“Gross,” Vince moaned, covering his face with his hands.
“It must run in the family,” Paul muttered, and we all turned to stare at him. He shrugged. “What? I’m just saying.”
“It’s good to be back at the Build-a-Bear Sweat Shop,” Helena said. “If I wasn’t already tied down to that lovely hunk of meat, I’m sure I could find someone else here more than willing to… tie me down.”
Many hands went into the air.
“I volunteer as tribute!” a burly man yelled.
“Hmm,” Helena said. “I’m sure you do. But alas, this queen has already found her king. And now for something I never thought I’d say: enough about me. We’re here for a very specific reason. To crown the new Mr. Leatherman for Tucson. I’m told it’s a high honor and one not to be taken lightly. And what better person to help bestow this honor than a queen?”
She curtsied so low, I thought she was about to do the splits.
“However, I cannot do this alone,” she said as she stood back up. “If only there was a man who would be able to help me with this task. A man unlike any other. A man who currently holds the title of Mr. Leatherman. Is there such a man to be found here?”
“There is,” another voice said, and everyone in the bar tilted their heads back and howled.
My skin felt like it was arcing with electricity.
“I suspected as much,” Helena said, and she looked right at me. “Perhaps you would care to join me on stage? Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages (though that had better not be the case), I give you your current Mr. Leatherman… Jeremy Olsen!”
He stepped out of the shadows.
I could barely breathe.
What he was wearing wasn’t inherently sexual; leather didn’t always have to be about sex, though it could play a part. It was almost like drag in that way.
But that didn’t stop my brain from making it sexual. Gone was my former professor, the man who would get excited with what he was teaching on any given day, pacing back and forth, gesticulating wildly as he got wound up. Gone was my boss, the man who hated being stuck in his office (even when he needed to be) and who would instead be out in the front with everyone else, smiling brightly, bopping along like an awkward turtle with whatever music was playing.
This man had a perfectly trimmed beard and a leather cap not dissimilar from Charlie’s, though the links on the chain across the front were fatter. This man wore a blue leather dress shirt (what the hell?) with pockets on either side of his chest, the buttons mostly covered by a long black leather tie. A black belt with a thick buckle was wrapped around his waist through the loops of his leather pants. He even wore black gloves, for fuck’s sakes.
And wrapped around his chest and shoulders was a thick, heavy sash made of leather (of course; I almost wanted to bring Tyson here just to see his brain explode) that proclaimed him to be MR. LEATHERMAN TUCSON.
And he was strutting like Charlie had when we first got into the bar. As the men and a few women in the bar cheered for him, he moved like a goddamn animal in the middle of a hunt. It wasn’t like Helena slinking around. This was heavy and harsh, his boots thudding on the stage, his shoulders squared, his lips almost in a sneer. He wasn’t a big man, not like Vince and Darren, but he almost looked like he was, giving off the aura of someone who liked how that glove sounded when it smacked against bare skin and—
Nope. Not even going to go there.
“Still want to run away with me?” I heard Charlie ask through the haze.
“What?” I said stupidly.
“That’s what I thought.”
I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but it seemed distant and unimportant. I watched as Jeremy raised his gloved hands into the air. The people in the audience screamed their approval.
A man crept toward the stage, staying out of the spotlight. He handed a second mic to Helena. She winked at him before stepping back, letting Jeremy move from one side of the stage to the other. The sound from the crowd was deafening.
And then I was blocked from seeing what was happening by a large man who was demanding that I move over so he could sit down.
I blinked stupidly up at the stranger.
“Yeah, Sandy w
as sure that was going to be your reaction,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I hate it when he’s right.”
I started to turn to Charlie to tell him to use his crime boss powers to have this random murdered and buried in the desert for having the audacity to approach the table, when a thin ray of light broke through the clouds in my head. “Darren?”
Darren sighed. “You’re so pathetic. I don’t know why you just don’t fuck it out of your system. This is ridiculous.”