VASSO
Even within the city of style, in a couture salon that’s all mirrors, chandeliers dripping galaxies and a runway of Persian wool that hushes footfalls, my wife dazzles.
Naomi stands on the low dais while a seamstress pins silk to the idea of her, and the idea of her is devastating.
“Bad luck for the groom to see the dress,” the head fitter murmurs in musical English.
“I don’t believe in borrowed curses,” I say, taking the offered flute of champagne. “In this marriage, we make our own luck.”
Naomi’s mouth tips, not quite a smile, but it’s enough to make my pulse misbehave.
They bring out lingerie first because Milan has its rituals. Whisper-soft lily-white silk that kisses the line of her hip with iced ivory corsetry that pretends it’s angelic, an obsidian lace bodysuit so sheer it might be audacity stitched into negative space. Every change is theater: screens whisk, silk whispers, pins flick, the fitter’s chalk skates like a blessing along the seam where her thigh disappears under lace.
I taste the champagne. Then I tasteher, in memory. The room tilts.
She turns. “Too much?” she asks, tone dry, eyes hot.
“Not enough. The black lace stays,” I answer, because truth is the one luxury I never counterfeit with her. My gaze drags down and then back, deliberate, reverent and greedy. I don’t hide the hunger; I let it live on my face, in my hands on the back of the velvet chair, in the way I wet my lower lip and catch it lightly between my teeth.
Her breath stutters.Good. She’s not the only one who remembers the blazes between us.
“Walk, please,” the fitter says gently to Naomi, and I obey the command even though it wasn’t for me.
I rise, step closer and circle my wife, let them measure the heat between us like it’s a hem.
A second flute appears; I take it and touch the rim to my mouth, slow. The champagne paints my bottom lip. I drag my thumb across it, then my tongue, a lazy lick that steals the bubble-kiss. Naomi’s eyes lock on my mouth like it’s a hand placed low on her back. Her throat works. Her fingers flex against her thigh.
I sample again…just my bottom lip, and watch her watch me. She obeys a seamstress’s turn, and I take her in profile: the proud line of her jaw, the necklace’s ghost on her skin, the way her breasts lift and her juicy nipples bead against lace that isn’t hiding a sin so much as framing it. She is magnificence in silk. She is everything I want and exactly what I said I wouldn’t beg for.
“Next,signore,” the assistant chirps, producing a sultry scarlet slip-dress with cut with only wickedness in mind. Naomi steps into it and the fabric pours like molten fruit down her body. I sit because standing would be an admission.
She looks at me through the mirror. One heartbeat. Two. And the air learns how to spark.
“Ladies,” I say pleasantly, handing the second flute to the nearest pair of trembling fingers without taking my eyes off my wife, “you have another of these garments available yes?”
“Si, signore,” someone responds eagerly.
“Good. Give us the room.”
Pins freeze. Then breaths catch as Milan understands this language.
The room clears in a choreography of professional haste; a door clicks. Naomi doesn’t move off the dais. I don’t move at all.
“Missed you this morning,” I say, and it’s not a line; it’s the ache in my knuckles when I didn’t touch her.
“Florence needed you more,” she replies, chin high, voice softer than her posture. I catch the question in there though.
“Handled,” I say. I don’t really want to talk about Harrison or what it took to douse the fire he dared to start.”
Relief flares, then guilt; I feel it across the room like heat from an open oven. She opens her mouth—I’m sorrylurks there, a bird that hates cages.
“Come here,” I murmur.
She steps off the dais. Two steps. Three. I don’t meet her halfway because I need her to cross the last inches, choose this line herself.
“I texted to wish you good luck.”
“Hmm, I saw.” When she’s within reach, I hook a finger in the strap of that red sin and slide it an inch, exposing skin I’m already fluent in. “But, baby…luck,” I tell her, “is for people who don’t do the work.”
