Jeffy came home from school, dropped backpack on the worn crimson carpet of the stairs without going up, poured rootbeer in the avocado kitchen. Then thought better of it: went to the burnt orange freezer and added a scoop of vanilla ice cream to the flowered glass. He was on his second cookie when the phone rang. The furboy didn't turn down the stereo."Hay, Brian..." Tyler had offered to help with the raccoon's homework. "Aww, but dude! You promised!" Pause of resignation, self-doubt; the hallmark of the loner. "Yeah, sure. Bye."
The fox sucked frothy soda, slumped on the antiqued kitchen stool. Banged his tennies against the black cabinet doors under the vinyl-upholstered bar. His sophomore brother tutored some of Jeffy's junior high classmates and kitsat for their younger siblings to score extra college cash.
But to Jeffy, it was all cake. Brian was one of the most popular boys in school, not like the young fox himself.
Overflowing of a high-window afternoon indoors, vulpine angst and boredom - and not to mention spooge, sloshing in waves within - the teenfox would float slouched in his seat behind the cool and stocky coon through long and boring history lectures, dark sneaks untied and comfortably loose at his ankles. Brian's luscious scent would all too soon become dizzying in the Spring heat, the huge and fluffy ringed tail before the fox ever so distracting, its silky shine in the sizzling sun enticing. Forbidden. Arousing.
Jeffy had reached out to touch it once, secret and sly and insane, beneath the bitter wormwood surface of his school desk. Then that treacherous paw had on its own moved upwards.
He shook himself from the memory, flinching at the betraying fantasy as had the historical Brian upon the unsought touch that faithless day. What the lonely fox missed in friends he almost made up for in guilty and twisted ingenuity. For whenever his classmates would come over to get help from the older Tyler, Jeffy was always there to hang about, bored and anxious and clandestinely thrilled.
Especially he liked it when Ty passed out occasional sodas, making his protégés sit in the kitchen so the careless kits wouldn't spill on the rug - their mom would so scream if the teens dared to stain the scarlet shag. The foxboy would ogle as his classmates reclined on awkward barstools, slouching for comfort, the roomy legs of shiny team shorts riding up. Sometimes his older brother would tutor them there, or maybe in his own room, all sprawled across the poofy earth-toned spread. Then Jeffy often hung about, leaning on the forbidden frame of the open door as the studentfur lounged on Tyler's bed: khaki pants tight across, or satin baggy and gaping, or denim draped and most obvious to the inquiring mind. It was a torture that fueled his nightly fantasies, tormented his sordid soul in dark and guilty mental afterplay.
But the best was whenever Tyler's pedagogic efforts would pay off, and he rewarded the youngster under tutelage with a swim in the backyard pool. It was a heated affair, secluded, seductive all year round being secreted over by a glass-sided shed of sorts to keep out leaves and other seasonal intruders. Of course the happy boyfurs, on such short notice, would surely not have brought a bathing suit with them. And so Jeffy, usually ignored and diffident, who spent his time brooding in the low-raftered den, was always at the ready, offering one of his own pair - not out of selflessness but of yiffy self-interest. Patrick had even changed for the swim right in front of the spying foxboy one afternoon, while Tyler was turned to rummage through his own dresser. The slender feline hadn't noticed Jeffy, muzzle slack and gaping, through the open bedroom door.
Who stood presently, licked foam from his muzzle. Adjusted the perpetual teenness between his legs. Left the empty glass dirty in the sink.
Flopping across his own comforter, the teen vulpine lifted the painted sash, hung head out over sweet honeysuckle below. The pool was visible, shining, its lone natator completing a splashing dive. No sound reached the foxboy's erect ears as stray water dashed the slanted glass.
Jeffy rolled back indoors, bunched the pillow up beneath him. He thought about going down there, the long dissipated sashay by shallow 70's stairs, the languorous fop across the whitestone backyard path to inform his brother of the sometime phone message. But he didn't. Tyler would find out soon enough that Brian had called off, anyway. The fox wasn't feeling anything but lazy; careless; tired after a long schoolday and faced with an even longer evening of enforced study. It wasn't easy having a big brother on the dean's list. Keeping up own grades was certainly not Jeffy's idea of how to spend his fourteenth year. But no matter what he did - and despite his sporadic academic strivings - nothing ever seemed to satisfy Tyler, or please his own parents either.
They never took his side about anything, anyway - his mom and dad. That's what the boyfox believed. He was in trouble lots (but never cared), and most of the time over something to do with his brother. Besides, Tyler always won, usually when their parents stepped in - who took the smiling sibling's word without questioning - but sometimes it didn't even get that far. Jeffy couldn't begin to describe how unfair it all seemed. Wasn't the little brother the one who was supposed to get the preference?
Without warning the fox thrust a paw deep into the silo of his oversized jeans, a nuclear preemption, masturbatory physics against the threat of rogue feeling-states. It was a planned first strike, sexual Armageddon, the mind-bending atomic explosion of spooge to counter weapons of emotional destruction wielded by the terrorists living within his own self-pitying skull. He groaned, moved his hips, as he counted down to launch.
"Jeff! Jeffy!! Are you up there?" Tyler was standing outside the pool house. "Hay, Jeff!"
"Fuck." The foxboy turned over, erect in his undershorts. "Yeah!" he called out through the open window. "What'd ya want?"
His brother stood in the naked glory of sunshine, privacy ensured by the high rock wall encircling the lot. His bright red fur gleamed wetly, dripped onto the cedar deck. The ripped and buff fox hadn't bothered with Speedos.
"Dude! Bring me down a towel. I don't want to track water on the rug."
Jeffy groaned, rolled his eyes. The family slave. That's what he was. Collards and watermelon. The house nig-
"C'mon, bro! I'm expecting kits over."
If he went downstairs just then, Jeffy was sure he'd show through his jeans. "Does it look like I'm your fuckin' cock-servant, Tyler? Huh? Now does it? Huh?" The foxboy's tone was direct but measured, impudent, irritated, and raw as his frustrated sheath.
And he not yet even close to anger.
Oh, he might get there, he knew. Rage. His other feelings had grown ever the more confusing of late. Even harder to understand than the ones which crawled in beneath the bedroom door like rabid rats to plague his sleepless midnights: thoughts of other guys, their bodies, their tails. There was just too much to handle in the turgid, turbid stream of his murky adolescence. And now he was elected towelfur, too.
Big brother's paws fisted. He saw. It hadn't happened often - well, not that often - but Jeffy knew what that could mean. Sometimes he even deserved it, too. His mind clamped down upon further insubordination, guilt on the throne where fear might justly have sat. It was too much like his parents, when they told him what to do.
"Hurry up, dammit!"
With a chuff, the fox padded to the near bathroom, pulled down rumpled terrycloth that was closer to the coming laundry day that to the one just past, slid the rag nervelessly upon the scuffed lacquer of the banister as he descended. The staircase was wide and deep and retro, shag free of risers - and likewise apologies - unself-conscious in that minimal decadence of metallic wallpaper and a peculiar species of modern that was old before the furboy was born. Like his family, frozen in time, and worse because once taken seriously.
Jeffy had no idea what it felt like to fit in.
The porch glass slid back; the towel was jerked from his paws. "Shit, thanks." It wasn't a courtesy of gratitude, but of the taking for granted familiar.
"Brian called," Jeffy put in with heavy-eyed ennui, a cool yawn. "He's not coming today." The look of passive arrogance on his muzzle dared the older sibling to challenge his assertion, to demand to know why. It was easier for the furboy finally to punk it about eye-to-eye, now muzzle-to-muzzle when timid anticipation was past, and the sweet delectation of his own boldness so strong upon the vulpine tongue. He would have experienced pleasure at the pass, had he even cared.
But neither did Tyler rise to the impudent remark. He exfricated workfurlike water from his sodden pelt, then rubbing vigorously with the unclean towel. Jeffy dropped his unregarded gaze to the older vulpine's brotherly sheath. It swelled with naked white maleness and the hidden maleness within, curiously not as arousing to the languid younger fox as even the clothed backsides of the buddies he betrayed daily with his own undressing eyes. Yet interest he felt, a fricative stirring in the sudden damp discomfort of the fabric of his imprudent underpants, boxers; the kinship of flesh and filial flesh, strange genetics and erectile tissues. The boyfox looked away, paws deep in his pockets.
A side gate swung open; a teen wolf appeared. "Anyfur home?" His eyes got big when they brushed over the soft and moist-matted underpelt of the nude and mature foxstud.
Jeffy barked out a sardonic laugh. The little grey canid's optics seemed about to pop out of his face.
Tyler moved the towel from muzzle to groin, wrapped it about. One leg still showed to the hip. "Hi! Yer the new fur, heh..."
The wolf nodnodded.
He grabbed Jeffy by the shirt collar, yanked him onto the porch. "This is my brother. He's in your class?"
"Nah," the wolflet answered now, obviously seizing at cool, to cover himself as if caught naked too. "But I've seen him around."
"Sure you have," Tyler shot back. "Jeffy's... hard to miss." He chuckled unkindly. His brother's shirt was so last year. And so many other things that made him stand out.
Now the fraternal comment would have hung in the air like a foul bodily rudeness, but the foxboy did indeed miss the rest of their exchange. He had pulled impertinently away, slid the door shut with all such expedition and disgust as is ultimately possible without an outright slam.
"I was just taking a swim until you got here," the older fox explained unnecessarily from his easy stance in a puddle on the cement, a male Venus arising from the sea with one paw lightly upon his masculine modesty. Distracted, he couldn't get his fluffy blond brain on task, remember what the little wolf was there to study that first time. And so wanted to leave him, weighted with backpack and lupine uncertainty, briefly there on the rear porch while the fox stepped upstairs to take care of his insolent younger brother. He cast his gaze about the back yard as if he instead were the stranger there, licked his muzzle.
"Hay, dude. Before we start, do you want a quick sw-" He was interrupted by the noisy flop of a bathing suit at his footpaws. The window overhead thunked to, with a squeak of sulking maple.
"Yo." On the moment, a reddish muzzle and ears peeked over the gate, grey fleece hood flipped up.
"Hay, Tom," the wolfboy called casually. Another fox, smaller than Tyler's petulant sib, swung into the yard, latching with a paw behind.
"Sorry, Petey. Had to pick up..." He passed the grey canid an envelope, which the wolf fumbled before tucking it nervously into the pocket of his jeans.
"Drug deal?" Tyler speculated with amused and superior curiosity.
Petey laughed, cracked painfully. "Well, payday." The necklace at his throat was jute, pawmade, a gift. Bling only of the heart.
"Is that so? What business are you and yer foxbuddy in?"
The wolf looked at his furiend as if with surprise.
"Um, security," the other fired off, suddenly.
Tyler snirked. "Security? You some kind of l33t h4xx0rz?" From the guttural consonants and exaggerated vowels - and the smirk on his muzzle - it was obvious he had lapsed into Leet.
Petey shook his head in innocent denial, caught short and without excuse. "Nooo..."
Tommy said, "Secrets. That's our line." Grinned. The wolf nodded at him, pleased and relieved. They'd never told anyone of their tale, how two young teenfurs carried a teacher, the principal, and his former secretary, all in the lucrative and greasy burlap bag of blackmail. Pwned.
"Well!" the college fox expounded ironically, "Sounds all cloak-and-dagger. Yeah. 'Security.'" In truth, the pair reminded him of a couple of British smalls pretending their tree fort to be a rocket ship. Moonraker. "So if you, Mr. Bond, and you, Mr. Steed, would find it acceptable, I suggest you both avail yourselves of a brief bathe in the..."
"Whatehfuck?" The wolfboy wasn't impressed. Nor reserved about the matter.
Tyler shook his head, sighed. Maxwell Smart and John Gadget would be more to the point. "Wanna get in the pool for a second while I go get dressed? Then we'll study. Math, right?" The issues with Jeffy had almost slipped his busy mind.
The boyfurs looked at each other, shrugged, nervous glances turning to a brief shared giggle. "Yeah, sure," the hooded fox acceded. He stooped, scooped up Jeffy's bathing suit. "Convenient: it seems to be raining shorts."
Petey coughed out, turned it to a laugh. How Tommy could read his mind with such acuity, the little grey canid couldn't understand.
"Ok. Just gimme a few minutes." Tyler turned them the shoulder, slipped lithely through the sliding door into the tastelessness of swag globes and skylights as if his passage were oiled. "Assuming my brother hasn't eaten it all, come inside after and maybe you can have ice cream," he called back.
Tom's paw was on the wolfboy's shoulder, intimate as a whisper. "You ok with this?" He knew from close acquaintance that Petey could be painfully shy.
"Sure. Why not?" The small grey canid had come already to realize that no secret could be kept from his furiend. Which didn't always sit lightly.
"Ok, then. Let's go." Tommy steered them towards the pool, chatting. The fox hadn't got the opportunity for a swim since both he and the boywolf had been detached from their gym class, an arrangement redeemingly satisfactory for both in many other ways. That the Coach himself was one of the prey of their strange extortionate scheme had forced the issue. Tommy missed sometimes the rowdy exertion of sports and competition, the open and steamy camaraderie of the shared locker room after.
But Petey had changed things in him. With him. And through him, their school - and a little bit of their worlds - had become a better place.
"I like swimming." Petey sniffed beneath one arm, matter-of-fact. "Need it too, maybe." They smirked, both knowing of the secret rites of sweaty lunchtime amusement as were practiced by boyfurs at their school, sacred mysteries for the initiates of which they had both partaken that very noontide. "I coulda been on the team, even."
The wolf looked away then. Things weren't always easy when the other fur knew more than he himself said. "I ever tell ya I watched them practice once?"
Tommy had loosed his backpack, swung it to the seat of a green plastic chair at the water's edge. "Nah. When?" He cast about, paws on his pants, seeking a secluded spot to change clothes.
"One day at lunch. Before - well, you know... I snuck in."
"Into the...? Hay, that's all off limits!" The fox had never quite gotten past his own heroic amazement at Petey's occasional daring and exploits. Infiltration. Rulebreaking.
True magic repeated never becomes institution.
The wolfboy had already tugged off his Darkfang shirt, kicked sneaks from paws, then with no further ceremony unbuttoned and unzipped. Tommy gave only a quantum glance as the boyfur's bathing suit leaped into view between gaping copper, garish fluorescent colors like the neon sail of a Hobie. He knew his friend had some unusual habits and fears.
"Yeah, I didn't realize Coach could get mad like he does. And it was 'Boy's Day', and I'm a boy, right?"
The red canid nodded. Looked about, shrugged, tore Velcro at his trainers. Two-hundred-dollar tennies were not something his parents could have ever afforded. Tommy felt funny sometimes, suspected that Petey didn't split their take evenly, divvying the wages of sin by a golden rule. He supposed that the wolf was giving him the lion's share partly because Petey had never wanted for things material. And also because the fox had so many brothers that he often lost count, and a pair of tired working-class parents from whom overtime wages and a measure of love would be his only legacy. The new bike leaning against the wall at home was almost a dream come true, a magical gift with wuffprints attached.
"So in I went." Petey drew out the story, a lupine thespian going for the dramatic jugular. "It's dark, I can't see after coming from the sun... Then I realize I'm in the school pool! First the smell gets me; it's like bleach. Eww. And wet otters - not so bad. Then I hear a whistle: Coach running them through laps. So I duck under bleachers where they can't see me, right?" The canidboy broke off, drawing footpaws from the legs of jeans, when he noticed his foxfuriend bare-assed. Though they'd been through a lot together, he'd never seen the vulpine lad quite that way before.
Tommy caught his eye. Mild. Shrugged again. Bent to pull on the strange trunks. There had been no better place to dress. He felt curiously warm and owned. Then found he didn't quite mind.
The boywolf's muzzle was suddenly dry. "Umm, so... Yeah - anyway! And there's Rocky and Chris, and like they're crouching at the side of the pool, all wet like - Oh yeah!! And Coach is having them practice, like, naked-without-any-bathing-suits, ya know..." - Here he glanced briefly at the still exposed foxboy - "And so Pockets is, like, in the water thrashing away, and, like, the other two are all smiling and whiskers, paws around muzzles, and yelling at him and... Ohmygawd! Ohmygawd! Then when he won his heat they're all, like, jumping up and down and hugging each other, all wet and nak-"
Tommy moaned ironically. "Stoppit, fur! Yer making me pudge." He had a paw on his sheath, struggling to get the borrowed trunks over eager adolescent foxness. "Naked wet squatting otterboys... Indeed!"
Petey laughed, reached out. His touch was light, strange in the unfamiliar surroundings. The fox shuddered in surprise as familiar pads brushed the underpelt of his tummy.
"I guess..." It was as if a shadow crossed unseen stars on a night a thousand years away. "I guess I'm still not used to... it. The feelings, Tom."
There was a moment while the red fox stood, adjusted himself quickly, oddly embarrassed. The paw on him had even been places more fursonal. Why it should have made him squeam, he didn't know.
Quickly, the fox unzipped his hoodie.
"Guess I'd never really seen... ya know. Other boys like that before."
Petey was somehow affected deeper than Tommy himself by the post-prandial experimental games in which they both (together with some other boyfurs, a virtual club) sometimes engaged. But exactly how and why, the fox didn't know. He had, however, learned a great lesson out of poverty and the ministrations of a certain stripey feline member of the school staff: one fur qualified to teach not useless classes but only the important things in life.
Tommy knew with all his heart that you take care of what's yours - even if it's other furs.
"Hay, look at this."
"What?" The modest wolfboy was trying to keep custody of his immodest eyes. Tommy's borrowed bathing shorts were rather tight.
"I'm grey." The fox stood in fleece-hooded sweatshirt and Jeffy's charcoal trunks. "Like you."
Petey nodded. A fox is a fox.
"I could be a wolf, too, maybe." A suggestion, half in aweful wonder. Tommy ran a paw over flat and slender chest, imagined the feel of lupine muscle there.
"Why would you want to be a wolf? Yer a fox." Petey didn't feel like he wanted to be messed with. Not after sharing what he had, trusting. Foxes just look so much prettier.
"So I could do this..." Tommy pulled him to paws, took the other canidboy in his arms. Their bare chests met, tummies and necks and cheeks and ears. He could feel Petey through their shorts, alive and fearless and quiescent in waiting for life to begin.
Later: "Mmm. Thanks. Seems sometimes the more it brings us together, the further it pushes us..." He swallowed. So did the fox.
Tommy said, "Nah. We're furiends. Nothing's gonna get in the way. Nothing. I'll always be here for ya."
And the wolf nodded. "Ok. Me too. For you. Yer my best furiend, you know that, right?"
"I do love ya, fur," the little foxboy whispered. He felt like he had grown two years in the past moment. If the unseen paws of a yellow cat, custodian at school, were on his shoulders, the red canid would simply not have wondered.
"Me too. Umm..." Tentatively the wolfboy brushed his lips against the side of the teenfox's face. Tommy accepted what was going to happen easily now, his heart bigger through their shared history than a surprise between them could possibly be. The kiss was soft and sharing, the explorings of trust and togetherness far beyond flesh and mediated thereby as sacrament. Their breathings had not sped, and their minds only silenced, as they rested with muzzles over each other's shoulders.
"Think we should get in the pool now?"
"Yeah." Petey sniffled, wiped at his face. Laughed. "Last one in's an otter's scrotum!"
Tommy squealed out a giggle, froze motionless realizing at the side of the icy pool. The wolfboy solved it by pushing him into the water, with a shout and a splash.
Jeffy knelt on the bed before the spying window, jeans and undershorts around his knees, the dark red stem of his rampant teen maleness unsheathed yet limp.
The two young canids had almost... But then they...
His wank had been utterly destroyed. Some other part of him, too, left flaccid and unfulfilled. What the foxboy witnessed in their kiss had brought more wetness to his face than moisture to his groin. He clutched his furry belly, rolling over into the aching pillow.
The tears were utterly silent, as if it hurt too much to wail.
Tyler lay still on the kitchen floor, time halted by suddenness and syncope. How he got there, the fox could hardly remember.
"Meep!" Tommy levitated laughing from the water as Petey nosed him under the tail. "Don't sneak up on me like that!" He cast about, tread water, watching for where the wolf would surface. The fox couldn't believe anyfur could hold his breath for quite so long.
The spinning was replaced by throbs. Head. Tail. His poor bruised back. Crashed in a wasteland of shattered glass, the tumbler in his paw fallen to fragments as he had turned towards the fridge. The fox didn't dare move, couldn't let the agony in his cracked skull top fragile macho imprudence. With a groan he stood, only to have an unfortunate paw slip slickly from beneath him.
The gold linoleum floor was ribboned with a smear of ice cream.
"That tailhole," he shouted in a weak whisper, stepping on shards. "Jeff's ass is mine..." Pawfists flexed as Tyler crossed the paneled hall, to the stairs.
Tommy rested his chin on the waveguard edge, paws alongside as he panted. The water was cold; he tried to catch his breath.
Petey grinned beside him. "Toldja I could beat ya!" He leaned in, licked the fox on the nose, chlorine and vulpine in equal measure. Then reached out, found the fox's ribs beneath the pelt.
When his bedroom door crashed open, Jeffy leaped onto paws, tears cooked off in surprise and sudden panic.
"Oh fucking Jeezes! What the fuck?" Tyler's brother's pants were around his dark vulpine calves, the smaller fox's penis free of his prepuce and glistening. The fox could see the boyfurs in the pool through the window over Jeffy's shoulder; it didn't take the brains of a ferret for him to realize what his young and yiffy sib had been getting up to. He experienced a rush of nausea, the dizziness of concussion and humiliating power. "Aw, Christ, lil dude, that's fuckin' perverted!"
"Get outta my room, Tyler! I don't go in yours!" Jeffy fought humiliation with rage, won tears. The last time he'd entered the other fox's bedroom, his arm had been sore for a week. It was all so unfair!
"Screw that noise, you sick fuck! You were pawing off! And spying on those guys! Christ!" Tyler would have laughed, had he not been so overwhelmingly excited instead.
"Fuck you, tailhole! I wasn't!" His face burned beneath his fur, too much like the time he had been caught likewise in the bathroom by the school janitor.
"Goddamn - I know what I saw! Jeezes-fuck, what's wrong with you?" The bigger fur danced his energy and cruel eagerness, bobbed on digigrade paws.
The boyfox's muzzle was frothy, dry with fear. "Nothing! Just get out! Get outta my room!"
Tyler strode boldly in. "Fuck you, tailwipe! I saw what you were doing! That's so sick!" He slit himself open on the knife-bright blade of righteousness, a cutter in secret moral frenzy. The taste of fraternal terror in his muzzle was joy.
The smaller fur let fly a fist. It caught his brother in the gut, winded him. Instantly Jeffy knew he was capped.
"Aw, Tyler! No, fox! Don't... I didn't mean to..." He was so going to get it when his parents came home.
And that, only if he were lucky.
The pounce knocked the foxboy to the floor in a flood of acrid wet heat and fear between his legs. Jeffy screamed.
"You listen to me, you little perv!" The enraged vulpine's fangs dripped. "I don't give a fuck how fucked up you are! And you make me fucking sick!" He twisted an arm, fought off frightened claws.
Jeffy wanted to barf, worked the free paw protectively over his terrorized gonads. Moaned at the tender bruising there.
"You strut around like you own this goddamn place! Like your tail is gold and your sheath doesn't stink! You're always moaning and whining and trying to get your own selfish way! Mom and Dad hate it! And I'm sick of it, too! Fucking sick!"
"Naw, Tyler! No!" Jeffy trembled on the carpet, begging beneath his brother's onslaught. Wanted to plead, offer up humiliation; but held onto self, knew he was condemning own fur to a worse beating. There was an emptiness in his attacker, something that looked only too much like what he felt within, so often when he thought of his family.
"You don't pick up your room, you little prick; you don't pick up your clothes. You leave the bathroom so disgusting that I'm afraid somefur who comes over will gross out or something! Mom and Dad are always having to get after you, and me too! You never do the dishes when you get home. And you spilt stuff on the floor today and I damned near killed myself!!"
The younger fox was shaking, bright horror in his eyes brightened still further by tears of pain. And need. He'd never seen his brother so frightening before. So frightened, himself. Will had almost left him, and it was too late to escape.
"Please..."
Then the pads of a paw caught him in the muzzle, and blood speckled the wall.
Petey's paws were on the pool rim, either side of Tommy, who had turned to face him. Nuzzles turned to kisses, to a gentle seeking with tongues. He brought his belly close to the fox's, felt heat through the vulpine's borrowed trunks, firmness. Confidence. The warm furry torso between his arms, his friend's fuzzy lats cradled in the crooks of his elbows.
They blushed and giggled at their mutual boldness, at what had overcome them both in such strange and unprivate surroundings.
Jeffy sat on the corner of his bed, pants restored though dark with evidence of his incontinent shame. A cold cloth was held to his muzzle by one weak paw.
Tyler glowered, paced. Threw himself on the garage-sale beanbag, merciless, with psychedelic frustration. Trying to bank the rage, he looked for himself within sought torment. Gnashed fangs. It was all so mixed up inside!
"Thorry about the floor."
The big fox snorted. "What the fuck's wrong with you? Huh?" Unebbed anger was fermenting to a still worse and bitter corruption. "You act like a shit, and Mom and Dad can't do nothing at all with you!"
"They don't care." Petulance laced with honesty, a family Kool-Aid of the most poison kind to drink.
"Teh fuck. You don't care."
"Tyler..."
The fox didn't respond.
"Tyler, look at me." The boyfur's eye had begun to swell, and his chin was dark and stained. "Do they even love you? Do they?"
"Shit!" The other fox rose, gulped guilt and honesty. Paced again. The weakness of hate given in-to had left him vulnerable. And his little brother knew just where to strike.
Then he put his paw through the sheetrock.
"I didn't think so." Jeffy was cool, unnervingly so. His sibling wrung sore knuckles, wiped gypsum on his jeans.
"They don't love me either, Tyler. I know that now. It finally makes sense. And that's why I feel like this. Or don't feel it. They're so off in their own world, so... Tied up in... whatever." Imperfect words for a revelation too dangerous to experience in full.
Tyler shook his head, swallowed back emotions, the anger and insecurity, the jealous need and quivering abandonment. Which came out anyway, he so suddenly lost and far from home. "I feel like I'm just a distraction to them sometimes. Like a toy they once wanted, but got tired of too soon." The fox didn't understand how his brother could be bringing this all up from inside him, too; how he himself could be so defenseless to that confusing fur. Hung his head, resting on the wall. Wanting it all to stop. Blessed it that it continue. The admissions poured out of him like his sib's terrorized enuresis mere moments ago.
"Yeah. Me too. Their marriage is them first, not me. They even say that all the time.
"It's so fucking lonely."
"Watch yer muzzle, small." A growl from habit. Then he couldn't even remember when he'd dropped to carelessly into riding his younger brother so. "Yeah, it is. Lonely. Is that why you were...?" Tyler motioned with his muzzle to the window, euphemized the dying discovery. "Watching?"
The boyfox nodnodded hotly, eyes clear and red-honest and free of shame. "I can't believe how much it looks like they love each other - those two guys. They must. I can't even imagine what that must feel like." He sniffled back tears, whimpered, began to cry freely. Drops pattered onto his dark forepaws. He was so beyond self-deceit that the tears felt icy cold.
Tyler snorted. "Aw, fuck, lil bro..." And then he was on the bed too, cradling Jeffy in his arms. It was awkward, guilt and his own weakness jumping eagerly to the distraction, as he realized that his parents would surely have something severe in store for him when they found out about the beating. He felt no more secure and privileged in his home life that did his brother. "I've never been on a date, you know that? If there's love in the world, I don't know what it even feels like either." His late sorrow stained the otherfur's ears.
"Bro, please..." Jeffy winced as he opened his battered muzzle, sought his sib's mouth. "I wanna know what it feels like. Love."
"Getting cold here," Tommy said with a shiver. Water flew from his icy whiskers. "I think I'd better get dry."
Petey meeped, a little disappointed. He'd worked up a righteous good boner in the tight of his slick nylon swim briefs, moved away protectively as the fox climbed stiffly out of the pool.
"Didn't Tyler say they had ice cream?" Tommy was squeegeeing his fur with paws. He was without a towel, too.
"I thought you said you were cold..."
When the fox bent over to remove borrowed trunks, Petey didn't feel cheated in the least.
"Are you sure about this, lil bro?" Tyler's voice was coaxing yet cool, more tremulous for his own uncertainty and need than over doubts about his sibling's consent. It had taken a few moments for him to come around, to get past the twin habits of using and of fear. Some weeping, too.
Now they lay together, jeans wet and whitened shucked off onto the floor.
"It's love isn't it?" Desperation, anticipation, trembling in the younger fox's quivering adolescent voice.
What if medicine is the thing that makes you sicker, and affection what hurts the most?
"Isn't it?" Jeffy couldn't bear that thought.
In the cyclic agony of self-torment, the introspective Night which lasts forever, he had found his lonely meaning; it had all come together as the foxboy cried. If there would ever be love in his life, Jeffy knew he would first have to find it within. And without help from those very two who most owed him that sweet debt.
He sighed at the sadness, braced for impossibility.
Yet only blood can teach first openness, that quintessential trust, and without the gift as a free gift, he knew with all his soul that he would never grow to be loveable by those not of his own fur and family.
He stared into the cloudiness of his brother's eyes, needing beyond hope, beyond will to survive.
Tyler shook his head. "I don't know that there's love in it at all. I'm not sure I could feel it, even." He sniffied, swallowed. The lump in his throat was enormous. "And I don't even know that there's love inside me.
"But my heart, it wants for something, too."
Petey snickered silently as Tommy closed the door, they both tiptoed quietly away. Sat on the lavarock fireplace. Tupperware bowls of Hagen-Daz were in their paws, bamboo-handled spoons in their fists.
"The ice cream is in the kitchen," the little grey wolf giggled.
"But they've taken all the milkshakes to their room!"