The Queen & the Homo Jock King (At First Sight 2)

The weirdest thing hit me then.

I stood there staring at my phone in the middle of a destroyed closet, surrounded by enough sequins and spandex to make it look like I’d murdered RuPaul’s Drag Race, wondering how I’d found myself in the position to meet Darren’s father as his girlfriend and to meet his mother as his boyfriend, knowing that everything around me was spiraling out of control, but the only thing that I could focus on was the little blinking number that let me know I’d been talking to Darren for over an hour on the phone. An hour where’d he’d pissed me off, turned me on, made me laugh, and made me sad. An hour that let me see the man behind the façade of a Homo Jock King, at least for a little bit.

And it hit me that maybe it was the best hour I’d had in a very long time.

And if I just happened to sigh happily a little, well.

No one heard it but me.

Chapter 13: Helena Van Der Beek of the Dawson’s Creek Van Der Beeks

“WHAT DO you mean, you can’t meet up for lunch?” Paul asked Saturday morning. He was on speakerphone while I sat in front of the mirror at the vanity in my bedroom, experimenting with lipstick to see which better said that I was a woman with a mission who would still probably leave lipstick rings on your cock. It was hard to strike the balance between the two. Well, hard for a drag queen. I needed Andrew Taylor to see me as a force to be reckoned with while also making him slightly uncomfortable. Not that Darren needed to know anything about that.

I had a plan, after all.

And if past experience dictated anything, it was that every plan I’d ever had had been executed flawlessly.

“I’m busy.” I pouted at the mirror, wondering if my lips should be fuller. I thought maybe about doing the whole Kardashian shot glass lip plumping thing, but then I realized I was not an idiot and also had a modicum of sense, so I decided against it.

“Doing what?”

“Darren.”

Paul gagged. “Oh sweat balls. Say no more. I really don’t want to know anything about that. But I’m glad you and he are done fighting.”

I paused in my ministrations in the mirror and looked back down at the phone. “Who says we were fighting?”

“Please. You were glaring at him the entire time at your show on Wednesday. I’ve never seen you angrily perform Beyoncé before. It was almost a religious experience. And Darren looked like a kicked puppy the entire time. Seriously. That family’s genetics are totally unfair. They get to be hot and muscular, and when they’re pouting, all I want to do is give them a hug and a hand job or something.”

“You want to give Darren a hand job?”

“Oh god no,” Paul said. “I was just speaking generally. I don’t speak asshole like you and Darren do. It’s why you’re made for each other.”

“You say the sweetest things, baby doll.”

“I try. Why were you pissed off?”

“Your mother is meddling.”

Paul sighed. “What did she do now?”

“She got Dare to give her his mom’s phone number, called her up out of the blue, and invited her down for Thanksgiving to meet Darren’s new boyfriend.”

“Okay,” Paul said. “Then what happened?”

Well, since I really couldn’t tell him about meeting Andrew Taylor under the guise of a heterosexual relationship, I had nothing else. But that should have been enough. “That’s it,” I said.

“I don’t understand what the problem is. Why wouldn’t you want him there?”

And no, he wouldn’t, because Paul was a paragon of virtue who didn’t lie about his relationship in order to help a man named Mike who sometimes smelled like frozen taquitos from Costco. Paul would never understand that I was meeting Darren’s mother under the guise of a fabricated relationship. This poor, sweet woman was probably thinking her slutty son had finally found someone to settle down with, never knowing that I was essentially just a butt plug on his sexual appetite, keeping it all inside until one day, the plug would be removed and all that was trapped inside will come gushing out in a flood of shame and remorse.

“I just don’t know if I’m ready for that,” I said instead to Paul. Because, maybe, if Darren and I were in a real relationship, I’d be worried that it’d be too soon to meet his mother. That sounded

plausible and something I would say. Or at least I thought it would be. “What if she comes down here and hates me because she thinks her son deserves better? Or worse, what if she loves me and then Darren and I break up like, two weeks later? Who would get to keep his mother in the divorce? I would hope it would be me, because I’m an amazing son.”

“She’s not going to think that Darren deserves better than you,” Paul said.

“I know that,” I said. “I’m wonderful and the best that Darren could possibly do. I was just practicing being humble for when she gets here. Did you believe me?”