The Promise of Lace (2 page)

Wow
, I thought. Someone was
forward as hell.

And that’s when I noticed the nametag. He worked here. He
wasn’t just walking around a lingerie store hitting on anything that moved. I
couldn’t make out the name on the disc of plastic pinned to his shirt, because
the angle was all wrong.

“That’s sweet of you,” Hailey replied, carefully moving the
black lace off her body, suddenly as embarrassed as if he had caught her
wearing the nightie and nothing else.

“But,” he kept going, “
Black
is not you. You’ve got the sunshine blonde going for you already. Make it
incandescent. Stay here.” It was a ridiculously cheesy thing to say, possibly
creepy coming from a man in this type of store, but he did manage to make it
sweet. He waved a finger at Hailey, lightly pulled the black lace out of her
hands and darted off through the racks of overpriced polyester.

“Son of a bitch, that is a beautiful man,” Hailey sighed,
eyes trained on what she could see of his ass as he hurried away.

I couldn’t exactly argue, so I did the best I could to snap
her back to reality.
Where she was engaged.
“Not
really your type though, is he? A little… lithe, not really the
captain of the football team like
Noah.”

“Get him sweating and inside
me
and
he wouldn’t have to be,” Hailey muttered. Her gaze snapped back to me. “You
know, I could… feel him out for you. See if he’s attached. It’s been a while
for you, hasn’t it?”

It had been
months
since I had been on a date and I was well aware of it. I’d been working and
just too busy to keep looking. Especially because even the dates I’d had before
essentially giving up on the dating thing were just… dates, a couple dinners
before I stopped calling or they stopped calling. The last guy had been someone
I met online. We had gone out for coffee and the whole thing had been such a disaster
that I excused myself to go to the bathroom after twenty minutes, walked a
couple blocks, and just got on the first bus that stopped at the corner.

My last actual boyfriend had been Isaiah and that had been a
couple years ago. He was sort of the one who got away. But
most
days I knew enough about myself to remember that I didn’t love
anyone enough to move to Mississippi for them, not when I had finally set up a
client base here in frigid, ice-encrusted, but lovely Minneapolis.

I scoffed at Hailey. “He’s gorgeous, his body is perfect,
his hair is styled and he just used the words ‘incandescent’, ‘voluptuous’ and
‘Rubenesque’ in a sentence. Gay.”

Hailey rolled her eyes. “You’re kidding me. He’s got some
respect for hygiene and he went to college. That doesn’t make him gay.”

“He works in lingerie store.
Enthusiastically.”

“It’s 2013 and he has hipster hair. He could be straight,”
Hailey protested.

“This!” The Guy announced, returning so suddenly that
neither of us had a chance to pretend that we weren’t talking about him. We
both went instantly into looking-up-at-the-ceiling guilty before recovering and
looking with interest at the nightie he’d brought out.

It was like mint green fog swirling around under a hanger.
Instead of a red thong, there were bikini-cut panties, totally sheer, with a
little skirt of lace hanging down from the waistline like Spanish moss. There
was no little matching bra.

“What do you think?”

“It’s gorgeous,” Hailey said, clearly mesmerized by it.

“It’ll look even better on you. Go ahead. Try it on.” The
Guy handed her the hanger and grinned.

“Thank you…?” She let her voice lilt up and glanced quickly
at his chest.

“Dieter,” he answered, with that million-watt grin.

“Dieter,” Hailey repeated. She nudged me as she passed me.
Well… it was more of a full body check, but if subtlety were one of Hailey’s
defining characteristics, I wouldn’t have been here helping her pick out sex
clothes in the first place.

She disappeared into a changing room and Dieter turned to
me.

“And what can I help you find?”

I’m not going to blush
, I told myself. He was cute,
sure, but I knew better than to assume that he was anything other than gay. He
was too muscular.
Too good looking.
Too
put-together.
He had product in his hair.

“Oh, I’m not looking, I don’t have anyone to impress with
it,” I shrugged. I hated myself for it, but I instantly reanalyzed the sentence
to see if I had unconsciously made myself sound single and desperate.

Dieter tutted at me.

“So get it for yourself. Get something just because you’re
beautiful. There’s this purple thing in the back. Someone like you… all big
brown eyes and long legs, it would suit you. When you do find someone to
impress with it, he or she—” He shrugged and I suddenly felt incredibly awkward
that he thought I might be gay, even though I had been making the same
assumption about him, “will be so impressed they’ll be entirely at your mercy.
Hell. Wear it just for yourself. It’s free to try it on.”

“You’re the best salesman in the entire company, aren’t
you?” I laughed at him,
then
worried when his first
reaction seemed to be offense. It was just a feint though. His glistening smile
was back in an instant.

“It’s fun to be good at things and make people smile.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that so I shrugged. “Sure. I’ll
try on the purple thing.”

He smiled at me and I tried not to be the pathetic girly
girl who went weak at the knees because of an obscenely handsome man’s
beautiful smile, though I had to admit I was tempted to do exactly that. He
turned and disappeared off toward wherever he’d gone before. The mysterious
backroom where he had squirreled away all the best lingerie so it wouldn’t have
to interact with the cheap costume shit that presumably languished in the
drawers of women who bought it for a man the way they bought jeans that were
too small– in the hope that they’d get some use out of it eventually.

I went over to the fitting room and peeked under doors until
I recognized Hailey’s socks.

“What’s the verdict?”

“Oh my god.
It’s perfect. It’s like its
Cinderella’s wedding night and all those little singing mice just went batshit
crazy with the Channel.”

Sometimes it was hard to know how to react to Hailey.

“I’m going to stand here and look at myself in it for a
little longer, and then we can go.”

“Take your time. He convinced me to try something on, too.”

Hailey’s laugh was loud and mocking.
“Uh
huh.
Kind of a waste of a move if you think he’s gay, isn’t it?”

“Shut up and look at yourself in your skimpy underwear,
Hailey,” I hissed back.

Chapter Two

Hailey was still teasing me about the stupid nightie a week
later. I hadn’t ducked into her door to see how she’d looked in hers because it
was obvious that she mostly looked topless, (which made it the perfect thing
for her to wear to entice Noah, especially because she had put on weight, but
most of it had gone to her hips and her rack) but
she
had ducked into
my
dressing room.

Then she had tried to convince me that I
needed
to buy it. Apparently, every
single girl needed
aspirational
kinky underwear.

I wasn’t really into lingerie. I had always figured it was
one of those things they tried to sell women under the guise that men cared
about it, or in fact, even noticed it. Like douching or lip-gloss.

But it
had been
fun to just try it on. And I had felt beautiful. The plum color had made my
brown eyes, which I’d always thought were boring, pop. The way the hem hung
longer in the back had made my legs longer.
More shapely and
less twiggy.
They’d looked good even though I hadn’t shaved them in
weeks. I’d almost looked buxom, which was a feat for me. My primary descriptor
was usually “bony”.

I hadn’t bought it, but it had found itself cast in a
recurring role in my dreams.
Particularly in one that I was
still blaming on whiskey and a heavy meal where Isaiah and Dieter, had… ahem…
costarred.

Hailey invited me out to a “Girls Only” brunch that
Saturday. After being terribly misled by an app on her phone we found ourselves
at an amusingly
divey
place near the art school that
offered omelets and bottomless mimosas.

The two of us were hunched over a tiny café table with
dented metal diner chairs crowded around it. The formerly shiny red vinyl of
the chairs was deeply cracked.

We were feeling comically out of place. It was the first
truly beautiful day of spring, so Hailey and I had celebrated by pulling spring
dresses out of our closets. I’d straightened my hair. Hailey had curled hers
way too tight, and looked a little bit like Glinda the Good Witch. We stuck out
like unhurt, well-manicured thumbs in the crowd of sore thumbs around us—all
students hovering around 20 years old, and all groggy and hung over.

The place mostly smelled like grease, delicately overlaid
with the
Eau De B.O.
et
Stale Marijuana
of art students, but the mimosas were excellent and just as
bottomless as advertised. They were served in huge beer mugs. We’d make do.

Hailey had already finished her first mug of mimosa and was
cheerily recounting her lingerie inspired adventure in a too-loud voice that
was not doing any favors to the hangovers of the couple in the booth across
from us as they shared a piece of dry toast, or to the innocence of the
baby-faced ginger waiter who kept coming over to check on us just as Hailey
made some new, loud pronouncement about her sex life.

“So, I set out an ice bucket next to the door, stick a
couple beers in it and set up a trail with all those little tea-light candle
samplers that my whole office gets for secret Santa stuff. Then I set them
around the room, way far away from the bed this time—I learned my lesson from
the Great Blanket Fire of ’06, and then I waited for him to get home.”

I fought the urge to drop my face into my hand.

“So I hear him come in, hear him laugh, hear him bolt across
the living room. He throws open the door and his jaw falls to the floor. He
almost dropped his beer!” Hailey set her palm over her face and giggled madly,
calming own just enough to take the last gulp of her mimosa. “He shucks his
jeans, dives into bed, sucks my tits until I’m damn near there already, and
then flips me onto my stomach and pounds me home!”

She banged on the table for emphasis. The students across
from us shuddered in unison. Our poor waiter, who had appeared behind Hailey
right around “sucks my tits” had gone from a rose pink blush to a worrying
purple color.

“Um,” he managed. “Do you… need a refill?”

“Oh, no, I should wait until my food
comes,” Hailey said, delicately hiding a burp behind her hand.

“’Kay,” he replied. He didn’t move, just kept looking at her
with an expression of pure terror on his face.

I cleared my throat. “I need another one.”

The kid jolted, like he was just waking up. He grabbed my
mug with shaking hands and hurried away.

Hailey went on, utterly unfazed at having mentally destroyed
a sheltered twenty-something.

“Then afterward I put on my sweats and he got me the other
beer out of the ice bucket and we watched
Deadliest
Catch
. It was the best anniversary sex ever. I swear to god I’m going to
send Dieter a thank you card.”

“That’s a good story for your grandchildren, Hailey,” I told
her with mock seriousness. She stuck her tongue out at me.

“Doggy-style though?
Really?”

“Love it,” Hailey replied with an appreciative groan. “Don’t
you?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s a situational thing. Some
one-night-stand dude-bro fucking me from behind—I’d feel used.”

Hailey shrugged. “I guess. But this is Noah we’re talking
about. “

“Right,” I laughed.
“Noah Chisholm,
Defender of the Innocent, Killer of Mice, and Changer of Light Bulbs.”
“
Then it’s just him proving that through diligent explanation, careful
guidance, a detailed diagram, and tons of practice, he has figured out where
the g-spot is and wanted to hear me swear.”

I should have warned her that the little waiter was behind
her again, but this was probably good information for the boy to hear. Adam’s
apple bobbing like a lifeboat in a storm, he set my drink in front of me. I
could see his hands shaking as he set the mug down. He ran off without even
talking to us.

“We owe that poor waiter a really good tip,” I announced.

“I’ll draw that diagram on a napkin for him. And maybe I’ll
draw it in Dieter’s thank you card too.”
“Do you really think
Dieter
has a
practical application for a vagina map?”