Chapter 8: The Transformation
The silence in the apartment had thickened into something gelatinous, a palpable residue of sweat and spent violence. Omar lay between them, breathing in hiccuping shudders. David’s hand on his thigh was the only anchor.
“Do we keep it?” Jerry’s question hung in the air, mundane and monstrous.
David watched Omar’s face, the tear tracks cutting through the sheen on his skin. He saw the flicker of fear, then a stubborn, almost defiant glint. “What do you think, prinsipe?” David asked, his voice raspy. “It’s your ass on camera. Your Arabic prayers.”
Omar swallowed, his throat working. He felt carved out, hollowed and filled with a new, terrible understanding of himself. The video was proof. It was a ledger of his debasement. It was also, inexplicably, a trophy. “I don’t know,” he whispered.
Jerry picked up the phone, his thumb hovering. “We could delete it.Right now. It would be gone.” He looked at David, a silent conversation passing between them. The threat of its existence was a power. Its annihilation would be a mercy. Which did they want to wield?
David stood, the movement causing Omar to flinch minutely. He paced to the balcony, pulling the door open to let in a stream of cool, indifferent air. He lit a new joint, the flare of the match stark in the dim room. He took a long drag, holding it in before speaking with the smoke. “He earned it,” David said finally, his back to them. “He took us both. He said the words. He gave us that.” He turned, his expression unreadable. “The video stays.For us. No one else.”
A strange relief flooded Omar. It was a binding. A secret shared in a vault of silicon and light. He nodded, a small, shaky motion.
“Good,” Jerry said, placing the phone back down, but now with a sense of ceremony. “It’s ours.”
Two nights later, the buzz of the neon sign outside the club was a toothache in David’s skull. Backstage was a humid cave of panic and glitter. He was due on stage in forty minutes as Daphne, but his mind was elsewhere, tangled in the memory of Omar’s trembling submission and the hungry look in Jerry’s eyes as he filmed it.
Omar had texted an hour ago: Can I come see you before your set?
Now, he stood in the doorway of the cramped dressing room, looking like a lost tourist in a bomber jacket and jeans, dwarfed by racks of feathers and sequins.
“Get in here and close the door, you’re letting the smell of desperation in,” David barked, not unkindly. He was in a black silk kimono, his face half-transformed—one eye a masterful wing of liquid liner, the other bare and human.
Omar slipped in, his gaze darting over the controlled chaos. “Your show… it’s really busy.”
“It’s always busy for a queen who actually has talent,” Jerry quipped from the corner. He was stitching a headdress, his mouth full of pins. “Unlike some of these bio-queens out there relying on Daddy’s money for their costumes.”
David peered at Omar, a slow idea coiling in his gut. The boy was here, in this sacred, sweaty space where boys became goddesses. He’d taken their cocks. What was one more transformation?
“You wanna help?” David asked, his voice dropping into a purr.
Omar blinked. “Help? How?”
David smiled, the expression sinister with one dramatic eye. “Jerry, pass me that silver dress. The cheap one from the ‘Fallen Angel’ number last year.”
Jerry’s eyes snapped up, meeting David’s. A grin spread across his face. He rummaged in a garment bag and produced a sheath of liquid silver lamé, scandalously short, with strategic tears at the hips and thighs. He tossed it onto the velvet chaise.
“Put it on,” David said, his tone leaving no room for question.
Omar stared at the dress.“What? I can’t—”
“First rule of being a bakla, habibi,” David interrupted, stepping closer. The scent of his setting spray and weed was overwhelming. “You take dick in this dress, or you don’t wear it at all. And since you’ve already taken dick from two baklas…” He let the implication hang. “Consider it your uniform.”
Omar’s face flushed a deep, beautiful scarlet. He looked from the dress to David’s half-made-up face, to Jerry’s expectant smirk. The air crackled with the same terrifying electricity as in the apartment. This was a new test. A public, albeit backstage, consecration.
His fingers went to the zipper of his jacket. He shrugged it off, then pulled his sweater over his head. His movements were stiff, shy. David and Jerry watched, their work momentarily abandoned, as Omar revealed his soft, plump torso. He unbuttoned his jeans, pushed them down his thighs, and stepped out, standing in just his plain white briefs.
“Those too,” Jerry said, not looking up from his sewing, but his voice was sharp.
Omar hooked his thumbs into the waistband and pushed them down. He stood naked in the fluorescent glare, the pink neon from the sign outside bleeding across his skin. He was vulnerable, utterly exposed amidst the costumes of artifice.
“Good,” David murmured. He picked up the silver dress. “Arms up.”
Omar obeyed, raising his arms like a child. David gathered the thin mater