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‘You can if you need to,’ I say. Gabriel looks dubious. ‘It’s okay.’
Victor closes his laptop and leans across the table. ‘This is the not-so-fun part,’ he says seriously. ‘I need to know what you two have been up to. Especially what you’ve done in public.’
Gabriel gives me a loaded look. I’ve always scoffed when couples say they have an almost telepathic connection, but in that moment, I know exactly what Gabriel’s thinking.There’s no way in hell Ican tell him Iwas in drag last night.
‘We only went out to dinner—’ I say at the exact same time Gabriel says, ‘We hooked up in the locker room at the rental tennis courts.’
Shit.
Bernard lets out a long sigh, like this is the last thing he wants to deal with. Sexuality is all fine and good but, clearly, mucking around during a tournament is where he draws the line. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he says to Victor, pushing his chair back from the table.
‘Okay,’ Victor says. ‘Let’s focus on last night. You said you went to dinner?’
Gabriel looks at me. ‘We have to tell him.’
Victor looks between us, clearly unimpressed. ‘Well, then? Explain.’
‘We went to dinner, and then we ate gelato across the road,’ Gabriel begins, looking to me for backup.
‘I thought it would be nice to unwind for a bit, and a friend was hosting karaoke nearby.’ I feel my face go red. ‘Drag Queen Karaoke. At a place called the Flamingo Bar.’
‘The drag queen is Noah’s friend,’ Gabriel interjects. Victor looks like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.
‘I had a few drinks, but Gabi was definitely still sober, and the next thing I knew, I was on the stage singing a rendition of “Memory”, and—’
Victor gives me a strange look. ‘. . . The cat song?’
‘Heaps of people recorded it; I suppose it might even show up on the club’s social media page.’ Saying it out loud, I realise we definitely were not as careful as we thought we were last night and that possibly a fair chunk of the shit that’s gone on this morning is mostly my fault. ‘Gabriel was there, but, well, he was in disguise.’
‘Disguise.’ Victor looks to Gabriel. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I was dressed up like a woman.’ He says it very, very quietly.
It’s clear Victor doesn’t know whether to be amused or scandalised. ‘As in . . . you dressed up like a drag queen?’
‘We didn’t want anyone to recognise him,’ I say.
Victor runs his hands over his face. ‘Let me get this straight. Last night, the night before a match, you went to a club, and dressed up as a woman to watch a drag show in which the person you were with sang a song from the musicalCats.And everyone recorded this. Am I up to speed?’
‘Pretty much, yeah.’ Gabriel looks as if he wants the floor to open up and swallow him whole.
‘You’re earning your salary this tournament, Victor,’ Gabriel’s manager mutters to himself as he turns back to his computer. ‘The good news is that no media have mentioned the club scene, and I suppose, technically, youwerein disguise, so it looks like you weren’t recognised. I’ll just need to monitor social media for a few hours to ensure any videos don’t surface.’ He looks at us both expectantly. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘Most of it was pretty tame,’ I explain.
‘Other than hooking up in the locker room and a brief stint as a drag queen, it was pretty tame,’ Victor says dryly. ‘No scandals; no drug use, no public sex, nothing that could possibly get out to make this story live any longer?’
Gabriel shakes his head. ‘Nothing else.’
‘Okay.’ Victor tilts his neck back and forth, cracking it. ‘I can work with that. Now, how serious is this thing between you two?’ His finger waggles between us.
Shit. I look at Gabriel. He looks at me. Our conversation last night is pretty hazy, and I still have no idea how to navigate how I feel about him. The only thing I know is that Gabriel occupies my every waking thought, and that in a matter of days he’s upended my life so spectacularly, I don’t think I can go back to the way it was before, and that I hope, desperately, that he feels the same way.
‘Have you not—’ Victor begins.
‘It is—’ interrupts Gabriel, his eyes never leaving mine, ‘—serious. Isn’t it?’
I look into those stupidly beautiful brown eyes and just want to leap across the table and kiss that stupidly beautiful brown face. ‘Gabriel, I—’ God, theIlove youis right there but it’s not the right time. Not when he’s dealing with all this. ‘I’m so serious about you it hurts.’
