“Yeah. Dude, you know him already. You’ve seen him before.”
“What?” He looked adorably confused again, and I hated myself for using words like adorable and beautiful to describe him. I was pretty sure I was about to flop my vagina on the table.
“That’s Helena Handbasket.”
“The drag queen?”
“Yeah.”
“But… he looks so little as a man.”
I shuddered. “Don’t let him hear you say that. Helena will come out before you know it, and that bitch is fierce. This one time, some big leather daddy tried to start some shit with him, and then Helena came out to play, and the daddy ended up on his knees with a collar around his neck, apologizing to Sandy, who held him on a leash. They ended up dating for two weeks, but then it ended because Sandy figured out she wasn’t meant to be a Dom.”
He watched me for a moment, looking for what, I don’t know. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. I didn’t know if he was still with me or if something I’d said had confused him. I felt like a jackass then, at least a little bit.
And then he spoke, and I understood that he wasn’t confused per se, he was just still stuck on a point a few turns in the conversation back. “So do you have a boyfriend?” he asked. “Or a partner or whatever?”
I started getting nervous and shy again, but I allowed myself a brief moment to feel awesome about myself when I realized I’d been having a conversation with him for, like, five minutes. Even if I’d told a pedophile joke, it seemed to be going better than I ever thought it would. This, of course, caused me to shut down just a bit further.
I looked down at my feet. “No,” I mumbled.
“Thank God,” he said, sounding extraordinarily relieved. “Can I take you to dinner?”
Uh. What? “Uh. What?”
“Din-ner,” he said slowly, as if I was stupid. “Can. I. Take. You. Out?”
I was starting to get defensive. “Why?”
His brow furrowed. “Because I want to. Don’t you want to go with me?”
“Guys like you don’t go out with guys like me.”
He looked me up and down as if trying to figure out what I was talking about. I wasn’t wearing my nicest dress clothes, but I thought I looked okay this morning. But standing next to him now made me realize I probably looked like a homeless albino who found these clothes in the sewers. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked finally. “You sick or something?”
“Sick? What? I’m not sick.”
His eyes widened, and he looked around quickly before leaning forward to whisper, “You are gay, right?” He was sort of pensive at this.
“Way gay,” I reassured him. “Like, super gay. I fart and rainbows come out.” Oh, crap.
He rocked his head back and laughed, a delicious sound that was deep and gravelly. I wanted to lick a line up his exposed throat, but I didn’t think the rest of the restaurant wanted to see that. Besides, I didn’t think he’d want it, either, even if he was presently confusing the shit out of me.
“Can you please ignore what I just said?” I asked desperately. “I don’t fart. Ever.”
He shook his head, wiping the tears from his eyes. “You said it, so it’s out there, man. You are something else. I knew you would be, right when I first saw you.”
“You did?” I squeaked, unsure if that was a good or bad thing.
He smiled a lazy smile that screamed insane possibilities. “So… dinner?”
And then it hit me, what this probably was, and I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before, or even thought of it, especially with the fact that he was at the club with Darren and his group, the biggest bunch of assholes in the history of the world. They were such pretentious pricks that I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten he was there with that group to begin with.
“You’re Freddie Prinze Junioring me, aren’t you?” I accused him, slight anger in my voice.
“I don’t even know what that means,” he reassured me, not perturbed in the slightest.
I scowled at him. How could he not know? Then I realized that not everyone knows the things that go through my head, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Freddie Prinze Junior? The actor, probably the greatest one of his generation? He was in that movie She’s All That.”
He shrugged. “Never seen it.”
“Whatever. In the movie, he’s a cool popular jockish dude who makes a bet with his cool popular jockish friends that he can turn the most unattractive girl in school into prom queen. He only asks her out because he’s an asshole, at least at first. Then the girl goes through life-changing things for him and gets to go to prom with Freddie Prinze Junior, but she finds out about his bet and he realizes too late that that he loves her. She breaks up with him because he shouldn’t have made the stupid bet to begin with!”