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“Why are you always smiling?”
The question came out of the blue, dragging me away from my impromptu fantasy. “Huh?”
“Like right now, you’re practically beaming. Dude, I’m just adding some powder on your cheeks, but it looks like I’m giving you a freaking lap dance.” I glanced up at him, noticing that his words sounded a little antagonistic, but he was smiling, too. “What’s your secret?” he asked, a little more earnestly.
“I told you, I live life on the ‘be positive one hundred percent of the time’ setting. It makes everything way more fun.”
Plus, I was picturing how your smile would look as I started to kiss my way up your thighs.
I kept that bit to myself. Elijah gave a huff, taking a step back to look over the work he’d done so far. I’m not entirely sure what had gotten into me, but I really wanted to get up from the chair and pin Elijah to the wall with a kiss, feeling those supple lips of his curling into a smile that matched mine.
“I wish I had that same outlook,” Elijah said with a downward inflection. “Life just made it hard for me, right off the bat. I didn’t really stand a chance.”
“What happened? Was it when you came out?” I asked, remembering him briefly opening up to me in my office, speaking about his traumatizing coming-out experience and how he’d experienced homelessness as a result. It didn’t only shatter my heart but pulverized every tiny piece into minuscule grains of dust. To think that any parent would kick their own flesh and blood out because… I couldn’t even think about it without getting red.
Elijah shook his head. “Even before that,” he said, using a pink sponge-looking thing to rub at my cheekbones. “I mean, look at me, Ryan, I wasn’t exactly a deep closet case. My friends were always girls, I loved wearing my mom’s high heels, and I played around with her makeup so much that they had to put a lock on the bathroom cabinets.”
My eyebrows jerked up to the ceiling. “Locks?”
“Oh yeah. You’d think I was stealing money out of their wallets. And that was only the start of it. They tried forcing every straight-boy thing they could on me: baseball, football, fishing, farming, cars. They burned all of my pop albums and replaced them with spiritual tracks only sang by men, as if that would have some kind of gay-cleansing effect on me.” Elijah rolled his eyes, an icy-cold laugh cutting through the room. “Joke’s on them. I found a way to burn over the CDs so that it looked like I was listening to Jo Shmo talking about finding the light, but I was really listening to Lil’ Kim sing about finding the G-spot.”
That pulled a laugh out of me, even if I wanted to personally find Elijah’s parents and chew them the fuck out for ever trying to dim their son’s light.
“I’m assuming you don’t talk to them anymore?”
“Not at all,” Elijah said. There wasn’t a hint of sadness or regret anywhere in his voice. “I came out to them at sixteen, when I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’d been waking up with tears in my eyes for years already. Literally, I’d open my eyes in the morning, and there would already be tears. It was excruciating. My best friend, Amelia, she helped me through the darkest times, but I knew that I couldn’t keep relying on her. I had to come out and end the lie, before I ended everything else. So I did, and my parents kicked me out that very afternoon. Just like that. Both of them.”
I sat up in the chair, my knuckles pale as I gripped the armrests. I made a conscious effort to unclench my jaw. “Fuck, Elijah, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine… fuck.”
“It was shitty, beyond shitty at the time, but looking back now, it feels more like a blessing. I needed out of that toxic environment. They made it easy for me in that sense.” He dipped his brush into an aquamarine blue before telling me to close my eyes, his soft touch pressing against my lid.
“And you were taken in by a drag queen, right?”
Elijah gave a surprised huh. “You really do listen, don’t you?”
“I’m a detective—it’s my job to remember every detail. You also make it really easy.” I cracked an eye open, wanting to see his expression with my next words. “Everything about you is memorable.”
His smile was cut off by him telling me to shut my eye again, the brush lightly pressing against my eyelid.
“Whatever,” he said. I didn’t need to have my eyes open to tell he was still smiling. “Yeah, I had been hanging out around some drag shows around my sixteenth birthday. They’d sneak me in for the eighteen-and-up nights, and one drag queen kind of adopted me from the first night on. Majora Drive. The fiercest glamazon queen to have ever graced Blue Creek and beyond.”
