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As soon as I walk into my apartment, I see that Rey’s bag is gone from my kitchen island, and I feel both relieved and disappointed at the same time.
Throwing my jacket on a chair, I walk into my bedroom to get some sleep before practice. Rey made the bed neatly, and I wonder if she makes her own bed at home, too. I take off my pants and shirt and peel back the covers, climbing in.
The sheets feel cool and soft, but they smell like Rey’s light, floral perfume. I bury my face in my pillow and groan, getting hard just from imagining her between these sheets an hour ago.
Hot and cold. Back and forth. Heaven and hell. That’s going to be my life until Rey completes this assignment.Chapter ThirteenReyna
“Does anyone have extra pantyhose?” a loud voice booms out across the dressing room.
“I might,” comes in answer from a man with his short black hair slicked back. He’s carefully applying lip liner in a lighted mirror.
There are around a dozen queens in the dressing room in various states of dressing and putting on makeup. Kai told me on the way here that I don’t have to learn everyone’s names or ask what pronouns they prefer; if I just address everyone as “queen,” I’m good.
“Kai!” a tall queen dressed in all white calls out.
All heads in the room turn, and faces light up. Several people rush over.
“Girl, can you fix this?” a queen asks Kai, turning to give him a look at her face from every angle.
Kai crinkles his face the same way he does at me when I try something new.
“How many hours do you have?” he asks, breaking into a grin a few seconds later. “Yeah, I got you, boo.”
“You brought an assistant!” A stunning queen, with dark ebony skin, puts her hands on my shoulders.
“Hi, I’m Renee,” I say, my heart pounding nervously.
I feel like an oddball here. I’m not part of this club in any way, and I have nothing to offer. I’m concerned I’ll come off looking like a gawker.
The queen eyes me quizzically. “Are you…?”
“I’m just a boring old cis woman,” I say, shrugging. “I’m a friend of Kai’s.”
“Then you’re a friend of ours, too.” She puts an arm around me, and I get a whiff of a sweet, powdery scent. “I’m Dee.”
“You look incredible,” I say, admiring her perfectly painted face.
She’s wearing chaps, a ruffled white blouse and super tall dark cowboy boots with heels at least four inches high. Every angle of her face is perfectly defined and exaggerated, her eye makeup done in white and gold.
“Thank you,” she says, looking pleased.
“Do you do your own makeup?” I ask her.
“I do. Takes more than two hours to paint this mug.”
“I wish I could do that.”
Kai looks up from his spot crouched over the open suitcases of supplies we carried in and says, “Renee’s a beauty blogger. Teach her all you know, guys.”
“Ugh,” someone groans. “Why did you bring her on Western Night? It’s the shittiest.”
“Speak for yourself,” someone else calls out. “I look fucking fabulous. Ride-able, if I do say so myself.”
A door to the room opens and a voice calls out, “Forty-five minutes to showtime, ladies!”
The room erupts into chaos then.
“I need some goddamned pantyhose!”
“Fucking razor burn!”
“I need someone to sew me into this gown real quick.”
“Make yourself useful,” Kai says to me, winking.
I nod and spring into action, doing what I can. It doesn’t feel like much—I deliver makeup samples from Kai’s case to anyone who wants to try them, help zip boots and blot shiny faces. Some queens who are ready can’t lift drinks to their mouths due to wearing super long nails, so I carefully lift straws to their lips.
“You’re too pretty to be real,” a queen says to me, tilting my jaw upward to get a better look.
I laugh as Kai says, “Show them a picture of Jonah!”
“Girl, who’s Jonah?” someone asks as several queens cluster around me.
“Her boyfriend,” Kai says. “He’s a professional hockey player, and I want to lick him, just sayin’.”
I could show the queens a picture of me and Jonah on the Ferris wheel, looking like an average, happy couple. But something in me scrolls past those and finds one I snagged online and saved to my phone.
Jonah was posing for a magazine photographer who did a series on athlete’s bodies. He’s naked in the photo, his full sleeve tattoo on one side on display and nothing but his hand covering his crotch in the bottom of the frame. He looks intense as he leans on the top of his stick, his blue eyes piercing.
“Fuck me, he’s hot,” someone mutters as the group erupts into hoots and hollers.
“Girl, that’s your man?! You are one lucky bitch!”
“He needs to move his hand out of the way!”
