FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Post sonos, relinquat nuntius."

As the dull note sounded in his ear for the third time that afternoon, the young lion smiled sadly and disconnected his cell phone. "Still no answer."

"I'm sorry, Bobby."

Feigning nonchalance, the athlete set his phone down on the cluttered desk, trying to shrug. "I guess Jerry will call when he can. Take your coat off, browncoat; welcome to the glamorous world of the jock dorm."

The tiger shucked his jacket, looking around himself. "So this is how the university treats its star JV quarterback?"

"My own cat cave," the lion chuckled. "They don't spring for a maid, as you could probably tell."

"No worse than my own place, trust me."

Bobby Harris put his own jacket on a wall hook near the door that seemed to radiate pride of place. He glanced surreptitiously at his guest, wondering what he saw as he gazed around the room. Malcolm Lamar, the lean, bookish tiger who was a freshman by technicality only, seemed more confident and self-secure than Harris felt at that moment. The footballer had heard the term "old soul" a few times in his life, and he felt certain that Malcolm qualified. Of course the tiger saw the mess, but what did it tell him, Harris wondered? Was he analyzing everything, like that new version of Sherlock Holmes, or just letting it exist without really noticing all that much? Four hundred square feet of efficiency apartment wasn't much room to waltz around in, but it provided space for a desk, a couch-slash-bed, couple of chairs, built-in book shelves that actually held a few books amid the DVDs and general catch-all of a growing young male's life.

"Thanks for being here, Mal," the lion said softly, taking a seat on the bed. It was a natural enough choice, as there were very few places to sit, but he wondered how the tiger would take it.

"You said you needed to talk more." Malcolm sat in one of the chairs, leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees. "I'm glad to help, if I can."

Slowly, Harris nodded. "I have the feeling that I'm going to sound stupid, so I'll apologize in advance and try to go from there." He paused, then laughed ruefully. "Sorry for all the clichés, they're really piling up. I was about to say, I'm not sure where to start."

The young tiger smiled gently, encouragingly. "Would it help to start with what you wanted to talk to Jerry about? I'm not him, but... I mean, as a place to start..."

Rubbing his nose absently with one forepaw, feeling his ears flick self-consciously, the quarterback let his eyes focus on the slatted puddle of autumn afternoon sun pouring in through the window like warm butterscotch, spilling across the end of the bed in a soft cascade of light, coloring the room in softly muted tones, highlighting the tawny honey-gold of his smooth fur... and then wondered where the hell all that poetry came from. "Everything feels different," he said quietly, seeming almost to hear himself from far away. He smirked. "Listen to me, kit from a long line of tough-types, talking about his feelings. A year ago, I'd have sworn I didn't have any."

"Sounds like a tough way to grow up."

"Ever wonder about my name? Bobby Harris. That's on the birth certificate. It's not Robert, or Bob, or just a convenient short form - the given legal name is Bobby."

"What's your middle name?"

"Don't have one. It's like my folks lost interest."

The lion looked over sharply at the sound he'd heard, something between a sigh and a sniff. Malcolm hadn't moved, although his face had clouded over somehow. He shook his head slightly and blinked at Harris. "I'm sorry."

"Facts of life, I guess." The athlete shrugged his strong shoulders, his full russet mane dancing around his shoulders. "I'm not playing the sympathy card or anything, or I don't mean to. I only mean that, compared to what I grew up with, how I grew up and all that stuff... I don't have anything to compare all this with. And I don't mean just the sex part, it's all the emotions as well. I don't know what to do with it all." He felt his eyes go soft as he gazed at the young tiger across from him. "You're so comfortable with your feelings. Like what we were talking about yesterday. How did you do that?"

The smile on the kit's face was rueful, and modest, and charming. "I hope you don't mind if I tell you that I really don't know. It's how I've always been. I never really knew any other way to be."

"Sounds like you had an idyllic kithood."

"Not the word I'd choose!" The tiger laughed, unselfconsciously, openly. Harris found himself really enjoying that laugh, knowing that he wanted to hear it often. "Lots of trials and tribulations. I was a wimpy youngster, with two older brothers - twins - who were always in the limelight. My first exposure to jocks, and I guess that includes my dad. I could never compete." Malcolm's face sobered slightly. "I lost myself in books more often than not. It was always safer there. I could always find safe haven somewhere."

"History through literature." Harris nodded. "No wonder you have such passion for it." The lion breathed slowly for a few moments, feeling, experiencing feeling, wondering if it were something that he was somehow doing wrong. Who could say? Who might tell? "Were you... well, could you be free with your feelings? With your parents?"

Strangely, Malcolm seemed surprised. He looked away, his brows furrowed, his ears splayed slightly, considering, wondering. "I never thought about it. Pretty much so, I guess. There were times when I didn't think so, I'm sure... oh yeah, times when I felt like, as my dad would tell me, I just had to suck it up and quit whining. I didn't think it was whining, believe me, but Dad..." The freshman shook his head slowly. "He wasn't trying to be mean, I think. And it wasn't often, but he... I guess he was raised pretty much like most males, with that whole Big Males Don't Cry sort of thing. On my own, I would bawl like a kit, mewling into my pillow, trying not to make too much noise. I wasn't afraid of being punished or anything; I just didn't want to have to deal with Dad's reaction, or my brothers teasing the hell out of me."

"You seem to have survived them."

"Blue belt in aikido." The tiger's smile showed great personal satisfaction.

Harris paused, knowing that it was his turn. "I'm one of five," he began. "Two brothers in front, two sisters in back. I wonder if maybe my dad didn't know what to do with Sarah and Beth. I can think of a lot of times when he seemed completely at a loss, trying to figure out how to relate to the girls. Me and my brothers, we had a proper drill instructor upbringing." The quarterback grinned in spite of himself. "It wasn't brutal; we weren't abused or anything, but we learned our lessons the first time we ever stepped out of line. If you wonder how in the world I ended up this muscular, the answer lies in exercise, hard work, and a lot of fatherly expectations."

"Your brothers are athletes too?"

"Linebackers. Built like bulls. I was the runt of the litter, in my household. My brothers were half again as large as me, and a head taller. They were surprised that I made it onto the football team at all; they thought I'd be a kicker, the scrawny specialty player who had to be supported by everyone else. Instead, I started out in track, learned how to be fast first and agile second." Harris chuckled. "Part of that was so that I could outrun my brothers."

"That, I can relate to!" Malcolm laughed along, that sound like something musical, or like... like a story that Harris was sure he'd read, or at least heard about, but he didn't understand it then, about a young princeling whose laugh was like water from a well. The lion had heard of eyes described as twinkling, but he'd never seen it before now, not before those sweet amber eyes twinkled just for him. Merriment was a new experience to him, a word that had no meaning before this wise, affectionate tiger had brought it to him as a gift to be shared in the languid, sticky syrup of this slowly fading autumn afternoon of butterscotch light that he was sure, if it fell upon the deep, dark orange of the tiger's fur, he could lick off like the sweetest dessert ever dreamed...

"Anyway..." he said, trying to recover himself, "I found out that I could throw a football pretty well, and practice made enough perfect - at least at my AAA-sized high school - to land me a spot on the team. And that was what occupied my thoughts for most of the last five years or so." He considered, nodded. "Yeah, somewhere about my sophomore year in high school. Dad was happy - athletic scholarships took care of a lot of his concerns. And I just plowed through each day, doing whatever was next, not even paying attention."

His gaze shifted, largely unfocused, as he thought about whether or not he was lying to Malcolm. He certainly_remembered_these past years; it wasn't as if he had gaps in his memory, either accidental or intentional. There was a sense of some of it blending together into chunks, and he might have some trouble getting exact dates right without the help of a calendar, but he remembered. A few such memories blew through his thoughts like the leaves being tossed around just beyond his window, and some of those thoughts included leaves, autumn days like this one, because... because he_liked_ autumn, because there were sounds and smells and memories and experiences that caused emotions, feelings, and because there were those few times when he was alone that he could let himself realize that he really did have feelings, and...

"Bobby?"

His eyes darted back to the tiger's face, leaning forward, concerned. "Sorry, Mal, just sort of drifted away for a minute."

"If I were a writer, I'd have said that you were remembering. Something in particular?"

The lion considered briefly, chose the truth. "Not in particular, really, not like a specific memory. I was remembering that I used to have feelings. Or, you know, remembering that... well, it's not like I've never_had_ feelings, I've just never known what to do with them. Does that make any sense?"

"Yes." Malcolm nodded slowly, his large amber eyes holding Harris' own. "More than you think. It's a big theme in literature, because it's a big thing in life. There are very few of us who don't have feelings. Even if we were raised away from others, we'd still have feelings; we just wouldn't have anything to compare them to." The tiger paused, swallowed, his tail flicking anxiously to one side of him. "What sort of feelings were you remembering?"

Breathing slowly, evenly, the lion let himself pull back the memories and feelings that vied for his attention. "Alone," he said softly. "Not lonely, necessarily, just alone. There was a place I found not too far from the school grounds, and I'd go there sometimes. I didn't really know why at the time. It was quiet, maybe that was the main reason."

"Did you go there to listen to the snow fall?"

Harris' eyebrows tried to knit themselves together as he looked at the smiling tiger, and then he too smiled. "Not a lot of snow fell in Niceville, Florida. So I guess I don't know what falling snow sounds like."

"It would probably sound different to you from what it sounds like to me. I won't spoil it by giving you my impressions first." The freshman shifted in his chair, his tail wrapping around his hindpaws self-consciously. "Did you like the feeling of being alone?"

"Sometimes." The footballer answered candidly. "It was like trying to hear myself think, or maybe feel. Cutting out all that dialog, getting away from what everyone else expected." The lion became aware of the pauses in the conversation, in the air, as if he and Malcolm were somehow moving toward each other in halting steps, never seeing each other move, never quite arriving, red light, green light, autumn light... "Mal, did you ever... I mean, well... how did you know that you were gay?"

Leaning back into his chair, Malcolm sighed, a resounding effort that came from deep within. Harris sat up quickly, asking, "Did I say something wrong?"

Smiling sadly, the tiger waved a forepaw and shook his head. "No, not at all. It's just sort of a... loaded question. I haven't talked about it with anyone. I've thought about it a lot, but I just never..."

"If you'd rather not..."

"No, it's okay. Maybe you're exactly the person I need to tell the story to." The freshman considered for a long moment, his tail tip flicking slowly, an ear twitching occasionally in deep thought. "I can't say that I was ever interested in girls, not sexually, and perhaps not even emotionally. I had friends who were girls, and in high school, I had a few girls who decided that they just had to kiss me, for some reason." Not quite realizing it, Malcolm reached up with a paw and rubbed his muzzle as if wiping away a memory.

Harris chuckled. "I can think of a lot of good reasons why someone would want to kiss you." Though he felt a cliché twinge in his belly, that fear that he might have gone too far after all, the lion didn't look away. Malcolm shifted, a tinge of red under his cheek fur and the lining of his agitated ears. "I'm guessing that it didn't sway your opinions much."

The tiger laughed. "No. No, it didn't. I don't know why, exactly, or I didn't know why for a long time." He drew in a deep breath and exhaled it forcefully. "I guess some people would say that I was molested or abused..."

Eyes wide, Harris moved quickly to the edge of the bed and sat up, reaching for Malcolm's forepaws. He felt the kit squeeze his paws firmly, tenderly before he continued.

"Nothing like that. It was consensual... more than just consensual, truth be told. His name was Aiden Madrigal." His eyes sought Harris' and held them. "Father Aiden Madrigal."

The name was spoken with such soft affection, almost reverence, that Harris' mind could not quite reconcile all the horror stories that came to his mind. "A priest?"

Malcolm shook his head firmly. "Yes, but it wasn't at all like that. The folks next door to us were Catholic, and their son Jeremy was my friend almost since we were born. I never caught the faith bug, but I went to church with Jeremy a few times, and we went to the gym at the church recreation hall a lot. Father Aiden was a good coach, and he never once was... 'inappropriate' to any of the young males he coached. And I mean never. I was the sole exception, and it didn't happen the way you might think."

The tiger swallowed, and Harris squeezed the kit's forepaws. "I'm here."

Sniffing, Malcolm continued. "You want to know where my love of literature came from? It was Father Aiden. My passion for words came from the tortured passion of a polar bear who loved life too much to be ministering to others from a base of hypocrisy. He had been a priest for a dozen years or so when we first met - I was eight at the time. Over the years, he helped me discover just how amazing words could be. Have you read the Christian bible, Bobby? It's certainly not history, and it's nothing to base your life on, no matter how many people might claim to. But the poetry... much of western literature depends on phrases and references to that mythology. The patience of Job... the testing of Abraham... the Sermon on the Mount... the skin of my teeth... draw a bow at a venture... hide your light under a bushel... It's a treasure trove of allusion and allegory, aphorisms and faithful old shibboleths that we fall back on. Father Aiden showed that to me."

After another pause, the tiger drew a deep breath and continued. "I had my muzzle poked inside a book more often than not, and a great many of those books were recommendations from Father Aiden. I knew I was going to major in literature long before I got into college, and it was Father Aiden's reading list that helped me get those AP classes and CLEP test scores. My parents thought he was wonderful, perhaps especially because we weren't Catholic and he helped me anyway. My parents are sort of literalists that way, I guess. Let me tell you, Bobby... he really was fantastic, and I regret nothing about what happened between us. My only guilt was that I was afraid that I was the one who had destroyed his faith. I hadn't, though. In a way, I helped him find it..."

Shaking his head, Malcolm closed his eyes against the tears that formed there. Harris found himself leaning over to touch the tiger's cheek so very tenderly, realizing that his own feelings were churning inside him, sharp points swirling in a warm soup of something almost like a great pool of tears within his chest. What the hell... do feelings always have to grind like this, or feel so big that you have to wonder if you're ever going to get out from under them? Yet "under" wasn't the right word, because what the lion felt was both inside him and outside him at the same time, the outside part being Malcolm's, yet it was part of him... like being joined, being more than what he was before, and for all the sense of being vulnerable and weak and open to things that could hurt, the feeling of being stronger, being larger, being bound together...

"I was fifteen. Father Aiden was just about to celebrate twenty years as a priest. For a long time, I noticed he'd seemed to be struggling with something, and I was too young to really understand it. It was like depression, it seemed to me, yet there was more to it. And as young as I was, I felt that I wanted to help him, and little by little, he started to tell me things. He showed me books that were all but banned by the church, books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and thinkers who made him take a long and powerful look at what he had been doing with his life. He wasn't all that old - barely 45 - yet he felt as if he had somehow given up his life in favor of the church, and he wasn't at all sure that it was an equitable trade.

"If you kept the idea within the definitions of the church, I guess I had become his confessor. He was able to talk to me about his doubts and his fears, and somehow I was able to understand... or at least able to listen. Religion held no answers, he said, and in fact it only made things worse. It made people angry, inflexible, even violent. He told me something Dawkins had said: 'Science flies you to the moon, and religion flies you into buildings.' No matter how much he may have helped individuals, he said, he was still a participant in a system that did its best to spoil just about every good thing that life was all about."

Harris squeezed the tiger's forepaws, unable to say anything.

"I was just a kit. What could I tell him? And he was afraid for a while that he had poisoned me too, that all his talk had turned me against faith." Malcolm took in a shuddering breath. "And I said something that I never really knew the source of, where I found these particular words. I said, 'Father Aiden... you have shown me that faith belongs in something that makes you strong, makes you grow, something that never can lie to you, that no one else can lie to you about. You have shown me how to have faith in myself.' And I put my arms around him and hugged him with every ounce of love that I could conjure up in myself. He hugged me back, and he held me for a long time, and then..."

He breathed again, fighting back tears. "It didn't happen then. He stopped us, even though I felt sure that he wanted to continue, and I did too. I'd talked to him before, about wondering if I liked males instead of females, and whether or not it was wrong. He knew. I knew too, but he stopped us that day. It was almost a week later when we..." The tiger's breath hitched in his throat.

Harris whispered, "Was he your first?"

"The first time that it was real, yes. My friend Wally and I had... not too much happened between us, but he and I had our experiments, frightened adolescent things with fumbling paws and uncertainty. With Aiden... it was so different. We kissed. We held each other. We spent hours together that day. We talked and whispered and spoke, with or without words." Malcolm rubbed Harris' forepaws, smiling a little. "I guess you could say that was when I knew that I was gay. Or at least that was when I discovered just how much I could love another male, and share that love sexually." He chuckled ruefully. "And I never did get any further interest in females."

"What happened to him?"

"His 20thanniversary service was planned as a big party, and I was one of those invited, to no one's surprise - I was one of his best students, after all. It was quite a do, taking place several days after he and I had spent our time together." The tiger sighed softly. "He simply didn't show up. He vanished the day before, and no one in the parish ever heard from him again. His clothes and personal things were gone; his vestments, his bible, and his collar were carefully arranged on his well-made bed, I'm told. I got a letter from him a few days later. I could recite the whole thing, if you want - I'd memorized it quickly, in case I felt that I needed to destroy it, to protect either or both of us."

"No," the lion whispered, shaking his head gently. "Those words are for you. I'll bet they're poetry, though. He sounds truly amazing, Mal."

"He was. Is, I suppose - no reason to think he's gone."

"You haven't heard from him again?"

"No. And maybe that's okay after all."

For a long moment, Harris tried to think of what to say. Instead, he bent his head down to kiss Malcolm's forepaws tenderly, then look up into his eyes. In a voice choked with feeling, he whispered, "Malcolm... may I love you?"

Whimpering softly, the young tiger fell to his knees before the lion and kissed him feverishly. They wrapped their arms around each other, Malcolm combing his fingers through the thick russet mane, Harris rubbing the tiger's back through his clothes and pulling him backward onto the bed. They lost themselves in the kiss, touching and feeling each other's warm, hard bodies pressing together. The lion gave himself over to his feelings, yet enough of his mind remained to want the moment to linger, to last, to print itself indelibly onto his mind and heart. It was different. It was, as Malcolm had called it earlier,real.

Carefully, he pulled his panting muzzle away from the tiger, stroking the kit's headfur gently, a smile playing about his lips. "I figure that's a Yes."

Malcolm laughed. "Yeah," he breathed heavily. "I'd say so. Unless you think we should stop...?"

"I think we'd get multiple hernias trying!" the lion chuckled. "Although maybe I could make myself slow down a little... if you can..."

The tiger nodded, smiling. "I can try. I've got time, if you have."

"I want to, browncoat." Harris touched Malcolm's cheek tenderly, just as the last of the afternoon light bathed their fur in a rich, shadowy broth-colored haze. "I still don't understand it all. And I don't know if I'm gay or bi or just freaking confused." He laughed gently. "But I know that I want you here, with me, like this. I want to love you as much and as well as I can, and for as long as we have time for. Is that enough? For now, at least?"

"I'd be willing to find out, as long as we find out together."

His breath catching, his eyes threatening tears, his heart confused yet more full than he'd ever known, Bobby Harris leaned in to kiss his beloved independence fighter as if no future could exist without him. And as the last light faded into the deep intimate darkness of the long, cold night, Malcolm met the lion's lips with his own, as if to promise that the future, whatever it looked like, would take care of itself.