“My Queen,” he said as I approached.
“My questionable heterosexual,” I said, leaning over the bar and kissing his ear.
He grinned at me as he set two shots of Patrón on the bar. “You wouldn’t even know what to do with me if I swung that way.”
I grinned at him, showing far too many teeth. “Kitten, there would be nothing left by the time I was done with you. I would destroy you.”
He clutched his hands over his heart and sighed dramatically. “With an offer like that, who I am to resist?”
“You’ll give in.” I slammed back one of the shots. It burned as it went down. I placed the glass back on the bar. “They always do.” I brushed a trace of tequila off my lips and licked my finger.
“Maybe I like to go slow.” He leaned forward, elbows on the bar. He had these pert little nipples that just begged to be twisted. “All gentle-like.”
I rolled my eyes. “Then, honey, you’re talking to the wrong queen.” I took the other shot and felt myself even out. “I don’t do slow and gentle.” Well, I did, but very rarely. It was an intimacy that I didn’t quite allow myself to have.
“My girlfriend hates it when I do it slow and gentle,” he said seriously.
I grimaced. “Ugh, that is such a waste.”
“What? That I have a girlfriend?”
“No, that you like it slow and gentle. It’s unbecoming of a man with nipples like yours.”
He blushed and there it was. It was probably a good thing he was straight, because if he hadn’t been, I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist having his cock down my throat the second night he worked. What could I say, I obviously just cared too much.
“I’m never going to be able to look at my nipples the same way again.” He sighed.
“There, there.” I patted his hand. “I’ll do all the looking for you, and somehow, life will go on. Now stop distracting me. I have a show to do.”
Izaac rolled his eyes. “Your baby queens are already back behind the stage. I think Summer Zeeve was having a little freak-out earlier.”
My jaw tightened. Summer was a newer queen who had impressed me during her auditions with her ability to crab walk backward while gyrating her crotch toward the ceiling directly on the beat from Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer.” She was young, brash, and somehow, didn’t have a goddamn lick of common sense.
Most drag queens were also drama queens. You really couldn’t be one without the other. However, it was meant to be part of your persona, to add to the whole package. Summer tended to forget that and was about drama for drama’s sake. She liked to have mini-meltdowns prior to shows, saying she was too scared to go on, that she just wasn’t ready. It usually took me snarling in her face a bit before she would smirk quietly and go out on stage. I didn’t have time for her right now. Not for the first time, I regretted hiring her.
It was Saturday, the second in the month, which meant I had three other queens with me. I was the only regular, the others were on rotation. Georgia O’Queef was an older black queen who loved lavish costumes and Bette Midler. The other, Crystal Queer, was a couple of years younger than me, a lovely queen who usually utilized the stripper pole installed on the stage. She’d told me once her dream as a child had been to grow up and work at The Candy Store, but that dream had died when the strip club had closed after it turned out to be a meth lab and had forty-six dead bodies buried underneath the floorboards. “There’s nothing like seeing your childhood dreams dying because of murder and meth,” she’d said sadly. Given that she was one of my favorites, I’d had Mike, the owner of Jack It, install the stripper pole after I’d promised under no uncertain terms that there would be no nudity. I’d promised with wide eyes, both of us ignoring the fact that there were dicks out in the back room even as we were speaking.
“Of course I have to deal with children,” I muttered.
Izaac shrugged. “Not everyone can be so well put together like you, Helena.”
“If you ever leave me,” I threatened, “I will hunt you down and it will end in a murder-suicide.”
He cocked his head. “Who would be the murdered one?”
“Try and quit one day,” I purred. “See what happens.”
“I could never leave you,” he said. “No one simultaneously strokes and crushes my ego all in one breath like you do.”
“And don’t you forget it,” I said. “Tell me I look beautiful.”
“You look beautiful.”
“Thank you, baby doll. Now I must leave before I pull on those nips of yours.” I winked at him as he blushed again, leaving him behind and heading toward the back of the stage.
I pushed through the curtain at the end of the hall that led behind the stage. Georgia stood with her hands on her hips, wearing a long, elegant, and deeply cut blue dress with a train that stretched along the floor. The edges of the dress were slightly frayed, years of mending not able to catch every little stray strand.
Crystal wore white thigh-boots and a black unitard that barely covered any skin and would have been a probable pornographic situation if it hadn’t been for strategically placed costume tape that held the p