“Four thousand,” I managed to say. “To Nana. Because why the fuck not.”
“I like men in skirts,” Nana said to everyone around her. “I have this paddle at home that I’ll probably use on him. Make him my boy for the night. Helena would understand. She knows what’s up.”
Darren started coughing explosively.
I waited until he stopped being such a drama drag queen before continuing. “Four thousand,” I said. “Do we have five thousand?”
“Five thousand!” someone called from the back, an older man who looked like he’d probably be better off driving an ice cream truck through a neighborhood at ten o’clock at night. I hoped he wouldn’t win with his creepy ice cream money.
Nana glared at him. It would have been intimidating, except she was barely over five feet and was instead adorable.
“Six thousand!” another person shouted and that voice I recognized.
“Paul,” I hissed into the microphone. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged as he pushed his way through the crowd, Vince trailing after him. “Bidding,” Paul said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
So, naturally, I had to take it one step further because it wasn’t obvious to me. “Are you trying to reenact my sex dream I had about all of you?” I blurted out. “I told you, I didn’t mean to suck Vince’s dick! That doesn’t mean you can promote incest and then have them both suck on your nipples.”
Now, the funny thing about blurting is that it’s almost an involuntary action. You’re not necessarily controlling the sound of your voice, nor the words that come out, given your mouth tends to move ahead of your brain.
And sometimes, you’re standing on a stage, holding a microphone, and you blurt into it, causing a proclamation about nipple-sucking brother sex to just echo around a rather large room you happen to be standing in with hundreds of people, some of which are your friends and family and that one guy whose heart you wanted to hold and butthole you wanted to lick.
All noise inside Jack It pretty much just died after that. Even the DJ stopped the remix with a stereotypical screech of the song, like I was trapped in that eighties movie my life had become.
“Um,” Nana said into the silence that followed. “What?”
“Wow,” Matty said to Larry. “Just when you think this place can’t get any kinkier, incest happens.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be surprising, given everything else that goes on here,” Larry said, eyeing a couple who partook of the furry lifestyle. One was a fox. I thought the other one was supposed to be a poodle or a duck-billed platypus. I couldn’t be sure of which. “We might as well be squirrels because we’re surrounded by a bunch of nuts.”
“Oh my god,” Paul moaned. “I can’t believe he said that.”
“Was he talking about balls?” Vince asked Paul. “Or people.”
“Double entendre, for the win,” Matty said, high-fiving her husband. “Well played, Mr. Auster. Maybe you should squirrel me away for the winter.”
“How perfect, Mrs. Auster.” He kissed the back of her hand. “Because I’m already nuts about you. And if you’re lucky, maybe I’ll be nuts on you—”
“Seven thousand!” Nana shouted. “I won’t let my grandson beat me on winning Darren Mayne for some incestual freaky-deaky. Not when I can have my own piece of that pie.”
“I’m not trying to win him for incest,” Paul cried, sounding scandalized. “I don’t even like him like that.”
“You better not,” Vince said with a growl. “I don’t want to share you with anyone. And I don’t think I can fuck my own brother.”
“I bid ten thousand for the brothers!” creepy ice cream truck guy bellowed. “I have no problem with incest! I’m going to be the meat on that hot brother lover sandwich!”
“This escalated rather quickly,” Kori said, holding the microphone between her and Charlie.
“Twelve thousand dollars!” Nana bellowed. “Twelve thousand dollars for the Homo Jock King!”
“Do you even have that kind of money?” Kori asked.
“I used to do things when I was younger,” Nana said.
“What kind of things?” Vince asked, carrying on as if we weren’t standing in the middle of a gay bar on a Saturday night while I was trying to pimp my fake boyfriend.
“Things that make your toes curl in horror and pleasure,” Nana said, going shifty-eyed. “I can’t say anything other than that because then I’d have to kill you. And trust me when I say, you wouldn’t be my first.”