Chapter 21
The first coherent thought to enter Will’s mind as he woke was that this might be the only time he had ever slept in another man’s arms without waking up a sweaty, disoriented goblin. He’d always loved the romance of the idea, but after five minutes of spooning he usually became so hot and irritable that it undercut the purpose. So aside from the very rare occasions when he would wake up with a dreadful hangover being spooned by an unconscious Jordan after crashing at his place, he tended to avoid it. This morning, though, opening his eyes to find himself tucked into the side of Patrick’s body, arm draped over his chest, head nestled under his shoulder, he realized it might have been the best night’s sleep he’d had in a long time.
The second thought arrived quickly on the heels of the first and announced itself far less gently: He had overslept. The sky outside was a bright, warm blue, and the sun had already moved around to this side of the building, which meant it was noon. At least.
“Shit,” he whispered, carefully extracting himself from Patrick’s embrace and leaning over to check his phone on the nightstand. Then, when he saw just how much he had slept in by: “Shit, shit, shit!”
Will scrambled to exit the bed in such a hurry that he became entangled in the covers and nearly went headfirst onto the floor. Feeling Patrick begin to stir next to him, he finally liberated himself from the sheets and tiptoed out into the bathroom to pee, brush his teeth, and hastily scrub the goop from the corners of his eyes and mouth.
When he returned to the bedroom, Patrick was awake.
“Good morning,” he mumbled happily, stretching.
“No, it is not,” Will informed him, tripping over the shoes he had kicked off the night before in what had felt at the time like erotic abandon, and now struck him as an act of sabotage against his future self. Why did he never pick up after himself?
“It’s not a good morning?” Patrick asked, squinting in the direction of the window, where a house sparrow had decided to set down at that very moment, like something out of a Disney movie. Except this particular princess would have to dress herself and would deal with the inevitable bird shit on the windowsill later.
“It’s not morning,” Will said. “We overslept. No. I overslept. It’s story hour in the Rainbow Room in…Jesus, in less than an hour.”
Patrick watched, clearly amused at first, as Will floundered around the room, gathering little containers of eyebrow glue, foundation, highlighter, and a dozen other tools of his craft from various drawers and surfaces. It was a curated chaos that might not make sense to an outsider, but Will knew exactly where everything was. Except for when he finally sat down in front of his mirror, then realized he’d forgotten something, swore, and got back up.
“Are you about to get into so-called ‘quick drag’?” asked Patrick, sitting up in bed. The sheet slid down, revealing enough of his chest—those nipples! God, the sounds Patrick had made when he played with them—that Will was momentarily distracted before remembering the task at hand.
“Pretty much, yes,” he said, checking his phone again. “I need to be ready in, like, twenty minutes. Which is a lot to ask, even for those among us who are already women when they wake up.” He fumbled while trying to open one of the many little tubes in front of him, and he forced himself to take a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just really need to focus. I can’t believe I’ve let this happen.”
A strange look passed over Patrick’s face, and Will realized how he must have sounded. He’d meant, I can’t believe I forgot to set an alarm and I’m late again. Patrick probably heard, This is your fault.
“I should go,” said Patrick, rising and pulling on his boxers and jeans.
“OK,” said Will with his back to him, mouth morphed into an exaggerated O as he concentrated on expediting the metamorphosis that would ordinarily have been conducted with a patient, ritualistic reverence. “I’ll call you later,” he added, guiltily. “I…I had a great time.” Patrick paused before leaving the room to kiss his crown and rest a hand for a second on the back of his neck.
“Break a leg,” he said, his expression in the mirror still odd. Then he grabbed his jacket and let himself out in a hurry, and Will didn’t have the time to linger on the stilted goodbye, or to feel like shit for rushing him out of here, especially after last night had taken such an intense turn.
He ignored several text messages and a missed call from Faye Runaway while rushing through the final stages of his makeup, carefully installed his wig, then called a taxi and squeezed into his outfit and heels while he waited.
Daytime drag was a little like daytime drinking: As fun as it was, Will always had a guilty suspicion in the back of his mind that it was something he probably shouldn’t be doing, and suspected that one of these days it was going to end in an injury. Everybody he knew had a friend who had been beaten up—or worse—for the crime of being too fruity in public: holding hands with their boyfriend, walking with just a little too much sway in their hips or flounce in their wrist. Stepping outside his front door before dark dressed like a conservative Christian’s worst nightmare—or, more specifically, a cutesy interpretation of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, complete with pigtails, gingham pinafore, and sparkly red Mary Janes—was practically a provocation. He’d had taxi drivers refuse to pick him up when they saw him, and he knew that in the wider scheme, that was probably a best-case scenario. But needs must when the devil drives—or, in Will’s case, when the gay never passed his practical test and had to rely on Uber because the only alternative was a bus, and in these shoes? He didn’t think so.
Luckily on this specific day the driver offered Will little more than a bemused glance in the rearview mirror as he scooped up the voluminous tulle of his skirt to prevent it from being trapped in the car door.
“I’ll tell you what, Umar,” Will said, strapping himself in. “There’s a five-star rating and a cash tip in it for you if you can get me to the library in under ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” Umar considered the proposition as he maneuvered back onto the main road. “Easy-peasy.”
“You’re my hero,” Will told him. “Now let’s fly.”
They pulled up to Centenary Square with twenty whole seconds to spare, and Will shoved a tenner in Umar’s general direction before unspooling himself and his skirt from the vehicle and trotting across the plaza to the Library of Birmingham.
“Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” he exclaimed as he entered the building and caught the eye of Annie (or was it Amy?), the library staffer who helped them organize the story hours. “I’m late, I know, feel free to flog me later,” he continued. “How angry are the parents? Scrap that, how angry is Faye?”
“Everything’s fine!” said Annie or Amy, beckoning him to follow her to the Rainbow Room. “I mean, honestly, we were all just so surprised—”
“That a drag queen didn’t show up on time? It’s a sorry fact of life, darling,” said Will. “Death, taxes, and men in frocks barreling through the door fashionably late.”
“No, not that,” said the admin, who Will remembered now was actually called Allie. “The surprise guest. The kids were all so excited. So were the parents. I mean, we all are!”
“Surprise guest?” Will paused for a second, then resumed his pace to keep up with Allie. Blessedly, she led him to the lift, having encountered the story hour queens enough times to know that they didn’t do exceptionally well on stairs.
“He’s a huge hit,” Allie said. “I’ve been hearing the kids cheering from across the building for the last ten minutes.”
“He?”
The lift doors opened, and a moment later Will was entering the Rainbow Room, where he saw the usual semicircles of young children sitting cross-legged, on tiny stools, or in their parents’ laps. And seated before them, reading with impressive projection and enunciation from The Little Prince, was Patrick.
Or, rather, Captain Kismet. Patrick wore the famous blue bodysuit, red boots, aviator goggles pushed up over his forehead, pushing his hair out of place every which way so that Will’s hand twitched at his side with the impulse to smooth it.
“What the…”
Faye spotted him and silently glided to the back of the room to join him, her reproachful glare heightened by her evil-queen regalia.
“I see you finally made it,” she whispered.
“Sorry,” said Will.
“I need to be able to count on you, Gracie,” she continued. “This isn’t performing for gays who are so off their faces they don’t know what time it is.” She nodded toward the children, who were all still rapt under Patrick’s spell. “They’re our most precious audience. And days like this are precarious enough as it is.”
She was right. Will knew she was right. The story hour was about opening up the world to kids, showing them the pure magic of imagination. And even more than any birthday clown or costume-shop Elsa, queens were the embodiment of that imagination: living proof that you could grow up to be whoever and whatever you wanted to be. Children’s books were full of orphans and neglected waifs who discovered magic. Faye and Grace—and Patrick, it seemed—held the keys to that world. If Will were more prone to sentimentality, he would call it one of the great privileges of his art.
The children and parents all applauded, signaling the end of Patrick’s story. Acknowledging the presence of Captain Kismet for the first time, Faye said: “I suppose I can’t be too miffed, given your stand-in. Watch your back, girl, you could be looking at your replacement. He does better voices than you and he was on time.” She widened her eyes dramatically, and then turned back to the room, jumping back into the character of empress emcee as though Will had just flicked a switch on the back of her dress, effortlessly corralling the families into a queue so that the children could have a picture with their favorite superhero.
Wildly, Will didn’t think half the grown-ups in the room even understood that this was really Patrick Lake, the movie star; they just saw a guy in a costume and were grateful that it made their child happy.
Allie sidled up to him. “He’s good with kids, isn’t he?” she said, seemingly for want of anything else to say. Then: “I kind of want to get in line for a photo, too. But oh god, I don’t know. Would that be loser behavior? I kind of think it’s almost cooler not to ask, don’t you?”
“Hmm,” said Will, noncommittally.
“I’ve got to ask,” she said. “How on earth did you book Patrick Lake for this? How did you even get in touch with him?”
Will tilted his head sideways in Allie’s direction, like he was about to share a secret with her. She leaned in expectantly. He allowed his voice to fall to its deepest and said: “We go to the same barber.”
“Oh. Oh!” She laughed, and before she could ask for a serious answer, Patrick approached them both.
“Hi,” he said, cheeks flushed, voice slightly hoarse from projecting. Will got a sudden flash of the earnest, enthusiastic theater major Patrick must have been once, the kind of person who was always surrounded by queers and queens before life took him on a different trajectory, and felt a tightness in his chest.
“This is Allie,” he blurted.
“Hi, Allie,” said Patrick, reaching out and shaking her hand, a smile breaking out on his face as if she were exactly the person he had been hoping to run into at exactly this moment. He’s so good at that, Will thought.
“Allie is too shy to ask herself, but I think she’d really like a picture,” he added, and he felt her feign mortification next to him.
“Of course!” Patrick handed the book he’d been reading from to Will, and Allie excitedly pulled out her phone to take a selfie.
“Thank you!” she trilled. “OK, I have to get back to the front desk. Thank you!” She scurried away, already frantically tapping at the screen, no doubt disseminating the photo through every group chat in her phone.
“What’s going on?” Will finally asked, turning to Patrick. “What are you doing here?”
“You just seemed so stressed out earlier, I wanted to help,” Patrick said. “I thought that if you were going to be late, then maybe I could just show up and mug for time a little.”
“So you…” Will’s eyes drifted downward to the costume.
“Before shooting began, I pulled a hamstring, so we did all my costume fittings in my hotel room. I ended up keeping one of them. I’m honestly kind of amazed nobody has asked for it back yet—the studio is usually really strict about that kind of stuff, and this thing would sell like crazy on eBay. Anyway, I rushed back to the hotel, put it on, and came straight here. It’s like five minutes on foot.”
Will didn’t say anything, could barely wrap his head around what Patrick had done. This is the part where you say thank you, he told himself, but the words were somewhere else, in a place he couldn’t quite reach them. Narnia maybe, or Oz.
“I’m sorry if I overstepped,” Patrick said, less sure of himself now. “I wanted to help.”
How did he do that? How did he have the courage to lay himself so bare, show his beating heart like he didn’t care about getting hurt? And why was he doing it for Will of all people?
Will smiled so widely he was almost certain it would ruin his makeup.
“My hero,” he said, for the second time that day. “This is honestly the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.” Then, under his breath: “I could kiss you.”
The pink in Patrick’s cheeks didn’t deepen, but it didn’t go away either.
“I could actually do a lot more than kiss you,” Will added.
“Flirt,” Patrick whispered back. “Listen. About last night…”
An iron vise appeared out of nowhere to crush Will’s chest.
“It was…God, I don’t even know.”
“Too much?”
“Incredible,” Patrick said breathlessly. “I never even…You were…Yeah.”
Will smiled again, shyly this time. “Yeah,” he agreed.
“You look amazing, by the way. Judy would be proud.”
Will waved a hand as if to say, This old thing? “Just something I threw together in twenty minutes,” he said. “I can’t believe you got in drag for me again.”
Patrick snickered. “But I should really get going. Before those pictures go online and Simone puts one of those geolocation tags on me.”
“Are you going to get in trouble?”
“If I do, it will have been worth it.” He tapped the chest of his uniform and reiterated: “I should get this back.”
“Damn, but don’t you wear it well.”
He could see Patrick begin to shake his head ruefully, to do the aw-shucks self-deprecating downward glance and smile that he could see now had become a reflex over the years, the result of doubtlessly rigorous media training—and then he seemed to stop himself.
“Thank you,” he said. “Though I’ll admit, it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world.”
“You are talking to somebody wearing six-inch heels,” said Will. “And a girdle.”
“Point taken. I’ll see you later.”
“Wait a second.” Will reached out and pulled Captain Kismet’s goggles back down over Patrick’s eyes. “In the event of paps,” he said.
“What would I do without you?” Patrick grinned.
It was only after he was gone that Will realized he had not actually thanked him for doing this. For saving the day. For considering Will somebody whose arse was worth saving.
“The little people are getting restless,” Faye said, reappearing. “Let’s give them one more story and then get them out of here.”
“Sure,” Will said, reaching into his bag for his copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He already had the perfect passage picked out: Dorothy meeting the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, and encouraging them to join her on her quest. It was what he used to read to Dylan when they were younger, doing his best to create distinct voices for each character. Not to mention that a story about making friends with people who were different from you, who each have their own flaws and goals, felt downright educational.
Except his audience weren’t especially receptive to such benevolent messaging. He could feel the children becoming fidgety and irritable while he read aloud, the excitement of Captain Kismet’s visit waning along with their attention spans. It was perhaps the most unenviable slot he’d ever performed in. How was one supposed to follow a real-life superhero?
“Cameron, if you bite Lara again, then I am going to leave you here,” one exhausted-looking mother hissed at a remorseless toddler, and Will stifled a laugh as he came to the final line of the chapter and closed the book dramatically.
“The end,” he announced, and tried not to take it too personally when the applause sounded a little half-arsed compared to Patrick’s ovation.
He hung back as everybody began to filter out of the room, several small children now screaming inconsolably at the indignity of being transported anywhere without their prior approval.
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?” Faye remarked from the corner of her mouth. “Groundbreaking.”
“You’re just feeling left out because I stopped before we met the Wicked Witch,” Will retorted, and they both laughed.
“Share a cab?” Faye asked, and Will knew that this meant, Share a cab down to Hurst Street, where we can enjoy a drink and not be ogled?
“Sure,” he said.
“And then you can explain to me why you sent your boyfriend to do your job for you,” Faye added, with the tone of a teacher who has read your assignment and just knows you are capable of better.
“What?” Will froze. “What are you talking about? He’s not my—”
Faye raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, please, I read enough schlocky celebrity gossip to know that man has never had a real girlfriend,” said Faye. “And I’d know those shoulders anywhere.” She adopted a higher, Kenneth Williams–esque voice as she straightened the last of the chairs. “Infamy! Infamy!” she wailed. “They’ve all got it in for me!”
“You can’t tell anyone,” Will babbled. “It’s a secret. I mean, I can’t talk about it. I mean, there’s nothing to talk about!”
“Calm down, dear, your secret’s safe with me.” Faye looked at Will as if seeing him for the first time. “Bloody well done, mind!”
Will giggled involuntarily, panic turning to relief. He hadn’t said anything, had technically not broken the NDA. He could hardly be blamed for the fact that most queens were like truffle pigs when it came to sniffing out gay gossip. And it felt good, for someone to know that Patrick had been here today for him. Even if he couldn’t so much as give Will a peck on the cheek in public, he’d still found a way to show he cared.
He was dwelling on this, a giddy smile on his face, eyes down on his sparkly red shoes, when he and Faye exited the building and he first heard the jeers. Looking up, he saw something he hadn’t registered properly on his way in, he had been in such a hurry: a small group of protestors. Only a dozen or so, but their boos were vocal, and each of them touted signs that ranged from the innovative—The Devil Wears Padding—to the weak—It’s Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve—to the downright inexplicable—Bibles Not Books.
“And I thought the kids were a tough crowd,” he remarked.
“Ugh. There’s more of them,” Faye said, and her earlier words came back to Will. Days like this are precarious enough as it is.
“More?” Will asked.
“They’ve shown up at readings before. It was only five or six then. Pathetic, really. I almost felt sorry for them.” She jerked her head in the opposite direction. “Come on, lass. Let’s go.”
In the exact same moment that they turned away, Will heard an impact right next to him. A muffled, wet thud. Faye stood still, face stricken, and Will instinctively stepped around her to check something he already knew.
The remains of an eggshell were embedded in Faye’s wig, the slime of the yolk already seeping into the fibers. Will wasn’t sure if it could be salvaged or if the entire thing was ruined, but he knew instantly, could tell from Faye’s wordless stare, that the desired effect had been achieved.
“You should all be ashamed of yourselves!” he yelled at the protestors, scanning the crowd for whichever one was armed with an egg box.
“Not now, Gracie,” Faye whispered. “Just keep walking.” Will looked at her for a second, and the rage bubbling up inside him subsided into something far worse. Something approaching pity.
“All right then,” he said, taking Faye by the arm and marching away. The crowd did not follow. Their mission had been accomplished.
Will messaged the driver and requested he meet them around the corner, and he used the waiting time to pick eggshell out of Faye’s hair. He suggested first that she remove it, but her silent refusal let him know he needn’t ask again.
When the car arrived, Will began to walk around to the other side, but Faye said, “I think I’ll go home now, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Of course,” Will said. “Do you want me to come with you?”
Faye shook her head. She climbed into the car and let Will carefully close the door after her. Then she sat stiffly and silently, looking at the back of the driver’s seat as the taxi pulled away, her face stony in profile, head held high in quiet dignity.