Chapter Three
Kayleen’s car was in good shape for its age, a champagne-coloured Saturn from the logo on the hood. As they drove towards the city proper, Kayleen said, “So…” just as his phone rang.
Darcy recognized the ringtone and pulled out his phone with an apologetic look. “I have to take this. It’s my agency.”
“Darcy! Oh good, I wasn’t sure I’d reach you,” came Sunanda’s familiar voice. “Plan Chromatic is shooting a new video, a follow-up to the one they did last year. They’re going for a concept look.”
Darcy pulled his phone from his ear for a brief moment to frown at it, as if Sunanda could see him. “I’m glad for them, but what’s that to do with me? I was just a backup dancer.” He wasn’t a particularly skilled dancer, so he felt he’d lucked into the job at a time when he really needed the pay.
“Oh, but you weren’t, remember? They closed the set to keep it secure, and one of their actresses suddenly took sick.”
He remembered; the woman hadn’t even made it through makeup when she’d suddenly turned and vomited in front of everyone. It hadn’t been anything subtle. But none of the other women on the closed set fit her dress. Darcy had, so they’d quickly made up his face, stuffed the bodice of the dress with cotton, and sealed the faux bosom with artful tape. His long hair had been restyled while he’d gone over the very brief script—no lines, of course, but he had to lip-sync a couple of the lyrics and learn the new choreography in heels, which had been found last minute. He never did find out which of the women present had feet the same size as his. He was never credited for it, either, though they did pay him appropriately.
“Still,” Darcy told Sunanda. “They want the woman originally hired.”
“No, Darcy. Emslie wants you. She said you have an androgynous look that, and I quote, ‘really made the first video.’”
“I’m shooting Shelter Cove,” he reminded his agent. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do the shoot, but he didn’t want to find himself typecast into only doing drag roles. Even in the show, only about twenty percent of his scenes involved his character as a man.
“I know. I told her, and she said they would work around your schedule and pay you accordingly. In fact, I’d have accepted on your behalf already, but I wasn’t sure you wanted to do another drag gig.”
Darcy didn’t say anything since Sunanda’s words echoed his own thoughts. He held the phone to his ear and tapped his fingers on his thigh.
“Darcy?”
“I’m thinking, Sunanda.” He was. He looked out the window as Kayleen slowed for a red light. The storm clouds were so dark, the streetlights had come on. The rain streaking the car window caught the lights like jewels. Another five minutes and he would be home. He’d gotten pretty wet just going from the set to Kayleen’s car, and an umbrella wouldn’t have helped, not with this wind, and he figured he’d get soaked to the bone from her car to his apartment building.
“Darcy, time is money.”
“Right, sorry. Okay, I’ll do it.”
“Good man. I love you, Darcy.”
He grinned. “Yeah, I bet you do.” He thumbed the end call icon and stuffed the phone into his back pocket.
“Iffy job?” Kayleen asked.
“Music video. It’s a callback to reprise a role, but the thing is, I wasn’t supposed to do it originally.” He told her about the shoot and how he’d ended up in a dress and high heels, lip-syncing to Plan Chromatic’s “Fashion Guilty.”
“Oh my god, I love that song! So you were… um, Darcy? Are you gay?”
Whatever he thought her reaction might be, that wasn’t it. “Gay? Uh, no.”
“Cuz it’s okay,” she said hastily.
Darcy frowned. If she was asking if he was sexually attracted to men—and that was the definition of gay, wasn’t it?—then he definitely wasn’t gay. “Isn’t that a kind of personal question?”
“Yeah, well, you know,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.
He didn’t, but she didn’t say anything more, and he wasn’t sure what to say after that. “Thanks for the ride,” he said as she pulled up in front of his building. The weather didn’t permit any lingering over goodbyes.
“See you tomorr—”
Her words were cut off when he slammed the door.
He was right, he got soaked going from the sidewalk to the front door, and the roof over the entrance did nothing to block the rain as he fumbled with his key.
His shoes squelched all the way up to his tiny apartment, which was basically one room with a bathroom. The wall opposite the bathroom had kitchen appliances and possibly three square feet of counter space. Between it and the other wall was a pair of patio doors that no longer opened onto a balcony, just a concrete sill of maybe six inches and a wrought-iron railing to keep drunk people from accidentally falling off. A Murphy bed was already pulled out of the wall. If Darcy ever made his bed, it would fold up and a table would fold down.
As it was, his bed served as a sofa and desk for his laptop. He peeled off his wet clothes in the bathroom and turned on the hot water for a shower. He hated being asked if he was gay because he felt weirdly guilty saying he wasn’t. No one ever asked, “Are you straight?” He would have had to answer that one the same way. If straight was defined as being attracted to members of the opposite sex, he wasn’t straight either.
After a hot shower, he hung up his wet clothes and flopped on the bed in just a towel. He pointed the remote at the TV and did a quick yoga routine to decompress.
He wished Kayleen hadn’t asked.
Being a military brat, Darcy had never really been in any one place long enough to make lasting friends, but he’d usually gotten along. By high school, his mother was stationed in Preston, and with the onset of puberty, Darcy began to realize he wasn’t like his classmates. As they teased him for being gay—because he wasn’t interested in girls—he’d gradually become more and more withdrawn. He wasn’t attracted to boys either, and it seemed he should be attracted to either-or. It wasn’t that he didn’t ever get an erection or that he never jerked off, it was just that most of the time it was…something he did. He didn’t fantasize about other people. He didn’t lust after other people.
And his peers thought that was weird. At times, he wished he was gay, because at least that was a thing, and if not the most accepted of things, it was still on the far end of the “normal” scale. Since he couldn’t do that, he just slowly closed himself off from people, from anyone who would get to know him well enough to care about who he was fucking. Or in his case not fucking. He hadn’t thought Kayleen was nearly that close to him, but evidently, some people just liked to dive right in with the personal questions.