“Oh, right,” I said. “I don’t like fish. Give me Darren’s steak that he obviously ordered like a douche and he can have the seafood. That will teach him to order me dainty food. You eat it if you like it so much. I’m a lady, and I deserve to eat like a queen.”
Darren sighed while his evil father chuckled.
IT WASN’T until we were back in Darren’s SUV that I freaked out.
“How could you let me say those things to him?” I shrieked at Darren. “I basically threatened a government official! Are you out of your damn mind? Those are felony charges.”
“Oh boy,” Darren said, not even glancing at me.
“Do you know what he could do to me? Do you know the type of people he probably knows? I bet all it takes is a single phone call before he has his secret service taking a hit out on me! Do you know what hitmen do, Darren? Do you? They kill. Your father is going to use his powers to hire hitmen and they’re going to kill me and I’m going to be on the local news and they’re going to say something like middle-aged man found dead in his home, the victim of his own idiocy.”
“In what world are you middle—”
“And even if he doesn’t try and put a hit out on me, he’ll probably have the NSA tap into my phone and computers and they’re going to see my web browser. Darren, do you know how curious I am about fisting? Do you? Only a little bit. But that won’t matter, because I logged on to that fisting site three times, and that’s all they’re going to focus on. Pretty soon, everyone in the world will think Sanford Stewart wants to be some beefy bear’s meat puppet. I don’t. Most of the time. That’s beside the point. The point is… okay, the point is… goddammit. What were we talking about?”
“Honestly,” Darren said faintly, “I have no idea. I’m still stuck on the whole beefy bear meat puppet thing—”
“And okay,” I said. “So I tried cybersex. Like, one time. And maybe I used a pickup line to start it. Hey, I wish you were like a winter storm. That way, you’d give me your eight to twelve inches so I won’t be able to leave my house for days. I regret it, okay? I didn’t even like cybersex and I was nineteen years old.”
“It’s like Christmas,” Darren breathed. “And these are all my presents.”
“So, yes. This is all your fault. Your father is going to NSA me and then kill me and I’ll have to make a run for it and go into hiding. Do you know what happens to people like me when they have to go into hiding, Darren? I’m not Jason fucking Bourne, okay? I have a beauty regimen that I must adhere to nightly. Do you think all of this happens by accident? No! It doesn’t. I work hard for this, Darren. Hard. Do you think I’ll be able to exfoliate when I’m on the run from your father’s goons? No. No, I won’t. You’ll be able to see my pores. My pores, Darren. From space. Or, at the very least, I’ll go to prison. Do you know what happens to men like me in prison, Darren? Let me tell you. Men like me go to prison and get passed around like a church collection plate at Christmas mass. Everyone is going to have a finger in it, Darren. Everyone. And that’s at minimum. Because your father is, like, the president of Tucson. The president. And what if he—okay. Wait. Now that I think about it, I still don’t think I understand how local government works. Does your dad have secret service? I didn’t see any secret service. Huh. Okay. And I don’t have any more dick pics saved, so. That’s good. Okay. You know what, this will be fine. We’ll be fine. We just have to plan an entire fundraiser in about four weeks and pull it off flawlessly, all the while making more money than your father and his rich old white-guy friends and we’ll be good. Better than good. We’ll be great. We’ll make a billion dollars for crack babies by selling off men in dresses and it’ll be fine. Chances are I’ll probably need to make a second plan to somehow sabotage your father’s gala dinner, but I can worry about that down the road.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
I felt much better.
Every now and then, it was good to just let your crazy go all out without caring about how people might judge you.
I looked out the SUV window. At some point, we’d pulled over into a strip mall parking lot. “Huh. Why are we stopped?” I turned back to Darren. He sat next to me, slack-jawed and staring at me with wide eyes. “Everything okay?” I asked him, quirking my eyebrow.
“How are you a real person?” he asked, sounding awed.
I frowned. “Is that some kind of trick question?”
He shook his head, like he was clearing the cobwebs. “Should we even talk about the part where you volunteered me to dress in drag and pimp me out?”
“Oh. Right. Um. So. Hey. Do you want to do me a favor?”
“Whatever could that be,” he sighed.
“You are going to need to let me dress you up and then sell you to the highest bidder.”
“Which is what I just said.”
“Sort of. I used euphemisms. Made it sound a bit better, so.”
“And why is this going to be a drag bachelor auction and not a normal bachelor auction? And, as an aside, I should probably think about the direction my life is headed when sentences like that come out of my mouth and I really don’t bat an eye.”
“Everyone knows that drag bachelor auctions are more fun than regular bachelor auctions,” I said.
“Dare I ask why?”
“Dare you?”
“Why, Sandy.”
“Because it’s more fun that way.” Wow. And here I was thinking it was obvious. Maybe Darren didn’t understand what fun was. He was a homo jock, after all. If he couldn’t lift it, eat it, or fuck it, he probably didn’t quite understand what the concept of fun was. “Everyone thinks so.”
“Everyone,” he said flatly.
“Right. So. Darren. Notice how you’re talking about drag queen things and their level of entertainment with the Drag Queen? Yeah, who do you think out of the two of us knows what they’re talking about? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not you.”
“You really don’t want me to answer that question.”
“Asshole.”
“Bitch.”
“Rude,” I said with a gasp. “I am a lady and I demand you treat me as such.”
He snorted. “Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.”
“It was nice while it lasted.”
“Was it?”
I decided he’d been through enough today and decided to say something nice. “Your dad was… fun.”
“Shut up, Sandy.”
“No, really. You should be proud. I can see where you get your whole… existence from.”
“I don’t know why I thought this would be any other way than it was,” he muttered, flexing his fingers on the steering wheel.
I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic, something biting given I was still running on adrenaline and I didn’t need to be that nice, but I stopped myself when I saw the tightness around his eyes, his mouth stretching into a thin line. “How did you think it would be?” I asked, curious.
He laughed bitterly and shook his head. “Not like that.”
I thought about pushing more, but thought it better to back off and see if he would say whatever it was on his own.
Surprisingly, he did after a few seconds. “I just… I don’t know. Anytime I think that maybe there’s a decent human being buried in there somewhere, I get piles of evidence to the contrary. I’m just tired of expecting one thing and getting another, though it’s my fault for having any expectations to begin with, I guess.” He started the SUV and pulled back out onto the road again.
What was it Mike had said weeks ago when he’d first floated this awesomely terrible idea at me? Don’t you think it’s odd that for all the shit he’s talked about his dad, he still works for him? Maybe not him directly, but still. You know what that says to me, princess? It tells me that Darren still cares about what Daddy thinks about him. That he’s still searching for some kind of approval.
And that sucked, if it was true. Which it seemed to be more and more. Because here was a perfect
ly… acceptable boy who had the unsanitary habit of attempting to fuck everything in sight. Sure, he was obnoxious and annoying and I really did despise him partly (though, maybe not as much as I did, say, four hours ago), but he didn’t deserve to be born into the family he had. Maybe his mother was the nicest person in the world, which I hoped she would be to counteract Taylor’s evil and her son’s idiocy. I hoped he’d had at least one good parent growing up.
But even I could understand the need for acceptance. I’d craved it after the indifference I’d gotten from my own parents before they’d died. I was taken in by a family who only cared about making me smile again rather than the makeup I wore. For all I knew, Darren didn’t have that. Or, at the very least, he didn’t have it from the one person he wanted it from.
I thought hard about what to say, because it seemed important that I say the right thing. “Sometimes we hope for things to be a certain way, even though we know most likely it will never be. I think it’s better to temper expectations toward something realistic rather than something fantastical. It makes things easier when people let you down.”
He glanced over at me, lips twitching. “Did you read that out of a fortune cookie?”
I glared at him. “No. I just made that up on the spot. You should be writing this stuff down. It’s life changing. Do you know how many people would kill to be in your position right now and be on the receiving end of a Helena Handbasket’s Lovely Life Lesson For Loving Yourself Lovingly For a Long Time™? Like, at least four people.”
“Nana, Paul, Larry and Matty?” he asked.
“Nana, Paul, Larry, and Johnny Depp,” I corrected. “Larry listened to my advice one time and grew this killer mustache that made him look like a Tom of Finland drawing. Matty finally went crazy and shaved it while he was sleeping and told me I’m never allowed to give facial-hair advice ever again, especially to her susceptible husband who thought Tom of Finland was a friend of ours from school. I thought Larry looked like a sexy daddy. Matty thought he looked like a police-sanctioned sketch drawing on a wanted poster for a man accused of accosting teenage girls in a park.”
“You know,” Darren said. “I don’t even question the things you say anymore.”
“That’s good,” I said, reaching over and patting his hand on the gearshift. “It’ll make your life easier in the long run.”
“Oh?” he said, sounding amused. “You’re thinking long-term already. Sandy, please. We’ve only been fake together for a few weeks.”
No matter what he would say later, the sound I made then was completely masculine and I didn’t flush horribly. “That’s… you don’t… oh my god.”
He decided to go easy on me. “I guess I should just let it go, huh?” he said. “My father. The fewer expectations I have, the less it’ll hurt after a little while.”
“Why do you want this?” I asked, trying to recover from my latest bout of embarrassment.
“What?”
“Him.”
Darren shrugged, but it spoke volumes when he resolutely kept his eyes forward. “He’s my dad.”
“Has he ever really been?”
He knew what I meant. “He never instigated anything. It was always my mom calling him. And we could never call his house. Or his office. He owned a construction company back then. Made good money. Mom liked him, even after she found out he was married, but I think it was more because he paid her money to keep quiet. Not that she ever asked for it. And she only took what she needed for me, nothing more. That’s just the kind of person she is, I guess. Not that I wanted anything to do with it, not after I found out where it came from. I always thought it was dirty.”
“She sounds like a good woman,” I said quietly.
“She is.” He laughed, but it sounded forced. “Which doesn’t really explain how she got involved with the likes of him, but something we do when we’re younger may not reflect who we are when we’re older.” He glanced over at me before looking away again. “We make stupid choices, you know? Maybe even do something we regret doing and wish there were ways to go back and change it.”
It was only then that I realized my hand was still on his. I pulled it back like he’d burned me. All my bravado fell by the wayside when I remembered my bathroom freak-out and the reasons behind why I’d needed to call Paul.
Because I had undeniable, disgustingly fond feelings for Darren Mayne.
I might have even been in like with him.
Which was awful. Because I didn’t like him at all.
Except for the parts I did.
Which were a lot of parts.
What a terrible thing to happen to me.
And here he was, saying the mistakes of the past were changed by the reflections of the future. Or something. I didn’t know. I was too busy wondering if movies were realistic in that people who threw themselves from moving vehicles were able to get up and run with hardly any injuries at all. I would have to tuck and roll, but I was used to tucking as it was, so it was no skin off my penis.
I reached for the door handle. Of course, that’s when we crossed onto a bridge with a long drop below to a dry riverbed.
“Fuck my life,” I groaned without even meaning to.
“What’s going on?” He glanced at me.
“Nothing!” I said, and my voice absolutely did not squeak. “Nothing. Everything is… just fine. I’m fine. You’re fine.” I coughed in horror. I hoped it looked like a normal cough to Darren and not a horror cough. “I mean, you know, not like fine, but like, good. We’re both good and everything is fine. We’re just two people driving on a Saturday. A Saturday drive because it’s a nice autumn day with no water below to break my fall should I jump out of a moving car.”
He eyed me warily. “Did you smoke crack in the bathroom and it’s just starting to hit you now? Because that’s really the only explanation I can come up with for why you’re sweaty and your eyes are bugging out of your head.”
“Do I look like I’d do bathroom crack?” I snapped at him. Then, “Wait. Don’t answer that. Also, you never tell a lady she looks sweaty. Even if said lady is sweating her balls off. It’s rude and I will fucking cut you if you say that again. And I don’t have buggy eyes, you overgrown meatsack.”
He laughed, and his shoulders lost some of the tension they’d carried since he’d picked me up. It should have put me at ease, to hear that sound from him, but it just made things worse. I was in over my head and I didn’t know how I was going to get out of this without it blowing up in my face.
“Are we really going to do this?” he asked, and for a moment, I thought he could see into my head where I was currently stuck in a vision of where I was sitting on his face while he licked my taint on a beach somewhere in Los Cabos while I sipped a margarita out of a glass the size of a goldfish bowl. It was all very detailed and I might have had no idea how I’d gotten there in the first place.
“If you’re flexible,” I said, my voice sex-deep, Helena purring.
“For the drag show?” he asked, tongue darting out and wetting his lips.
“Exactly.” I cleared my throat, trying to shove Helena as far away as I could. If she had her way, we’d be pulled over on the side of the road showing Darren what a lack of a gag reflex looks like. I didn’t think this was the time nor the place for it.
I really needed to get home and untape my penis.
“Nothing too overboard.” He narrowed his eyes at me.
“Baby doll,” I said. “I’m a drag queen. There’s no possible way it won’t be too overboard. How do you feel about sequins?”
“Against.”
“Feathers?”
“Apathetic.”
“Assless chaps and then we bedazzle your butt cheeks?”
He groaned again. “Do you see what I do for you? Anyone else, and I’d have left you high and dry a long time ago.”
There was a strange buzzing in my ears and my breath caught in my chest. “And why is that?” I managed to ask.
“What?”
/>
“Why are you doing this for me? Anyone else, you wouldn’t. Why this?” I didn’t even try to hide how breathless I sounded.
“Rule ten,” he said, not looking over at me. “You agreed.”
You don’t get to ask me that.
I nodded, somewhat flustered.
We rode in silence for a while.
Then, “You’ve never called me that before.”
“What?”
He shrugged, attempting indifference but somehow landing on endearingly nervous instead, almost like he was shy, for fuck’s sake. “Baby doll.” He coughed, and I saw the blush on his cheeks. “You call Paul that. And Corey. And Vince sometimes. But never me.”
“Oh,” I said awkwardly. “I guess. I just… I mean, we’re friends. Sort of.”
“Sort of friends,” he repeated.
I looked down at my hands, wondering the best way to salvage this without giving away the raging figurative hard-on I apparently had for him. “Yeah, I mean. Right? When we have our fake breakup, maybe we could still be friends. Or something.”
“Fake breakup?” He gripped the steering wheel again, knuckles turning white.
“That’s how this ends,” I reminded him, suddenly very unsure about a lot of things.
“Right,” he said.
“But we could be friends.” Because the thought of us going back to the way things had been before wasn’t sitting right with me.
“Maybe,” he said and nothing else. Like a douche.
I snorted. “Great validation there. Thanks for using your words. Would you rather I go back to hating you? Because I can. If that’s what you want.”
“Shut up, Sandy,” he grumbled. “You never hated me.”
“Maybe,” I mocked.
He rolled his eyes, and the silence that followed wasn’t that bad.
It was almost… comfortable. Like two people who’d spent time together and enjoyed each other’s company without the need to fill the quiet. I’d never really had that with a person before. It was… nice. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend that we weren’t pretending and this was just a normal Saturday for us.