At least, mine hadn’t.
I guess white gold maybe? And round? Maybe? But don’t buy anything else. And don’t make a big deal about it.
Ring size?he texted.
I’d had my wedding ring from Jimmy sized at the local strip-mall jewelry shop last month in preparation for the ceremony, because I’d made all the preparations, because everything had needed to go perfectly, even the size of the ring, or else his family might change their mind and abandon me.
The perfectly sized ring hadn’t mattered, had it?
Seven,I texted Nico.
Good.
While my phone screen remained dark for the rest of the designer dress show, Nicolai sporadically tapped and swiped and pinched on his phone screen, though he glanced up as each new model strutted out onto the runway, striding andstomping. He fixed each with a steady, analytical stare before going back to his phone.
At the end, Clementine informed me that I would try on three different dresses, each in a different color she described as bright autumn: a deep wine red, navy blue, and burnished copper.
The hostess lady and her minions scurried around, finding a size big enough for my boobs and hips, which felt like it was supposed to be an insult.
If the hostess’s scurrying was meant to be catty, Clementine didn’t seem to take it as such and merely told them to hurry up with finding the right size and then ordered snacks.
Snacks.
Clementine bossed them around without so much as a hair flip. She just casually told them what they were going to do, and they did it.
The snacks were little fruit-topped pastries, sweet and tart in my mouth that wafted sharp citrus into my nose, so Clementine must not have been concerned about putting me on a crash diet to wedge me into one of the dresses.
When the gowns were ready, the hostess lady hustled me into the back room where four new women wearing shapeless black dresses stripped me naked and trussed me up in the dresses Clementine had chosen, clamping the fabric down the back with binder clips and shoving me stumbling back onto the runway to parade around in front of Clementine and Nico.
Sweet baby Jesus, I was glad I’d shaved my legs and pits when I’d double-showered last night.
Clementine evaluated each dress on my body with the eye of a civil engineer auditing highway bridge construction.
First, her systematic gaze swept me from head to toe, and then she clambered up onto the runway to yank the dress tighter around my waist and the bustline up and the sleevesinto different shapes, all the time conferring with the hostess lady in trilling French.
Nicolai watched, his phone lying face down on the couch beside him. He didn’t look uninterested, merely not insinuating himself into a conversation that Clementine had definitely excluded him from.
Right up until I tried on the burnished copper dress.
The deep red-gold satin was already a better fit than the other two dresses, though I don’t think that would have swayed Clementine’s ministrations in the slightest.
They were pinching and pinning the fabric, changing the drape of the skirt that swished like molten metal around my feet, when Nicolai spoke up. “That’s the one.”
The hostess lady startled and twitched like an anxious squirrel.
Clementine looked up at him and scowled. “While I told you that you do not have an opinion, you are also objectively correct in this particular case. It will be this one.” She suddenly looked at me, and her eyes widened. “You like this dress, do you not?”
A mirror had been set up in front of the runway.
The image of that woman in the mirror wearing the molten copper dress couldn’t have been me.
Rich-people clothes were so different, not just in the thickness and smoothness of the fabric, but also in the way the dress manipulated my body to look like a balanced hourglass.
Yet somehow, I could still breathe. “Yeah, I like this one.”
Clementine stood beside me and examined my reflection in that mirror, critically but not criticizing. “I’ll send my hairstylist and makeup girl over tonight.”
CHAPTER 5
