Sue Ellen had a terrible idea when she took Damaris and I to that meeting. Those women had been condescending, superior, smug and they had treated Damaris like shit and made her feel terrible about herself.
Damaris had been totally justified in throwing a foundation at a mirror in anger at them.
I couldn’t think of any reason why she would want to see them again now. Some part of me hoped it was to give them a piece of her mind.
Either way, Damaris didn’t need them.
We didn’t need them.
When Damaris got back I was going to take her shopping at Krumpdorf’s with my new credit card.
I smiled to myself and focused my stare at the fire hydrant like I could pop it with my eyes alone and send a jet of water rocketing thirty feet into the air.
I’d like to see those bitches top that.
I really would.
“Hey, you’re still here.”
I turned toward the sound of her voice like a flower turning toward the sun. “Of course,” I said.
She was grinning from ear to ear, walking along with a bounce in her step and the sunshine glinting off her shiny hair. She looked so beautiful when she smiled, it was enough to make my day. She looked so happy.
It dawned on me that she looked much happier than she had been this morning, when she was with me. After sleeping with me last night.
I felt a surge of anger toward Teagan and Tommy, their absurd names, like some kind of indie rock duo.
“I told you I have a surprise,” I said, and just as I was about to say it, a new idea came to me.
An even better one. A million times better.
“Do you want to maybe…” I waited until she looked up and caught her eye. “Get your hair did?”
Her smile actually faltered slightly and she looked at me uncertainly. “My hair did?”
I nodded and let myself smile. This was something I could give her that no-one else could. “We’ll go to my stylist.”
She blinked. “The one who does your weave?”
I nodded. I wanted to reach out and touch her hair, but I didn’t dare to.
“You want to get a weave? I’d love to see you with, like, wavy auburn tresses down to your elbow.”
She laughed. “You’re—you’re joking me.”
“No,” I said, pulling her arm to make her come with me. “I want you to have whatever you want.”
She met my eyes then, and smiled tentatively. I smiled back.
Accept. Please. Please accept.
I felt terrified all of a sudden that she would reject this. Reject me.
“Well,” she said, linking her arm through mine. “I always did want to try long, really straight and silky black hair. You know when you can use the hot rollers in it? Make it really big and bouncy?”
My heart leapt into the sky in a flurry, like that kids movie, the one where the little boy befriends a wizened old imp who commands balloon magic.
The balloons bobbed along above me, just lifting me until my feet were only skimming the ground and Damaris’ arm through mine was the only thing keeping me from rising up and drifting away on the air current from the subway vent.
“That would look gorgeous,” I said, and I wanted to touch her face, put my arms around her and kiss her until that sad look she’d had just now was a distant memory.
The subway entrance wasn’t far up ahead. We bounced toward it cheerfully.
“Don’t you need to do upkeep on it, though?” Damaris said.
“Oh, they give you that stuff,” I said. “Like the oil for your scalp and everything. Oh, and you should go back for a shampoo and touch up regularly.”
“And what about taking it out? They charge for that?”
“Taking it out?” I glanced at her, feeling my heart balloons start to deflate for some reason. The sun shining on my little parade seemed to have dimmed somehow.
“After two months or whatever, when you take it out,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“So do they charge to take it out or not?”
I frowned. “I don’t know. I never ask.”
She frowned back. “You never ask.”
I looked away from her gaze.
I never looked at the total bill when I went to the beauty salon. I just handed over my card and signed. It had never occurred to me to ask for an itemized bill or try to break down the individual costs. “We’ll ask them,” I said, turning and keeping walking.
“No, I need to know now,” she said, not walking any more.
I was starting to feel a little bit hot under the collar. Wasn’t she going to accept my gift? Was this not good enough for her?
“Well, I don’t know,” I said, and had to restrain myself from crossing my arms.
“Can you find out?” Damaris stood her ground.
“How would I find out?” I said, hearing my own voice go very high. “Aren’t you even going to enjoy your hair, you want to think about taking it out already?”
“Anthony,” Damaris said, and she did have her arms crossed, “I need to know how much it’s going to cost me in two months’ time to have the damn thing out before it pulls all the hair out my head or my scalp rots or whatever else.”
“Traction alopecia only happens if you abuse weaves, it’s not going to happen to you on your first time!” I said, my hand going to my head. I couldn’t believe she was being so critical.
She stared at me and I saw her blink, slowly, once, and then again.
“Can you find out how much it costs,” she said. “Please.” And then, “I’m sure your scalp isn’t rotting, that’s not what I meant.”
I smoothed my hair down a bit more until I felt sure it looked okay. “I take very good care of my hair, as it happens,” I said.
“I’m sure you do,” she said. “I know you do. Your hair always looks good. Now would you find out about the damn cost?”
I pursed my lips. “I don’t have my phone on me,” I muttered.
She just stared at me for a few seconds, then took out her phone, unlocked it and handed it to me. “Call them,” she said.
I took the phone, looked at it for a moment. Then I said, “I’ll pay for the taking out charge. Don’t worry about it.”
She indicated the phone. “I want to know how much it is.”
“Damaris, just let me pay for it,” I said, handing the phone back.
She was looking at the ground. “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” she said.
No. No, come on…
“I think it’s better if I don’t do it,” she said.
“Why?” I said, and realized I was begging, and didn’t care. “Why not? In two months—we’ll go together and get it taken out. And if you want, you can get something else. Please—”
She shook her head.
“Please, Damaris, won’t you let me do this…” I felt as if I was going to fall to my knees in front of her.
I wanted to make her feel pretty. As pretty as she was, as she deserved to be, and so much prettier than those women could ever, ever make her feel.
“It’s really nice of you,” she said. “But I have to gracefully decline your offer.”
My heart balloons were rapidly deflating and sinking, wrinkly-skinned, to lurk and hover just above the surface of the ground, and scurry this way and that depending on the breeze.
“Can we at least go to Krumpdorf’s?” I said. “I—” I was going to say, I have this new credit card with a huge spending limit, but that didn’t sound good somehow. I found another idea and seized on it. “I want to get you something for your birthday.”
She chuckled. “My birthday isn’t for another month.”
“Well,” I said, forcing myself to look into her eyes, no matter how humiliated I was by her weave rejection. “I’m getting a head start on it, then.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I can’t set foot in that store.”
“What? There’s a really nice café, if we get there early enough we can beat
the lunch rush.” I took her arm again, as she had done to me.
“That place is for celebs and high-class people,” she said, resisting my tugging. I stopped. “Like you,” she said, looking me up and down. “I doubt they would even let me in the door.”
I was still holding on to her arm, and I looked up into her face. I reached up, stood up on my toes, and kissed her.
My heart balloons stirred tentatively, unsure what to expect. She put her hand on my cheek and I felt her lips press back on mine, and then she looked into my eyes.
“You really want me to go with you, huh?” She said.
I nodded. “They’d be lucky to have you,” I said. “To have an angel walk through the doors.”
She laughed and put her arm around my shoulder. “Okay, slick,” she said. She cuffed my cheek gently with her other hand. “Who knew you were such a smooth operator?”
I smiled shyly at her. “Operator?” I said innocently.
She laughed harder, and then she took hold of my face and planted a smacker right on my lips. “Too cute,” she said, and moved her arm to my midsection and squeezed me.
If she hadn’t been holding me, I would have been carried up into the stratosphere.
I held out my hand to the street to signal a cab. When my mother lived in New York, we’d had a driver. That was heaven.
To be quite honest, I didn’t like the subway.
When a classic yellow one pulled up, I pulled on Damaris’ hand and opened the door for her.
She smiled at me as she got in, and then I followed, and I felt a sense of relief as we started to make our way Uptown.
It was almost 5pm by the time Damaris put her key into the lock of the street door to the apartment and we wrestled all the shopping bags inside.
“Mmm,” she said, inhaling through her nose. “Smells good, DT!” She shouted up the stairs, closing the door with her shoulder and starting to walk up the stairs.
I felt my mouth start to water as the scent infiltrated my nostrils as well. It smelled divine. I re-adjusted the bags over both my shoulders and followed her.
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Duane Tyrone, in a pink gingham apron, stood there arms akimbo with a frown on his face. “What’s all this?” He said, stepping back to let Damaris in.
My heart quailed as I took the last few steps toward him and then had to navigate around him, as part of his bulk still blocked the door.
“Y’all buy half the city?” He eyed the bags as I walked into the apartment, across the living room, following Damaris into her bedroom, where she was dumping bags onto the bed.
I went inside and did the same thing, sitting down gratefully on the bed.
“Anthony Alcantara,” Duane Tyrone said, appearing in the door frame with one hand on his hip. “Your sainted cell phone has been beeping and bleeping fit to drive me out of my mind.”
I looked at the nightstand. Sure enough, there it was. I went over and picked it up, but when I did, the screen stayed black. I pressed the home button. Nothing. “It’s dead, Miss Ellegrandé,” I said.
“Well, it stopped a while back,” DT admitted.
Then he raised a finger and pointed it at me. I felt myself start to shake in anticipation.
In moments like these, I wanted to hide. I wished I could hide behind Damaris and she would protect me. “That thing was pinging away day when I was trying to sleep. I had to get up and find my noise-blocking earmuffs that’s only supposed to be used when there’s construction work next to my window!”
“I’m so sorry,” I immediately started to grovel. It was the only way I had found to react to Duane Tyrone’s rants. “I’ll never do it again.” As I said this, I realized the implications of what DT was saying.
Duane Tyrone was saying he knew I had spent the night here. Because why would I be here so early to have left my cell phone unless I had slept here.
It’s fine. DT thinks you’re gay, like everyone else at House of Ellegrandé.
Well, more or less everyone.
But it was true.
It wouldn’t arouse suspicion for me to have spent the night here with Damaris, because DT wouldn’t think anything could happen between us.
Just like Machyl had probably spent the night here before. It was just a sleepover between friends. That was all.
The more my mind lingered on this topic, the more memories of last night started to surface again in my mind and I felt my face getting hot again. I stood up, thinking that sitting on the bed might not be helping.
Duane Tyrone looked back at me with his big black eyes, sizing me up.
“Well,” he said. “Mind it never happens again. You heard?” He turned and lumbered back toward the kitchen. The apartment was thick with the smell of his cooking. “All the food is covered,” DT called. “You can start bringing the food down and lay the table. I just need to go—” he turned and started walking back toward the bedroom, where Damaris and I were both just listening to him. “Are you listening?” He called, coming back into the door frame and fixing his eyes on us.
“Yes, DT,” Damaris said sweetly. She really knew how to talk to him.
“I need to run to the store for soda,” he said. “We run out of clear and dark.”
“Okay, DT,” Damaris said with a smile. “We’ll fix the table. Don’t you worry.”
“They’ll start to arrive soon,” DT said fretfully, and turned away slowly, patting his pockets. Sunday dinner was held early, so everyone had time to get ready for the show afterward.
“I’ll be back in a half hour. I need to get napkins, and they don’t have that at the corner store…” He went out the door, still muttering to himself.
Duane Tyrone had been in New York City for so long he’d mostly lost his accent, and he tended to speak in his Ellegrandé old Hollywood film star voice most of the time anyway, but when he cooked on Sunday, he started to talk Southern again, and it never failed to amuse me.
Before we moved to the US, I’d only heard Southern accents in the movies and they seemed very exotic to me. They still did. It wasn’t something you heard every day living in New York.
Damaris laughed softly once DT was gone. “He gets so crotchety when he hasn’t slept good,” she said, getting up and closing the door.
I felt a flicker of nervousness when she did that. Now we were alone in her bedroom again. Memories and feelings from last night were flooding through me.
Damaris started taking the bags apart, laying the parcels of tissue-wrapped clothes out on the bed.
She smiled to herself as she tore the neat labels off the tissue paper and held up a slip dress in shantung silk, a deeper shade of the apricot her crop top was in.
She laid it out lovingly on the bed, then followed with the other things I’d bought her, laying them out in a neat array radiating from the centre of the bed, until all of the tissue paper was empty and crumpled in the bags on the floor.
She glanced at me. “Turn around,” she said, in a slightly coy voice.
I felt a streak of lightning run through me, I didn’t know why. It was the tone of her voice, or the look in her eye. I turned around, staring at the corner of the room behind the door, the crack running down the wall into the skirting board.
I heard slithery sounds behind me, the dry brushing sound of fabric against skin, and the hairs on my body started to rise until each one was standing at attention, sending shivers running down my spine and making my clothes uncomfortable with the sensitivity.
Then I heard the creak and wheeze of thousand bedsprings and the thud of the bedhead against the wall, indicating that someone, specifically Damaris, had climbed onto the bed. I gulped.
“Turn around again,” she said. Her voice sounded husky and warm. I did so.
She was half-lying on the bed in the middle of the array of clothes, propped up on one arm, her legs curled demurely to one side, wearing the shantung dress and looking straight at me.
“How do I look?” She asked, her eyes holding m
e in place.
I gulped, tried to swallow.
“A-amazing,” I said, and I meant it. The vibrant deep apricot against her rich smooth ebony skin made her glow like a dark star.
I saw her lick her lips, and unconsciously I did the same.
The delicate silk draped her body and fell gorgeously over her breasts, which I realized I was looking at, and Damaris was looking at me looking at them.
Her fingers traced the straight neckline of the dress and climbed up the thin shoulder strap, and pushed it off her shoulder. The thin fabric slipped off like flowing water and exposed her breast.
I stood there transfixed as her eyes drew my gaze, and she reached up and did the same thing for the other strap. She sat there, looking at me, and I saw her bite her full lower lip, and her chest started to heave.
All of today, I had started to doubt that what last night meant. I had started to question it. She hadn’t kissed me back this morning. She had shied away from my kiss in front of the other women. She hadn’t said anything more about it while we were at Krumpdorf’s, and I hadn’t dared to ask.
But all of those doubts melted away as I stood there and watched her nipples harden.
The blood rushed to my penis, and I wasn’t embarrassed. Not in the slightest. It felt right.
I went toward her, and sat down on the edge of the bed. It creaked and sighed loudly, and I tried to ignore it, because it felt as if a spell had fallen over the room and I didn’t want to break it.
I didn’t move any closer. I was waiting for her to tell me what to do. She looked me over, and gestured for me to come nearer. I went toward her.
Last night the first time she held me, it was almost the same position. But now I could see her, drink her in, and I could look into her eyes.
Her big, dark eyes, I could look into them all day, if she would let me.
She lay down as I got closer, and I lay down next to her on my side, still not daring to touch her, as if she were a statue in a museum.
She took my hand and put it on her waist, where the bodice of the dress had pooled when she slipped it off. I rested my hand half on her warm skin, half on the skin-warmed silk.
She still had her eyes closed when she reached her hand out and ran her thumb along the stubble on my jaw. I hadn’t shaved this morning.
Drag Queen Beauty Pageant Page 27