“I’m not sure I understand,” Treston said.
“I told him you’d suck him off. I told him you have the best fucking mouth in Vegas, that you swallow, and you’d take good care of him. He said if you gave him a good blow job he’d let me off the hook this time. You have to help me out, man, and you have to do this.”
Although Treston had done things like this with men for money before, this was the first time a boyfriend had ever asked him to suck a guy off. At first, he felt a sting in his chest and he wanted to punch Harlan in the gut. But when he looked into Harlan’s dark sunglasses and caught a glimpse of his brown eyes, and he saw the way Harlan was pleading with him, he shrugged and said, “Let me take a shower first. Tell him I’ll be right out.” One more blow job with a total stranger certainly wouldn’t hurt him. He liked dick and one more wouldn’t change his life.
Harlan slapped his ass and said, “You’re the best. I swear I’m going to buy you a ring and we’ll get married soon.”
“Do you mean that?” Treston asked. He started to jump up and down, and threw his arms around Harlan’s shoulders and hugged him.
Harlan remained emotionless; he didn’t even lift his arms to return the hug. “Sure, I mean it,” he said, with a slight laugh. “I’ll fucking marry you like those gay guys got married on TV. I’ll make an honest little fag out of you, sweet lips.”
When Harlan called him a fag, Treston didn’t take offense. In fact, it turned him on in a way he found hard to explain. If he’d been walking down the street and someone had called him a pejorative like that he would have told them to go fuck themselves. But when Harlan called him a fag he only wanted to swing from Harlan’s big shoulders and do bad things. “When can we do it? We have to get rings. I know just the place. It’s a little jewelry store I’ve been passing on the way to work for a year. They have gay wedding bands in the window and I stop and stare at them every day.”
Harlan slapped his ass and laughed again. “We’ll talk about it more later. Right now you’ve got a dick to suck. Go brush your teeth and wash your face.”
If it had only been the one time, Treston wouldn’t have minded at all. But after that night, Harlan started bring more men around and he always gave Treston the same old story, or one similar to it. One night he came home with three drunken college guys he said he’d met on the strip and he’d promised them he’d hook them up with the best sex they’d ever had for the right price.
Treston was already in bed, listening to the one song in the world that could put him to sleep after a long night at the strip club: You Are My Sunshine. No one had sung him this song when he’d been a child. No one had ever sung him a lullaby of any kind. As a child he’d gone to bed alone most of the time because his mother had worked in an all-night strip club just like the one where he worked now. And he’d never known who his father was because his mother had never been quite sure.
Harlan crossed to the bed and pulled the covers off him. Without going into a detailed explanation, he glanced down at Treston through his dark sunglasses and said, “I’ve got a couple of guys out front. I said I could hook them up with the best tranny sex they’ve ever had.”
“I hate that word,” Treston said. “You’re supposed to say transgender, or at least cross-dresser. Tranny is offensive.”
“Fuck that shit,” Harlan said. When he said fuck it sounded like fock. “These dudes want hot tranny ass and I told them you’d take good care of them for the right price.”
Treston sat up in bed. He removed the ear plugs and set his phone on the pillow. “Did you lose again? Were you playing cards? Is this why you need money? I’m starting to think you have a gambling problem, Harlan. Maybe we should talk about it.” Treston spoke in a soft loving tone. He had been born and raised in Vegas and he’d seen more than his share of addicted gamblers. In most cases they were worse than alcoholics or drug addicts. They would stop at nothing to get their gambling fix.
The rowdy college guys in the living room started to laugh. Harlan spoke over their deep hollow voices and said, “We’ll talk later. Right now I need you to get your hot little ass out of bed and give these dudes some great tranny ass.”
Treston blinked. “But I’m not a transgender or a cross dresser. I don’t even like drag shows all that much.” Though he had soft delicate features for a man, and a perfectly smooth body he shaved daily because he stripped in public, he’d never been a sissy boy. He worked out in a small makeshift gym in the back of the strip club almost daily to maintain a tight, toned body, and he hadn’t been shortchanged in the penis department either. One of the reasons why men went to see him strip was because he was all man, but with a few exaggerated curves in the right places. The only thing that really set him apart from straight men was that he had blond highlights added to his brown hair about once a month. He thought the bleached highlights made him stand out from the rest of the male strippers at the club—and even that was questionable, because so many straight men he knew were dying their hair nowadays.
“These dudes don’t know that,” Harlan said. “Go put on the pink thing you wore in those Halloween photos you showed me. The one with the blond wig and the pink high heels. Even I thought you looked hot in it and I’m not even into fucking trannys.”
“I wore the showgirl costume as a joke for Halloween one year at the club,” Treston said. “The only reason I showed you the photo was for a laugh. The costume’s in the back of my closet and it took me a while to get ready that night.” Treston hated bad drag, which is why he never did it. He loved it when drag was campy or lifelike, but when it wasn’t there was nothing more insulting.
Harlan laughed. “Just put on the costume, the wig, and some lipstick and the high heels. You’re pretty enough to pass if you wiggle your ass the right way. These dudes are so fucking wasted they’ll never care. They’re willing to pay a thousand bucks to take turns on you.”
“Oh, Harlan, I don’t know about this. Seriously,” Treston said. A thousand dollars was a lot of money. Treston had done worse at the club for less money.
The guys in the living room grew louder. When they started to scream, “We want pussy,” in their deep, slurred, young male voices, Harlan climbed onto the bed, put his arms around Treston, and said, “If I you do this for me, we can pay off that credit card bill and get a couple of wedding rings and make it official. You know how much I want you to be my husband.”