by L.H. Cosway
I push back my initial instinct to tell him I wouldn't mind cuddling him if I could trust him not to drop the hand in the process. Ever since we met I've found him to be overly tactile, always touching the places that send my adrenaline soaring. The small of my back, the spot below my ear, the inside of my wrist..Okay, I'm turning myself on here. Who would have thought that a drag queen could be my ultimate male fantasy?
“It will probably be sunny, so it won't get too cold,” I say, pushing back the imagery of the two of us alone in a tiny tent.
Nicholas lets out a loud guffaw of a laugh, and I don't know what I've said that he's found so funny. I keep asking him for the next few minutes, but he just shakes his head and wipes happy tears from the corners of his eyes. Annoyed by whatever private joke he's harbouring about me, probably something to do with my prudish embarrassment, I sigh and go about cleaning up the dressing room.
Just before he takes to the stage, Nicholas suggests that I go out and sit at the front of the audience to enjoy a drink. He says I worked hard enough today and that I deserve a break. He doesn't have to tell me twice. I grab a glass of white wine from the bar and hustle back to the stage where I swiftly sit myself down at a table of rowdy, pretty men.
I chat with them amiably and tell them that I'm Vivica Blue's executive assistant, even though I have no clue what exactly an executive assistant is, nor what one does. Their eyes all light up when they hear I know Nicholas and they immediately begin to pester me with questions about him and his ambiguous sexual orientation.
In layman's terms, they want to know if he's gay, straight or bi. I'd feel bad having to break it to them that he doesn't bat for their team, so in the spirit of keeping things mysterious I tap the side of my nose and give them the old “Now, now, wouldn't you like to know” routine. I'm sure Nicholas would thank me for preserving his mystique as a performer. The prospect of him being gay or bisexual is likely what keeps the place teeming with male punters on the nights of his gigs.
When Nicholas' set begins he comes out singing Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots Are Made For Walkin'”. He laughs as he sings and gives me a wink, before pointing down at his black leather boots. He's clearly singing the song intentionally to tease me about how crap I am with a heel any thicker than an inch and a half.
After a couple of songs he does a skit where he changes his whole outfit in front of the audience. I'd been wondering why he got me to leave a purple dress and a pair of custom made, red soled Louboutins by the side of the stage before he went on. I spent a while marvelling at how he managed to get a pair in his size. They must have cost him a pretty penny.
He cleverly manoeuvres himself out of the boots, seductively zipping them down while the audience whistles and cheers him on. He slips on the Louboutins and then pulls a shy looking guy in his early twenties up onto the stage and gets him to help him out of his corset. The guy's entire face goes red as a tomato as he fumbles with the complicated buckles, while Nicholas cheekily teases him not to be taking a peek. At long last he's in his new outfit and he continues with the second half of the gig.
For the final song of the set The Wilting Willow sit idly and watch as Nicholas prepares to sing a capella. The entire club is reduced to hushed whispers once Miss Vivica Blue's demeanour turns serious.
“This last song is about love, it's sad but it's real. I'd like to dedicate it to my new home and the wonderful friends I've made, who have welcomed me with open arms and made me feel like I've always been here. This one's called “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”.
Nicholas' voice echoes around the silent club, eerily filling the space despite the fact that it's only him singing. I look up at him and he catches me with his eyes, like he always does when our gazes meet. He holds me there, like a prisoner, as goosebumps wash over my skin with the haunting lyrics. He sings each word with meaning, as though he wrote the song himself and felt every moment of the love and tragedy that the story tells. He continues singing, but comes and sits down right in front of me on the edge of the stage.
I sat within the valley green, I sat me with my true love
My sad heart strove the two between, the old love and the new love
The old for her, the new that made me think on Ireland dearly
While soft the wind blew down the glen and shook the golden barley
When he says the word “golden” he reaches down and drifts a hand through my hair. My entire body comes alive, like he's singing for me and only me. Like the hundred odd people packed into the club aren't here at all. It's just the two of us.
While sad I kissed away her tears, my fond arms round her flinging
The foeman's shot burst on our ears from out the wildwood ringing
A bullet pierced my true love's side in life's young spring so early
And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley
He's so caught up in the song now, caught up in the story, that an actual tear runs down his face. God, he really is good at this, I think to myself. My eyes go a little watery too. He can put so much genuine feeling into his voice. He shouldn't be singing in some obscure little club in Dublin, he should be on a proper stage, sharing his wonderful voice and his ability to convey emotion with the world. Suddenly, when Nicholas gets to the final verse, people in the audience begin singing along with him.
But blood for blood without remorse I've taken at Oulart Hollow
And laid my true love's clay cold corpse where I full soon may follow
As round her grave I wander drear, noon, night and morning early
With breaking heart when ever I hear the wind that shakes the barley.
When he's finished singing, quiet encapsulates the building, before people rise to give him a standing ovation. Nicholas bows three times, blows me a discreet kiss and disappears behind the red velvet curtains. I say goodbye to the men I'd been sitting with and make my way to the dressing room.
Once there, I find Nicholas sitting by the mirror, having already made a start on removing his make-up. His mood is sombre, perhaps he's still feeling the after effects of the song. It's an iconic Irish Sean Nós song, but I'm surprised he knew it at all since he normally sings songs from musicals or big band numbers.
Then a realisation hits me like a ton of bricks. He sat and sang an Irish song to me, just like he sang the Italian inspired song to Dorotea last week. Oh no. Disappointment fills my gut as I think how despite the heartfelt story of tragic love he told, it was all just a ploy to get me to sleep with him. After all, the same thing worked a treat with Dorotea. I'm such an idiot for getting so taken in by it all. A mixture of sadness and anger fills me as I step forward and carefully remove his wig, not breathing a word.
He watches the movements of my hands in the mirror, as he swipes the make-up wipe across his cheek. I take out all the clips that had been keeping his hair in place beneath the wig. His gaze is speculative, like he doesn't know how to broach a conversation with me.
God, I'm so ridiculously upset with him right now, and it takes everything that's in me not to burst into tears and flee the room like the cliché of a spurned admirer. I really am just another potential fuck to him, some stupid girl he thinks he can manipulate into bed with an emotional song and a fake tear or two. He played Dorotea like a fucking piano. I'm not going to go the same way.
“Why did you sing that song?” I ask him finally, after a silence that was beginning to feel like it would go on forever.
“I wanted to pay respects to the country I'm trying to make my home,” Nicholas answers after thinking about it for a second. His brow furrows slightly as he regards me.
“And why did you sit by the edge of the stage and sing it directly to me, touching my hair like it meant something?” I keep my voice steady. It's difficult but I just about manage it.
Nicholas looks at me long and hard now, no trace of his usual humour on his face. “It's a show Fred,” he answers low and soft. “I was giving the audience a show.”
“S
o it's all fake then?” I go on, steeling myself for what he might say next.
He looks away and stares up at the ceiling for a minute. “Not all of it, but I do act. It's all a part of the performance. Do you think I mean it when I blow kisses to the men in the audience and flirt with them? I'll admit I feel things when I sing, lots of lyrics hold meaning for me, but 95% of what I do on stage isn't real Fred. I'm Vivica Blue up there, not Nicholas.”
“Right, I think I get it now,” I reply, my jaw tight.
He puts his hand on mine, stopping me from removing the final few clips from his hair. “Do you Fred?”
“Yes, what you do on stage is a performance, it doesn't mean anything.”
“It's entertainment Fred, and I am an entertainer. This is what I do. It's what I've always done. I wouldn't know how to be any other way.”
His words hurt me, because I know what he's really trying to say. He's telling me that he can't be changed. He'll continue to shag his way from woman to woman just like he always has. And yes, I'll admit that somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to be special to him, different from all of the other women who've turned his head. Isn't that what every girl wants? To be loved by someone uniquely, to make a man feel something he hasn't yet felt for anyone else.
The female need for true love is a fickle bitch. It forces itself into your life and shapes your actions, always driving you to find that one guy who'll love you unconditionally. Some of us seek it in the worst of places too, in soulless pubs and night clubs filled with guys who can't see past their own shallow egos, who only see the surface of a woman. They don't look for what's underneath because they don't want that; they want the aesthetic, the long hair and the tight little dresses.
Nicholas is no different really. I want him to be more than just some flirty straight drag queen. I want him to be the one. Unfortunately, I think I'm cursed to be one of those women who sees “the one” in the wrong one.
We barely speak after that, just quietly pack up the last of his things. When we get back to the apartment building he goes inside his place and I go inside mine. Tonight has been a cold slap of reality, if nothing else. I just need to enjoy being friends with Nicholas, let him boost my confidence with his flirting and quit harbouring unrealistic romantic ideas about him.
The next day I'm like a zombie. The noise of the blender as I mix the cupcake frosting makes me want to act out Nora's fantasy and take a hammer to the bloody thing. I think I'm going to have to bake my cupcakes on Thursday evenings before I go to the club with Nicholas and refrigerate them, because getting up to make them in the early hours of the morning is going to mean I'm consistently cranky on Fridays.
They won't be as fresh as they usually are, but at least I won't mess up the icing as badly as I am now. I've just dropped a massive blob of vanilla onto the kitchen floor. I crankily get down on my hands and knees to wipe it up.
When I arrive at the charity shop, Theresa greets me with a nice cup of coffee and it wakes me up a little better.
“You're looking tired today, Freda. Late night last night was it?” she asks, looking fresh as a daisy. The cow. I'm jealous of her full night's sleep. I only got about two hours, since I spent a while wallowing in misery over my realisation that Nicholas isn't going to be the love of my life like I subconsciously wanted him to be. Mournfully, I relived how exquisitely he kissed me and made me come, and then fretted over how I'm not going to get to experience that again.
“Yes, I've got a new job in a night club,” I tell Theresa, bringing myself back to the present. I avoid going into detail about being a drag queen's assistant so as to avoid her questions. I don't want to talk about Nicholas right now.
“Goodness, you're going to end up working yourself to death,” she tuts like a mother hen.
“Not necessarily. When you add up all the hours I work in my three jobs it's more or less the same as the usual 40 hour week most people do. The hours are just a little all over the place. But I don't mind, it keeps me busy. I'll probably sleep this afternoon when I finish my shift here though. I'm going to be tired until I get used to the new routine.”
“True,” Theresa agrees. “Oh, by the way, a young man came in here yesterday looking for you.”
“Oh yeah, it was probably Harry. What did he look like?”
She puts her hand on her hip and squishes up her face as though trying to remember. You'd swear she saw him ten years ago instead of yesterday.
“Blond hair, medium height, glasses, a bit of a stern expression.”
Her answer causes my stomach to drop and air to gush right out of my mouth in a gasp. Christ on a fucking bike. That does not sound at all like Harry. There's only one person I know fitting that description, the stern expression gave it away. My ex Aaron. How on earth did he find me? I know Dublin's hardly the biggest city in the world, but he lives in the suburbs and I don't have a Facebook page.
The only people who know where I work and live are my family and my small group of friends. I know this sounds crazy, but I actually google myself regularly out of paranoia, just to make sure nothing pops up that I didn't manage to erase.
Aaron never hurt me, but he was possessive to the extreme, and not in a sexy way. One time he wouldn't allow me to leave his house and he locked me in for several hours before finally agreeing to let me go. I had to sit in his living room and watch as he manically paced back and forth, ranting about how I didn't value our relationship the way he did.
I don't even know why I went out with him in the first place. I was never even remotely attracted to him. He looked halfway between a computer nerd and a poster child for Nazi Germany. He has this starkly blond hair and eyebrows. We met at a college party for some society we were both members of and he was just really pushy, asking me to go out to dinner with him.
If you've ever been to college you'll know that it's the one time in your life when you meet the biggest amount of weirdos. I experienced everything from sociopaths to narcissists to plain and simple psychopaths. The only reason I agreed to go out with Aaron was because I'd been single for so long and wanted to show people that I wasn't a closeted lesbian. Some girl who didn't like me had started up a rumour.
Anyway, I'd only planned on going out on a few dates with him, but he stuck to me like glue. There was no getting rid of him. He'd show up after almost all of my classes, take me to lunch, walk me home at the end of the day. It was suffocating.
Now, I know what you're probably thinking. What makes me so special that some guy would be that crazy about me? There lies the rub. There was nothing particularly special about me. Aaron was just one of those guys who fixated on a single girl and became obsessed with her. Lucky me, I happened to be that one girl.
I cannot believe that after three years he's still on the hunt. Suddenly I'm remembering the time after I'd told him I was breaking up with him, and he'd marched into his kitchen and started smashing plates and cups onto the floor like a nutter, calling me a slut and a whore. He clearly has some undiagnosed psychological condition where he develops these attachments to people he can't let go of.
My heart is thumping way too fast and I think I can feel a panic attack coming on. Theresa gives me a strange look as I excuse myself and run to the bathroom. I sit in there for about fifteen minutes, trying to calm myself down.
Various horrific scenarios run through my head. Like what if he's gone even more do-lally in the three years that have passed since we broke up? What if he breaks into my apartment and threatens me with a knife? Or says he's going to kill himself if we can't be together? Actually, I think he tried that one when we were together. As you can imagine, he's not the kind of person you want to have obsessed with you.
Finally, I manage to pull myself together and go back out to the shop, but I'm well and truly shaken for the rest of the day.
Chapter Nine
Lady Suits and Locked Bathroom Doors
Two weeks go by, within which I find myself constantly looking at the people who are walking b
ehind me, paranoid that I'll see Aaron somewhere. Every time a new customer comes into the shop my heart jumps in case it's him.
He doesn't turn up though, and I begin to think that it might not have been him who asked for me that time at all. Perhaps it was just some customer I'd been chatting to who wanted to follow up about a purchase. One who bore a freaky resemblance to my old boyfriend. Yes it's unlikely, but I latch on to the easy explanation as it's the only way to retain my sanity.
When I spend time working with Nicholas we seem to find a platonic middle ground, which both of us stick to rigidly. I think he knows he hurt my feelings before, so he's being very careful not to lead me on again. I'm a one man kind of woman, but he's not a one woman kind of man. Obviously, any tryst we might have had would never have worked out.
I help him set his apartment up properly and unpack all of the boxes, because he wants to have a belated house warming party on Sunday night. His second bedroom is practically an oversized wardrobe now, with all of his costumes stored in it. He gives me a check for my first two weeks working with him, including that first Saturday night, and it's far more money than I expected. I try to get him to write another check for less, but there's no budging him.
“You're a pleasure to be around Fred. Take the money, you deserve it,” he says casually, waving away my protests.
I grudgingly slip the check into the pocket of my jeans and say no more about it. The idea that he's paying me to spend time with him doesn't sit right with me, but I bite my tongue. I'm his employee first and foremost, and that will just have to do.
I have to cancel going to visit my parents on the day of Nicholas' party, because I agreed to cater it for him. I have a chat with Mum on the phone for a while and she tells me how her ankle is all healed up now. She's the only person who knows about my past with Aaron, but I haven't mentioned that he might be looking for me again because I don't want to worry her. She's older now, and I'm afraid the stress might make her sick.