“Yes,” came the faint, dismayed answer. “Nolan, is that you?”
“C’est moi. Is Luca in there with you?”
“No,” she said grumpily. “He never showed up this morning. And I need—I need a second person for this costume.”
My pulse kicked up, threading through my veins at a double clip. “You need help getting dressed?”
“Ugh. Yes.”
I tried to summon every ounce of pseudo professionalism I sort of had. “You know, my day job back at home is working at a theater, and I help with costumes a lot, especially historical ones. I’m happy to lend a hand if you need it.”Or two hands.
“You have a day job?” she asked after a minute. “Why do you need a day job? Didn’t I see you posed on a bed made of solid gold on a private jet once? In the liner notes ofINKredible?”
“It was a rented jet.” I was glad she couldn’t see my giant grin. “You’ve looked at our liner notes?”
She went silent, like she was pleading the fifth, so I relented. Although I did tuck that little nugget away to warm me up later tonight, that little Ms.Bee was almost certainly a former INK fan.
“Actually—this is a boring story—but we signed a pretty shitty contract when we formed the band,” I said through the door. “It gave our manager nearly total control over our money, and then one day he up and left with almost all of it. And by then INK was dead, and my attempted solo career after that quickly went south—”
“Because of Duluth.”
“Because of Duluth,” I affirmed, leaning my shoulder against the door. “And so the only thing I knew how to do other than sing, dance, and sign posters was theater. But Iknew if I tried to act locally, it would get weird fast—and I didn’t want people crashing the show because of me, or critics panning it just because a washed-up pop star was in the cast, so I decided to work behind the scenes. As Nolan Kowalczk, not Nolan Shaw, so I could be sort of discreet.”
And it had mostly worked. There had only been a few awkward moments—usually people waiting after shows to try to catch me coming out the back door so they could get a selfie or an autograph. I was the Kansas City theater scene’s worst-kept secret.
Bee took a moment to answer after my explanation, but then she finally said, “Okay. You can help. But you have to promise not to laugh.”
I turned the knob and opened the door.
“Why would I laugh—oh my God.” I couldn’t help it. I did start laughing. Bee clearly had been attempting to tighten her own corset, and she’d looped the lacings around the inside doorknob and also around a curtain hook to try to pull it tight. I had to duck under a tangled web of lacings just to get inside the dressing room.
She gave me an adorable pout as I straightened up in front of her. “You said you wouldn’t laugh.”
“That’s before I knew how funny it would be. Hold still,” I said, and slowly followed the twisted lacings to the doorknob, where I unhooked one of the rabbit-ear laces. “This is like some weird Spider-Man cosplay. This is like shibari gone wrong.”
There was a note of interest in her voice when she said, “And you know about shibari goneright?”
I could hardly say that I’d learned about it from watchingsome of her scenes, so I settled for a mysteriousmmmnoise instead.
I got the other rabbit ear unhooked from the curtain holder, and then, with the crisis solved, I had a moment to really take in what Bee was wearing.
Or rather, what Beewasn’twearing. Because while she was wearing a corset on top, she wasn’t wearing any of her historical underthings on the bottom yet. Meaning that she was wearing tiny little boy shorts trimmed in black lace.
Somewhere deep inside the folds of my newly hemmed dressing gown, my cock jerked fully back to life.
“Uh,” I attempted, my throat dry. “Um. Would you like me to tighten it for you now?”
“Yes, please,” she said. Did her voice sound strange too?Toocasual, maybe? Or maybe she actually was this casual about a near stranger lacing her into a corset, since her day job meant people saw her in various stages of undress all the time?
I cleared my throat, trying to sound casual too. “Straighten your shoulders a little,” I said. “And make sure your, um, chest is where you want it.” I knew from several years of helping performers at Shakespeare in the Park that no one liked having their boobs cinched with their nipples pointing down at the floor.
She laughed a little, but did as I asked, adjusting herself ever so slightly, and I reminded myself that I could do this. I could be alone in a room with Bee, lacing her into a corset. This was fine.
I carefully swept a long curl off her shoulder with my fingertips so that it wouldn’t get caught, moving it so that itdraped over her collarbone and down to her chest. She shivered as my fingers brushed her skin.
I felt that shiver in the pit of my stomach.
Working methodically, trying to keep myself focused and trying to keep my fingers from lingering on the soft skin underneath the lacework, I tightened from the top and from the bottom, working my way to the middle, where I’d give her a final cinch and tie the laces off.
