Tell Me It's Real (30 page)

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means he’s being a whiny little bitch,” Charlie said.

I sighed. “Thanks, Daddy. That’s exactly what I meant.”

“Then let me say it a different way,” Vince said. “Instead of asking you, I’m telling you. You
are
coming down to meet my friends.” He paused and then broke. “Right?”

He looked at me with such earnestness I couldn’t say no. I had a feeling that was going to be a common event. “Yeah, I’m going down. Just give me a few minutes, okay?”

You would have thought I’d gifted him another bicycle with the way he attacked my face. I almost forgot that we had an audience as he sucked on my tongue. I was finally able to break away before I jacked him off in front of an old man and a drag queen. There gets to be a certain point where once you get going, you just can’t stop, and he’d brought me close there twice in four hours. “You gonna let me stay the night at your house tonight?” he whispered in my ear, flicking his tongue out and grazing it just once.

I didn’t even allow myself time to think. “Yeah.”

“Good answer,” he said, giving me another dirty kiss before backing away.

Helena and Charlie stared at me.

“What?” I tried to ask defiantly, knowing I was beet red.

Charlie shrugged and spoke for the both of them. “Diaries, dildos, and making out with a hot guy who apparently is now your boyfriend? Who are you and what have you done with Paul?”

“I don’t have a diary,” I said weakly.

“Can friends borrow dildos?” Helena asked Charlie. “Or is that a sex toy no-no?”

“As long as it’s cleaned, I don’t see the problem.”

“I want the big black one,” she told me. “But clean it first.”

“So gross,” I shuddered.

“It’s showtime, girlie,” Charlie said. “Get your pretty ass in gear.”

“Walk me down the stairs?” she asked Vince, batting her fake eyelashes at him.

“Sure.” He glanced back at me. “I’ll give you five minutes. If you’re not down there, I’m coming to get you and making you go down.”

“I’m a grown-up,” I snapped at him. “I’ll come down when I damn well please.”

“Five minutes, Paul.” He grabbed Helena’s hand and led her toward the door.

“You sure know how to work him already,” I heard her say. “You got to grab him by the balls if you want to get him to do something.”

“Oh, I plan to,” was his reply.

The door closed behind them.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

Charlie burst out laughing. “Boy, you surprise the royal hell out of me sometimes. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I don’t know if I do,” I said truthfully. “Vince kind of wore me down until I couldn’t say no anymore.”

“Yeah, I bet that was
such
a hardship on you, looking as he does. It’s a good thing you decided to hit him with your car.”

“I
didn’t
! He ran into
my
door!” When were people going to believe me?

“Uh-huh. You should have just asked him out if you wanted to get his attention.”

“I didn’t want his attention.”

“Bullshit. You’re just as head over heels as he is. The difference is you hide it better underneath all the remarkable bluster you have sometimes. But since I’m your daddy, you can’t bullshit me. I’ve known you for far too long to get fooled by you, Paul Auster. Vince may not see it yet, but you can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”

I sputtered at him for a good minute or two until he went over to his perch on the balcony to man the spotlight and the camera. I took my usual place beside him, but this time, instead of watching Helena, I immediately searched for Vince. It didn’t take long to find him standing with the same jocky boys he’d been with the week before. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him standing next to Darren Mayne. And I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see Darren wrap his arm around his shoulder, his mouth close to Vince’s ear as he said something to him. The drag show hadn’t yet started, but it was noisy enough that I couldn’t make out what was being said. All I knew is that Darren seemed to be standing
way
too fucking close to Vince, and Vince was doing absolutely nothing to push him away.

Darren Mayne. What a lot of people might not realize is that gay bars are exactly like high school, in that there are cliques. Tucson isn’t big enough to have multiple gay bars to cater to specific groups of homos. Instead, they all converge on this one place. Sometimes they mingle with one another, but mostly they stick to themselves within their own groups.

You’ve got your bears, your Muscle Maries. You’ve got the twinks, the ravers, the leather crowd. You’ve got the models, the lesbians (who, to be fair, have their own subgroups, but since I don’t have a vagina, I’m not privy to them). There are the queens, the transsexuals, and those random guys who just like wearing skirts. There are daddies and their boys, masters and their slaves. You’ve got the older and the younger, the middle age. There’s even a small group that comes out every now and then consisting of married couples with children, though they’re usually exhausted and leave by nine o’clock.

And then you’ve got the jocks, of which Darren Mayne is the king. I’d never spoken to Darren before, aside from the usual, “Sorry, sir, I totally didn’t mean to be breathing your air even though you seem like a big asshole,” that I would mumble under my breath every time we passed each other. There were a couple of times we’d pass each other and he’d catch my eye and I’d be convinced that he was about to say something, but either he thought better of it or it was my imagination. I didn’t know what possible thing Darren Mayne would have to say to
me,
so I figured it was always me misinterpreting.

But regardless, he was the king of the jocky gays, his little muscled boys around him like they’d just walked off one of those gay college porn sites that I’ve never,
ever
subscribed to (you know, the ones where the cookie-cutter hairless toned frat boys sit next to each other on a random couch and go through the cringe-worthy banter with the camera man who tries to convince the audience that the two dudes both have girlfriends and that they’ve
never
tried anything before with another guy, only to watch them proceed to fuck like bunnies. Very, very
experienced
bunnies at that).

Darren himself was probably around the same age as Vince, which put him slightly younger than me. And of course he had great blond hair that did whatever he wanted it to do. A killer body that looked like he spent every waking moment in the gym. He had a smile that could make your insides feel a bit loose and a great laugh, from the one time I’d actually heard it. I’d always heard that he was a bit of a slut (those jocky college boys tended to be like that), but he was never cruel, at least that I could see, and even more, he was always at Helena’s shows. Thinking back on it, I couldn’t remember the last time he
hadn’t
been there on a Wednesday or a Saturday, grinning at her while slipping her fives and tens rather than the usual one-dollar bills she got for tips.

But now I hated his stupid fucking face because he was standing way too fucking close to my fucking boyfriend who wasn’t doing a fucking thing to move back. They looked awfully chummy standing next to each other, their muscles bunching together like they were going to be sitting on some couch in their near future, talking about how their girlfriends didn’t know they were there, that they’d never really thought about doing anything with another guy, and then deep-throating each other like they’d been sucking cock all their lives.

And, of course, right then was the moment Vince obviously chose to say something about me, because he pointed up toward the balcony and they both glanced my way. I’m pretty sure they saw me with my crazy “I want to murder you because I’m weirdly jealous” face going on. I attempted to school it quickly and looked away, but not before I saw the flicker of confusion go across Vince’s face and the amused little smile on Darren’s. The fucker.

Ever-watching, Charlie hadn’t missed this exchange at all. “Give him a
little
credit,” he chided me. “I’m pretty sure he’s not bored with you yet.”

“Or maybe I’m the other woman,” I said forlornly. “Or maybe he and Darren have been together for twelve years and I was meant to be a present for Darren’s birthday and we’re going to have a threesome and then they’ll throw me to the curb like a box of unwanted newborn kittens before they go back to their lives, where they’re planning on adopting a Croatian baby named Braslav.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you should be on medication,” Charlie said. “It can’t be healthy to have you thinking all by yourself without some kind of pharmaceutical intervention.”

The DJ proceeded to announce Helena, and Charlie trained the spotlight on the curtains while flicking on the video camera. Before she started, he leaned over to me and said, “You’re being summoned.”

I looked down and saw Vince crooking a finger at me. I thought about shaking my head, but Charlie must have known that I was acting a bit stupid because he kicked my stool and knocked me over. I almost fell to the floor, but instead gracefully stumbled, making it sound like an obese herd of elephants had just been spooked by lions and was trampling up on the balcony to get away. People below looked up as if they expected the roof to come caving down on them, which, to be fair, it probably almost did. Charlie didn’t even have the common decency to look slightly repentant, instead just smirking and waving me away.

So I started toward the Stairs Of Doom which would lead me to one of the most horrifying experiences of any young gay man’s life: meeting the friends of the new boyfriend. By the time I had reached the halfway point, I’d convinced myself that not only were Darren and Vince butt buddies, but that they had orgies all the time with all the jocky pretending-to-be-straight-to-be-slightly-more-appealing boys and I
really
was getting Freddie Prinze Juniored and this was going to be the moment that I would stand in the middle of the dance floor, the period ghost up on the balcony, and blood would rain down on top of me like I was Carrie at the prom. Then they would all point and laugh at me, and Vince would be at the front, getting handed money by Darren because
he
won their bet and then they would start blowing each other and Darren would have the world’s biggest cock and I would sit there and watch, having been menstruated on all over my head.

Pretty much convinced meeting new people was the worst idea ever in my current state, I decided to make a run for the exit as soon as I passed through the door. I would tell Vince later that I saw a robbery in progress and attempted to thwart it, only to end up being kidnapped and held against my will in an Islamic prison, which would be the reason he wouldn’t hear from me for a few days. Plan set, I opened the door.

Vince stood on the other side.

“Oh sweat balls,” I muttered, looking longingly at the front of the bar.

“Going somewhere?” he asked, slightly amused.

“No, dear,” I said. “Just coming down to see you like I promised. I’m super excited about meeting Darren.”

“Good,” he said cheerfully, grabbing my arm. “Glad to hear you are so ready for this.”

“I was being
sarcastic
,” I snapped at him, trying to pull from his grasp as he weaved his way through the crowd. Helena did her patented backward cartwheel look-how-special-I-am move, and the crowd roared around me. Please. If only they knew how long it took her to perfect that and how much I had to help and how much of
her
sweat I got on me, they wouldn’t be cheering. They would be fleeing in terror.

I tried to relay to the people we were passing that I was being forced somewhere against my will in hopes that one would step in and save me. However, apparently Good Samaritan laws do not apply in gay clubs as no one stepped forward to risk their life for me.

I smashed into the back of Vince when he came to a sudden stop in front of me. I thought about burying my face in his back and hiding behind him but figured he didn’t want his friends to know he was dating the world’s most gaping vagina, so I steeled my balls a bit and looked up at him when he brought me to his side, dropping his arm on my shoulder. He leaned over and nuzzled my neck. “It’ll be fine,” he said for only me to hear. “You’ll see.”

Somehow, I managed to keep my eyes from rolling. I put on my best smile, preparing to relay to the group that I was just
thrilled
to meet them all, when I realized it was only Darren standing in front of me. The rest of Vince’s jock posse was gone, as if they’d never been there at all. I could only think about Darren with his arm wrapped around Vince’s shoulders, like he thought he had every right to be there. I thought I had every right to make him live the rest of his life as an amputee.

“Paul,” Vince said above the music. “This is Darren. Darren, this is my boyfriend, Paul.”

I held out my hand and Darren looked at it for a moment as if deciding whether I had scabies and running chances in his head of getting it himself if he touched me. It was about to get awkward when he reached out and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I mumbled.

“What?” he said, raising his voice.

Hurray. This is weird already.
“I said nice to meet you!” And of course, as I shouted this as loud as I could to be heard, there was a pause in the music and my voice echoed over the silent club like I was some screeching capuchin monkey who had just discovered masturbation. Everyone in the club (and most likely on Earth) turned to look at me.

“That was my distant acquaintance Paul, everyone!” Helena said into the mic. The music picked up again and she rolled back into her routine.

Vince chuckled quietly in my ear. “Still haven’t found that time machine yet,” he said. “I’ll keep a list for you of all the things you’ll want to undo.”

I glared at him.

“Nice to meet you too,” Darren said, smirking at me like I was the funniest piece of shit he’d ever seen. “I wish I could say I’d heard a lot about you, but that would be a lie.”