Chapter 1

After the Show

“Chuck’s got it,” the drag queen known as Devine tells a makeup assistant when asked if he needs a drink. Sinking into his vanity chair, he waves her away with his hands as if drying his well-manicured nails. She leaves.

In the mirror he plucks off glittery eyelashes that leave his tired eyes red. He wants to lie back, dip his fingers into a tall glass of water, and press the wet tips against his shadowed lids. Where is that bouncer?

Propping his feet up on the vanity, he stretches out, his head on the back of the chair. His wig falls to the floor; his eyes slip shut. Absently he unties the corset he wears. Beneath it he sweats. Water sounds wonderful…

Someone enters his dressing room. “It’s about time,” he mutters without opening his eyes. “You better be Chuck.”

The door shuts as a gruff voice confirms, “It’s me.” Suddenly something hard and cold and wet presses against Devine’s forehead—an ice cube. “You wanted water?”

“Please,” he sighs. The ice moves down his nose, chilling a path to his open mouth. Chuck rims his lips with the cold chip but when his tongue licks out, the bouncer pulls away. “Please.” Almost a sob.

The ice glides down the curve of his neck into the hollows of his throat, then trickles over his chest to melt somewhere around his navel. At his crotch, a rough hand cups the erection straining his panties. Fingers ease beneath the silky fabric to stroke him hard. “Please.” He could cry.

The corset is open now, the panties pushed aside. Strong fingers encircle his cock. “My hose,” Devine cautions as he thrusts into the bouncer’s hand.

Chuck toys with the lacy hem of the black thigh-highs and says, “Leave them on.”

Ambush

His name was unpronounceable to the enemy.

The Americans from the MASH unit called him “Triage” because he hung around the medical tent whenever the wounded were flown in. Most of the soldiers thought him a petty thief, a vulture preying on the dead and dying. They laughed when he showed up, and teased him when there were no locals among the wounded. “None for you today,” they said, nudging each other. They thought he didn’t understand their language.

He saw no reason to inform them otherwise.

Beyond the pitched tents ringed with barbed wire and camouflage netting, the jungle grew like crazed hair sticking up from the earth at all angles. Triage hid among the foliage, keeping out of the war. His forays into the American camp had started as a search for food—he visited when the choppers came because in the noisy rush of activity, he was mostly ignored. But his curiosity got the best of him, and he wandered into the operating theater, a blank look on his face, absorbing everything he could see and hear and smell until he was chased away.

One man took a liking to him, a young MP who lowered his gun whenever Triage appeared. He had a quick smile that was nothing like the jeering grins of the others, and it was he who gave Triage his name. The MP was a tow-headed country boy with full lips and eyes as blue as the night sky, so exotic, so different from anyone Triage had ever seen before. The name on his jacket read MacMurphey. Triage spent hours alone in his hut, sounding out that word until it rolled flawlessly from his tongue. The first half he got right; after that, it sort of fell apart. So the man was simply Macin his mind.

Mac thought he visited the camp to look for someone, a wounded relative or a dead friend, and there was something in his eyes that made Triage look over the incoming with a cursory glance, as if to prove him right. “One day, Tri,” Mac told him, clapping a hand on Triage’s shoulder, “You’ll find who you’re looking for, I promise.”

The hand on his back was hot and heavy, and Mac seemed to have forgotten he placed it there. Triage didn’t dare move; he didn’t want to lose that touch, the first he’d had in months. Inside his chest, his heart swelled, and in the confines of his loose dungarees, his neglected cock did the same.

* * * *

By midday, heat baked off the jungle in waves that warped the still air and stunned the human mind into a dull stupor. Triage hid in the hot bush, silent, his breath thin and shallow as he peered through the leaves at Mac. The day was eerily quiet—no artillery firing in the distance, no choppers cutting through the air, nothing that gave any indication they were in the midst of battle. The only movement came from the soldier picking his way through the low brush, kicking rocks as he wandered away from his camp.