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Gavin trusts her. He trusts her with things he probably couldn’t even trust his own mother with. Things he knows he couldn’t trust his own mother with. And he knows that her level of secret-keeping would be kept well away from pillow talk. He could trust her with everything.
So he can’t exactly figure out why it’s taking him so long to go and confide in her these things.
It happens when he and Geoff head over to the Fort on a Friday to watch her hack away at a chunk of wood with a chainsaw until suddenly it was something beautiful. He always loved her level of artiste that transcended any single medium. When she thanks everyone for coming and relaxes for a moment with a beer in her hands, he casually slides over to her and nonchalantly says, “Hey, Griffon, can I talk to you for a moment? Privately?”
She agrees, but then is immediately distracted when Geoff comes up and plants a huge kiss on her cheek, proclaiming about seventy-four types of love for her, including three undiscovered by man, and suggests they dance to the music one of her studio mates has playing. Apologetically, she promises later and goes off to shimmy with her husband, and Gavin busies himself in a game of ninja Millie has started with several of the onlookers of the carving show.
It is later, after Griffon has showered and Millie has been put in bed, that Gavin attempts to speak with her again. Geoff is in the shower, so their likelihood of being interrupted is slight. Together, they lounge on her bed, and Gavin breaks the ice.
“I, ah… I’m not sure how to start this,” he says feebly, a little nervous.
“Try telling a joke, that always helps,” Griffon suggests, shrugging.
Gavin chuckles. “No, ah, well… it’s something sort of serious.”
Griffon looks over at him. “Is everything alright?”
“No, yeah, everything’s good. I’m just… I have something I want to do? And I feel like I can only trust you to help me.”
“This would be so much easier if you would just tell me what it is.”
Gavin blushes. “Well, just keep in mind, I’m not gay, honestly, I’m just curious, it’s something I’ve been thinking about.”
“Gavin, come on, just tell me!”
The bathroom door opens just as Gavin opens his mouth and Geoff ambles out, towel around his waist. Quickly, so as not to lose the moment, Gavin leans over and quickly whispers his request into Griffon’s ear. She grins, and Geoff looks confused.
“What are you so secretive about?”
“Nothing!” Gavin says quickly, looking around like nothing had happened. “Who here keeps secrets?”
“Yeah, Geoff, are you paranoid or something?” Griffon says playfully, looking at him with narrowed eyes.
Geoff stares at his wife and friend and shakes his head, turning around walking right back into the bathroom, mumbling about crazy people. Griffon chuckles and looks over at Gavin; she holds out her pinkie.
“Safe with me. I’ll make it happen.”
Gavin grins widely and links pinkies with her, locking her promise.
True to her word, Griffon makes it happen. She subtly suggests that Geoff take Millie out for a father-daughter weekend, staying in some hotel in another city and spending all their time together, and she does it in a way that Millie overhears and subsequently begs, “Yeah, Daddy, please! Let’s go somewhere!”
Griffon goes on to suggest to Geoff that it would be completely thrilling for the both of them to take a flight to Chicago and see the White Sox play on their home field and bond over America’s pastime and Geoff is instantly sold and getting tickets online without a second thought. In a week’s time, Geoff and Millie pack their bags, say their goodbyes to Gavin, and Griffon drives them to the airport, winking to Gavin on the way out the door. Gavin has some time to prepare himself, and though he should be relaxed, he is panicking. It doesn’t help that he has no idea what to do with himself.
When Griffon finally returns home, it’s clear she means business. Without even a hello, she points at Gavin. “Shower, now. Shave everything that needs to be shaved.”
“Like what?”
Griffon sighs. “Well, face, for starters. Armpits. Legs. Chest, too, unless you want to wear something with a collar. No, wait, we’ll use Geoff’s electric for that. Just, go on!”
Gavin doesn’t argue and does as he’s told. He finds shaving his legs and armpits disconcerting, but he did ask for this, and he has to put up with his own choices. It all seems annoying and rather pointless and he has no idea why women do this willingly, and then he brushes his legs against each other when he gets out of the shower. For the next two minutes he stands there like an idiot, rubbing his calves against together, because dear God, that is a smoothness granted only from heaven. It all makes sense when he comes out of the bathroom, shaved and smooth and lovely, and finds Griffon in her and Geoff’s bedroom, digging into her closet.
“Ah! Good. Come here, and promise me you’ll sit still.”
So he does, and suddenly she’s asking quite a lot, because she’s got some sort of medieval pinching device in her hands and then his eyebrows feel like they’re slowly catching fire.
“Argh!”
“Quit whining! You already have nice eyebrows, this is not going to take that long, I’m just shaping!”
Begrudgingly, he sits through the torture, and she smiles grandly when the tweezers are taken away. “Lovely! Remember: you lost a best, if Geoff asks. Got it?”
“Got it,” Gavin replies, and then Griffon has Geoff’s electric razor in her hands, and she’s got it to Gavin’s chest, removing all traces of body hair from his clavicles to his hip bones. It should be odd, Griffon’s intense attention to detail making her get very up close and personal with his skin, but it isn’t, not when she’s smiling and brushing off his lap.
“Excellent. Let’s get your face pretty.”
She does things with makeup he didn’t even know was possible. His face feels heavy with the approximately twenty-seven pounds of powder and cream and liquid and maybe even latex at one point. His eyes go wide when he glances in the mirror.
“Bloody fucking hell,” he says in awe, examining his face from all angles as Griffon turns the brush on herself.
“One of my best works, if I do say so myself. Look how pretty you look! I never get to use a palette for green eyes, and your skin looks flawless, this makes me happy.”
Gavin spends the next twenty minutes looking at his face as Griffon transforms herself. Gavin isn’t sure how it’s going to play out, but if this is one of the results, he’s pleasantly surprised. His eyes are surrounded with colors, shades of red and gold that make his green eyes stand out. His cheekbones have been raised about half an inch by her use of powder and he is utterly shocked by how she’s managed to make his nose look narrow and prim. And the finishing touch, the cherry on top of his porcelain smooth skin, is the dark red on his lips, just barely overlined so his lips looked plumper. Gavin has never expected himself to be a fan of lipstick, but in that moment, he wishes that men wearing lipstick was a more widely accepted concept, because he adores the color.
After admiring Griffon’s handiwork, she finishes her own face, then drags Gavin over to her closet. “You’re not very big, so you could fit into my things. Pick something fancy.”
He spends a few minutes mulling over his options, then finally picks a simple black gown, something she’d worn when she was a bridesmaid for a friend, and they shimmy him into it, zipping it up with ease.
“It’s too bad I couldn’t get you some fake breasts,” she says sadly, poking his sternum. “Some bronzer on here will have to do.”
She dusts a fake line of cleavage on him, dresses herself in something fancy, and then gestures him over to her final touch of the ensemble. He eyes the thing nervously, unsure about it, but Griffon assures him he’ll look wonderful, so he sits still and lets her place the wig on his short hair, playing with it for a moment before she declares him completely done.
Eyes open, Gavin sees that he is no longer himself. He is a powerhouse in red lipstick and a smooth black wig that has sideswept bangs and no part, pulled into a loose ponytail. He is feminine, even though the hard edge of his jaw and his Adam’s apple say otherwise, and he adores it. Griffon bends down and they look at themselves in the vanity mirror; she’s equally as done up, with her hair teased and her lips a shade of pink he didn’t know existed outside of watermelon flavored things. She smiles widely.
“Look at you, my pretty queen.”
“Is this what it feels like to be a woman?”
“What part?”
“Everything.”
“Well, maybe not everything. Nobody wears makeup like this unless they are drag queens or Kardashians, but the feeling of being pretty is lovely, isn’t it?”
“It’s absolutely top,” he comments, looking down his nose, still completely blown away at what she’s done to it. “I… Griffon, I don’t even want to go out anymore.”
Her pout is one of the saddest things he’s ever seen. “Oh, really? But I knew a good drag bar I wanted to take you to!”
He smiles apologetically. “I’m sorry. But I kind of want to just go and dance with you in the living room. No one deserves to see me this pretty.”
Griffon chuckles. “I’ll go get something on the stereo.”
She picks the entire soundtrack to the movie The Birdcage and then makes them cocktails and they dance, Gavin laughing at how he keeps forgetting the dress has straps and how bloody smooth his legs feel. Griffon spins him around and decides his drag queen name will be Jackie Union (he can’t even begrudge her the pun because it actually is a good name) and they drink and dance the night away, and the sun starts peeking over the horizon when they both drunkenly and haphazardly fall into Griffon and Geoff’s bed and fall asleep, Griffon snoring louder than Gavin.
Hindsight is 20/20 and they both immediately regret not taking off their makeup before bed. Gavin looks like he’s been caught in a rainstorm, everything is so smeared, and there’s huge splotches of dark red lipstick on Geoff’s pillowcase (“It’s okay,” Griffon tells him later. “If I ever want to divorce Geoff, I’ll just use these to say he’s been cheating and blame it on him.”). Groggily, and with a massive headache, he washes off all the traces of makeup as Griffon combs out the wig and adds it back to her stash of costumes and stage paraphernalia. He steps out of the shower, glances at his face in the mirror, and frowns. He’s back to being himself, albeit it with quite a lot less body hair and much more shapely eyebrows.
He feels an odd sadness he can’t quite explain.
“What exactly made you want to drag it up a little, sweetie?” Griffon asks later as they make breakfast at three in the afternoon, Gavin carefully adding bits of cooked bacon to the eggs for scrambling as she tended to their hash browns.
He stirs the eggs and bacon and thinks about it. “I’m not quite sure. I was just clicking through links on youtube and it brought me to this video of a drag queen talking about why he did it, that he felt this strength from embracing things that are feminine and how he got this weird sense of power, to be both man and woman, and I just… dunno. Felt curious about it. I wanted to see if I could feel that kind of power, too.”
“And how would you rate it?” Griffon asks, flipping their hash browns, making a victory fist when she gazes on their lovely shade of golden brown.
Gavin nodded. “I’d say that there, in the living room, drinking vodka cranberries and dancing to We Are Family in a dress and wig with you, I felt a sort of something I’ve never felt before.”
“Success,” Griffon replies cheerfully, throwing her arms up in a muscle pose. “We are women, hear us be fabulous!”
Gavin snickers. When they sit down to eat, Griffon poses another question.
“You know, I had fun doing it, too. Could we try and go out in public next?”
“I don’t know. I sort of want the power I feel to be private for now. Does that make sense?” Gavin asks timidly.
“Absolute sense. We’ll feel powerful in the living room.”
“And, ah… this is still our secret, right? Geoff won’t know?”
Griffon looks at Gavin, then smiles, leans her elbow on the table, and sticks out her pinkie. With a wide grin, Gavin links his pinkie with hers.
Perhaps one day, they’ll share the power with Geoff. But for now, the power is theirs alone.