She scoots back and executes a windmill move with her legs to disengage, rolling onto her stomach and sliding off the high mattress, flashing the curve of her bare arse as her dress rides up. Dancing away, she goes to the duffel bag and bends pointedly low to yank it open.
I shake my head. “Merciless.”
She stands with a crumpled handful of pearl-gray fabric in one hand. “I’m gonna rinse off.” As she walks into the en suite, she calls back, “You can open the bag now! Put it on.”
She leaves the door open and peels the dress off, then does something I’ve never seen anyone do in my life: steps into the shower before turning it on, then starts the water. She shrieks,then laughs, as the cold water hits her. Once it’s adjusted to her satisfaction, she breaks into her bold, off-key singing.
It feels oddly like home—I’m so happy to hear it again. She’s bawling out the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” injecting it with an affected drunken drawl. I lean through the doorway, savoring the din of her complete lack of inhibition (or sense of pitch). Her arms shoot over her head and she dances, hips bobbing side to side, rotating in the spray of water.
I go to the garment bag and pull the zipper down.
“Bloody Nora,” I mutter, my expression falling. Returning to the bathroom doorway, I ask, “Salvi, darling… you cannot be serious with that suit.”
She peeks around the edge of the frosted glass divider, her body fetchingly covered in suds. I try not to gawk, but those tiny rose-petal tits dripping handfuls of white foam… dear God.Give me strength.
“A hundred percent. And I put a lot of work into thinking about it, not to mention paying my tailor in Korea and having it overnight-shipped here.” She disappears behind the glass wall, then ducks back to add, “Oh, and there’s cologne in the pocket. You gotta wear that too.”
I pause, wrestling with how I might plead my case and escape the mischievous humiliation Sage has engineered. “It’s a very, erm…thoroughprank—I’ll give you that. Point taken. But I’m not wearing that getup in public.”
She peeks out again. “Dude. Remember in Melbourne you said something about how you’d ‘burn the world’ to have me? Consider this the final payback. You’re a vain guy, right?”
“I can scarcely deny it.”
“All right. So are you willing to feel as embarrassed as I was when you wrote that shit about me? This is pretty fucking mild, comparatively—walking around for a few hours in an ugly suit.”
“It’s more than ‘ugly,’ pet. It’s aggressively clownish.”
“Yeah, I know.” She turns away and resumes washing. “The day you made that blog post, I was literally throwing Skee balls at a clown-face target and pretending it was you. This closes the circle. No complaining.”
I look over at the unzipped garment bag, which appears to be disgorging a poorly digested meal of colorful patterns. “If I do this, we’re even?” I ask.
“Yes. The slate is clean.”
With a sigh of defeat, I return to the garment bag. Fishing out a brown-glass bottle of sample-size cologne, I inspect it: something called “Chaps.” I twist the top open and sniff, then recoil. “There are fuckin’ limits,” I growl, capping the abomination and dropping it back into the pocket.
Minutes later, Sage comes into the bedroom as I’m suiting up in the absurd outfit. She’s wearing a dress of thin gray T-shirt material inflicted with deliberate horizontal slashes, the fabric laddered and exposing much of her tempting pale skin. It’s sleeveless, with rhinestone-spangled straps, and clings to her, dotted with dark water stains as if she put it on without toweling off first.
She brushes my hands aside to button the shirt. “You’re gonna wear the tie too, right?”
“Ghastly as this is, I’ll wear it until you take it off me.”
It’s worth noting that none of the six pieces of theensemble—trousers, shirt, necktie, vest, jacket, and socks—matches. The trousers have a pattern of pink iced doughnuts. The shirt, though adult size, is something a child would wear, littered in a cartoon cowboy motif: horses, lassos, boots, Stetson hats. The vest has flying saucers and green space aliens. The necktie is decorated with Christmas ornaments and readsCHECK OUT MY BALLS. The jacket’s pattern is an assortment of sandwiches. The socks are bright yellow and adorned with fishing flies.
She gives my chest a pat after rigging me out in this visual headache, then leans in, standing on her toes, to sniff my neck. “You’re not wearing the cologne.” She reaches into the garment bag pocket to retrieve it.
“I draw the fuckin’ line at dousing myself in that ‘cowboy disinfectant.’ It’d bring me out in a rash.”
Her lovely toffee-gold eyes widen into pools of melodramatic despair. “Sandy, youhave towear it!” She opens the cap and thrusts it toward my face.
“Such a brat,” I gripe. “Determined to make me look a pillock and smell like a 1980s honky-tonk bar shat itself.”
I take the bottle from her hand and dab on the smallest possible quantity. When I go to the en suite washbasin and scrub my hands to remove the residual cologne from my fingertips, Sage draws up behind me and wraps her arms around my torso, peeking at my reflection. I turn and pull her into my arms, and having her pressed against me like this, the world could end in a barrage of meteors and I’d go out happy. Everything feels so right that I’m simultaneously euphoric and terrified, not knowing how long I have before it’s all over.
Her upturned face has the look of an invitation to a kiss, but I’m afraid to risk it. The dance floor is always moving beneath her—her rules, whims, focus, manic actions, the whirl of her thoughts… all of it unpredictable.
The thought intrudes: my mother’s counsel to “work on this one.” Inside, I’m all in. But I know it’s too soon to state aloud what I’m feeling.
My brain arrives at a safe compromise. “You know,” I begin, stroking a thumb up and down Sage’s spine, “I was fuckin’ lost from the moment you grabbed my arm in the Bahrain airport.”
