Seven Deadly Queens (The FuBar Book 3)

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Because it’s yours,” said Bunny, amazed that someone this stupid could even operate a shoelace. “I don’t need the phone. I just need the video, and I emailed that to myself before we started this conversation.”

  “You…”

  “Have the video? Oh yes. It’s very funny. I plan to enjoy it again later, at my leisure.” Bunny grinned. “Of course, you know me and funny. I hate to keep a laugh to myself. Always wanna share. It’s just in my nature as a comedian.”

  Venus reflexively squeezed the little dog, making it look as though she and Chad were having some kind of competition to see who could look the most bug-eyed. “Are you blackmailing me?” she said.

  “Totally,” said Bunny.

  “Think of it as keeping your social media branding consistent and on point,” said Helena, who was clearly having the time of her life. “After all, your brand is kind of ‘pastel pixie dreamgirl,’ which doesn’t really work with the whole Stormfront vibe you’re giving off in this video. Unless you think you can make swastikas work for you in millennial pink? In which case, you’re laughing.”

  Venus audibly ground her teeth. “What do you want, Helena?”

  “What I want is for you to start acting like a grown-up on Instagram. We admit that we had a disagreement, I admit that I was wrong to punch you. You admit that you said some unacceptably racist things about my boyfriend and that you’re going to try to be better in the future. Just as I will promise to watch my temper in the future.”

  “And you stop pretending that she broke your nose,” said Bunny, shutting off Venus before she could continue the lie. “Bitch, don’t front. You think a kosher queen like me doesn’t know what rhinoplasty aftercare looks like?”

  Ryan gave a short huff of laughter. “Was there even a gig in New York?”

  There wasn’t. It was obvious, in the droop of Venus’s shoulders. This day just kept getting better.

  “Oh my God,” said Helena. “You said you had a gig in New York as a cover for getting your nose done? We were all sewing around the goddamn clock because of your stupid deadline, and you weren’t even going to New York at all.”

  “It was a deviated septum,” said Venus. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “And you were going to pretend you were in New York?” Bunny groaned, trying to contemplate the logistics of such a lie. Did she have a bunch of photos ready to go? What about the time stamps? What about location tracking? “Venus, you amaze me. You are three hundred pounds of stupid in a hundred and fifty pound bag. What the hell goes on in your head? I’m serious. It’s fascinating. I think I’ve eaten sandwiches with higher IQs than you.”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” said Venus. “You don’t have to insult me.”

  “I know we don’t,” said Helena. “But it is kinda fun.”

  Venus glared at them. “Fine. I’ll do what you want, okay?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  “And you’ll delete the file?”

  Bunny sucked air through her teeth. “No.”

  “No?”

  “Uh uh. I told you, Venus. It’s very funny, and I always hang onto funny things so that I can study them, you know? You should be flattered. You’ll be occupying the same space on my hard drive as Basil Fawlty’s car meltdown and Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words.”

  Venus’s glare intensified. She looked like she was trying to bore a hole through Bunny’s forehead with her eyes. “Are you going to keep it to yourself?” she said.

  “Well, that depends entirely on you, doesn’t it?”

  “Play nice and it will never see the light of day,” said Helena.

  “Nice.” Venus snorted and turned the full force of her scowl on Helena. “And you’re ‘the nice one’? You gotta be kidding me. You’re a fucking bitch, Helena Montana.”

  “I know,” said Helena. “I’m embracing it. Is it wrong that I kind of love it?”

  14

  At the end of the night, Bunny opened the front door for one last check of the doorstep.

  “Poop free?” said Justin.

  “Poop free.” Adam closed the door and locked it. “Poor stupid bitch.”

  “You mean Venus or the dog?”

  “Venus,” said Bunny, limping back to the tables. “Chihuahuas are supposed to be pretty smart. Large brains, relative to their size. You’d think that would work with Venus, what with the fivehead and all, but it doesn’t. That name? Venus Envy? She didn’t even come up with that on her own.” He hoisted another chair onto the table. “That was all me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. She was gonna go by Venus Divine, but I didn’t think the East Coast was ready for the category five hurricane that would be caused by Our Lady of Cha Cha Heels spinning in her fucking grave.”

  Justin went over to help with the chairs, because Adam looked tired. He wore a sweater and jeans, without so much as a touch of eyeliner. No heels, either, which was really unusual, because Bunny liked to clop about in heels in and out of drag, like a kid who had never grown out of playing with Mom’s shoes. Instead he was wearing a pair of pale gray Mahabis, and his left ankle looked puffy.

  “I never did hear that story,” said Justin.

  “Which one?”

  “The one about how you were, like, Venus’s drag Obi Wan. And how she turned to the dark side.”

  Adam laughed. “Well, it started with a trade blockade and a bunch of really unnecessary CGI,” he said. “Then she announced that she hated sand, fell in love with a series of hairstyles that were pretending to be Keira Knightley or something, and then I chopped her legs off. The end.” He stretched, a hand on the small of his back. “She was a mediocre queen. No talent, I thought. Can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t act, can’t time a joke. Doesn’t even deliver polished drag, but it turns out I overlooked her main talent.”

  “Which was?”

  “Vomiting every boring detail of your life online and knowing how to use hashtags. That’s a talent now. Helena levitates, I learned to play ragtime piano and nobody fucking gives a shit, because all Venus has to do is photograph her Starbucks leprechaun jizz frappucino, or whatever end stage capitalism confection she’s sucking down this week, and she gets fifty thousand likes and a duct tape sponsorship.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” said Justin.

  “I don’t worry. It’s just annoying.”

  “Whatever. The way I see it, you’ll come out on top on the end. When civilization collapses and everything goes Mad Max, we’ll be the useful ones.”

  Adam leaned heavily on the back of the chair he was about to lift and frowned. “What? Drag queen thunderdome? Is that gonna be a thing in our dystopian future?”

  Justin shrugged. “Who knows? But the point is, people need entertainment. They need jokes. They need stories. They need magic tricks. And they need booze. These things have been around forever…”

  “…since the dawn of civilization.”

  “Totally. And they’ll probably be there at the end. What’s Venus gonna do? March up to people and invite them to stare at her coffee?”

  To Justin’s delight, Adam cracked up. “Oh my God. That is literally what she does. When you strip away all the social media blah blah, that’s basically all it is. ‘Hey, look at this thing I bought because everyone else is buying it.’”

  “See? She’s useless. No talent. No point. Don’t worry about her. She’s not gonna be messing with us any more.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Adam, perched backwards on the chair, long legs wide open. “One thing does bother me. Like, why didn’t she press charges? Obviously she didn’t want to get caught out in her little nose job lie, but legal drama is next level drama, and she lives for drama.”

  “Nah,” said Justin. “I know what that is.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. You know Hipster Sam? Her latest boyfriend?”

  “Uh huh.
”

  “Major hydroponics operation.” Justin paused to savor Adam’s expression. “Oh yeah. I expect it was him who told Venus he didn’t want the popos up in their business.”

  “Wait, Venus listens to boyfriends now?”

  “Sam’s got real good dick,” said Justin. “He’s not huge, but it’s thick and pretty and smells good. Also he can touch the end of his nose with his tongue.”

  Adam’s eyes were like pinwheels. “Justin, you’re a marvel. You’re like, the Rolodex of Pittsburgh dick.”

  “You know me. I try to make myself useful.”

  Adam tried to get up, took his weight on the wrong foot and winced.

  “Okay, you need to let me ice that,” said Justin. “Because it looks bad. Come on. Come over and sit in the booth.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “It is that bad. If you’re not doing the housework in stripper heels then something is wrong.”

  “Oh, I’m probably just getting old,” said Adam, settling into the faded leather banquette and putting his foot up on the edge of the table. “That or it’s a tumor pressing on my lymph gland. Something nice and close to the spine, no doubt.”

  Justin shuddered as he went to the ice machine, remembering how Mom’s feet had swelled to three times their regular size as a result of the chemo drugs. He’d had to cut slits in the side of her slippers just to get them on. Bunny’s wasn’t nearly as bad, and it was only the left foot.

  He scooped ice into a Ziploc, wrapped it in a towel and returned to the booth. The lights were low and Adam’s heavy eyelids – bare of paint and glitter for once – looked smooth and veiny. Delicate. Like flower petals. His skin was a gift for a drag queen, a china doll complexion and a sparse beard that took several days to come in. In bed he was like a long wisp of silk, his skin so soft that it was a joy to wrap your legs around him. The sense memory grabbed Justin by the balls and pulled. It was getting harder now, pun intended, and last night Justin had lain awake thinking not about sex, but about whether God could give a shit. Did he really want to believe in a God who gave him time off in purgatory just because he’d turned down a threesome with a high school coach and a drag queen? He knew that was the God he’d been raised to believe in, but yikes – that dude sounded petty. Someone whose job it was to keep the stars in motion surely had bigger fucking things to worry about.

  Fuck the grand gestures, like abstinence and big donations and public prayer. Surely goodness was made up of little things. Icing swollen feet. Putting your arms around someone when they cried out in their sleep. Agreeing to wear a dress, so that someone would have a reason to make it.

  “Does it hurt?” Justin asked, as he pressed a finger into the flesh of the instep.

  “The swelling doesn’t. The ankle does. It’s not been right since I fell off my heels at Helena’s thirtieth.”

  “Which was in July. You really should see a doctor about that shit.”

  “Ugh.” Adam rolled his eyes.

  “Okay, explain this to me, because I’ve always wondered. How come whenever there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re always thinking you’re having a heart attack or a brain tumor? But when your foot swells up like a balloon – which it’s not supposed to do, by the way – you don’t go to the doctor?”

  Adam gave a long sigh. “I don’t know,” he said. “Welcome to the mysteries of hypochondria.”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. If I see a doctor they might tell me it’s definitely fucked, and then they might want to do surgery on it, and that’ll become a whole thing with pins and casts and recovery times, and…oh shit.” Adam slapped a palm against his forehead. “And there it is. I’m turning into my mother.” He groaned and leaned back in the seat. “Well, that was inevitable, I suppose. Boys turn into their fathers, drag queens turn into their mothers. God, I hope you guys are ready for this. I’m gonna be rinsing out the garbage cans with Lysol every other day. Taking power walks with a pair of pink, two-pound weights. Constantly tapping my Fitbit.” He tapped his wrist. “‘Adam, it’s still got that dead pixel. Why won’t it come back? Is that from when I dropped it in the toilet? Should I put it in a bowl of rice again?’”

  Justin laughed and adjusted the ice pack. “How’s that feel?”

  “Actually pretty good. Thank you.”

  He sat back. His legs were so long that his bare toes brushed Justin’s chest. There was chipped blue glitter paint on his nails, and a slutty little spray of black stars tattooed up his ankle, a ‘let’s see how much this hurts’ tattoo he’d got before committing to the Jessica Rabbit on his arm.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you ever…resent me?”

  Justin blinked. “Uh, for what?”

  “For breaking up you and Ryan. It was the closest you’ve ever come to monogamy, and I know how Ryan can be. He’s attentive, and loving. Makes you feel special…”

  “…says really fucked up, filthy shit in the sack.”

  Adam gave a soft huff of laughter. “Also that.” He was an unfamiliar sight without make-up, because the busy holiday season had been one of almost uninterrupted drag. Even without mascara his lashes were thick and black, their roots dark against the pink rims of his tired eyes. “You had him, and then I came along and fucked it all up.”

  “You didn’t come along,” said Justin, remembering the way those eyelashes felt fluttering against the sensitive skin behind his ear. “You were always there. You were always going to be the one in his heart.”

  Adam turned pink in the low lights. “But…don’t you ever want that? To be the one? In someone’s heart?”

  Justin shrugged. “I don’t do so good with jealousy and stuff,” he said. “It eats you up inside. Best to avoid it, I figure.” There was a pause, too long for comfort. “Look, you met my sister, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Being one of seven kids – it really did a number on Cher. She tried so fucking hard, Bunny. So hard. Tried to be the good girl. Worked hard in school. Joined the Girl Scouts.”

  “Had a thing for badges and uniforms even then, huh?”

  “Yeah, I shouldn’t have called her a Nazi. I guess all she ever wanted was some order in her life. Sometimes I think she thought that if she was the good kid, everything else would fall into place. Like Mom and Dad would look at her and be like ‘Oh, this is how it’s supposed to be,’ and finally shape up. Pay attention, instead of letting us kids try to raise each other.” Justin sighed. “But it didn’t. Instead she just got taken for granted. Then our sister got pregnant, and got all the attention for doing the one thing they’d told the girls not to do. Mom freaked out for all of about five minutes and then she was all ‘Oh my God, grandbabies,’ and I guess Cher just…snapped. Gave up on being good and dived headfirst into this valet parking scam Dad had going, but she has the worst luck. Got busted, and went to prison. Squeaky clean record and all, but the judge sees the name Barrow on the docket and bang – six fucking months.”

  Adam let out a long breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s how it is. You have that many siblings, you either accept that you’re gonna be part of a crowd, or you end up like Cher. Trying so hard, and always ending up…unsatisfied, I guess.”

  “And what about you? Are you unsatisfied?”

  Justin shook his head. “Nah. I learned early to take what I can get. And to have fun with it.”

  “But don’t you ever want more?”

  Once Justin would have laughed and said more was for other people, not him. But the last year had brought him up close and personal with love in ways he could never have imagined. He’d been caught in the middle of Bunny and Ryan’s frustrations, watched Stephen fall asleep while eating breakfast for supper, because he’d been up all night with Hu at the hospital. And then there was Rose, a slight weight on the mattress beside him at night. What the hell did that mean, that he went to so much trouble to make the kid
happy?

  He shifted the ice pack.

  “Is it doing anything?” said Adam. He looked good in this light, some of Bunny’s prettiness bleeding through those big dark eyes and creamy skin.

  “It still looks puffy. You need it higher – to drain. Lift it up. That’s it.”

  Adam, his foot on Justin’s shoulder, slithered down the seat and giggled. “Well, this brings back memories,” he said, and it did. God, those legs. Cartoon sexy, all garter belts and high heels, totally girly until you got up to the top and wound up with a mouthful of big dick. Justin ran his hand up the back of Adam’s calf, and Adam’s huge eyes somehow got wider.

  This had always been a turn on, seeing what he could get away with. A handful of ass here, a sneaky grind there, because Adam and Ryan belonged to each other, and Justin had to take what he could get.

  More.

  There it was, the deep down dirty wrong shit that tickled Justin’s brain and balls every damn time. The temptation to take more than current permissions allowed. He pushed the cuff of Adam’s jeans higher. The skin beneath was shaved and soft, and he breathed faster as he watched Adam’s teeth sink into his full lower lip, eyes so wide they looked like they could swallow the whole bar. Whenever they did this there was always the question of how far they were allowed to go, but now that it was doubly forbidden it was like someone had set a match to a tinderbox. He turned his head and kissed the inside of Adam’s ankle.

  Those eyes. He couldn’t look, or he was going to come in his pants like a teenager. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth and sucked gently on the thin bare skin. The ice had left it cool, but the memories were steaming, like when he’d been fucking Adam and – out of the corner of his eye – saw Ryan replacing the shoes that had fallen off Adam’s toes. A tip jar heel pressing into the small of his back, pushing him deeper and making him come too fast. Adam drew in a thin, nervous breath and lowered his foot.

  “I’m moving in with Ryan,” he said.

  Oh. “Cool.”

  “Cool?”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  Adam sighed. “Actually, I have no idea. It’s weird, isn’t it? What we have?”