“Thank you,” Bella whispered after a pause, her head lowered, her hair hanging down to hide her face.
“Believe it or not, I remember being your age,” Lucy answered in a low voice. They’d reached the end of the lingerie departmentand had no luck finding the appropriate bras. “However, I think we might be stuck. I can’t find what we’re looking for and I might have to ask Miss Double D over there.”
Bella let out a huff of laughter, quickly smothered. “Keep looking,” she muttered, turning away from the sales assistant.“Please.”
Fortunately they found a “Young Miss” section at the end of a rack of sports bras, kept in boxes and left there almost as an afterthought. Lucy scooped up a couple in different sizes, and then impulsively grabbed a bra in her size to cover the incriminating boxes. “Okay, we’re good,” she told Bella. “But you do have to try these on, I’m afraid.”
Bella eyed her with disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”
Lucy glanced down and saw she’d managed to pick up a purple satin push-up bra. She let out a little laugh. “That one’s for me, just for cover,” she explained. She gestured to the boxes. “These are yours.”
Bella’s face was bright red and she looked away. “Fine.”
Lucy marched to the changing rooms, brandishing the purple bra. “I’d like to try this on,” she told the assistant, who gestured to a row of empty, curtained stalls.
“Just give us a shout if you need a different size,” she said cheerily, and Lucy nodded.
“Will do.”
Alone in the corridor of changing rooms, she turned to a still-mortified Bella. “Okay, I’m going to try on this purple monster, and you try on yours. They should fit well, not too snug, not too loose, okay? The panel in the middle should touch your breastbone, not pull away from it. If it pulls away, you need a larger cup size.”
Clearly that was TMI for Bella, for she wordlessly grabbed the boxes and disappeared into one of the stalls. Lucy glanced down at the purple bra and decided that she might as well try it on.
And actually, she decided a moment later, having never owned a push-up bra before, she could definitely see the appeal. She’d never looked so perky.
“How are you doing in there?” she called to Bella, and received a suffocated “Fine” in response.
A couple of minutes later they met back out in the corridor; Bella’s bras had been stuffed back into the boxes.
“Did you find one that fits?” Lucy asked, and she nodded and held out one of the boxes. “Great. I’ll go get a few in that size and you can take yourself off to another department if you want. Just in case the sales assistant feels like having a conversation about our purchases.”
With obvious relief Bella hightailed it out of the lingerie department. Lucy found a couple of bras in the same size, in various colors, and brought them to the register. The sales assistant engaged her in a detailed conversation about the escalator, which had been bought from the London Olympics for the impressive sum of four hundred thousand pounds. It was, the woman told her proudly, Whitehaven’s only escalator.
“We had a little party when we opened it. Champers, even, and a Tom Cruise look-alike.”
“Wow, that sounds amazing,” Lucy told her, quite sincerely, and then, bag in hand, went to find Bella.
Bella was loitering by the cosmetics counters, reminding Lucy that she’d been wearing quite a lot of war paint yesterday. Somehow she doubted the girl had paid for all of it herself, and Alex didn’t seem like the kind of dad who shelled out for eyeliner and crimson lipstick.
“Hey.” Lucy joined her by a display of sparkly eye shadow in every color of the rainbow, the bras safely hidden in an opaque plastic shopping bag. She nodded towards the eye shadow. “What do you think? I’m fond of the purple, myself.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It would match my new bra.”
Bella’s mouth quirked in a tiny smile—sort of like the way her dad’s did—before she turned away. “Who are you trying to impress?” she asked in a deliberately bored drawl. “My dad?”
Lucy hesitated, then decided for lightness. “Somehow I don’t think the eye shadow or the bra would impress your dad, Bella. But if you’re worried I’m trying to make a move on him, I promise you, I’m not.”
Bella turned back to her, eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
“What do you mean, why not?”
Bella shrugged. “He’s single. He’s not that old. You’re single, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“He’s okay looking, for a dad. So why aren’t you interested?” She subjected Lucy to a challenging stare, making her realize she wasn’t fooling anyone with her paltry promises.
“Well, I’m only here for four months, first of all,” she said after a moment. “And yes, I’m single now, but I just got out of a long-term relationship and I’m not looking for another one quite so soon. And your dad is okay looking, true, but you might have noticed he can be a little scary? A little intimidating?” She tried to elicit a smile, but Bella just looked away.
“Whatever,” she said in a dismissive tone, making Lucy feel as if she rather than Bella had brought Alex into the conversation. She decided to drop it. She really didn’t want to talk about Alex with Bella, and she definitely didn’t intend to trip all over herself trying to explain why she wasn’t interested. Because she was afraid that wasn’t even true.
