Valya loves the evenings before a rave. Nothing has started yet, it’s all just a scramble: everyone’s texting each other, and no one has really decided anything, someone’s running late while someone else is already waiting downstairs, the bathroom’s never free, and Le Feu d’Issey, sweet Mugler Angel, and someone’s Black Afgano are all mixing in the air. And there’s still money, because nobody’s spent it yet. There’s a whole night ahead. Some of these people show up in Valya’s life for the first and last time, some of the faces have been familiar for ages, and he even kind of knows them, or at least knows them by sight, though he couldn’t tell you anything about them beyond their names. The core group is always more or less the same, and the main thing is that his bestie Ernest is always around. Valya likes checking out what everyone’s wearing tonight, standing with someone in the smoking area, and listening to what they’re telling him. There are lots of beautiful people around, and he’s among them.
After the rave, everyone sleeps at someone’s place until the next night. If Valya has anywhere to go back to at all, it’s usually some rented room on the outskirts or out of town that takes forever to get to, so Valya wakes up where it all started, with the people he felt like being with, at least while the fun lasted.
There are raves, and then there’s what they call “the club.” Before heading to the club, Valentine gets ready on his own and has the bathroom all to himself. Some of the clothes he wears there are authentic, the rest are good reps. The authentic pieces are expensive gifts, and some of them will be sold one day. Better if they gave him cash, Valya thinks.
They always head to the club with a vetted crew, more sober than Valya would like. The dub playing there was written with one purpose: God forbid anyone notice the music. When Valentine does finally get introduced to someone, Valya knows Ernest already has it all sorted. But that doesn’t happen very often. It’s usually deadly boring there, and Valya is always scanning the room for the promo robots who work there - with them, he can always talk and get properly wasted.
Valya has plenty of simps online, but only a handful follow him over to OF for more, and there’s not much money in it. Holding on to the ones who do subscribe takes pleated skirts, dolphin shorts, and chokers. Basically, the standard-issue femboy kit, any deviation from which is punishable by mass unsubscribes. How to look and what to say on OF, what to wear to “the club,” what each benefactor wants, and what look is safer for walking around his own neighborhood - Valya has it all down pat and doesn’t identify with any of these versions: he knows exactly who he wants to be and who he doesn’t.
Ernest put together the whole business model for Valya: the femboy is for converting simps into OF subscribers, the sugar-baby twink, for sugar daddies, whose average spend is higher. Ernest is responsible for positioning, promotion, profiles, and meetings. He makes sure that behind the crop top, makeup, and skirt, the person in frame still reads clearly as a “boy.”
As for Ernest, he calls himself an SSA gay man and doesn’t use acronyms longer than three letters. He knows the seedy spots from back when he used to go there looking for “straight” men for himself, targeting those who had something to lose - since men like that could offer more. Now he takes Valentine there.
By morning, all that’s usually left of the whole night is fragments - someone’s fight, Ernest’s meltdown as he gets pulled off the club’s ledge yet again, someone’s still throwing up in the bathroom. The moment it wears off, it gets chilly, and Valya recognizes that cold and everything that follows over the next twenty-four hours. The people around him have suddenly stopped being beautiful, and the ones he loved with all his heart an hour ago now seem hostile. They all head home in silence, and on the way Valya is no longer sure whether he had fun.
