“I know,” I said. “So how is it different, exactly?”
He pursed his lips when he caught my tone, but then his face fell and his eyes took on a puppy dog cast. He glanced at me.
“You don’t know?”
Don’t make me out to be the villain here. He was looking like a kicked puppy and making those big eyes.
“I normally,” he said, digging into his gelato and swirling the spoon slowly, “abide by the expression Don't shit where you eat.”
I raised my eyebrows. Charming.
“I would never screw anyone at work,” he said. “And drag is, you know, another work, kind of.” He glanced at me, tried to offer a smile. “Fun work,” he clarified. “And of course, I mean, I would normally just go with DT’s rule. It makes sense. You know? Avoid the drama that goes with a bunch of queens fucking each other.”
He looked into my eyes with he said fucking and I had to squeeze my legs together, bite my lip and try to do anything I could to stop myself from starting to really get aroused in this gelato café at four in the afternoon.
I was tense as a bowstring, my whole body poised, frozen, staring at the wood grain of the tabletop, as the memory of last night flooded through me.
The way I had moved against him, on the edge of wanton, and he had groaned into my ear as if his self-control was hanging by a thread.
I didn’t nod or reply. Just traced a pattern on the small table with my fingernail.
“So,” I said, grasping for anything—anything that would get me out of this moment in my head. My face was hot and I thanked God that my emotions didn’t broadcast on my face the way they did on his. “What are you trying to say? You just said you don’t date people at work.”
He was going pink again. The longer I looked at him, looked into his brown eyes, that unusual shade which clashed with his dark hair and eyebrows, the darker his blush got, until he was completely red. He swallowed and I saw his Adam’s apple jump jerkily. “You’re the exception.”
The goosebumps were back, like nerve endings firing up and down my skin, and I shivered. I licked my lips nervously and his eyes fixed on my mouth, and he did the same thing.
“I meant what I said last night,” he said. “I—I should have said it differently. I mean, built up to it.” His gaze dropped and he started to touch the table top as well, so I took my hands and put them under my thighs.
“You know, just asked you out or whatever. I—” he took a deep breath and then sighed heavily. “I was going to. I’ve been trying to work up the nerve for weeks. It was just—you know, yesterday, kind of pushed things over the edge. And I realized that Machyl was right, you know?”
“Machyl?” I echoed, confused.
“Oh,” he said. “Fuck. Hmm. Well, look, Anthony, I shouldn’t have said that.” He was rubbing the back of his head again. “Machyl mentioned to me a while back… he thought you liked me, you know.”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if Marcus had told me he was planning to stop shaving his chest, gain sixty pounds of muscle and fat, and go join one of the bear colonies up on 14th street.
“Machyl what?” I said.
He looked alarmed. He was blinking rapidly, his hands rising in self-defense.
“Don’t blame Machyl, you know he has that way about him, he just knows things, knows what people are thinking.”
“Knows what people are thinking?” I nearly shouted, standing up and stumbling down from the bench. “He—I—can’t believe he said that to you!”
What in the sweet name of St Sebastian?
What in the ninth circle of hell?
Marcus got down from the bench and came toward me. I turned away and started marching out of the café. The guy behind the counter glanced at us warily. I just flashed him a contemptuous look as I flounced past.
“This isn’t about Machyl, forget about him.” Marcus said, following me.
“No,” I retorted, spinning around to face him. “He had no business—”
He out and out lied about me—
“See why I want to go to Duane Tyrone?” Marcus said softly, trailing his hand down the bell sleeve, ending at the bow at my wrist.
I felt his fingers touch my palm, the backs of my fingers, as if he wanted me to take his hand. I looked away.
“We’re not going to be able to keep this a secret.”
He totally told Machyl already. He had practically just said so!
I looked up at him. The intensity of his gaze was almost too much to bear. I couldn’t stand to keep resisting the overpowering force of my own desire.
Even as I reached my hands toward him and I could sense him softening, I hated myself for what I was doing.
I put my hands on his torso, smoothed them over his denim shirt and around his back. His eyes went lazy and I could sense him swooning. He put his hands on my shoulders, leaned down and we started kissing in the street.
His lips were so smooth, his tongue so textured, it started to put me into a trance. I broke the kiss and he blinked at me.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, raising his hand. I realized he was hailing a cab.
Shit.
A cab pulled up and he opened the door and got inside, pulling me in with him. My heart was pounding in trepidation as I got in.
What am I going to do now?
“Alexis will be home,” he muttered to me, glancing at the driver. “Your place?”
I swallowed hard, looking at him. It was so easy for everyone else. It was more than easy. It was fun for them. It was a game. It was a pursuit. It was an obsession.
I was obsessed too, but I couldn’t do it.
Damaris asked me if I didn’t want a relationship. I wanted it more than anything else in the world.
She asked me if I just wanted to hook up. No, I didn’t want that, at any price.
And I couldn’t explain why. I thought about sex all day long, every day.
I woke up in the morning, achingly hard, and jerked off in the shower if I didn’t have time, or in bed if I did. I masturbated during the day. At least once. And when in bed at night, I thought about sex, and fantasized about it while I made myself come again before I fell asleep.
That was just a part of my days that I had come to accept, without knowing why I couldn’t take the extra step that everyone else seemed to be able to without a second thought.
There was clearly something wrong with me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“I don’t feel so good,” I said slowly, and looked away from Marcus’ face. “I’ve been feeling worse and worse for the past half hour.”
It was actually true. The whole time I had been flirting and kissing with Marcus, a baseline feeling of disgust at myself had been growing steadily somewhere in the pit of my being.
The Machyl revelation—which I couldn’t even bear to think about right now—had just been the cherry on top of an extremely uncomfortable experience.
Because the more turned on I got, and the clearer it became how much Marcus wanted to do those things he had talked about last night, the clearer it became that I was never, ever going to do any of that with him.
It was like a concrete block sitting there in my mind, in between my excitement and arousal and the actual possibility of it happening.
“Can you drop me off by any 4, 5 or 6 stop?” I addressed the taxi driver.
“Oh,” Marcus said.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
I sort of was sorry. I sort of felt bad for him. But then, why did he like me anyway? Where had that come from? And what did it say about him, really, that he liked me?
That was the question my mind really caught on. What did it say about him that he liked me? I glanced at him.
Marcus seemed very different to me now. I used to be quite intimidated by him. He had always seemed haughty, aloof and mysterious.
When Bone China got out her sandalwood fans and did her twirling routine with them, the slit in her silk cheongsam high, the bodi
ce tight, I had always been struck by a sense of otherworldly elegance.
As if this couldn’t really be a creature of Earth. She must hail from one of the celestial spheres or come straight from one of the ancient Chinese dynasties.
But now looking at Marcus sitting red-faced and silent next to me in the cab, he seemed quite different. Smaller, somehow. Human.
I crossed my arms. The goosebumps were gone. I felt cold and calm inside.
And I wanted to go home.
“It’s fine,” Marcus said. He took my hand and I let him, but didn’t return his reassuring squeeze.
He turned my face to him and kissed me once on the lips, which I let him do, although I made a mental note this should be one of the last times.
“I understand, really. I want you to get better,” he said, then leaned into my ear. “So we can make up for lost time.”
I smiled at him tightly, conscious of the driver.
He was still leaning into my ear. “I’m going to clear my schedule next weekend,” he said.
I squeezed his hand, trying to get him to stop talking.
“You can fuck me if you want,” he whispered, bringing his hand up to the other side of my face. “I’m flexible. Are you too sick to fuck me?”
The surge of desire his words elicited caught me by surprise and I realized I had grabbed his hand and forced it down, onto my upper thigh, and was holding it there, looking into his brown eyes, my chest heaving. My blood was racing through my veins, through my heart, my lungs, and downward, making a beeline for my cock.
I tried not to wince. I looked away from his gaze, trying to get myself back down to Earth, remembering I was sitting in a taxi cab cruising up through Saturday afternoon traffic heading out of Gay Town.
Harsh sunlight glanced in through the window and I looked outside, trying to ground myself.
I saw an old hippie-rasta lady walking along in brown and orange-striped flared corduroys, a string vest in in the colors of Jamaica poking out underneath a suede waistcoat, a waterfall of grey dreadlocks falling down her back.
She was wearing little John Lennon glasses and sauntering along, waving her hand in time to some music only she could hear. There were daisies poked into her dreads as she walked past a hip beer bar with big doors and windows open to the fall breezes.
“Look at that lady,” I said, even though I could still feel his hand on my thigh, treacherously close to my dick.
“That’s Jem,” Marcus said instantly.
I glanced at him, raising one eyebrow for an explanation. He grinned at me, his face close to mine, and I felt the tension between us, the spark, as he looked at Jem, then back at me, still grinning, still close, as if at any moment he might pounce and kiss me again. He rolled his eyes, half a grin still gracing his features. He was so pretty.
“I used to bartend near here cash in hand,” he said. “She lives in a homeless shelter. Talks to voices. You know. Standard New York City character.”
I smiled wanly. “Cool,” I said.
“So,” he said, touching my hair with one finger and pushing it away from my face.
I shook my head, and looked away again. “I can’t,” I said, and I couldn’t find any more lies and excuses inside me, I just needed to get away from him.
“Okay,” he said. It sounded like he was making a big effort to put on a positive voice, it sounded strained and a little too high. “We’ve got time, eh?”
He took his phone out of his pocket with one hand, leaving the other on my thigh. It was seeping heat into me and I wanted to give it back to him, and I didn’t, at the same time.
His chin rose as he looked out the window, craning his neck and he interrupted himself. “I think this is you,” he said, indicating the subway stop sign up ahead on the left.
“This is fine,” I said to the driver with a surge of relief, reaching into my jacket and pulling out my wallet.
“Let me get it,” Marcus said, also going into his pocket. “I’ll get out here, too,” he said. My heart sank. I had hoped he was going to keep going in the cab on his own.
I had already pulled out a twenty, but Marcus was holding his twenty out to the driver, trying to get him to accept it. I gave up and put the bill back in my wallet, the wallet back in my jacket pocket.
The cab came to a stop and I got out. He followed, slamming the cab door shut behind him. I took a step back up onto the curb and walked straight into the path of a white man in a gray suit with a bald head.
He was carrying a cup of coffee and I cringed, expecting it to spill and fly out all over my blouse. He lifted the coffee cup up and away out of reach, his face an unhappy mask, and glanced at me. I saw him do a double take, looked at me again, open disgust in his eyes.
“Sorry,” I said.
He glared at me, then turned and rushed away, disappearing into the crowds on the sidewalk.
“What an arse,” Marcus muttered, putting his hand on my shoulder and guiding me back against the wall surrounding the subway entrance.
It was crowded and there were a lot of people going by, trying to get into the subway.
I wanted to break away from him and hurry down the steps into the subway but now I was up against the wall, leaning my elbows against it, and he was half-leaning on me, standing over me, with one hand on my neck.
He glanced around and then leaned down and pecked me on the mouth.
The kiss brought back the words he had just whispered in my ear in the cab.
You can fuck me if you want.
I tried really, really hard not to think about Marcus on his back, arching his neck, his arm raised behind him, knuckles white gripping the bedhead, his eyes closed tightly, mouth slightly open.
I meant to move away from him, but the mental image distracted me and before I knew what was happening, he had leaned in again for another kiss.
I felt eyes on me, eyes on him. I moved away from him. A little peck was one thing, but full on kissing was quite another.
“What is it?” He was frowning.
I pursed my lips. “Not in the street,” I muttered.
He crossed his arms. “You have a problem with that?”
“We’re not in Gay Town any more,” I pointed out quietly.
“You think I care?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Obviously you do,” I muttered, shrugging my jacket on and zipping it up over the silk, the pearl ad the bows.
I was starting to feel self-conscious. The jacket was still a woman’s jacket, but it was just a classic biker black leather jacket with gold hardware. Much more neutral than the flowing silk blouse. I reached up to my ear, considering taking off the pearl drop earring.
“We can do whatever we want,” Marcus said, setting his jaw. “I’m not censoring myself for anyone.”
“That’s fine,” I muttered, eyeing the sidewalk. Could I dodge around him?
“This isn’t what I expected from you,” he said, putting his hands on his hips.
I stared at him, feeling hurt. What was he saying? I was ashamed of myself?
“You’re a lot bigger than I am,” I said, crossing my arms tightly. “How do you think I’m going to defend myself?”
Marcus looked at me, his expression filled with—skepticism? Pity?
“Sweetheart,” he said. “You’re in New York City. The biggest freak show on the planet.”
“I’m not a freak,” I muttered.
“Do you know what I saw the other day?” Marcus said, smiling, “I saw two hairy leather daddies in leather harnesses walking a chihuahua down the street wearing a matching harness, holding hands.” He came closer, and I felt like he was going to embrace me. I backed away. He saw me doing it and stopped. “Babes,” he frowned. “I’m just saying. You’re far too fabulous a queen to ever, ever care about what anyone else thinks of you.”
I chewed on the inside of my mouth. Clearly he didn’t understand.
“Okay,” I said, not looking at him. “I’m so glad to hear you’ve never encountere
d homophobic abuse.”
He frowned. “Anthony,” he said, a note of exasperation creeping into his voice. “I have, it’s just—”
“Well,” I said, losing patience, “you haven’t had to deal with the consequences of being the race that I am. Did you ever think about that?”
I turned and walked quickly around the other side of the wall around the subway entrance, the long way round, until I got to the stairs and hurried down them, and I looked back as I went through the barrier, but he hadn’t followed me.
Good.
I zipped my jacket up to the neck. And I didn’t take the earring off. But I did pull my hair down over it, so it wasn’t so visible.
Mermaid Parade
As I approached my building, I tucked my hair behind my ears self-consciously, hoping I wouldn’t run into any of the other residents. I smiled at Walker when I saw he was on the door. Walker I was always glad to see.
“Mr. Alcantara,” he smiled and tipped his cap at me as he opened the door. He had freckles on his face like Morgan Freeman, and the same gray at the temples. His shift started at six every evening on weekends and he was my favorite doorman.
The common areas of the apartment building had been renovated. I guessed they had done it to attract buyers, or to keep up with the Joneses, who knew. It was modern, anyway, a basic version of minimalist luxe, smart enough to reassure renters they were getting something for their money.
I got into the elevator. The elevators had been updated as well. I stood there looking at my reflection in the wraparound mirrors until the door pinged and I got off on our floor and let myself into the apartment.
Our unit had not been renovated, and it was the most 80s thing in the world, all moulded plaster ceiling roses and gilt and crystal chandeliers and the sunken living room, two steps down from the rest of the room, with a white ornamental railing along the ledge on one side, and on the other graduated steps leading down into the pit, as I used to call it when we first moved in.
The appropriate word in the second decade of the twenty-first century was tacky, but try explaining that to my mother. She saw no problem with it.
I went into my bedroom and started pulling off all my finery. The earring, the pendant necklace, the blouse, the paneled leggings. I draped it all over my bed, which was lazier than hanging it up but less lazy than throwing it in a heap on the floor.
Drag Queen Beauty Pageant Page 10