Page 18 of After Midnight

Dad came over and kissed the top of my head. “I’m sure you’ll figure out a time to get together when they aren’t around. I think it’s good for you to have to wait a minute before you sweep a man off his feet. Maybe it’ll slow things down enough that you can actually get to know him.”

“Whatever,” I replied nonchalantly, not wanting to give them any clue that was exactly what I’d decided when I realized Dominic was already stuck in my head. I also decided to play it safe by changing the subject.

“Hey, I need to know some things about the nineteen eighties. That’s why he invited me to his house last night. He was helping me learn some pop culture stuff to entertain the early crowd at the club. We watched a movie, which was great, but that’s just a start.”

Both my fathers shrugged. “What do you wanna know?”

“Well, I want to be able to reference movies, music, that sort of thing? And, you know, tie them into my jokes.”

They looked at each other and laughed. Then Papa K said to Dad, “I told you this day would come.”

That made Dad snicker even more. “What day? What are you two carrying on about?” I asked. Knowing my dads, this was not going to go well for me.

“Your father kept wanting me to get rid of the stuff from our high school days,” Papa K said, causing Dad to shake his head.

“After breakfast, we’ll show you,” Papa K said as he put a plate in front of me and went to make one for Dad as well.

True to his word, after breakfast, I was led down to the storage area in the basement. He dug around a while, then handed me boxes full of yearbooks, trophies, and other memorabilia to haul to the living room.

When I flopped onto the couch, boxes spread out on the coffee table, they sat on either side of me and began leafing through the yearbooks. “This is Allen his senior year. Oh, he was so handsome,” Papa K said dreamily.

“Excuse me,was?” Dad asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Well, I meant it was the first time I noticed how handsome youare,” Papa K corrected. “I was so jealous of that broad you were dating back then.”

“You had a girlfriend?” I asked Dad, shocked my drag queen father ever even entertained the idea of dating a woman. “Am I only just learning now that you’re actually bisexual?”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “But to quash any questions, I’ve always known I was gay.” Taking the yearbook from my lap, he flipped through the pages until he found a picture of himself and a young woman labeled,Homecoming King and Queen.

“See, I was all butch and masculine. Heck, I was the star of the football team too.”

I sat staring at the image, trying to reconcile my Dad as a high school jock and the last time I’d seen him performing onstage wearing full-on makeup and sky high stilettos. “I’m thinking the wrong person in this picture got the tiara.”

Dad nodded in agreement, then flipped back a few pages until he came to the freshmen photos and pointed to a very young, geeky-looking teenager.

I almost fell off the couch laughing. “Dang, Papa K, was your hair big enough? It’s a wonder they had a wide enough camera lens to capture it all.”

We went through a couple more boxes together, my dads relaying little stories with each item we pulled out, until Papa K received a work-related text. Ever on-call, he ran upstairs to his office to make some calls, despite it being a Saturday.

Dad helped me navigate the rest of the boxes, finding several VHS movies and even a few old cassettes.

“Thanks, for taking me down memory lane, Dad. I had no idea you two were so cool back in the day.”

“We weren’t, son. We were just good actors, like all gay men and women had to be back then.” When I looked at him strangely, he qualified, “You sorta had to be if you wanted to survive. Things were very different in those days.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I’m glad things have changed, although you two look like you had some fun times.”

He winked at me. “We did. Maybe next time you wanna trip down memory lane, we’ll tell you how the two of us finally got together. It was quite a fiasco.”

I’d heard the story before and it’d always made me chuckle. But now, knowing Papa K had been a roughneck and Dad a football jock, my perspective on their early dating lives had seriously shifted. I felt for my fathers and all they’d lived through just to be themselves, and felt fortunate I didn’t have to experience that myself. If being temporarily cockblocked from kissing a handsome man was my biggest complaint in life at this point, I was doing fine.

Chapter seven

Dominic

As predicted, the drama started the moment I drove up in my new all-wheel-drive Subaru Forester. I didn’t even make it to the front door before the dragon met me, hands on hips and breathing fire.

“Where did you get that?” Margarette demanded.

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