Fishy Queen (Drag Queen Beauty Pageant Book 2)

by Malachite Splinters

  “I’m just saying…”

  “No,” he licked his lips, his eyes blazing. “You can’t just say. You don’t know me. I’m not like you, and you can’t handle that. Can you?” He was panting slightly. “I like women. And I like being fucked. But I’ll go the other way and top just as easily.”

  He topped? Anthony topped?

  I winced with sudden, unexpected arousal.

  I had never expected to hear that. I shifted in my seat, praying that my inner thoughts didn’t show on my face.

  “The world says it doesn’t work that way,” Anthony was still talking, and all I wanted to do was grab him and—and—

  “You can’t handle evidence to the contrary,” he continued angrily. “Well, I’m your evidence. Judge me all you want. I’m not going to change just because you don’t like it.”

  I liked it, though.

  I liked it a lot. I liked it too much.

  He was different. He was different from any other man I had liked. Different from any other man I had ever wanted.

  He was special. And maybe part of what made him special was this—this orientation that he constantly insisted he had. He definitely had a special way of looking at things.

  That was what I liked so much about him.

  I suddenly felt like I was going to cry, and I had no idea where that came from, but I liked him so much. So, so much.

  “Alec,” I said. “My first boyfriend, you know. This was in freshman year of college. He was there on a football scholarship. He grew up poor, he came from a really bad neighborhood, he had been in foster care some. So this was such a big deal… such a great opportunity. And it was so much pressure on him, he was terrified he was going to mess up.”

  I could see him in my mind’s eye as I spoke, his powerful frame, his big hands, broad nose, high cheekbones, thick eyebrows. He had carried a little more fat than Angel, it softened up the hard edges of muscle into undulating curves where the light reflected off his skin. Lord, he had been beautiful.

  “So I did most of his academic work for him,” I ran my finger across my eyebrow.

  “Did you ever get caught?” Anthony asked, sounding surprised.

  I shook my head. “I saw him through. Almost all the way through. He got a new girlfriend who was a really good student, so that lightened my load, I guess. His previous girlfriend was, um. Not the most academic.”

  “So, wait…” Anthony said.

  “Yes, he had girlfriends,” I said. “And now he has a wife. I told you he was straight, didn’t I?”

  “So you were…” Anthony trailed off.

  “At first we—he—ignored me in public. He said people would get suspicious. We had to have this system for seeing each other. But over time he agreed to pretend I was tutoring him. That sort of made it easier. Also I moved off-campus, that helped a lot having my own place.”

  I scratched the back of my head. I hadn’t thought about this in so much detail in years. Actually, I had never told anyone these details before.

  “I just needed the sex so much,” I muttered. “He was really big and,” I gulped. “It was such a big fucking turn on.”

  I looked up nervously to find Anthony gazing at me and I felt the force of the electricity crackle through me like I had just touched a live wire.

  Anthony licked his lips and I stared.

  “So is that all it was?” He asked. “Just sex?”

  “It wasn’t just sex,” I said. “It was really, really good sex. Like…” I trailed off. I looked down at the table again, pressing my lips together. I wanted to throw in a bunch of adjectives and metaphors of how good it actually was.

  And it had been good. We were young. At times it felt insatiable. I lost track of the number of times we went all night in between playing video games or watching movies and fell asleep when it got light out.

  And most importantly, he loved sucking dick. He would jump me the minute he got in the door.

  But all of that wasn’t what came out of my mouth.

  “I was in love with him,” I said quietly. “I would have done anything for him. I was sure that eventually, he would realize he loved me too and,” I crossed my arms. “He would realize he was gay and he would break up with his girlfriend and he would—” My voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “He would call me his boyfriend.”

  I had never admitted this to anyone before. I always just told people that I dated a linebacker in college and made sure to tell them his vital statistics, six foot three, two hundred and fifty pounds, benchpress—well, I wasn’t sure exactly how much it was, but it sure looked heavy when I timed my gym visits to match his.

  That was a real turn-on.

  But… yeah. I had always focused on that.

  “I was sure we were going to get married… I thought about it all the time. I thought we would get married, have kids…”

  “Why did you think that?” He said, rather abruptly.

  I looked up at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “He wouldn’t even acknowledge you in public, and you thought you were going to get married?”

  “He was different when we were alone,” I said defensively. “He told me about his problems. He…”

  “Oh, yeah, sounds like he had a lot of problems,” Anthony rolled his eyes.

  I smarted. Anthony was judging me?

  “What do you know,” I muttered. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see how he acted.”

  “How he acted shows he was an asshole,” Anthony retorted. “Why did you let him treat you that way?”

  My head snapped up and I met his eyes.

  Didn’t he understand?

  I would have done anything for Alec. I would have given him everything. But he didn’t want me to do anything. He didn’t want my everything. He didn’t want the things I was offering. He didn’t want me.

  “How long did this go on for?”

  “We were together for three years,” I replied.

  “Together,” Anthony remarked, just saying that one word.

  He was right. It hadn’t been a real relationship. I had known that for a long time, I knew it while it was going on, but I didn’t want to face it.

  “How did it end?” He asked.

  “They got engaged,” I said. “He said he wanted to do right by her and he couldn’t see me any more.” I sighed. “I was so heartbroken… He lied, though. He did still want to see me. And I still kept sleeping with him for another year.”

  Anthony frowned. “At what point in the three years did he get engaged?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “At the end. I just didn’t consider us to be together after that. I considered myself his… I don’t know, there’s only the female word, mistress.”

  “What a jerk,” Anthony muttered.

  I had stopped defending Alec years ago, even in my own mind. But at the time, I would have fought to the death to justify his actions.

  “I just kept hoping,” I said. “It wasn’t like it was unheard of. The linebacker on his team was with a guy from the swim team. Like, normal, open, out, with. Like matching tuxes at the award ceremony dinner at the end of the year. So why couldn’t he do it?”

  “I told myself I was fine with being discreet, that was how he always put it. I always said I was proud of being gay, but now that I think about it… hiding it made it seem like there must be a reason to be hiding it… something to be ashamed of…” I swallowed. “I’ve never talked about this before.”

  He frowned. “About what?”

  “About Alec. I—I always gave the impression we were a couple like the linebacker and the swimmer. Even though I didn’t have the pictures to prove it.”

  “Never like never?” Anthony frowned.

  I nodded, unable to meet his eyes.

  “Who’s—who’s your closest friend?”

  I glanced at him. “Damaris.”

  “And she doesn’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh.” He was silent. “Why are y
ou telling me?”

  “You asked,” I pointed out. “You said you wanted the truth about gay sex. Well, I’m telling the truth.”

  For once.

  “So, what lesson am I supposed to take from that?” He was frowning.

  “Life is hard? Shit happens? Love isn’t a fairy tale? You can’t just expect it to be like the movies?”

  “What movies?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Romantic movies?”

  “I don’t know if you noticed,” Anthony raised his eyebrows. “But things don’t tend to end too well for the gay people in those movies.”

  I scoffed. “Fine. So the movies are right, then.”

  “You really believe that?” He was looking at me hard.

  “Believe that in real life, gay relationships usually end with the suicide, murder or otherwise tragic death of one or both of the queers in question?” I asked, sarcastic myself now.

  I knew full well that was how non-straight movies ended, and had ended, since cinema began.

  “Of course I don’t believe that,” I said. “What’s your point?”

  He was flushing with frustration. “This is exactly what I asked you the other night.”

  I remembered. He had asked me about love.

  When he saw me outside the bathroom at House of Cosmosis, I remembered what he said. Who wants to date a cold, heartless snake like you?

  Good question.

  I remembered what Angel and César had said to each other in the black reflective bathroom. I need you, I’m scared to lose you, I’m in love with you.

  I love you.

  “Angel never told me he loved me,” I said. And I had never said it either, even though I felt it.

  Anthony didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

  “After Alec, I lost…” I paused. I didn’t want to start crying. In front of him? But in my dream last night, I had. “I stopped believing in those dreams.”

  “Marriage and kids?” Anthony asked.

  I shrugged. “It sounds so reductive when you put it that way,” I muttered.

  “I wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to,” he started, then stopped. “I just mean—” He shook his head. “I’ll just not say anything,” he said. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “That’s not what I meant. I— I want you to. Um. Talk.”

  “You do?”

  Our eyes met and I looked away, feeling very uncertain. He was acting different. Let’s just say he had never asked me for advice before.

  I felt the urge, the same urge from earlier when he asked me to go out and eat with him. The urge to lash out and cut him down. That way I would know where I stood and make sure it was above him.

  I wasn’t going to do that. Right now I felt that it would hurt me just as much as him for me to do that.

  So I sat there with the uncertainty still going strong within me. I felt awkward, my body didn’t know what to do with itself. I didn’t know what to say. But before I knew what was happening, I was talking.

  “I lied to myself with Alec and with Angel, too. When I met Angel I was still mad about Alec. It was years since I saw Alec, but I couldn’t get over it. I tried to forget about him with everything. School, work, drag, partying, hook ups. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, so I just worked more instead. When I met Angel, I did the same thing I did with Alec. I just started fantasizing that we would have this perfect relationship and get married, even though reality didn’t support that. I believed it was love but now I don’t think it was.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “No, I know it wasn’t. I was just too scared to face what it meant if it wasn’t. That would make me twenty-seven years old and…”

  I couldn’t say the final words. That would make me twenty-seven years old and never having been loved. Having been in relationships based on lies. Relationships that turned out to be meaningless.

  And the implication, which I kept trying to turn away from like the sun trying to burn my eyes.

  The implication, that if one part of my life was a lie, then what if other things were, too? If these cold, hard facts about my love life had been revealed, what else was waiting to come into focus, like animals camouflaged, coming into view when the eye adjusted?

  What if the rest of my life was just a house of cards, waiting to collapse and scatter?

  A touch on my arm. I looked. It was Anthony’s hand, resting lightly on my skin. I raised my eyes and looked at him. Our eyes met. My heart beat, one resonant beat like it was sending out waves through my body.

  Anthony looked back at me, blinked once. Then he said, “You look like you need a hug.”

  He stood up, his chair scraping on the kitchen floor, and stepped toward me, reaching out his arms and encircling my shoulder with one arm, my flank with the other.

  I accepted it, I raised my arms and they touched his back. He felt as fragile as he looked. My skin tingled at the contact with his racerback tank top and, just slightly, his exposed shoulder blade on one side.

  Nothing else touched. The angle was awkward, with me sitting in the chair. He drew back and remained there, looking at me with one hand on my shoulder.

  For some crazy reason I thought he was about to bend down and kiss me.

  Instead he took a step back, sat back down and started putting on the new kicks, lacing them up carefully and neatly.

  “So what do you want to do?” He asked, still lacing, head down. “Since Damaris isn’t here?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know why I had that thought about him kissing me. It was stupid. Ridiculous. I didn’t know where that had come from.

  My heart was still resonating, emanating out through the rest of me, up through my head and down through my hands and feet.

  And the tender place deep in my ribcage, somewhere not far away from my heart, was being vibrated by its beating and the way it felt, sensitive and trembling, made me bite my lip.

  “Let’s,” I said, and it felt strange to be saying that word with him, “go eat and we can decide then.”

  “I don’t want to be in that studio all day,” Anthony said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Okay.”

  “Can we just go for a walk or something?”

  “You want to go for a walk?” I was tempted to ask how that was going to help him prepare for his audition, but I managed to resist.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I want you to explain some things. And I want to see the neighborhood. I’ve never been to this part of the city before.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I got my wallet and keys and as we went out the door, I felt like things had gone much differently than I would have ever expected.

  I thought they had gone better, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think they had gone worse.

  The fact that I couldn’t tell, that was…

  That was the really different thing, I guessed.

  “Why did we need to be here early?”

  It was Monday evening, and Miss Clarion Call had just walked in the door of the back studio.

  I had texted the new girls to ask them to show up a half hour earlier today, at six-thirty instead of seven.

  Duane Tyrone was going to come and watch the rehearsal today and I didn’t want him to be the first face they all saw when they walked in the door.

  Before I could answer, Clarion Call walked past and commented. “You shouldn’t do that, you know.”

  I looked up in silent disbelief.

  I maintained the pressure on Anthony’s knees.

  Clarion slung his gym bag on the floor next to the pile of mats and turned around to us, his hand on his hip and a take out coffee cup in his hand. “It’s really bad for the knee joints.”

  I looked at him coolly. “My gymnastics coach used to do this to us to improve our flexibility at the start of every class.”

  “It’s not done any more,” he said, the slightest glare coming into his eyes.

  I held his eyes steadily and didn’t remov
e my hands from Anthony’s knees.

  “Machyl,” Anthony said quietly.

  I looked at him and relaxed my grip immediately, sitting back on my haunches. He changed his position to a different stretch, then turned around and looked at Clarion. “Hey,” he said shortly.

  “Evening, beautiful,” Clarion’s expression transformed completely and he smiled charmingly down at Anthony.

  Excuse me?

  If I wasn’t mistaken, hadn’t Clarion Blackwood just ended it with Anthony this morning?

  Anthony looked taken aback, but responded with a tight smile. He looked even more alarmed when Clarion came straight over and sat down next to him on the floor.

  I felt the immediate instinct to tell him to fuck off, and that startled me so much, it was like someone had just clapped next to my ear unexpectedly.

  Also, I was still sitting pretty much right in front of Anthony, so now we were all awkwardly close together. Clarion obviously thought I would give way and let him.

  He thought he just had the right to come in and interrupt like that. If they had actually been dating then I would have given them the space out of respect. But they weren’t dating.

  So what was he doing?

  I started getting up, to get the tracks queued on my laptop, then stopped. I wasn’t about to be pushed out by this milky freckled gingersnap. I sat back and crossed my legs and settled in.

  “So how was your day?” Clarion inquired sweetly, and half-raised his arm as if he was about to touch Anthony’s face.

  Anthony looked even more taken aback, but he didn’t move away or anything. He just kind of sat there, smiling in an embarrassed way.

  “Hola chickies!” Lucky Penny burst in the door. “Sorry, I forgot the time was changed. Ooh, is it a pow-wow?”

  I turned. He dumped his bag and came toward us, sitting down next to me so we were all sitting in a kind of circle on the floor.

  He beamed around, lifting his shoulders excitedly. “So what’s going on?”

  “We’re not doing that fourth number,” Clarion Call declared.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Excuse me?

  “It doesn’t suit my character,” Clarion rubbed his fingers up and down the shaved undercut on the back of his head. “Clarion Call would not be doing that shit.”