Darling - K. Ancrum Page 0,43
the drag queen by the door, who had finally put her other lash on, while waving a hand at Ominotago. “Her makeup actually looks good.”
Ominotago was busy doing something on her phone and didn’t acknowledge the compliment. Wendy had only known Ominotago for approximately thirty minutes, but she already felt safer with her than she had with Tinkerbelle. Ominotago was much more serious, and she hadn’t backed down to Peter at all, hadn’t given him a single inch. Whatever fight she and Peter had before Wendy arrived had already been won, and it was extremely clear that Peter was the loser. Wendy wasn’t stupid enough to ask about the whole Peter/Tinkerbelle/Ominotago dating time line, but she was curious about it. Who was first? Tinkerbelle? Ominotago? How did he even manage to get Ominotago to like him? That alone seemed like a monstrous feat. Had he treated Ominotago as aggressively as he seemed to treat Tinkerbelle? Ominotago wasn’t scared of Peter, that was obvious, but she did seem to dislike him a lot. And where did Curly fit into this? Did he fight Peter over giving Ominotago a nickname before or after Peter and Ominotago dated? What happened when Ominotago and Tinkerbelle started dating? They hadn’t stated it out loud but they were clearly very much together. She couldn’t imagine that reveal going over very well. She hadn’t known Peter for particularly long, but there was no way that a boy who had spoken to Nibs the way he did in the kitchen without waiting for an explanation wouldn’t have gone ballistic to hear that both of his ex-girlfriends had started seeing each other.
Especially because of how besotted Tinkerbelle clearly was with Ominotago. Wendy remembered how Tinkerbelle had beat her hands against the police car window in hysterics, and the relief with which she’d clutched Ominotago when the other girl was finally free. It was almost embarrassing how romantic it was to watch. If there hadn’t been explosions and sirens accompanied by the sounds of Charles’s sobs, Wendy would have felt extremely awkward. Almost like she’d stumbled into the climax of a movie set where the main characters were finally making out, accompanied by the soaring strings of the score.
“Hey, kid, look, do you want me to do this shit or not?” Dorothy was saying.
Wendy snapped out of her thoughts to see Dorothy holding a makeup wipe in her hand and looking impatient.
“Ground control to Major Tom,” Dorothy said. “Either give me an answer or get out of the chair.”
“Yes,” Wendy said quickly.
Dorothy sighed in irritation and began roughly wiping the makeup off Wendy’s face. “Okay, here we go.”
“How do you get it to look like that?” The drag queen who had complimented Ominotago’s makeup asked.
Ominotago finally looked up from her phone for a second. “I do it with my fingers. I just picked a bunch of colors that went together and kept at it until it looked okay.” She returned to texting. She clearly didn’t care.
The queen leaned back in her chair. “You are much more talented than you give yourself credit for, girl. That shit looks like a J. M. W. Turner painting. Dorothy, you see this baby doing yellow under her eyes and fading that to blue and pink, purple in the shadows?” The queen sucked her teeth and nodded. “Opulence.”
Dorothy looked over Wendy’s shoulder at Ominotago, who seemed irritated at the attention. “You can’t teach that,” Dorothy said.
Dorothy finished polishing all of Tinkerbelle’s work clean off Wendy’s face. “You want the same thing or something different?”
“Tink—uh, my friend did my makeup like this because she wanted me to look different. Not like myself,” Wendy answered.
“Like a disguise?” Dorothy asked, raising a slim eyebrow. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into?”
Bella snorted, and Wendy turned to her, but Dorothy wrenched her chin forward.
“You sound too timid to be one of Peter’s girls,” Bella said softly. “He likes them spicy. You’re too white bread and tap water.”
“Too berries and cream,” Dorothy echoed.
“Too Ann Sather’s,” the drag queen by the door said. “What are you doing with that wild-ass boy?”
“She’s new,” Ominotago remarked, not looking up from her phone.
“Oh, honey, you need to go home,” Bella said in a deeply apologetic tone.
“I know,” Wendy said firmly. “I’m working on it.”
“Oh, never mind. There’s that attitude!” Dorothy screeched, laughing again. “I should have known you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have it.”
Wendy wanted to frown, embarrassed that everyone knew Peter had a type and she apparently fit it.