Every now and then, it was good to just let your crazy go all out without caring about how people might judge you.
I looked out the SUV window. At some point, we’d pulled over into a strip mall parking lot. “Huh. Why are we stopped?” I turned back to Darren. He sat next to me, slack-jawed and staring at me with wide eyes. “Everything okay?” I asked him, quirking my eyebrow.
“How are you a real person?” he asked, sounding awed.
I frowned. “Is that some kind of trick question?”
He shook his head, like he was clearing the cobwebs. “Should we even talk about the part where you volunteered me to dress in drag and pimp me out?”
“Oh. Right. Um. So. Hey. Do you want to do me a favor?”
“Whatever could that be,” he sighed.
“You are going to need to let me dress you up and then sell you to the highest bidder.”
“Which is what I just said.”
“Sort of. I used euphemisms. Made it sound a bit better, so.”
“And why is this going to be a drag bachelor auction and not a normal bachelor auction? And, as an aside, I should probably think about the direction my life is headed when sentences like that come out of my mouth and I really don’t bat an eye.”
“Everyone knows that drag bachelor auctions are more fun than regular bachelor auctions,” I said.
“Dare I ask why?”
“Dare you?”
“Why, Sandy.”
“Because it’s more fun that way.” Wow. And here I was thinking it was obvious. Maybe Darren didn’t understand what fun was. He was a homo jock, after all. If he couldn’t lift it, eat it, or fuck it, he probably didn’t quite understand what the concept of fun was. “Everyone thinks so.”
“Everyone,” he said flatly.
“Right. So. Darren. Notice how you’re talking about drag queen things and their level of entertainment with the Drag Queen? Yeah, who do you think out of the two of us knows what they’re talking about? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not you.”
“You really don’t want me to answer that question.”
“Asshole.”
“Bitch.”
“Rude,” I said with a gasp. “I am a lady and I demand you treat me as such.”
He snorted. “Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.”
“It was nice while it lasted.”
“Was it?”
I decided he’d been through enough today and decided to say something nice. “Your dad was… fun.”
“Shut up, Sandy.”
“No, really. You should be proud. I can see where you get your whole… existence from.”
“I don’t know why I thought this would be any other way than it was,” he muttered, flexing his fingers on the steering wheel.
I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic, something biting given I was still running on adrenaline and I didn’t need to be that nice, but I stopped myself when I saw the tightness around his eyes, his mouth stretching into a thin line. “How did you think it would be?” I asked, curious.