighs. “I’m on the sofa. I’m going to bed now.”

“Drink some water.”

“Goodnight, Harold.”

“Goodnight.”

She doesn’t hang up. After a moment, she says, “Thank you.” And then there’s maybe a moment when I’d have a chance to answer, but I stay silent, and the line goes dead.

I put my phone back on the nightstand. Lacing paws behind my head, I stare up at the ceiling. I wonder if Wiley is sleeping tonight. He’s in the arms of someone who cares about him, and that probably helps. I hope he never has to learn to go to sleep without it.

The clock reads 12:47. I close my eyes.

10

Rest Stop (Argonne)

Argonne originally had little purpose other than to be a temptation, but as the series went on, he had to have some motivation to keep coming back. When he and Dev had their scene at the end of Uncovered, I wanted to know how Argonne felt afterwards. So when the need for a bonus story arose, he was the perfect subject. This story first appeared in the hardcover of Over Time, and later the e-book.

* * *

Argonne had just under an hour to think on the three-mile walk from the Y to the highway on-ramp. There was a closer on-ramp, of course—this was Crystal City, where highways were only slightly less plentiful than ear tucks and boob jobs—but the other guys at the Y said that if you were going to hitch, the on-ramp at Cocksucker Blvd. was the one least frequented by cops.

The actual street name was Corsicker, but the guys called it Cocksucker, and that name had stuck so well that Argonne was afraid he wouldn’t remember the actual name when he came to it. He also worried he might miss it because he spent so much time thinking about Devlin Miski, that self-righteous asshole tiger prick.

The guy was gay, for fuck’s sake, and had told everyone about it, not like the guy Argonne had dubbed “Closet Smith” who was happy enough to stick his cock in Argonne’s mouth whenever the opportunity presented while fingering his gold cross the whole time. The guy’s boyfriend was a red fox just like Argonne, so it wasn’t like he had a thing about foxes or anything. Having a boyfriend wasn’t a problem either; everyone fucked around on the road. That was the reason a bunch of Argonne’s gal pals hung around team hotels and got laid.

Ever since that tiger’d come out, Argonne had made it a personal goal to bag him. If he couldn’t get a gay guy, then…well, already the other gals were teasing him about it. So here was his last chance this season, championship game. He’d just come down the elevator rolling the taste of Closet Smith’s cock around on his tongue, the jizz still coating his throat, and there was the tiger. Play it cool, Argonne’d told himself, and fuck him if it didn’t work. Miski dragged him to a room, and while the tiger hadn’t been quite ready to bury his cock in Argonne’s rear (more’s the pity), he’d been happy enough to whip it out for a blow job.

That was fine. Argonne gave great blow jobs. Maybe, he thought, once the tiger got a taste of that, he’d be back for more. Regardless, he’d finally bagged Miski, had that length in his muzzle and knew that making the tiger arch and moan was just a few minutes of sucking away.

Until the tiger stopped it. In the middle of everything, pulled Argonne off his cock and said, “Oh, shit,” like he only just that minute realized he was cheating on his boyfriend. Like it made a difference if he stopped before he came. Argonne had tried to stay cool and seductive, had slid his fingers along the tiger’s cock (and he could feel how much it needed release, how hot and hard it pulsed) and breathed warmly across his whiskers.

And for all that, the fucking tiger had pushed him away—shoved him, really—and told him to get the fuck out. “You can’t be serious,” Argonne had said. “Just a few more minutes. Let me take care of that.”

He’d reached for the tiger’s stiff cock again, and the tiger had smacked his paw away. “Get out now.”

There Argonne had lost it. “You think waiting ‘til I’m gone and jerking off is any different from finishing in my muzzle? You’re still going to be thinking about me. You think it makes a difference?”

“Makes a difference to me.” He hadn’t even looked at Argonne as he’d pulled his pants up, like he wasn’t going to just whip it out again the minute the door was closed. “Maybe if you didn’t go sucking off anyone who dropped his pants for you, this would’ve ended differently.”

“Oh, don’t you lecture me on that,” Argonne had snarled. “Considering you dropped your pants for me, you sanctimonious hypocrite.”

“Yeah, well, I made a mistake.” He’d zipped up then. “Least I realized it in time.”

“You made a mistake all right.” Argonne had put a paw on the door. “Missed out on the best blow job you’ll ever have.”

“Hey,” the tiger had said, and Argonne had paused, had started to smile. Miski had changed his mind, and things were going to be different. But then the tiger went on. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll tell them who the other guy you blew tonight is. And that’ll be the end of your ‘regular hookup.’”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Argonne had replied. “Like it’s worth ruining my reputation to ruin yours.” And he’d slammed the door behind him, which didn’t have quite as much satisfaction to it when you’d been kicked out.

What bothered him on the three-mile walk through the cooling air of evening was two things: one, that he hadn’t come up with better insults while he was there in the room with the smell of the tiger still in his nose, the feel of that cock on his tongue. And two, that flash of hope when the tiger’d stopped him on his way out. He hated that.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d thought Miski would be different because he was gay. Shit, the girls all talked about how sometimes a player would bring a couple of his friends around, how they’d have a party and trade partners, a real orgy type thing. All season Argonne had been thinking about how Miski might be less uptight than the guys he blew, how he might become a regular guy on the road, but someone who’d get a little conversation in addition to a load in his mouth. And then he’d gotten close only to have the door slammed in his face, almost literally. He hated it, and he hated that he hated it.

And he hated that he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He’d run into Delilah outside and they’d gone for coffee, the skinny panther buying for him. She was one of the few girls who felt sorry for him or maternal toward him, he couldn’t always tell the difference. She’d sucked off some bear who hadn’t said much; Argonne had barely listened to the story because it was the same as every other story, only the names and numbers changed. When she’d asked for his story, he’d just said, “Same old closet case, same old cock, same old come in my mouth.”

Delilah had laughed and reached across the table to pat his paw. “Don’t grow up too fast, honey,” she’d said. “You keep me young, you know.”

He couldn’t say why he wouldn’t tell her about Miski. It wasn’t that he’d promised, not really, or maybe it sort of was. But also it was that he was imagining her saying, “What, the gay guy threw you out?” He didn’t want to deal with that, not then and not now.

He’d planned to maybe get in with some of the parties going on around town to clear his mind. The girls had connections, after all, and there were sure to be some happy Sabretooths who needed blow jobs. But then his manager had called and asked if he’d be available to work Monday. “I know you’re off ‘til Wednesday, but there’s some kind of bug going around and nobody else is in.”

It was Kim and Khalil who were out, so Argonne knew they were “sick” with the football championship party flu. He could easily have said no, but found himself eager to be done with this city, this crowd, this trip. And Val was a good manager—she treated Argonne better than the assholes at the Jack In The Box and the Price-Rite. He’d begun to realize that a good manager was like a well-coordinated outfit: when you ran across one, you held on for as long as you could.

So here he was trudging through neighborhoods getting the stink eye from a couple lions and three rats lounging across the street. He skirted broken glass and stayed under street lights as best he could, hurried across crosswalks between cars (because the cars never stopped here in Crystal City), and kept the noise and smell of the highway to his right.

He found the Corsicker Boulevard on-ramp and installed himself there, leaning casually against a sign with his tail swinging free and his thumb pointed discreetly toward the highway whenever a police car wasn’t in sight. Cars zipped by him for twenty minutes before one stopped, a four-door sedan.

“Where you go?” the kinkajou asked through the passenger window.

Argonne leaned in. “Any travel center more’n an hour west.” The guy stared back at him blankly. He pointed down the highway. “West. One hour.”

The kinkajou shook his head. “Sorry.” And the car pulled away just like that.

Fifteen more minutes went by, and then an SUV ground slowly to a halt in front of him. The rear passenger side window rolled down, and a pudgy raccoon stuck his head out. “Are you a criminal?”

Argonne shook his head. “No.”

From inside the car, a high-pitched female voice. “Ask him where he’s going?”

“Where you going?” the raccoon dutifully repeated.

Argonne gave his destination again. “We’re going to Orange Creek,” the raccoon said. “That’s an hour and fifteen minutes.”

“Don’t tell him where we’re going!” the female voice shrieked. “Just tell him how far.”

“An hour and fifteen minutes,” the raccoon repeated.

“I’d really appreciate it if you could drop me off,” Argonne said.

“Tell him to get in,” called the female voice, and the locks clicked open. Argonne had his paw on the door handle and was pulling before the other raccoon could finish repeating his companion’s order.

The driver was an older female raccoon in a sleeveless dress that smelled of birds and tea. She stared suspiciously as Argonne got in and closed the door, and her glare didn’t lighten even when he turned on his most charming smile. He didn’t even twitch his nose, which was hard because the whole SUV smelled of birds; they must drive their pets around fairly often. “Thanks,” he said as he pulled the seatbelt across his chest. “I need to get back to Chevali for work in the morning.”

“Hah.” The old female raccoon pulled back out onto the road and turned onto the highway ramp. “Josh. Keep your gun out. If he tries anything, shoot him.”

“I’m not going to try anything.” Argonne reached into his pocket, and the old raccoon nearly swerved into the next lane.

“Hey! What’re you doing there?” she shrieked. “Don’t you pull a gun on me. Josh! Josh!”

Fortunately, Josh didn’t seem quite as excitable. He stuck his masked head forward between the seats. “I don’t really have a gun,” he said amiably. “That’s just something Ma says to scare people.”

“And it doesn’t work if you tell them,” his mother snapped. “If we get killed, this doesn’t count as a mitzvah.”

“It still counts. It’s better, if anything,” Josh said. “Then we’re like martyrs.”

“It doesn’t work that way!”

“It’s just my phone.” Argonne showed them. “I want to call my manager. That okay?”

“Sure,” Josh said.

So Argonne dialed Val, and even this late she picked up. “Hi,” he said. “So it looks like I’ll be able to get back for Monday morning.”

“Oh my God, thank you so much. I owe you. And you won’t be charged for the vacation days, of course, any of it. How much did it cost to change your plans?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s…it’s fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. See you tomorrow at nine, then. Thanks again, Chris.”

He hung up and replaced the phone. “See?” he said to the mom.

“Anyway,” Josh said as his mother stared stonily ahead at the highway, “if you tell them I have a gun, then if they have a gun, the first thing they do is shoot me. And if they don’t have a gun, we don’t need to be worried.”

She didn’t answer. Argonne curled his tail over his knees and closed his eyes. “I don’t have a gun,” he said. “I just want to get to a truck stop and get a ride to Chevali.”

“What’s in Chevali?” Josh asked. “What kind of job?”

Argonne sighed. “Target,” he said. “I stock the clothing sections and work the floor.”

“Oh, you live there?” Josh leaned forward when Argonne nodded. “You just seemed like you travel around a lot doing a bunch of different jobs.”

Ha, Argonne thought, but stayed quiet, and Josh went on. “We visited Chevali once. It’s really warm. Do you even grow a winter coat?”

It seemed like a lot longer than an hour out to the truck stop, but Argonne was at least grateful to the raccoons for taking his mind off of Miski. The mom didn’t join in much of conversation, but did noticeably relax, and by the time they got to Silver Hills, she even drove out of her way to take him to a truck stop.

“Call when you get to Chevali,” she said. “Some of those truck drivers are rapists, you know.”

Argonne raised his phone. “I will,” he promised, though he had no intention of doing so. “Thanks for the ride.”

* * *

In the truck stop, he was on more familiar ground. Here there was an unwritten contract, and he’d navigated it many times. Hitching in a city, you never knew who was going to stop and pick you up, but at a truck stop? These guys mostly just wanted company on the road. Not for free, of course; you could pay in “gas, grass, or ass.”

So he leaned against the outer wall (a couple paper towels between his paws and the spiderweb-crusted brick) near the corner of the little building, where all the truckers walked on their way back to their trucks. He pulled out his sea-foam scarf and wrapped it around his neck, then pulled his pride necklace out and let it show over his chest.

Problem was, only about half the guys walking by were going to be interested, and there weren’t that many guys to begin with. Sometimes he could be picky if he chose the right time, but he didn’t have that option now. So he gave everyone the eye as he went by. When the overweight hare scratching himself walked up, Argonne tried to meet his eye, all the while thinking, Please no, please no.

The hare went on by. And fortune smiled on him, because the guy who did stop when Argonne caught his eye was a red wolf, about his height, well-groomed, wearing a flannel shirt hanging open over a t-shirt. The t-shirt had no writing or images on it, but showed a little extra padding underneath. Argonne preferred tight muscle, obviously, but the red wolf smelled good, and after all, they weren’t going to cuddle up or anything.

“Where you headed?” the wolf said.

“Chevali.” Argonne held the wolf’s brown eyes with his and curved his lips into the hint of a smile. “I can’t pay for gas, and I don’t smoke.”

The red wolf flicked an ear. “Got any ID on ya?”

“I’m nineteen.” Argonne pulled out his state ID and let the guy inspect it. Most truckers wouldn’t ask, but he understood the guy’s caution.

“Wall then.” The wolf’s Cajun drawl came out more strongly. “I c’n get you far as Cactus Point, but I’m headed north after that. Plenty guys goin’ to Chevali from there, though.”

Two blow jobs was one fewer than it’d taken him to get out to Crystal City. “Love to keep you company,” Argonne said, and pushed off from the filthy wall.

“You c’n call me Scruffy,” the wolf said, opening up a large forest green truck adorned with stickers: “My Pack Goes 70,” “Marie Laveau’s Voodoo,” “Café Le Monde,” “New Kestle Fire Department.” Not a surprise, given his accent.

The cab smelled of Scruffy, mostly, but also mint; it took Argonne a moment to spot the circular tin of Mint Chew in the center console. Caffeinated mint leaves weren’t uncommon among canid truckers, in his experience. He pulled his door closed as Scruffy climbed in the other side. “I’m Argonne,” the fox said.

“Pleasure.” The red wolf didn’t start the truck, just leaned back in the seat and turned his reddish-brown muzzle toward Argonne. His eyes gleamed with the reflection of the streetlights in the parking lot. “So you wanna take care of this now?”

“Don’t pay the ferryman ’til he gets you to the other side,” Argonne said lightly.

“Heh.” Scruffy reached forward and turned the key. The great truck’s engine rumbled to life, shaking the cab. “Sound like m’older brother. He loved that song.”

“I didn’t know it was a song ’til a couple years ago.” The fox relaxed back against the seat. He didn’t even have to fold his ears back against the clatter of the big diesel engine anymore. The driver, he was sure, was far more used to it, but keeping your ears up when the engine revved was a sign that you’d been in trucks and knew your shit.

Scruffy guided the truck out of the lot and to the highway. “There’s a rest stop about ten miles outside Cactus Point. We can stop there.”

It wasn’t a question. Argonne nodded. “Sounds fair. Sorry, I blew a guy in the parking lot a couple years back and then he kicked me out of his truck. Said he didn’t want ‘no faggot smearing AIDS on his seat.’”

“Charmin’. Probably wouldn’t have enjoyed riding with him anyway.” Scruffy relaxed, back, shifted, and the truck’s engine ground and protested, then dropped into a higher gear. “Sounds like he was happy ’nuff to have a faggot’s mouth on his dick, though.”

“Sure was. And I wasn’t even as good then as I am now.” Argonne let his muzzle relax into a grin.

“Well, this cab already smells like faggot, so you got nothin’ to worry about.”

“That so?” Normally, Argonne would have welcomed the news that his ride was as gay as he was. Tonight that sent him back down the spiral of thinking about Miski. What had he expected? That Miski was going to dump that boyfriend and start dating him? The other girls he followed the team with carried around with them, like a trinket in their designer handbags, the hope that one of the one-night-stands would scoop them up, lavish money and gifts on them, maybe even marry them. These days marriage wasn’t necessary, though; they’d happily be a kept mistress.

Argonne wasn’t dumb enough to imagine that for himself. For one thing, until a few months ago, exactly zero guys in the league were out and gay. For another, or maybe another side of the same thing, it would ruin a guy’s career if he was found to be buying shit for a gay guy. Just the fact that Closet Smith had regular meetings with him was a sign of how desperate that fucking asshole was, and that was about the best Argonne could’ve hoped for.

He realized that Scruffy had said something and was waiting for his response. “Sorry, what?”

“This gon’ be a short trip if you don’ participate in the conversation.”

“Sorry, sorry. It’s been a long weekend.” He focused his attention on the red wolf. “What’d you say?”

“Just said I don’t suspect Chevali’s much more friendly to us faggots than New Kestle is. Then I asked how long you been riding the roads. Then I said, ‘hey.’”

“Chevali’s okay. Some parts. Better the last couple months.” But he didn’t want to delve into why. “Yeah, I’ve been following the Firebirds for a couple years now. Don’t have a license or a car.”

“Couple years, huh?” The red wolf looked sideways at him. “License said you’re nineteen now.”

“I’m precocious.”

“Zat so?” Scruffy grinned. “You blow one o’your classmates in fifth grade?”

Argonne raised his eyebrows. “We doing the confessional road trip?”

The wolf tapped the steering wheel. “Zach Elluria, muskrat. We were messin’ around with my dad’s booze and I asked him to take his pants off. Put my mouth on his dick but he didn’t come, ’course. Said it felt good, though.”

Argonne exhaled. What the hell, he wasn’t ever gonna see this guy again. He could tell him an Uncle Geoff story. “So fifth grade you were, what, eleven?”

“Twelve.”

“I was ten. Uncle Geoff.” He stared at the highway in front of them. “Caught me looking at gay porn on my computer. Asked if I wanted to learn to do the kinds of things they were doing there.”

“Shit.”

“Didn’t really wait for an answer.” Argonne shrugged. “After a couple times, y’know, I didn’t mind so much. I wanted to make him happy.”

“Does this end with you kickin’ his ass?” Scruffy’s voice got a growl to it. “Cause if not, I’d be happy to go do it for you.”

“Mom found out. Seemed to think it was my fault. So, y’know…I bummed around shelters for a while until I could legally work. Got a place with a few other guys now and I’m doing okay.” He’d told versions of this story to therapists at the shelter, to the other guys at the shelter, and sometimes, in his imagination, to the police. This was one of the simpler ones that didn’t require him to think too much about Uncle Geoff.

“Don’t care. You don’t do that to family.” The wolf smacked his paw on the steering wheel. “Especially not cubs.”

“My therapist says I should focus on healthy behaviors moving forward.”

“Heh.” The wolf relaxed back into his seat, eyes on the road. “This here seem like a healthy behavior to you?”

Argonne lifted an eyebrow. “You complaining?”

“Hey, no, not at all. Wouldn’ta picked you up just to complain at you. You don’t seem foux, but I just wanna make sure I ain’t addin’ pepper to the pot.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t picture him when I blow guys. I’m sure once I can afford a real therapist I’ll uncover all kinds of terrible damage he left me with, but I’m holding it together pretty well, all things considered. Only used to get twenty or thirty for a blow job around the shelter, so this is a lot better value. Financially, this is a very sound decision for me.”

“You’re all grown up now, I guess.” The red wolf snorted.

“What about you?” Argonne said, mostly because he was tired of talking about his own insipid life. “You just drive across the country and back again? How much are you home?”

“Home.” Scruffy paused on that word. “Mah first year in the life, I was havin’ a dinner with a couple other guys and I asked what they had waiting at home. They laughed. They told me if they wanted to be home, they wouldn’t be driving a truck. ‘One day,’ one of ‘em told me, ‘you’re gonna find a home you don’t wanna leave, and that’s the day you’ll hang up your keys.’ Never forgot that.”

“That’s the only reason to stop, huh?” The road before them stretched out straight and flat in the moonlight all the way to the horizon, unbroken pale sand dotted with low cacti and Joshua trees, and for all Argonne knew it kept going past the horizon, all the way to the end of the world.

“Nah.” The red wolf stared out with the fox. “Sometimes you just can’t no more, y’know? Just get tired of being on the move, and it’s not like you want to be home, but you don’t want to be on the road. We all believe there is a home, something at the end of this road. You never want to think you quit because you can’t hack it. You gotta believe you’ll hang it up because something better comes along.”

Argonne traced claws around the pads on his paw. “Something better, huh?”

“Hey, this ain’t so bad a life. Get to see all kinds of different places. I been up to Pelagia, out in the mountains around Highbourne, seen the Great Lakes and the Grand Canyon. But the mountains don’t look so pretty when they slow you down, and you just drive the fastest roads over and over so they get real familiar.”

“And boring.”

“Kinda.”

The fox turned to the window on his side and watched the landscape roll by. “You a football fan?”

“Nah. Guess there was some kind of big game this weekend, though. Couple of the guys were talking about it. You a fan?”

“Sort of. More a fan of the players.”

“Heh heh. Any of them…y’know, like us?”

Argonne flicked an ear and turned back to the wolf. “You don’t know about Miski?”

The wolf squinted, thinking. “Name sorta rings a bell.”

“Plays for Chevali. Came out as gay a couple months ago, first player to do that. Then the second one came out just this weekend at the championship game.”

“We-ell.” Scruffy chuckled. “Maybe I should start watchin’ football, eh?”

“There are lots of tight asses on display.” Argonne called up his phone. “If you want to see some of their cocks, I have a few pics of those too.”

“Maybe when we stop.” But the wolf’s tail flicked back and forth. “You hook up with that Miski guy? What is he, anyway?”

“Tiger. Gorgeous body. Yeah, I didn’t get a pic of him, though. Just a quick blow job to loosen him up before the game.”

“Wow. What a life.” Scruffy shook his head. “So you go ’round servicing athletes before games and you get…photos?”

“Photos and stories. And I get…” He curled his tail back and forth. “It’s hard to say, but I get to know something about ’em. Like I get to be a part of a secret in their lives.”

“Guess I can see that.” Scruffy turned briefly to him with a smile. “That why you blow your way ’cross the country, too?”

“Nah.” Argonne grinned back. “You’re not famous. I told you, it’s cheaper than paying.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What, you got a line of cute guys waiting to give you blow jobs?”

The red wolf perked his ears, his smile growing. “Think a lot of y’self, don’t ya?”

“I’ve seen the competition. And,” he said, stretching his arms over his head and sucking in his stomach, “you didn’t contradict me.”

“No, I didn’t.” Scruffy reached down to his groin and adjusted himself. “But we got a good four hours to Cactus Point. So why’ntcha tell me a couple of these stories you got?”

Argonne stretched his legs out. “Well,” he said, “the first time was when the shelter got tickets for a bunch of us to the football game. I slipped away from the rest of the kids and ran into a groupie named Carmen putting on scent. I figured out what she was up to, and asked her if I could tag along…”

* * *

By the dashboard clock, it was 2:13 am when Scruffy pulled the truck off the highway into the rest stop. Argonne, leaning against his passenger door, perked his ears.

“A’right.” Scruffy reached for his pants. “Ready to take care of business?”

Argonne glanced out the window. Under a shelter, three vending machines glowed. “Mind if I grab a water from the machine there?”

“Grab me a Coke while you’re at it. You need cash?” Scruffy held out a pair of ones.

“Thanks.” Argonne took them and hurried out.

Minutes later, his muzzle cool and clear, he knelt over the red wolf’s lap in the sleeper behind the seats of the closed truck cab. Scruffy had pushed his pants down and stroked his erection to fullness while Argonne was getting the drinks, and now he lay back on the bunk with his Coke in one paw.

On his way back to the truck, Argonne had wondered whether Scruffy would let him off without the blow job. They’d exchanged stories and actually had a fun time talking during the four hour ride. Scruffy hadn’t had the experience Argonne had, despite being seven or eight years older; he’d realized he was gay at fifteen but had stayed in New Kestle through high school, then taken the truck driving job where he got about one rider every six months.

So probably this was his twice-yearly blow job, and he wasn’t going to miss it just ’cause he felt sorry for some kid. And he probably didn’t feel sorry for Argonne anyway; the fox had painted his life in pretty glowing colors. He wasn’t tied down, he got to meet famous athletes, had a lot of sex (careful, he was sure to add), and still had time to figure out what to do with his life.

And yeah, the guy didn’t have that musky athlete smell. He had more of an “I haven’t taken a bath in a week” smell, which for a canid wasn’t too bad normally, but he also had an “I’ve been eating shitty food for a while and I have bad gas” smell hanging around his fur.

Argonne had blown guys with worse smells, and that wasn’t going to bother him. Once he got his mouth on a nice warm cock, he was focused on making the guy attached to it buck and arch, to getting that climax in his muzzle. Having someone squirm and make those satisfied noises made it all worthwhile, even if he wasn’t ever going to see the guy again.

Scruffy was pretty eager, too. Argonne had barely gotten the red wolf’s cock into his mouth, sliding his tongue along its hardness, before a paw clutched at his shoulder and Scruffy let out a long, low moan. “You ain’t jokin’ about bein’ good, son,” he said.

“Uh-uh,” Argonne replied around the wolf’s length, slipping one paw down to caress the sac that rested on the truck seat.

The smells vanished, the sounds vanished, and time stood still. All that mattered was getting that affirmation. He tried a few tricks with his tongue and found the one that got Scruffy to gasp; from there it was an easy road to more gasps, to moans, to a tighter clutch of the paw, tension and trembling in the legs, and then, finally, the warmth spattering the back of Argonne’s throat and tongue.

He gulped, licked a few more times, then slid his muzzle free. Scruffy’s head lay back against the headrest, his tongue lolling out. “Damn, son,” he said. “You c’n ride with me whenever you damn well want.”

“Need a tissue?” Argonne reached into the pocket of his jacket, opening his water bottle with the other paw. He looked around the small sleeper area out of the cab out of reflex, at the little things that made up Scruffy’s life. No photos of home, like some truckers had. Lots of pictures of places he’d been, some thriller books and newsy magazines, some empty Coke cans, and a suitcase.

“Thanks.” Scruffy took it and cleaned himself up, then pulled his pants up and swung his legs off the bunk. “Give me a minute. Okay. Right. Cactus Point coming up.”

They rolled on down the highway another twenty minutes to a truck stop, lit up with green and red signs and a dozen fuel stations stretching behind. Scruffy pulled into one and reached out a paw as Argonne opened his door. “Pleasure riding with you,” he said. “If I’m passin’ through Chevali, I’ll look you up.”

“Likewise.” Argonne shook the wolf’s paw. Neither of them had asked for phone numbers.

He used the restroom and then walked out into the chilly desert night. The moon high above in the clear sky gave plenty of light for him to see the gentle hills and scrub all around, the same he’d seen four hours ago, the same he would see three hours down the road until the glow of Chevali stained the horizon.

When Scruffy had taken that truck job, he hadn’t been much older than the young red fox who’d met a groupie named Carmen, who’d been taken into a hotel room and been presented with a professional football player’s cock for the first time. Now it was almost ten years later for the red wolf, and he was still driving around the country looking for something or running away from something. Maybe he couldn’t see that that was what he was doing, but it was plain to a clever young fox.

And for the first time in two years, that fox was discovering with some surprise a sense of relief that the football season was over. Not three nights ago he’d been smiling at Closet Smith’s orgasm, proud that he could still get that fox to come so easily, waiting for the customary gruff dismissal.

But that goddamn tiger had soured everything, finished Argonne’s season on an incomplete note. He’d even texted Smith a couple nights later to see if he needed him one more time. No answer.

So here he was in a truck stop in Cactus Point with the off-season stretching out ahead of him. Oh, there were training camps and mini-camps and workouts; it would only be a few months before his phone was buzzing again. The last two Januarys, he’d viewed these months as a chance to improve his wardrobe, make new connections, get back to the football players with even more to offer.

Now he wondered: In exchange for what? A few photos, a few stories? How many dick pics would be enough? Was he waiting to get a superstar in his mouth? And what then?

Scruffy had filled up his truck and used the restroom, and raised a paw toward Argonne as he walked back out to his truck. The fox waved back and smiled as the red wolf adjusted his pants. It did make him feel good to leave guys with pleasant memories of him.

They didn’t have to be football players, though, did they? It might’ve been the challenge that made it better, but that was gone. Closet Smith had been the first one to ask for a phone number, to text him and ask to meet up, and that had been thrilling at first too. Now the prospect of jumping up to answer one of his texts like a tame bird filled Argonne with distaste.

Fuck him, and fuck Miski, and fuck that whole team. He was glad they’d lost. Bunch of assholes.

Well, he had a few months to figure out what to do next. There had to be something better out there, and if he found it by June, he could tell Closet Smith to go suck his own cock. If not…he’d see how he felt when the message came.

That resolution felt good. He smiled up at the stars and breathed in the diesel fumes in the chilly night. Sunrise was getting closer every minute, and he had to get home. So the fox adjusted his scarf and pride necklace and settled back against the wall, swishing his tail, waiting to see who’d come out of the truck stop next.

11

More Than a Game (Gerrard)

Gerrard has always been a fascinating character to me, one of the two poles tugging at Dev’s life. In Over Time, we get wind of some major upheaval in his life, so naturally I chose him as the subject of the last book’s bonus story. This story has only appeared on my website.

* * *

He didn’t notice the blinking message light until he had fastened his seatbelt and grabbed the phone out of his gym bag to tell Angela he was on his way home. When he flipped the phone open, he saw that the missed call was from Angela, and he frowned. His thumb hit the “Call Back” button and he pulled out the muzzle mic as he put the phone to his ear.

“What happened?” he said when she picked up. If one of the boys had had an accident, he would drive directly to the hospital.

She didn’t respond right away. “Angela?”

“Your friend’s father was going over the money,” she said.

Oh. That was all it was. He relaxed back into the car seat. “Yeah?”

“He found…ten thousand a month missing. Sent to some attorney’s office in Hellentown?”

Gerrard looked out of the car into the mostly deserted parking lot. “Yeah?”

“Ten thousand! Don’t you have anything to say other than ‘yeah’?”

He rolled his eyes. She hated that, but she couldn’t see him. “Not really. Are we short money?”

“You know we’re not.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Where’s the money going?”

He couldn’t avoid a direct question: that was a promise he’d made to her a long time ago. This was going to be ugly, but best to get it out of the way soon. “A coyote.”

“Just a coyote?”

“And her cub.”

The silence was longer this time. “We’ll talk about it when you get home,” she said.

“Right.” He hung up.

* * *

He worked out every day because he’d worked out every day for twenty-plus years, and it had paid off. He’d gotten closer than ever before to that championship, just one or two fluky plays away from it. He had maybe three good seasons left in him and the team was better than it had ever been. They just had to stay healthy, stay on track, and he’d get that ring.

He knew he was the best in the league at his position. But in football, what mattered wasn’t how good you were, but how good you could make your teammates. There were limits to that, of course. But he’d done a good job this year, with the rookie—well, Miski was in his second year but he was a rookie at the linebacker position. Omba was solid and dependable. The backups were backups, but they were solid, too, and the rest of the defense was looking good. That new guy was going to be a star cornerback.

He couldn’t do much about the offense, but he trusted the owner and GM. After years of stagnating, there was finally some movement, and he was going to ride the crest of the wave until it got him to that podium.

At the driveway, he remembered Angela’s phone call and stopped the car short of the house. But there was no point in putting it off. He’d always known that this day would come, and he’d prepared for it just like he’d prepared for every training camp for twelve years.

She was waiting in the foyer, arms crossed, standing in the doorway to the living room like she was blocking the rest of the house from him. Her feet were together, tail curled around her hips so he could see the tip across the front of her skirt.

He dropped the gym bag to the ground. “Hi.”

“Hi,” she said.

They stood in silence. She wasn’t going to say anything, so Gerrard launched into his speech. “It was a mistake that happened five or six years ago.”

“What?” Angela said. “You taking ten thousand dollars every month out of our account? Did you accidentally schedule all those payments six years ago?”

He frowned. “That’s not what I mean. Should I have just walked away from my responsibility?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and stuck a paw out, pads toward him. “You should have respected our marriage vows, first of all.”

“We talked about—”

“And second, you shouldn’t steal money from your sons’ futures for a mistake!”

He shook his head. “We can spare the money.”

“That’s not the point.”

Now he folded his arms. “All right. What is the point, then?”

“The point is…” She trailed off and wiped her eyes. “When was it?”

He’d loved Angela because she was usually cool and rational, able to tackle all the problems of a household with ease. This was like if one of his teammates had suddenly forgotten which way to run during a play. “I told you. Five or six years—”

“No,” she said, her voice shaky. “When? Was it the time we were trying for Mike?”

“It was after that. Look, I don’t even really remember. We were in Hellentown for a game. She was in season and she reminded me of you.” There was a faint hope that she’d be at least slightly mollified by the compliment.

Her ears didn’t come up. “And you promised.” Her voice, still shaky, got lower. “You promised, no cubs.”

“What did you want me to do? Drag her to a clinic, force her to get rid of it? Last I checked that’s illegal.”

“You could’ve not slept with another coyote! It doesn’t seem like that’s all that hard. I’ve managed it.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

Angela put fingers to her eyes. “I know.”

“I told you it was a mistake,” he said. “I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

She stared at him and then turned on her heels and marched into the house. After a moment, Gerrard picked up his gym bag and followed.

He found his wife sitting on their bed crying. He dropped the gym bag and walked to her, but stopped short of putting a paw around her shoulders. Didn’t seem like she’d welcome that. They’d faced some crises together in the past—but both Mike’s illness and Angela’s mother’s decline had been outside crises during which they could support each other. This one was a mistake he’d made, and despite her knowing that athletes played around on the road, she was somehow not understanding. And despite expecting her to understand, he was somehow feeling bad about it. “Hey,” he said. “One mistake in thirteen years, that’s not bad.”

“I’ll call a counselor.” Her voice was dull. “Rebecca went to a good one when she and Fritz were having problems.”

“Fritz was a second-rate safety,” he said automatically. “And we don’t need a counselor.”

“This time, we really do.” She lifted her head and met his eyes. “We have to work through this.”

“Work through what?” He waved a paw around the room. “You want me to stop sending her money, I’ll stop sending her money. Maybe there’ll be a lawsuit. That’d be good for the family, wouldn’t it?”

“Not the money. I don’t care about the money.” She rubbed her eyes. “I mean, I do. But we’re stuck in this situation now. I think you could get it down to a reasonable amount, but that’s a matter for the lawyer. Did you just give her whatever she asked for?”

He leaned back against the closet door. “It was my idea. I wanted her to be comfortable. I’d just signed a contract for five and a half million a year. We could afford it. What else are we going to buy Mike and Jaren, a private jet?”

“That’s not the point.” She closed her eyes. “The point is you cheated on me, you lied to me, you took money from our family…I need to know that I can trust you to value this family.”

Ugh. This was going to be one of those moments. “Of course I value this family,” he said. “You know I do. Look how much time I spend with the boys. I fund all your charities.”

“Time with the boys.” She laughed, a short sharp bark. “You spend a half hour with them every evening, and sometimes dinner. When you’re not out with the team.”

“Team chemistry is important.” His hackles stiffened. “And I see the boys a lot more than that.”

“I know.” Her voice had returned to its dullness. “I said I’d raise the boys, and I will. I just wanted you to be…”

“What? The provider? I’ve done that.” He controlled the frustration. It was all right to feel it, but he was careful not to put it into his voice.

“More than that.”

“That was our deal. I put food on the table, you serve it and raise the family.”

“Ugh.” Angela dropped her muzzle into her paws. “This is why we need a counselor. You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

“I’m listening to every word,” he protested. This would not be like that Christmas four years ago.

“You’re listening but you’re not hearing.”

“Oh, Jesus Dog,” he said. “Is that from one of your movies?”

She stood up. “Get out.”

“Whoa.”

“Just get out. I’ll call you later and we’ll talk about things.”

He didn’t move. “Angela…”

“Fine.” She wiped the fur around her eyes and walked out of the room. “Then I’m going,” she said as he followed her into the hall. “Jaren and Mike will be home around four-thirty. They need to have their homework looked at so you can check that they’ve finished it tonight. Mike usually plays ball with his friends down the street until dinnertime. Jaren—”

“All right,” he said over her. “I’ll go.”

She stopped and let him walk past her. “We’re not done,” he said. “I’m not going to let you kick me out.”

“You have to decide what’s important to you.” She didn’t look at him as he walked by. “Think about that for a few hours. I’ll call you tonight.”

* * *

He drove around and around and kept winding up near the stadium. There were bars there but none were open at this time of day. Finally he wound up at a gym where he sometimes worked out because they provided a private area for athletes.

None of the other Firebirds were there, but there were two players from the local baseball team who seemed more interested in laughing about the girls they’d slept with than actually lifting weights. One was an opossum and the other a rabbit, and the weights they had racked Gerrard could almost lift with one arm.

He went to the other side of the gym to sit and work his quads while he thought over what Angela had said. He’d thought he had the marriage thing sorted out, and yeah, he knew that Reina and the cub would be a problem someday, that he would have to tell Angela about it at some point, but he’d figured when that day came he’d be able to explain it and she’d understand.

But she hadn’t. She’d kept focusing on the mistake he’d made six years ago and not the steps he’d taken to correct it. What else could he have done? Reina had emphatically refused to consider an abortion, and Gerrard had known better than to press her. Prince had told him in no uncertain terms that “illegitimate cub” was a way better story than “pressured to have abortion,” and it looked like that was going to be put to the test now.

That reminded him that he should call Prince. One way or another this was going to heat up, and he needed advice. But he couldn’t call his agent now, not while he was still so worked up about things. After the workout, he promised himself.

Stressing his body always calmed him, the focus on physical performance allowing him to focus his mind on the task in front of him. Even though the task when lifting weights was far simpler than playing middle linebacker, Gerrard gave it all his attention and emerged from the gym with a little fatigue and clearer focus.

The hotel around the corner was where visiting teams often stayed, and Gerrard’s friends had spoken highly of it. He walked in and got a room easily, and from that room, sitting on his bed overlooking the Firebirds’ stadium, he called Prince.

The cacomistle’s secretary put Gerrard right through to him. “Hey there, yote,” Prince said. “I’m on the seventeenth hole. What’s going on?”

“Angela knows about Reina,” he said.

There was a moment of silence, and then he heard the cacomistle saying, “Mark me a scratch on the last two. I’ll catch up with you guys at the clubhouse.” Then he came back to the phone. “How?”

“Does it matter? We knew it was going to happen eventually. She wants to go to counseling and work things out.”

Prince spoke slowly, measured. “Okay.”

“I don’t want to go to counseling. That’s a distraction.”

“It’s an hour a week.”

“Not the way Angela sees it. It’ll be two or three days a week, an hour a day, it’ll be exercises to take home and things for us to think about and focus on. I know her.”

“She told you that?”

Gerrard paced in front of the window, staring out at the stadium. “That’s what she wanted to do last time. I won’t be able to talk her out of it this time. I fucked up, Prince, but I don’t need some overpaid bartender to tell me not to do it again.”

“So don’t go to counseling.”

“Then I lose Angela, I lose Jaren and Mike.”

Prince was silent. “Yeah, dude, you’re gonna have to go to counseling.”

“Can you find me a counselor who will…” He trailed off.

“Respect your football time. Yeah, I’ll work on it. I found one for Abranno, I’ll call and see how she worked out.”

“Thanks, Prince, Appreciate you cutting your game short.”

“Anything for you.”

Gerrard smiled. “You bogeyed fifteen, didn’t you?”

Prince cleared his throat. “We’ll get you through this.”

Gerrard felt a small satisfaction at knowing his agent’s favorite course so well. “I can’t afford to have any distractions next year. I don’t have many years left. Four, maybe five if I’m lucky.”

“Depends on if you want to be the ‘veteran presence’ backup on a team somewhere.”

Gerrard made a face into the window. “Fritz went to marriage counseling. Remember him? He sucked that year.”

“Made All-Pro two years later, though.”

“After he moved to a different city and his wife stayed here.”

“They’re still together, though.” The cacomistle sighed. “All right. The other guys are finished. I gotta run. I’ll call around to your endorsements too and feel them out a bit on the marital difficulties. Most of them, won’t be a problem. Jerry Hall is a fundie but he’s also on his third wife, soooooo might not be an issue with him either.” Prince paused. “You know, if the counseling doesn’t work out.”

“Thanks,” Gerrard said. “I’ll wait for your call about the counselor.” And he hung up.

He didn’t want to think about the counseling not working out, but there was nothing else to do in the hotel room but pace back and forth and think. So he went over the situation with Angela, which was a lot like rehashing the damn championship game. And that was the problem. The championship game was over. Whatever mistakes he’d made during it weren’t going to carry over to the next game. Next season, every game started with a clean slate.

But his slate with Angela wasn’t ever going to be clean again. He loved her and the kids, and they loved their capable, flawless husband and father. And he wasn’t that anymore; he could never be that again. Counseling wasn’t going to change that; he could feel it in his heart.

Staring into his reflection in the window, he saw his boys’ faces, the adoration in their eyes. He’d been so careful to steer them right, to make sure they got all the advantages, were set up to succeed…and that included having a father who embodied all of those traits. And now when they looked at him they would see only the coyote who’d betrayed their mother.

And all because they’d decided to redo their finances, after a decade. And he’d forgotten about the automated payments to Reina; Prince had taken care of all that.

Gerrard put a paw to the glass, staring out at the low Chevali skyline. He hadn’t processed it before, but the guy going through their finances—that was Dev’s boyfriend’s dad.

He got out his phone to send Dev a message about his frustration, but this wasn’t Dev’s fault, and it wasn’t even the boyfriend’s, Lee’s. It was Reina’s and his, going back to the beginning. So he just texted Dev, “I can’t deal with this shit right now.”

After he’d sent it he realized that it wasn’t informative and there wasn’t much Dev could say to that, and that maybe he’d sent it just to get Dev to get in touch with him. What could Dev do or say that would make the situation any better? If Gerrard was going to talk to anyone, it’d be Omba, but Carson was with his grandmother and again, none of them could bring back Gerrard the trustworthy husband, the ideal father.

But Dev didn’t call, and neither did Angela. Prince called back with the name of a counselor who’d worked with football players before, which Gerrard noted down. After that, the phone stayed silent. Eventually Gerrard went down to the hotel’s fitness center and ran on a treadmill for half an hour, then did a few reps on each of the three whole machines they had there. He wanted to wear himself out enough to be able to get to sleep, and the exercise accomplished that goal. He stretched out alone in the bed, and for the first time in years, he didn’t like the way that felt.

He woke early, and still nobody had called. So he went to the gym, worked out for two hours, and got back to the hotel in time to catch the last half hour of their breakfast.

It wasn’t until after ten that Angela finally called him. “Where did you spend the night?” she asked.

“The Four Seasons,” he said. “Next to the stadium.” The morning sun painted the outer walls of the stadium through his window as he talked to her.

“Are you coming home?”

“You told me not to. You said you’d call last night.”

She exhaled, that exasperated and exasperating signal that he wasn’t listening to her properly. He was trying, but she wasn’t listening to him either. “I was still mad last night. We need to talk this out with a professional—”

“I got a name from Prince. A counselor.”

“I have a name,” she said. “I know you probably asked Prince for someone who’d work around your football schedule. I wanted someone who would take this seriously.”

“Dr., um,” he checked the pad, “Bryznyski is very serious.”

“The point is,” she said, “that you have to start putting this relationship ahead of football, just a little bit.”

He crumpled the paper the doctor’s name was on and rested his head in his paw. “Four more years.”

“What?”

“Four more years of playing. Then I’ll put it aside. That was our deal: I win the championship, you raise the cubs. Well…I haven’t won it yet.”

Her calm voice got an edge to it. “And what do I do until then?”

“I don’t know, what did you do for the last ten years?”

“I trusted you, that’s what I did!” The edge took over and then she beat it back. “And I want to get back there again.”

He stared out at the stadium, at the sunlight on the flagpoles around the top edge of it, at the empty seats in the top deck. He saw them filled with people of all species in bright red and gold, cheering and waving…but would his wife and sons be there cheering for him? “I can do it for a few months,” he said. “Until May. Then I have to give a hundred percent to football.”

“This doesn’t sound like putting the relationship ahead of football.”

“I’m giving up offseason workouts. Some of them. Angie, what’s going on here? You know football comes first.” He stood and paced back and forth in front of the window. “My job is what puts food on the table.”

“We have plenty of food on the table,” she snapped. “This isn’t about making a living. It’s about being the best. Guess what? You are the best. I see it in all the papers, all the articles online. ‘Best middle linebacker in the league, Gerrard Marvell.’ So what more do you want?”

“I want that ring,” he said.

“And what will that prove? That your father was wrong to walk out on you? That your mother’s wrong for liking your sister better?”

“Hey,” he said to deflect the barbs, “Let’s not start counseling yet.”

“Or ever. Because you think you’re perfect. You think everything’s all right.”

“Dammit, no!” He yelled it and then moderated his voice. “Everything’s not perfect, that’s the point, but I just, I can work on it myself. If you could just drop this, forget it…”

“By ‘work on it’ you mean forget about it while you play football. That’s your solution?”

“Angie—”

“This isn’t football, Ger. This is real life. You have a wife and two cubs, and you’ve let them down. So what do you do now? You can’t ‘do better next time,’ because there’s just the one time. You have to make up for this.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t. You won’t spare the time from football.”

“Football—”

“I know, I know, it comes first. You know, it’s funny, when you said that, I thought, he can’t be serious about football coming before his kids. Like, if Mike had been born two weeks earlier, when you had that game, you’d have skipped the game, right?”

“Probably,” he lied, and then felt bad about the lie. “That was years ago, and I told you I’d fly out right after the game.”

“Nobody would have faulted you for missing a game.”

“I would have faulted me!”

“So why aren’t you faulting yourself for this?”

He waved a paw, trying to release some of the tension in his chest. “I am! Jesus Dog, can’t you see that? But I can’t…I can’t go back and change it. I can’t erase it. But I haven’t done anything like it in five years and I won’t again, and I don’t understand why you need to sit down with a shrink and have me repeat that over and over.”

She exhaled again. “You really don’t, do you?”

“Is that what you need? Are you really asking me to do that? Because I love you, but—”

“Do you? Do you love me and Mike and Jaren?”

He touched his nose to the cool window. “Of course I do.”

“More than football?” Before he could talk, she said, “Don’t answer that. I already know the answer.”

“It’s not ‘love’ with football. It’s something I have to do.”

“Oh, Gerrard, who are you kidding? You love the team, the practices, the pressure of the games. You probably slept with that other coyote because you thought it would loosen you up and you’d play better. You’ve never thought about our marriage first, and I don’t know why I’m expecting you to start now.”

The situation with Reina had been close enough to what Angela was describing that he avoided that whole question altogether. “I want to have you and the boys in my life.”

“We’re a nice to have, not a need to have.”

“That’s not—” He took a breath. “Look, I haven’t seen her, this other coyote, or the cub. I don’t go visit them.”

“That’s not the point.” She sounded tired now, but as unwilling to hang up as he was.

“Then what is? I give you almost all my money, all my spare time, and that’s all I can give. I don’t know what more you want.”

“Almost all your money,” she repeated.

“I thought we agreed that I have an obligation to the cub, too. I’m not going to let her starve.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant that you think this is about…” Angela got quiet. “She’s a girl?”

“Yeah.”

When she spoke again, her voice was duller. “It’s not fair.”

“What? I only gave her a small amount every month. You and the boys kept—”

“You wanted boys!” The life returned to her voice. “You got your boys and I’m the one raising them. And I just wanted one daughter and you gave that daughter to someone else.”

He pressed one paw to the window. “That’s not how it works. We stopped trying.”

“I know! I know. I just…” Her voice trembled. “If you’re not going to counseling, then…then I don’t think you should live here.”

Gerrard rubbed his fingers against the glass, leaving smudges behind. He thought about not living with Angela, not sharing her bed, not seeing his boys every day. But the way Angela was now, arguing further would only make things worse, if that was even possible. And maybe time apart would let her calm down.

“Gerrard?”

“I’m here.”

“I don’t think—”

“I heard you. Do you mean you want a divorce?”

“We’ll see. Everything’s raw right now, for me at least, and maybe…it’s better we spend some time apart.”

He exhaled onto the glass and then wiped away the condensation of his breath. The smudge had mostly vanished, but he could still tell it was there. “What are you going to tell the boys?”

“Good God, Ger, you can still talk to your boys. I don’t know, tell them we had a fight and you’re going to play football and I’m going to take care of them and they’ll see you about as much as they normally do. How’s that sound?”

He kept the stadium in his sight. “I can work with that.”

“All right. Come by tomorrow when they’re at school and you can get whatever things you need.”

And just like that it was done. He hung up and stared out the window. A cloud had moved over the sun, but the stadium still shone brightly.

He called Prince back. “Hey,” the cacomistle said. “How’d it go?”

“I need you to find me an apartment or condo or something in Chevali. Somewhere with a private garage and good security.”

“Aw, shit dude. I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine. Thanks.”

“Hey. You going to be okay?”

Banners crackled in the wind over the stadium. He imagined one flying up there that said “Champions,” just like at the Kerina field he’d gone to with his father when he was five, the same stadium he’d played in once a season for his whole career. He pushed all the other stuff to the back of his mind, to be taken out at some future time. “I’ve got football,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

12

Contents Under Pressure (Kodi)

I wanted to write one more story to fill out the collection. But whom to write about? I ran a Twitter poll and Kodi was one of the choices, so I was pretty sure he would win, because he’s one of the characters people ask about most. Sure enough...here’s his story, never before seen.

* * *

He was going over the game plan for the offensive line with Coach Farmer because the upcoming game was really important and one of the guys had been missing his gaps. They were counting on the running game and so Coach was telling Kodi how important it was that his guys knew their assignments. Kodi couldn’t remember which one of the guys it was who’d been missing his gaps, but they couldn’t replace him because Killian College didn’t have a lot of depth at the D-line. He assured the old musk ox that his guys would know their assignments.

When he looked up from the meeting, Beck was there, a senior Kodi had coached through all four of his years. The tall, stocky sea otter fingered the waistband of his tight white briefs. “Coach,” he said to Kodi, “can you help me with this?”

Coach Farmer made some adjustments on his tablet. He wasn’t looking up as Beck walked around the desk and stood right in front of Kodi, plucking the waistband of his briefs. The outline of his erection strained at the fabric. “Go on,” Beck urged.

So Kodi put his paw up and felt the hard warmth, grasped it. The briefs came off and he was holding the otter’s shaft in his fingers, stroking it, the thick musky scent filling his nose.

“Hey,” Beck said, his voice harsher. “Hey.”

Kodi looked up into the otter’s frown. “What are you doing?” Beck asked.

The wall of Coach’s office fell down, revealing the whole team, all of them watching Kodi with his paw on this guy’s shaft. He tried to let go but couldn’t seem to. “No,” he said, his breath coming faster and harder. “No.”

“Get out of my office,” Coach Farmer said. “You’re finished.”

“No,” Kodi breathed. “I didn’t want to—he came over to me—”

He woke himself up with a moan, lying on his stomach, grinding his erection into the bed. The energy of the dream pushed him up onto his elbows, staring wildly around his small bedroom, and then the darkness and familiar smells of bear and beer sapped the urgency from him and he collapsed back onto the pillow.

Fuck. He exhaled into the damp cotton fabric, inhaled his own scent tinged with rank fear. Beck wasn’t even at Killian anymore; he’d graduated last year. Apparently even Kodi’s fucked-up subconscious wouldn’t let him fantasize about one of his current students. Not that he’d ever been attracted to one or had been in a position to do anything about it. He’d been scrupulously careful about that.

His clock read 4:13 am. Forty-seven minutes until he’d have to get up to get over to the facility, and his erection wasn’t going away.

He ambled to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub, eyes half-closed as his paw found his length and stroked in the familiar rhythm. He tried not to think of the dream, but the thick sea otter shaft worked its way into his mind the closer he got and eventually he let it stay, until he gasped, braced himself on the edge of the bathtub as his body jerked and spasmed and he came into his paw.

One hot water rinse later, he shuffled back to bed, eyes already drifting downward. This was all Lee’s fault, dammit, he thought.

* * *

* * *

* * *

He always enjoyed the drive up to the college through the hills and pines of southern Pelagia. He lived in what was technically a suburb of Verra because it was cheaper, but he considered the half-hour commute a benefit rather than a drawback of his little condo. Even in winter he mostly kept the windows down so he could breathe the air of the pines, and whenever he had time off, he liked to go out for long hikes, starting with a sunrise and ending with lunch in one of a number of small shops.

On the drive in this morning, his father called, which didn’t exactly ruin the drive, but didn’t help. Kodi rolled up the windows and took the call on speaker. “Hi, Dad.”

The elk’s booming voice filled the car. “Hey, Kodi. On your way to campus?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, bad news. Mr. Alchester is sick.”

Kodi frowned. “The possum?”

“Right.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “That’s—I’m sorry. Is it…” He tried to think of a way to say “cancer” without saying it. “…serious?”

“No, no. I think he just has a stomach bug.”

“Oh.”

“The point is, he was supposed to be managing the bake sale at the church, and now he can’t do it, obviously, not if he’s going to be puking on all the cookies, right?”

“I guess not.”

“So your mom has to be at church tomorrow morning and that means we’re going to have to leave tonight. Sorry about that. I think you said you had plans, but any chance you could squeeze us in for dinner, or an after-dinner drink, or something?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a—a friend coming up, haven’t seen him in a while.”

“All right, well, if you’re planning to stay up late, maybe we could see you for an hour after the game?”

“Sure, yeah. Let me see what his plans are.”

“Thanks. Go Hydras!”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Kodi exhaled and rolled the windows down. This was getting complicated, but it wasn’t too bad now. He couldn’t put off his parents, and he shouldn’t put off Lee, and of course there’d be a solution, but he was already breathing harder and clutching the steering wheel tighter.

By the time he passed the tall brick church at the entrance to the campus, he’d calmed down by focusing on the preparations he had to make for the game. The eastern horizon already glowed pink and orange, illuminating the few students hurrying to their 6 am classes clutching cups of coffee or tea. Kodi parked in the coaches’ lot and found the door to the Ogata Center already unlocked, because Coach Farmer got in before any of his assistants most days, but especially on game day.

He set a reminder on his phone to call Lee at nine in the morning; unlike his parents, he didn’t know how early the fox would be up. With Dev on the road at, hm, maybe it was Kerina this week, Lee probably wouldn’t be sleeping in, but his flight didn’t land until just after noon and it was only an hour flight, so conceivably he could be waking up as late as nine. Probably not much later than that, though, unless he lived right next to the airport.

So Kodi didn’t have to think about that again for a few hours. He checked in with Coach Farmer, asked the team assistant for coffee and a bran muffin, and got down to watching game film of their past few games.

At nine, his alarm went off and he surfaced from his film study to call Lee. The fox was on his way to the airport, it turned out, so he talked loudly over the traffic noise in the background. “We’re still on for dinner, right?”

“That’s the thing,” Kodi said. “My parents are coming for the game and they have to leave early. Would you mind if we had dinner a little later?”

“I’ve got to fly back tonight. Why not just bring your parents to the dinner?”

Kodi’s fur prickled. “We were going to discuss, ah…”

“Damon Albert, yeah. But that’ll take, what, twenty minutes? The rest of the time I just wanted to catch up. I can do that with your parents there.”

“I don’t know…”

“Am I on speaker?”

“No.”

Lee lowered his voice. “They know, right?”

“I mean, yeah, they know.”

“Okay.” The fox’s cheerful, loud tone returned. “So I’m sure they’ll be asking the same questions I do, except maybe some of the details about that wolf. But you can just text me the number of inches.”

“Listen…”

“All right, all right, I’m joking. But seriously, I haven’t seen you in years and I promise I’ll be a discreet and cheerful friend.”

One of the things his parents were always asking him was, “Why don’t you have more friends?” Kodi wavered. Lee was certainly capable of being professional and as far as he knew hadn’t outed him to Dev seven years on. What was more, that would turn two desirable but awkward social occasions into just one, which would be easier to get through, and if he didn’t tell his folks that Lee knew he was gay, he wouldn’t have to deal with that aspect of the conversation. He sighed. “All right. Yes.”

“You’re sure?” Lee gave a half-laugh. “I don’t want to pressure you into—”

“It’s fine,” Kodi said quickly. “I got to prepare for today.”

“Right. See you in a few hours.”

* * *

* * *

* * *

At ten they had the first meeting of the defensive line. Kodi stressed the importance of knowing your responsibilities, of hitting the gaps. They talked about what Covington College liked to run and whose assignments would be most affected.

Damon, a brown bear, wasn’t the most talented of the bunch, but he might be the smartest, and there wasn’t a dumb kid in the group. If anything, Kodi had to tell them that he knew they knew their assignments, but he had to go over it again and again because repetition helped. They’d been playing their whole lives pretty much and they understood the plays, but understanding them wasn’t the same as feeling them instinctively. Fortunately, they trusted Kodi and his professional experience as much as college kids who thought they knew everything could. And maybe he was hitting it a little harder because of the aftereffects of the dream, but he didn’t think about that until he was halfway through it.

After the meeting, he took Lanson aside. The moose was the most talented of Kodi’s group, with natural instinct and powerful, fast lower body muscles that let him bull-rush or cut around an offensive lineman with equal ease. “Hey,” Kodi said. “You’re having a great season. You know there’s UFL scouts sniffing around, right?”

“Sure.” The moose also had a good photogenic smile, which was more impressive for not appearing to be put on for cameras. He turned it on coaches, teammates, and friends.

“Friend of mine from the Whalers is here today,” Kodi said. “Don’t show off—just play your normal game.”

“Sure thing, Coach,” Lanson said. “But why’d you tell me if you don’t want me to show off?”

Kodi shook his head. “Because sometimes you get tired late in games. I see you thinking you can rely on your ability. Most of the time you’re right. But if you get tired today, think about someone watching you.”

Lanson rolled up his smile into a determined nod. “Yes, sir, Coach.”

“I know you can handle the pressure. Remember, too much pressure can crush you, too little lets you down, but the right amount of pressure…”

“Pushes you to greatness.”

“Right.” Kodi patted the moose on the shoulder and walked with him back to the main locker room area, where Coach Farmer had gathered the entire team. Chris, the fiery jaguar who was the defensive coordinator, had to flank Coach along with the offensive coordinator, but Kodi and the other position coaches sat behind them and off to one side. The bear did his best to pay attention but couldn’t help his mind drifting off into fantasies of how the evening would go.

“Oh, I know,” Lee said, jovial. “I tried to tell him years ago but he was too afraid.”

“We keep telling him that people will understand, but he’s just terrified.” His father leaned across the table, immense antlers leaning toward Lee. “Always has been.”

“It’s okay for him to be scared,” his mother said. “It’s his life.”

“I’m not scared,” Kodi said, staring down at his lap.

“You should’ve seen him talking to me in that hotel hallway.” Lee smirked as only a fox could. “I thought he might die of fright right there.”

Of course they wouldn’t do that. Probably.

“And who’s this?” Kodi’s mother, a chubby black bear, looked up as Lee approached the table with another bear in a sleek purple shirt.

“This is a friend of mine who lives in the area,” Lee said. “I just thought he’d like to have dinner with us and maybe get to know Kodi better.”

“That’s a great idea,” Kodi’s father boomed. “Come on, join us, what’s your name?”

“Jared,” the bear said, or maybe, “Alan.” And he sat next to Kodi and how awkward would that be, being set up on a date in front of his parents? Of course Alan/Jared would be a nice guy, would be perfect, would insist that there was nothing wrong with being out in public, would want to hold Kodi’s paw or accompany him to games or kiss him in front of his parents or something.

“Why aren’t you talking more?” his mother asked.

“He’s normally not this shy,” his father said.

“Have you met him?” Lee joked.

And they would talk about him like he wasn’t there.

Only no, Lee had promised to be discreet. He tried the trick he’d gotten from the counselor a few years ago, turning his negative thoughts into positive ones. The dinner would be fine. Lee would talk to his parents about college sports and Kodi would chime in now and then, and it would all go fine.

“So,” Lee said, “you heard about Kingler, right?”

“Oh, no, who’s that?” Kodi’s mother asked.

“He’s one of our guards. We just drafted him and he held a press conference saying he’s gay.” Lee sat up, proud.

“That’s wonderful,” Kodi’s father said, and all of them pointedly did not look at Kodi.

“Kodi.”

The meeting had broken up, Coach now turned to his assistant coaches. The musk ox’s horns wobbled from side to side, his eyes on Kodi. “How’d it go this morning? Any concerns?”

“No. The guys are solid and they know the game plan.”

Coach smiled. “I can always count on you.”

He went on to talk to the linebackers coach and everyone reported that their units were ready for the game. “All right. I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Let’s hit ‘em hard and hit ‘em right.”

The familiar routine comforted Kodi. Coach Farmer always had a good feeling, and since Kodi had joined his staff, Killian had won about two thirds of their games. In the Northwest Athletic Conference, they had been to a bowl game three of Kodi’s five years. Coach was always hoping for a higher profile bowl game (they all were), but he stressed that their top priority was the character of their young charges.

Kodi told his line every year that they were the best group he’d ever coached, and sometimes that was a lie. This year, it wasn’t. He believed in every one of them and Lanson might actually get drafted by a UFL team.

His routine with his guys was to start in the locker room, where he’d help the training assistant if they needed any treatment. In the pros, Kodi had had a team of guys whose only job was to help them, but he’d had to take a couple courses in basic physical therapy so he could help out like all the other position coaches did. Once his guys had had their massages and other treatments, he brought them out onto the field for warmups and stretches.

Today the field was wet; the overcast skies drizzled rain onto them as they jogged out. He gathered his guys to tell them to make sure to check their cleats and traction, to talk about using their leverage and the slicker surface to gain an advantage on the offensive line. Then he released them to do their own stretches; Kodi was a big believer in giving his kids some time to themselves to go through their own pre-game rituals.

His ritual from his playing days involved going to the bathroom and sitting there for about fifteen minutes visualizing his play in the game. He’d moved up and down the bench over the years, sometimes logging a total of fifteen minutes of playing time all season, sometimes coming off the bench in passing situations and averaging twelve minutes of playing time per game. Now that he was coaching rather than playing, he’d thought his pre-game ritual might change, but he’d retreated to it in his first year and it felt good, so he kept it.

He spent the game keeping an eye on his guys. Lanson had a pretty good game, if not a great one. At least Kodi noticed that as the fourth quarter rolled around, the moose kept pretty good track of his assignments, only losing track twice. Both times his raw talent let him recover easily, but the mistakes were obvious enough that Kodi noticed them from the sidelines, so he was sure Lee would have seen them too.

Damon, on the other paw, clearly knew his assignment every single time, but the offensive linemen he met generally pushed the kid around. He barely got any traction on them, and yet he still recorded two tackles by following the play and not giving up on it. The kid wouldn’t make it in the UFL, but he knew and loved the game enough to be useful to a team somehow; that’s what Kodi was hoping Lee would also see.

They won the game, so the mood in the locker room afterwards was jovial. This was their sixth win, which assured them of another winning season. “We’ll keep winning,” Coach Farmer said, “and we’re going to go to another bowl game this year.”

The team cheered, and Kodi’s phone buzzed just then. He waited until Coach’s remarks were done, but then just as he was reaching for his phone, Damon came up to him. “Hi, Coach,” he said.

“Hey, Damon. Good game. What’s up?”

“Can I, uh…” The bear gestured to the position coaches’ shared office.

He knew what kind of conversation this was going to be, and just anticipating that got his heart racing. “Of course.”

They settled into the office—right after a game, it wasn’t going to be used—and Kodi shut the door. “Questions about the game?”

“Oh, no, I know how I did. Those guys are so big.” Damon had cooled down from the game, so he wasn’t breathing as hard as he had been, but the exertion still showed in his posture. Kodi knew the bear was eager to get to the trainers for his post-game work. But Damon gathered himself. “I talked to my advisor. We got permission from the school for me to leave in December. I can earn credits through an independent study and I can take my senior communications class online for the rest of the credits I need to graduate.”

He finished up that speech with a hopeful look. Kodi nodded. “Great. I haven’t talked to my friend yet, but I’m seeing him tonight, so I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Coach.” Damon broke into a broad smile that he couldn’t help comparing to Lanson’s bright, photogenic one, which was unfair. “And…” He lowered his voice. “Gale says he’ll come with me.”

“Oh, uh. Great. Can he finish his classes too?”

“No, but…” Damon waved his paw. “He’s already landed a couple interviews with companies. They don’t care about the degree, just the experience, and he’s got plenty of that. He’s super smart.”

“Okay.” Kodi nodded. “I mean, I think it’s important to get your degree. I have to tell you that because I work for the school. But you’re smart. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

“I’ve talked to my mom about it too. My dad—some. I mean, the opportunity. Not the Gale part. Obviously.”

“Obviously.” Kodi walked over to the water cooler and poured himself a cup of water.

“Thank you for being so cool about it. I wouldn’t have been able to get through this year without you.”

“Oh, you’re welcome.” Kodi gulped the water. His mouth was dry again within seconds. “I’m glad I could help. My parents raised me to be tolerant, you know, to believe that everyone is entitled to live the way they want to.”

“That’s awesome. I mean, it just means so much, having someone to talk to. Especially on the football team. Not many enlightened jocks.” Now Damon’s smile was glowing. Now it looked like Lanson’s.

Kodi tried to keep the picture of that smile in his head as a salve against the tightness in his chest. “I’m happy to help,” he said. “Now let’s hit the showers, okay?”

* * *

* * *

* * *

The post-game routine settled him down. The rest of his guys were depending on him and that need pushed away all his fears. He got through the quick review with Coach Farmer and then made sure all his guys got their ice and their massages and got out to celebrate wherever they were going to go.

When all his work was done and he couldn’t put it off any longer, he texted Lee. The fox wrote back right away: Already there. Want me to order you a beer?

Sure, he wrote back. The Dragon Hoard amber ale is good.

It would be helpful to get at least one beer in before the conversation got too serious. Just on the way to the brew pub, Kodi had another vision of the evening, this one a common one whenever he went out with anyone.

“Kodi?”

He turned to see a tall wolf, or a polar bear, or a kangaroo even. They were coming toward the table heedless of the confused stares of his dinner companions. “Hey, didn’t expect to see you here!”

“Oh, yeah, I come here sometimes.” He could act as awkward as he wanted and it wouldn’t matter.

“Cool. Hey, I’m free next weekend. If you wanna do something, hit me up.”

He waved weakly. “Will do.”

And then they’d be gone, and the questions would start. “Who was that? How do you know him? What’s this weekend? You should invite him to things.”

He’d have to explain that this was someone he hung out with to watch Dr. Who, or to build model planes, or something sufficiently far removed from the world of football that the other coaches (who were mostly the people he went out with) would lose interest.

This had never happened, of course; on the rare occasions once every few months that he answered personal ads, he always went to some other part of Pelagia, and he made it clear that he was closeted and that if they saw him in public, they shouldn’t come over and talk to him. This conversation happened at the end of the evening and elicited one of two reactions: either they said, “Oh yeah, me too,” because they were advertising online for discreet sex, so of course they were, or they were indignant about someone who wasn’t open about his sexuality and turned frosty, making it clear they didn’t want him to call again.

And that was fine with Kodi. There were enough ads that when he got desperate enough—usually when he had a dream like the one he’d had last night—he could always find someone. Like that wolf he’d told Lee about when the fox had prodded him about whether he was going on dates.

He scanned the restaurant when he entered just in case there were familiar muzzles, but the only one he recognized was a fox near the bar at a four-top table, short and slender in a maroon polo with a gold Whalers logo on the right breast. Lee saw Kodi at almost the same moment and raised a paw.

He got up as Kodi approached the table and shook his paw firmly. “Hey, it’s great to see you again. How are you doing?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. How about you?”

“Really good. Busy. This is actually a nice trip. I don’t get to go out and see games so much anymore now that I’m running scouting. But also.” Lee grinned as they sat down. “Since I’m running scouting, I can take a game now and then. Especially, no offense, at a lower-tier conference.”

“None taken.” Kodi reached for the beer Lee had gotten him and took a drink of the familiar hoppy flavor. “My dad said they’ll be here at 7:05 according to GMaps.”

“Okay, so we have fourteen minutes.” Lee rested one paw on the other in front of him on the table. “Damon Albert.”

“He’s a really smart kid.” Kodi took another drink. He’d practiced this. “Smarter about football than any other kid I’ve coached. But—well, you saw him.”

Lee nodded. “Not physical enough for the UFL.”

“He’s such a fast study. I’ve had him four years and he gets better every year.”

“If only you could have him another four years.” Lee flicked his ears forward and smiled. “So you want him to get an internship with the Whalers, something like that?”

“He’d be a great assistant to the defensive line coach.”

“Uh huh.” The corners of Lee’s mouth twitched up. “I can probably at least get him an interview for that, but it’d be easier if he’d apply for a position working with someone who knows him well.”

Kodi frowned. “Is there someone on the Whalers who…?”

Lee shook his head. “Sorry. I’m being clever. What I meant was, I’m authorized to tell you that we have interest in you as an assistant defensive line coach.”

“You—the Whalers?”

“Sure.” The fox smiled broadly. “I put in a good word and talked to our staff. We don’t want to make a mid-season change, so this wouldn’t be until January, but we can always have another assistant on staff. That’s how you’d get your foot in the door for a UFL coaching job.”

“Yeah, I…” Kodi shook his head. “You’d want me for that?”

“Honestly,” Lee said, “the assistants don’t do much. You hang out, you help the coach, you learn the job. The reason we hire assistants, apart from doing some of the coach’s work for them, is so we can evaluate potential future coaches. If you love the game enough to be an assistant for, frankly, shit pay, and you’re smart enough to learn, and you get along well with the guys, you probably have a future as a coach. I feel like you’ve got enough of a head start on those things to be a good candidate.”

“Thank you. I, uh, so what about Damon? I mean, if you don’t want to make a midseason change?”

Lee nodded. “He could apply to be an assistant in January, but I was thinking about starting him as an intern. It’s not as much pay, but it’s a better chance for a young kid. Of course…” The fox gestured toward Kodi. “If you’re an assistant, you’d get to know the coaches and you could put in a good word for him. You know him better than I do.”

Kodi nodded, trying to think about how he felt about moving to Yerba. Lee checked his phone and then, as though following the bear’s thoughts, said, “Plus you’d be in a more open place. I know Pelagia’s pretty open, but this particular college town doesn’t seem like it’s all that…diverse.”

“It’s fine,” the bear said, and took another drink.

“I drove by the church out front, and I got a Bible study flyer under the door of my hotel room,” Lee said.

“I know.”

“It’s nice that Damon has someone to talk to, though.” Lee cocked his ears. “Does he know?”

Kodi shook his head. “He came to me because I’m his coach and I made it pretty clear I’m not religious.”

“So there might be other guys on the team, too.”

“Maybe. The coaches don’t talk about the private lives of our players. I mean, I told Coach Farmer because Damon said I could, but he promised to keep it discreet.”

Lee nodded, and Kodi knew where he was going. “I’m not Dev,” the bear said in a low almost-whisper.

“Wasn’t saying you were. Look, you gotta be comfortable with your life. And if this is your life, then…sure.”

The fox’s disapproval radiated off him. Kodi looked toward the door for his parents, finishing off his beer. He didn’t drink often, so his tolerance was generally low, but he still wasn’t feeling a buzz.

“Hey.” Lee’s ears were half-down. “I mean that.”

He seemed sincere, just as he had been in that hotel hallway so many years ago. Kodi felt a glimmer of possibility inside him. Or maybe it was just the beer finally kicking in.

The fox seemed ready to say more, but at that moment Kodi’s parents came in and joined them, and they wanted to talk about the game. His father hadn’t known much about defensive line play until Kodi’s college career, but he’d studied up so he could tell when his son was doing well. After every game he wanted to talk shop, and Kodi’s mother usually had to stop him. This time he turned to Lee. “You’re a scout, right? So you know what I mean.”

“Absolutely,” Lee said. “You can tell just by watching the defensive line how cohesive they are. They work together well. Clearly Kodi’s doing a good job with them.”

“How do you know Kodi?” his mother asked, clearly trying to head off a football-intensive conversation.

“This is Wiley Farrel,” Kodi’s father said as though Lee were some sort of minor celebrity. “Remember Kodi’s teammate who came out? Dev Miski?”

“Oh, yes.” His mother frowned. Kodi tried to think of some way to head off the inevitable conclusion to this conversation, but Lee spoke too quickly for him.

“I’m his boyfriend.” Lee smiled, though his fangs showed over his lips.

“That’s wonderful.” His mother leaned toward Kodi and lowered her voice. “So have you told him?”

Kodi rolled his eyes while Lee, politely, pretended he hadn’t heard, though the speed with which he flicked his ears to face the back of the room belied his manner. “Yes, mom, he knows.”

“That’s good. You have someone to talk to.”

“As a matter of fact,” Lee said, and Kodi couldn’t stop him. Lee was going to tell his parents about the job and then they’d harass him to take it, to upset his entire life.

But the fox stopped and went back over his words. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “It’s Dev who doesn’t know. Kodi didn’t want to make their playing time awkward and there hasn’t been an occasion to tell him since then.”

“Oh!” Kodi’s father reached up to scratch the base of his antlers.

“So if you meet Dev,” Lee said, “just keep it quiet.”

“Sure thing.” His father had that tone that said he’d be asking Kodi about that later, a conversation Kodi wasn’t looking forward to but hopefully could put off.

He was used to letting his parents dictate the flow of the conversation, and usually after football they talked about movies they’d seen. His father would tell him how their neighbors’ kids were doing, and his mother would talk about her law practice, and Kodi would make understanding noises. Sometimes he’d pick a story about one of his kids to tell them, like the time Beck had to study all night to pass a math test. They liked those kinds of stories because most people thought college athletes blew off their classes, and Killian emphasized academics.

(Kodi didn’t tell them about the things some of his players told him about other kids paying to have their homework done; according to school policy he had to go talk to the student in question and ask whether it was true, and then inform them that their football eligibility could be revoked if they were found to be cheating. Everyone knew it was a charade, that this kind of stuff went on and that the athletic department had to be scrupulously unaware of it. The kids usually got the message after that, so that kind of thing happened at most once a semester.)

But now Lee engaged his parents, turning the conversation from movies to the UFL, asking his mother about her job and even a little bit about their pet cockatoo. Kodi joined in when he felt he had something to say, or when there was an opportunity to nod in agreement. When the talk moved to politics, Lee discovered that Kodi’s parents were liberal, and so they talked about how much progress was being made in so many areas. For his parents, it wasn’t enough in some places, too much in others, and Lee engaged them without arguing.

Kodi hated talking politics because if you disagreed with someone, it turned into an argument and you had to defend your position or listen to someone else attack it, and if you agreed with someone it turned into a pointless back-patting session about how smart you all were and how dumb the other side was. It felt like politics had turned into religion.

Still, with Lee and his parents, it never quite got to that point. The conversation remained pleasant and everyone stayed in a good mood and nobody looked bored. At least, as Kodi had hoped, Lee’s presence prevented his parents from harassing him about his personal life.

Not that his mother didn’t get in a small dig as they were standing outside the brew pub and his father was trying to get more UFL insider info out of Lee, or maybe ask Lee about getting Kodi a job in the UFL—Kodi tuned out the conversation. “So,” his mother said. “I presume you would have told us, but are you seeing anyone?”

“No,” Kodi said.

She sighed. “Well, that’s your choice. I just worry about you. All those old football players need people to take care of them, and who do you have?”

“I barely played, Mom. I’m fine, just my knees get a little stiff sometimes.”

She sniffed. “Your father’s neck used to get ‘a little stiff,’ and now he needs a brace when his antlers come all the way in.”

“I still work out,” Kodi said. “I stay in good shape.”

“For now.” She shook her head.

Kodi’s dad came back over to them. “We should get going,” he said. “Got to catch that flight.”

“Me too.” Lee trailed behind him.

“You need a ride to the airport?”

The fox smiled. “Thanks, but no, I’ve got a rental.” He tapped the logo on his shirt. “Company business.”

“Great.” Kodi’s dad extended a broad hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Lee, and give our best to Devlin.”

“Will do.” Lee shook with Kodi’s mom too, and then stepped back to let the bear and elk say good-night to their son.

“Good game,” Kodi’s dad said.

“Always good to see you,” his mom added.

“Thanks.” Kodi hugged them in turn. “See you in a month or so. Safe flight.”

Lee hung around for a while as his parents disappeared. “Good to see you again, too,” Kodi said. “And thanks for Damon.”

“Sure.” The fox extended a paw. “You seem to have a good setup here.”

“Yeah, it’s—there’s a lot to like. It’s a small college, the kids are great, Coach Farmer likes me.”

“No pressure.” Lee held up a paw as Kodi started to protest. “Just the right amount of pressure.”

Kodi exhaled. The damp air had acquired a familiar chill that he enjoyed about the evenings in fall. The brew pub wasn’t too far from a park, and the smell of fallen leaves mingled with the smells from the pub. “That’s a good way to put it,” he said.

“I’ll tell you something,” Lee said. “We’re at least going to get to the final this year. And I’ve been working so hard to make this happen, every year for the last half decade, that I haven’t done a lot else. Oh, me and Dev are fine. We get our time together. But he’s working, I’m working, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else. So, like, helping a gay kid get a foothold in the UFL, that’s about all I do for gay rights these days.”

“Things seem to be going okay without you.” Kodi only had to force his smile a little bit.

“That’s part of it too, yeah.” Lee rubbed his forearms, ruffling the exposed fur, but the chill didn’t seem to bother him. His ears had perked and his eyes brightened. “Things are moving in a good direction everywhere else and I’m doing a little bit at a time in football, the last bastion of homophobia.”

“Heh.”

“Dev’s doing more, don’t get me wrong. But every little bit I can do helps.”

Kodi nodded. His mind raced ahead to another scenario, where his job was a token on Lee’s list, where anytime a gay player like Damon came up, Lee would want him to take an interest. Where he’d either be “that gay coach,” or he’d be in the closet and Lee would be disappointed, wonder why he’d even bothered with him.

“Anyway,” Lee said, “I should get to the airport as well. If I run into your parents I’ll say hi again, though I think they’re on Union Air and I’m on Northwest.”

“Safe trip.” Kodi reached out to shake again.

Lee nodded and gave him one more look. “Think about the job,” he said gently. “But I’ll understand whatever way you choose.”

It felt like Lee already knew what he was going to do, Kodi thought on the drive home. Really, had there been any question? Of course he was going to stay at Killian. It wasn’t ideal, but he knew he could do the job. Maybe someday if he worked hard he could be the defensive coordinator here.

His mind drifted off again.

“We’re here to celebrate the retirement of Kodi Pericak, who’s been a coach here at Killian for almost forty years. He’s been here through all the good years and thanks to him, there haven’t been many bad ones.”

The stands were full, because this was happening before the first game of the season after his retirement. A few former students would come up: maybe Beck, maybe Damon. Maybe Lanson, having had a decent UFL career. Maybe Coach Farmer, now retired. And then Kodi would say a few words, something like, “My years at Killian have been the most rewarding of my life. All my former and current linemen have been fantastic people it’s been my privilege to know. I’m just glad to have done my small part for this wonderful program.”

And then the people whose lives he’d touched came up to him and shook his paw. They watched the game together, and Killian won, and Kodi would look back on all the things he’d done, and not worry so much about the things he hadn’t. And sure, he’d go home alone, maybe to a cockatoo if he felt lonely, but that was his life.

He’d have more dreams, more worries, but he’d already proven he could navigate this life. The worry kept him sharp, and this life wasn’t too much pressure. Just the right amount.

* * *

Acknowledgments

Two of the stories in this collection (“Sinful” and “Slowing Down”) were made possible by my patrons on Patreon (http://kyellgold.patreon.com), and I owe both the patrons and Patreon a great deal.

Five of the stories in this collection (“False Dawn,” “Heart,” “Getting to Sleep,” “Rest Stop,” and “More Than a Game”) were written because one of my books sold over a thousand copies, and for that I have all of you to thank.

The usual cast of people have helped make these stories better. My writing group: Ryan Campbell, David Cowan, and Watts Martin read many of these. Kit and Jack have, as always, provided the love and emotional support that allowed these stories to grow.

About the Author and Artists

Kyell Gold has won twelve Ursa Major awards for his stories and novels, and his acclaimed novel Out of Position co-won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Novel of 2009. His novel “Green Fairy” was nominated for inclusion in the ALA’s “Over the Rainbow” list for 2012. He helped create RAWR, the first residential furry writing workshop, and has instructed at each of its sessions through 2018.

He lives in California, loves to travel and dine out with his partners, and can be seen at furry conventions around the world. More information about him and his books is available at http://www.kyellgold.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @KyellGold.

Cover Artist: Deus Ex Moose (or simply “Moose”) is a traditional and digital media artist from Melbourne, Australia. With a background in fine art, his work typically revolves around expressions of fetish and sexuality, using anthropomorphism as a lens through which he sees the world. You can find his work at http://deusexmoose.com.

Interior Artist: Kenket aka Tess Garman aka Kenket has a degree in illustration and paints animals for a living. She has collaborated on the award-winning Across Thin Ice and on the five books in the Out of Position series. You can find her work at www.furaffinity.net/user/kenket.

Also by Kyell Gold

If you would like to get monthly updates on upcoming publications, excerpts of works in progress, and writing tips, sign up for his mailing list (your e-mail address will not be sold or used for anything else).

Love Match

Love Match (vol. 1, 2008-2010) — Rocky arrives in the States from Africa and navigates the treacherous worlds of professional tennis and high school.

Love Match (vol. 2, 2010-2012) — Rocky begins his professional career, at the cost of his family and romantic relationships.

Out of Position (Dev and Lee)

Out of Position – Dev the football player and Lee the gay activist discover how to navigate their relationship. (mature readers)

Isolation Play – The continuing story of Dev and Lee, as they contend with family and friends in their search for acceptance. (mature readers)

Divisions – As Dev’s team fights to make the playoffs, Lee fights to keep his sense of self. (mature readers)

Uncovered – The playoffs are here, and Dev needs his focus more than ever. So when Lee becomes too distracting, something has to give. (mature readers)

Over Time – Dev and Lee try to plan their future while dealing with crises all around them. (mature readers)

Dangerous Spirits

Green Fairy – A gay high school senior struggling through his final year finds a strange old book that changes his dreams and his life.

Red Devil – A gay fox who fled his abusive family in Siberia seeks help from a ghost who demands he give up his gay lifestyle.

Black Angel – A young otter struggles to understand her sexuality as her friends prepare for post-high school life and dreams of women in other times plague her.

Argaea

Volle – The story of how Volle came to Tephos, a spy masquerading as a noble, and the first adventure he had there. (mature readers)

The Prisoner’s Release and Other Stories – The story of how Volle escaped from prison, and the story of what happened after, plus two other stories following characters from “Volle.” (mature readers)

Pendant of Fortune – Volle returns to Tephos to defend his honor, but soon finds himself fighting for much more. (mature readers)

Shadow of the Father – Volle’s son, Yilon, must travel to the far-off land he is meant to rule, but he will have to fight treachery to take the lordship. (mature readers)

Weasel Presents – Five short stories from the land of Argaea, including “Helfer’s Busy Day” and “Yilon’s Journal.” (mature readers)

Forester Universe

Waterways – The full story of Kory’s journey to understand himself and what it means to be gay. (mature readers)

Bridges – Hayward seems content to set up pairs of his friends. But what does he really need for himself? (mature readers)

Science Friction – Vaxy never took sex seriously, until he found out the professor he was sleeping with was married… (mature readers)

Winter Games – Sierra Snowpaw was an unsure high school student when someone he thought was a friend changed his life. Now he's fifteen years older and still looking for answers. (mature readers)

The Mysterious Affair of Giles – A servant in a British manor house tries to solve a murder.

Dude, Where’s My Fox? – Lonnie chases down a fox he hooked up with at a party as a way to get over his breakup. (mature readers)

Losing My Religion – On tour with his R.E.M. cover band, Jackson mentors the new guy in the band as his own life falls apart. (mature readers)

The Time He Desires — A Muslim immigrant struggles with the betrayal of his son and the dissolution of his marriage, as well as his own long-past trauma.

Other Books

The Silver Circle – Valerie thought the old hunter was crazy when he warned her about werewolves—until she met one.

In the Doghouse of Justice – Seven stories of superheroes and their not-so-super relationships. (mature readers)

Twelve Sides — Twelve short stories about side characters from the above books. (mature readers)

Writing as Tim Susman:

Breaking The Ice: Stories from New Tibet (editor) - On a hostile ice planet, survival is guaranteed to nobody.

Shadows in Snow (editor) - More stories from the unforgiving ice world of New Tibet.

Common and Precious - A kidnapped heiress comes to sympathize with her desperate captors, while her father discovers the limits of his power in trying to rescue her.

The Calatians

Book 1: The Tower and the Fox - Kip and his friends encounter prejudice and mysteries in their first few months at Prince George’s College of Sorcery.

Book 2: The Demon and the Fox - The forces of revolution grow in Massachusetts as Kip and his friends rush to solve the mystery of the attack on the College of Sorcery.