He looks at me. "Take it off or I'll take it off for you."
The room goes very quiet.
I look at him standing there — perfectly calm, perfectly certain, like he has said a reasonable thing in a reasonable tone and is now waiting for the world to comply with it. Something in my chest goes very hot.
"You have no right," I say, "to tell me what to wear. You have no right to walk into this room and decide what goes on my body. You are not my father. You are barely my husband. You do not get to?—"
He walks toward me.
I open my mouth to say something else and then his hands are at my back, the zip comes down in one clean pull and his hands go to my shoulders and the dress goes with them.
I cry out in shock when I’m suddenly bare from the waist up in the middle of my dressing room with my husband standing eighteen inches away.
For one moment — one full, frozen, awful moment — neither of us moves.
His eyes drop. They can't help it. I watch it happen in the mirror behind him, the way his face goes very still and very intent, his jaw tightening, something moving through his expression that is not flatness, that is the opposite of flatness, that is a man looking at something he was not prepared to want this specifically.
My breasts are full and bare, the dusky peaks of my nipples tightening in the cool air of the room, and he is looking at them with the focused, unguarded attention of a man who has briefly forgotten what he was doing here.
Then I yank the dress back up.
Both hands, clutching the fabric to my chest, and I spin away from him and my face is an inferno and I am shaking with something that is forty percent fury and sixty percent something I am not going to name right now.
"You absolute bastard! What is wrong with you? What is actually wrong with you? You don't just — you can't just — that is my body, Rafael, and you do not get to put your hands on it because you've decided?—"
"The burgundy dress," he says.
I stare at him.
He has caught himself. I can see it — the flatness back in place, the control reasserted, whatever crossed his face in that moment locked back behind the wall he keeps everything behind. He clears his throat once, almost inaudible.
"There's a burgundy dress in the wardrobe," he says. "You'll wear that one tonight."
"Fuck you," I say.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me." My voice is shaking and I hate that it's shaking but I cannot stop it. "I will wear whatever I like. I will wear this dress, I will wear the burgundy dress, I will show up in a bin bag if it pleases me, and there is nothing you can do about it because you do not own me."
Something moves in his jaw. He looks at me for a long moment — at my face, at my hands still gripping the front of the dress, at the fury that I know is visible in every line of me right now.
"Alright," he says.
I blink. "Alright?"
"Wear whatever you like." He turns toward the door. "Whatever I see tonight that isn't the burgundy dress will be torn off once I see you." He reaches the door and pauses with his hand on the frame, his back to me. "Your choice. I'll be downstairs."
He leaves.
The door closes.
I stand in the middle of the dressing room in a dress I am now holding up with both hands and I stare at the closed door for three full seconds and then I open my mouth and the sound that comes out is not words. It is a pure, unfiltered, weeks-of-this-compressed-into-one-evening howl, and it fills the room and bounces off the walls and when it's done I close my mouth and press both hands to my face.
Deep breath.
Another one.
I look at myself in the mirror. Flushed, furious, the lipstick still somehow intact, the dress crumpled against my chest, my hair slightly less composed than it was ten minutes ago.
