I would never admit that I put more time than usual into Sephora that Friday night. But the reality was that Jamie was all but dragging me out of the dressing room to be on stage on time.

There was no denying it paid off, though. I couldn't remember a time I had looked so good. My eyelids felt about a hundred pounds heavier and my lips were painted in a spectrum of six different colours. My wig was pumped to maximum volume, and my outfit was made almost entirely of mesh, with a thin pink slip underneath. I buckled myself into my heels, kissing Jamie on the cheek before moseying up to the stage.

"Are you sick of me yet Crescendo?" I called through the microphone. The whooping that answered me neither confirmed nor denied. "I am Sephora Utah and I actually do have an Instagram now, so get on that if you didn't bring tips."

I was rewarded with a roar of laughter and cheering. I smiled wide, hoping there wasn't lipstick on my teeth.

"I just want to say," I continued, buzzed on the thrill of performance. "You guys are the best part of my week. Crescendo fucking tops."

Someone yelled that they loved me. I blew a kiss to the air, tugging the microphone lead so I could strut to the opposite side of the stage.

"Why is this bitch still talking?" I yelled over the deafening ambience. "I've been getting into this underground performance artist called Stefani Germanotta. I'm going to do a little tribute to her to see if I can gain her some attention and traction because y'all are sleeping on her."

The crowd shrieked like magpies as the track started up, and I struck an exaggerated pose.

I wanna hold 'em like they do in Texas, please

Fold 'em, let 'em hit me, raise it, baby, stay with me

I love it...

I made all of thirty dollars in tips, but the performance revitalised me. After the week I'd had, I need an entire room of people screaming my name while I covered Lady Gaga in my falsetto register. I handed the stage over to a queen named Princess Flah – Zsa Zsa was betraying Crescendo with another gig that night – and immediately headed to the dressing room to check the time and touch up my makeup.

Nine forty-five. I had an agonising hour to fill so that when – or if – Caleb showed up, it wouldn't seem like I had just been waiting for him. His text had hardly been an invitation. He was just relaxing our strictly established boundaries. I had a firm plan to play dumb until he approached me; if he ever did. The last thing I wanted was a rejection while I was riding a high.

I downed a single drink before cutting myself off and inserted myself into the mosh pit near the front of the stage. When someone tried to nestle up next to me, I carefully extracted myself. Even if I wasn't waiting for Caleb, I didn't want him to see me in a compromising position the second he walked in. He'd proven to spook very easy.

When the clock hit eleven, I couldn't help but look to the door. Caleb didn't show up until eleven forty, and by that point, I had been close to calling it a night. But I clocked him the second he walked in, dressed extremely modestly in another button-down and jeans, but still outshining the entire club. The air seemed to change as if the building itself became aware that it was hosting an ethereal being.

I wondered to myself how I could be whipped for someone I wasn't dating. My internal dictionary suggested that the correct word was obsessed.

I quickly inserted myself into the bar, determined not to look at him. My second drink of the night didn't go down as easily as the first, as if my liver was punishing me by collaborating with my throat to make me choke. I didn't look over my shoulder to see if Caleb was watching. I had some self-control.

I was a filthy, dirty liar. I watched him almost exclusively until the clock hit midnight, always keeping him in the peripheral of my vision. When he approached the bar, I pushed away, shouldering back onto the dance floor. I watched him wait for a drink with his elbows hanging on the bar, eyes scanning the dancefloor. I turned my head down and flipped my hair over one shoulder, swaying my hips almost subconsciously. By the time I glanced back, he had his back to me.

We moved like magnets around the club. I kept my distance, determined not to crash into him. It would be transparent, even if I hadn't intended it. As Sephora, I had never shied away from confrontation, but I also liked to be chased. I didn't enjoy rejection, in or out of drag. It was easier to leave the ball in Caleb's court.

As the clock rapidly approached one, my hair had deflated, my makeup had probably melted, and Caleb had yet to approach me. He was talking to someone who had their back to me, about his height with dark hair. Very broad shoulders. My physical opposite.

Caleb kept smiling. I considered leaving.

But then his friend reached across the bar and I got a glimpse of his face. My heart skipped a few beats. I recognised Peter. Minus the eyeliner and wearing a band shirt, but recognisably Zsa Zsa's one-and-only. Taking two drinks from the bar and handing one to Caleb, leaning up awful close to him.

My stomach turned, and before I could talk myself out of it, I was crossing the floor. Caleb caught my eye as I approached, and his smile faltered into a gape. I gave him a tight-lipped grimace, before placing my hand on Peter's bicep gently. I wished I was wearing acrylics. I felt it would have given me an intimidating edge.

Peter turned quickly, startling under my heavy-lidded gaze. He brushed off his shock quickly, relaxing into a far too casual smile. "The notorious Sephora Utah."

"Hey, Pe – oh," I accepted his hug frigidly, meeting Caleb's eye over his hunched shoulder. He broke away to stare off into nothing, fixing his hair with the flexed palm of his hand. I pulled back with my hands clapped on Peter's shoulders. "Didn't expect you here tonight."

"I'm not one for leashes," Peter's gaze was intense. His forced smile scared me a little; it didn't even reach his top lip. "I must have missed your set."

"Your loss," I let my hands drop by my sides. In the heels I'd selected, I could almost look him in the eyes. "Zsa Zsa's performing tonight, isn't he? Avenue Q?"

Peter's smile grew even more strained, but I saw Caleb's eyes spark with realisation and he quickly deposited his untouched drink on the bar. I gave him a throwaway roll of my eyes as Peter sipped his drink tentatively, the tension between us three palpable.

"Yep," Peter said after he'd swallow, a picture of calm. He seemed to be standing taller, in an attempt to assert himself over me. "I'm headed to work in an hour. Night shifts aren't as fun for part-timers."

I wasn't sure whether I was being insulted or fed an excuse. Neither were particularly good tactics to lower my defences. "You probably shouldn't be drinking then."

Peter glanced down at the drink in his hand, and then placed it on the bar. "You're so right. Good to see you Seph."

He left his fingers to linger on my shoulder as he wandered away. My skin crawled under his touch. The crowd swallowed him up, and I was left alone with Caleb – who was very pointedly avoiding my gaze. I had no more qualms about bypassing this since I'd also given up on my rule of not approaching him first for any reason.

"It's me," I said lamely.

Caleb glanced up and met my artificial eyes. His misty gaze was framed with dense eyelashes. "I know."

I gestured after Peter. "He has a boyfriend."

"I got it."

I nodded stiffly. Our meeting wasn't brimming with the magic I'd expected it to. He looked completely unimpressed with me, despite the Sephora mask, which I had proof he liked much better. Spectacular, he had called me. No one had ever called me spectacular. Or likely ever would again.

With any other person, wearing the Sephora illusion would have boosted my confidence to a cartoonish level. But Caleb's gaze cut through my powder, painted mask, and peeled away at my ego. I was left naked, vulnerable, and very much Miles within seconds. It was infuriating, considering the amount of work I'd put in to hide my day-to-day face.

"I was just about to head off," I blurted out. Caleb's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "So you can stay if you want. I'll not see you at school."

His face hardened slightly, and he turned his body slightly away from me. "Okay."

I nodded, sighing through my nose. My irritation with him moved internally, extending to the itches and aches through my body. Drag was fucking uncomfortable. If I could only associate Caleb's company with the throb of my toes, stuffed into heels, and the tightness of being fully tucked.

"Sorry," I muttered before turning on my heel. I was seconds from flouncing away when Caleb spoke up.

"Were you really going to leave, or do you just think that's what I want?"

I rested on the back of my heels, fixed to the floor by his question. I twisted my head, resting my chin on one shoulder so I could halfway look at him. His shirt only had three buttons undone, modest compared to how I'd first glimpsed him at Crescendo, how long ago? Three weeks. It felt like yesterday. I could still make out the broad expanse of his chest, the golden skin beneath. It was a conservative amount considering what I'd seen in the locker room.

I realised with a start that I was staring at his chest. When I dragged my eyes back to his face, no big loss really, I realised that while I'd first though his eyes had been fixed on the floor, a lengthier examination of his gaze revealed that he was staring it my legs. Sweeping them up and down in appreciative strokes.

Arrogant and openly flirtatious Sephora kicked down the door of the closet I'd retreated into, and I turned out one foot, so the view was more flattering. "I thought you were avoiding me."

Caleb seemed to realise the game I was playing, and dragged his eyes up. "I thought you hadn't seen me. Or you were avoiding me."

I was about to argue that I was doing no such thing, but I remembered how I'd purposely stayed nine arm lengths away from him for twenty minutes. I'd done it to be enticing, but his semi-dejected expression reminded me that despite all his perfections, Caleb Proust probably couldn't read minds.

I turned completely around, placing my hands on my hips and tilting my chin up to him. "I didn't know if you wanted to see me. I don't mind isn't exactly an open invitation."

"Neither is maybe," he countered.

I tapped my fingers on my protruding hip bone. "Well, do you want me to leave or not?"

Caleb didn't answer; he turned his back to me. I was momentarily offended before I saw him raise his hand and flag down the bartender. Lyle, who knew me well, approached quickly with a winning customer-service smile despite being slammed with orders.

"Could I get a stinger?" he asked pleasantly, and turned back to me. "And...?"

I stepped into the bar, leaning next to him with my back in a low curve. "My usual, thanks, Lyle. Mwah."

Lyle got to work, and I pushed my heavy cascades of hair over one shoulder. Caleb watched it flow and settle, stray tendrils collapsing quickly back across my face.

"You look..." he began, "... like you put in a lot of effort tonight."

"Wow," I elongated each letter, and laughed. "You sure know how to make a girl feel special. I am dripping wet right now."

"Don't," he warned, but his tone was jovial. "I just can't see any of you. Miles. You look like a different person."

"That's the idea."

"You're very talented. Is what I should have said," he articulated as Lyle slid our drinks into our waiting hands. I felt my body react intensely to the compliment, and I squeezed my toes into the floor to anchor myself down.

"And you're very..." I took a sip of my drink, slow and meeting his eyes over the brim. I tried to find an equally coy compliment without just outright calling him hot. "Surprising."

He pushed off the bar downing a good portion of his drink and gasping for air after swallowing. "Can you dance?"

I wrinkled my nose immediately. "No."

"Great. I need someone to make me look good in comparison," he held out a hand, waited for a second for me to place my free wrist in it, and pulled me gently off the bar. The touch was purely platonic, but it sent shockwaves up my arm in complete opposition to the sensation when Peter had touched me. I tried to remember the last time Caleb had touched me. Not since the night that kicked everything off, surely.

Caleb was a very blokey dancer. Bobbing up and down, drink in one hand and absolutely no movement below the waist. I had no such qualms since the full Sephora Utah persona had emerged to match my appearance. I swayed and spun and teetered on my heels, occasionally staggering just so I could brush against Caleb's side. When his drink was downed, his hand, cold from the perspiring of the glass, dropped onto my shoulder.

I blinked up at him, system buzzing slightly from the alcohol. There were dark strands of hair falling in his eyes, and I had to fight a desperate urge to push them back off his face.

"How are you feeling?" he called over the music.

I took his hand and twirled myself around once, our fingers loosely entwined. "This isn't a pity party, is it? You're not being paid by some charity organisation to show the resident orphan a good time?"

He allowed our fingers to remain knotted together; a decision I was not anticipating. "You've got me there. They told me it would look really good on uni applications."

We were jostled around a little as Diana Ross came over the speaker system, prompting a new wave onto the dance floor. We wound up almost chest to chest, separated by an inch of what little willpower I did have.

Caleb's body expelled heat. His skin looked flawless up close, save a tiny freckle under his left eye. His eyes tracked the artificial contouring of my face, and I wondered if he was trying to see through it all. Wondered if he even wanted to. It would have been like stripping away the juicy, smooth skin of a fruit to gaze upon the wrinkled stone in the centre. The stone was always there, beneath the surface, but not half as appealing to look at. Uneatable as well.

I realised too late the number of innuendos my mind could pull out of the analogy. I back up a little out of Caleb's personal bubble, for my own sake. "So, what happened to my life, your life, and nothing in between?"

Caleb wiped some stray hair from his eyes. "I don't think I ever said that."

"We're not friends," I mimicked, and he sighed through a smile.

"We weren't. We're not," he emphasised. "Can you imagine what would happen if I started talking to you at school? Everyone would know something was up. We never travelled in the same circles before."

I was glad I had half an inch of makeup on to hide pesky things like disappointment. "I mean, the last time someone saw us alone together I got shirt-fronted into a locker so... I get it."

He nodded, apparently pleased we were on the same page. "But Crescendo is objectively the best place to be on a Friday night and I feel like I'm hindering my own gay high school experience with this whole fifty-feet at all times rule we've established so... if you'll have me, I would like to relax our restraining order. At least, outside of school."

His explanation was so very logical. I didn't know what I had been expecting, but I hadn't predicted that I would feel so put out by the end of it. I raised my hand in an offer of a half-hearted truce.

"Not friends," I assured him. "But no more blind, all-consuming hatred of one another?"

He took my hand in his own, warm and encasing. "I never hated you, Miles."

My heart sang a rapid four-octave scale. I wondered if Caleb knew what he could do to me with throwaway comments like that. I wondered how my body would react to actual fondness. Legitimate affection. It was probably for the best that Caleb saw me as nothing but a sad, repressed and occasionally bold thorn in his side because I didn't know if my heart could handle it if he felt the same way for me.

We didn't spend the whole night in each other's company. I reluctantly let him go, and he chattered with other men who looked much older and put together than me. I did my best to enjoy the early hours of the morning, but I kept finding him in the throng of bodies, like glare in the camera. He never went further than smiles and accepting drinks, I noticed. And he never bought anyone else one.

When last rounds were called, he approached me from behind, and when his hand brushed my shoulder I pretended to be surprised.

"How're you getting home?" he breathed into my ear.

I spun around. "Bus."

"Want to share an Uber?"

I was unable to contain my smile.

"I need to get into my civvies."

"I'll wait."

In the dressing room, I wiped Sephora away, peeling off her eyes, and folded my clothing into the bottom of my bag. My hair stuck up in all directions once I'd peeled off my wig, and my face was left slightly red and blotchy from the makeup wipes. When my pads and curves were shed, my day clothes hung off my frame unflatteringly. I tamed my hair with a few swipes of my fingers and hung my backpack off my shoulder.

When I left the dressing room, I couldn't find Caleb. I pulled out my phone and found a message from him.

Outside.

I farewelled Lyle and Emanuel on the door and found him where he said he would be. Caleb was standing under the neon sign, bathed in purple light. I felt immediately insecure, without my protective barrier of Sephora. I waited for him to look up, see me in my natural state, and instantly rethink his offer of a ride home.

But he just waved his hand for me to follow. It was an offer I was powerless to refuse.

The Uber driver was quiet, and Caleb jumped in the back seat with me after confirming his name. I clenched my bag between my knees and watched Caleb relax back into the seat, hand placed on the middle seat between us.

"How much?" I asked, going to dig my wallet out of my bag. Caleb waved me off.

"If I cared about that, I would have you paying gas money for all those lifts I've given you," he reminded me.

"Why aren't you driving?" I asked curiously.

"Because I came out with a plan to get drunk," his head flopped to his right shoulder and I averted my considerably more boring eyes. "My dad would send me to Alaska for drunk driving."

"They know you're out tonight, don't they?" He nodded, eyes still rolling lazily over me. "Do they know you're at a club?"

"They don't ask questions. Privilege of being freshly eighteen," he confided. "When I was underage, I would just pretend I was at a friend's house. They were always too wrapped up in Jake and Seth's bullshit to notice I was doing suspect things as well."

"Jake seems like a good kid."

"He is. He's far more well-behaved than I am," he laughed lightly. "I'm just better at playing the responsible one. Pick up the siblings, never miss a family dinner, call grandma on the weekend and they don't stop to ask why you're so dressed up to go to 'Mark's house' to watch reruns of 'the game'."

"Who's Mark?"

"There are five Mark's on the soccer team. I don't know any of them personally," the Uber driver jerked too hard around a corner, and I had to use all my core strength not to fall into his lap. My hand landed on the middle seat to steady myself, and our thumbs brushed.

Caleb didn't pull away like he'd been burned. He left it there, his skin excruciatingly ghosting my own. "How do you get out so often?"

I considered changing the subject, but I felt like I had an army's worth of intel on Caleb's family. I felt only fair to give up some of my own. "Reece doesn't dictate where I go and what I do. I mean, if he knew about this... who knows. He likes to stick his nose into my business but as long as he doesn't find anything, he just lets me do my thing."

Caleb nodded, lips parted slightly. "Have you spoken since Tuesday?"

I shook my head. We'd been walking around eggshells with each other for the whole week. Reece had been smoking more than usual, and his self-banishment to the porch every few hours gave me a little room to breathe. God knew what the weekend would bring. "Reece and I... we got along when my mum was alive. I even thought he was cool. He could fix anything, and he always bought food..." the same way people bought treats to someone's house if they were trying to convince their dog to like them, "... but more than that. He was just Mum's boyfriend. He wasn't constantly in my space, in my way, in my head. When she died, they were de facto partners and he got pretty much everything. I've got a trust fund apparently, but I've never seen it. Only Reece has access until I turn eighteen.

"My uncle wanted to take me, but I wanted to stay here. As if I had so much going for me, a whole two friends," I huffed. "I told Reece I didn't want to go, and he worked out a way to keep me here. Indebted to him."

Caleb was studying me, with an expression that could have been anything from disinterest to active engagement; I couldn't read it from the shadows of the car.

"Sorry," I said instantly. "I have a therapist for this shit, I know."

"Don't," he said, softly. I felt his hand shift, and it slipped over mine. My heart inflated to block my airways. "I'm sorry you have to live like that. And I'm sorry I used Reece to threaten you. I wouldn't have ever... even if he wasn't the kind of person he is, even if you weren't scared of him, I could never do that to you."

Or anyone, I waited for him to say. To broaden the scope of his altruism, as usual. But he never did.

He squeezed my fingers then retracted his hand as the Uber rolled to a stop outside my house. The driver waited impatiently for me to leave, and it would have been the perfect lull in our conversation to do so. But I could still feel my fingers tingling from Caleb's warm touch, and the three drinks pumping through me were all the ammunition I need to lean across the middle seat to graze his cheek with my naked lips.

That was what I was aiming for, anyway. But Caleb startled when I ducked towards him and turned his face just as our faces collided. My lips met the corner of his mouth, soft and smooth, and trembling slightly as his mouth dropped. For a second, I could taste him. But I quickly pulled back, understanding I had unintentionally crossed a line.

Caleb was staring at me, back pressed against the door of the car. His lips were parted in confusion and his body was curled away from mine, not exactly the look I was searching for.

I dragged my backpack into my lap and fumbled for the car handle, spilling out of the Uber. "Sorry. Thank you."

One of those phrases was directed at the driver, one to Caleb. My mind was so scattered that I couldn't tell which was which. I slammed the door in Caleb's dumbfound expression, hitching my bag onto my shoulders as I ran for the front door.

In my dreams that night, Caleb followed me out of the car and caught me at the porch. He spun me around and returned the favour full-frontal, kissing me in the way you only saw in the movies, with both our heads at different angles and our bodies slotted perfectly together.

Exactly the way he'd kissed me in the club, before he'd stripped back the layers of Sephora and found me, shivering and stammering, beneath.

A/N: thoughts? comments? also, I thought this would be a good time to share some concept art i drew of caleb and miles. shoes are hard ~