this club in any way, and I have nothing to offer. I’m concerned I’ll come off looking like a gawker.
The queen eyes me quizzically. “Are you…?”
“I’m just a boring old cis woman,” I say, shrugging. “I’m a friend of Kai’s.”
“Then you’re a friend of ours, too.” She puts an arm around me, and I get a whiff of a sweet, powdery scent. “I’m Dee.”
“You look incredible,” I say, admiring her perfectly painted face.
She’s wearing chaps, a ruffled white blouse and super tall dark cowboy boots with heels at least four inches high. Every angle of her face is perfectly defined and exaggerated, her eye makeup done in white and gold.
“Thank you,” she says, looking pleased.
“Do you do your own makeup?” I ask her.
“I do. Takes more than two hours to paint this mug.”
“I wish I could do that.”
Kai looks up from his spot crouched over the open suitcases of supplies we carried in and says, “Renee’s a beauty blogger. Teach her all you know, guys.”
“Ugh,” someone groans. “Why did you bring her on Western Night? It’s the shittiest.”
“Speak for yourself,” someone else calls out. “I look fucking fabulous. Ride-able, if I do say so myself.”
A door to the room opens and a voice calls out, “Forty-five minutes to showtime, ladies!”
The room erupts into chaos then.
“I need some goddamned pantyhose!”
“Fucking razor burn!”
“I need someone to sew me into this gown real quick.”
“Make yourself useful,” Kai says to me, winking.
I nod and spring into action, doing what I can. It doesn’t feel like much—I deliver makeup samples from Kai’s case to anyone who wants to try them, help zip boots and blot shiny faces. Some queens who are ready can’t lift drinks to their mouths due to wearing super long nails, so I carefully lift straws to their lips.
“You’re too pretty to be real,” a queen says to me, tilting my jaw upward to get a better look.
I laugh as Kai says, “Show them a picture of Jonah!”
“Girl, who’s Jonah?” someone asks as several queens cluster around me.
“Her boyfriend,” Kai says. “He’s a professional hockey player, and I want to lick him, just sayin’.”
I could show the queens a picture of me and Jonah on the Ferris wheel, looking like an average, happy couple. But something in me scrolls past those and finds one I snagged online and saved to my phone.
Jonah was posing for a magazine photographer who did a series on athlete’s bodies. He’s naked in the photo, his full sleeve tattoo on one side on display and nothing but his hand covering his crotch in the bottom of the frame. He looks intense as he leans on the top of his stick, his blue eyes piercing.
“Fuck me, he’s hot,” someone mutters as the group erupts into hoots and hollers.
“Girl, that’s your man?! You are one lucky bitch!”
“He needs to move his hand out of the way!”
“How big is his stick, Renee? Don’t hold out on us.”
“I’ll take a lick of that any day.”
Laughing, I put my phone away as a waitress in tiny cutoff jean shorts and a cropped blouse tied beneath her breasts approaches with a large tray full of shots.
Dee passes me a glass, and others grab until the tray is almost empty.
“Everyone got one?” Dee asks, looking around the room.
“Aya needs one,” someone says.
Kai grabs another glass from the tray and it gets passed back until everyone has a shot in their hand.
“We always do Fireball before Western Night,” Dee tells me, winking. She looks out at the group of queens and says, “Slay hard tonight, dolls!”
Glasses click and groans sound as the shot goes down. The liquid is hot on my throat; I haven’t had Fireball in years.
“Fucking awful,” Kai says, shaking his head as he puts his empty glass on the tray.
“We’re going clubbing after this, and you’re coming with us,” Dee says to Kai before turning to me. “You too, Renee.”
I nod half-heartedly. I think clubbing with this group sounds like a blast, but I can’t go. That one shot was all the alcohol I can drink tonight, because I’m very careful when I’m on assignment. Anything that impairs my judgment could let something slip out of my mouth that shouldn’t.
Kai and I slip out of the dressing room and out to the main bar area, which is filled with people in chairs turned toward the stage. Kai leads me toward two chairs off to the side with Reserved signs, which he takes off so we can sit down.
The first queen takes the