I open the wardrobe and my anger bubbles up my throat.
My evening dresses are gone!
Every single one. The green silk, the burgundy with the draped shoulder, the simple navy, everything. The hangers are there. The dresses are not.
I stand very still for a moment.
"That absolute bastard," I say to the empty room.
He knew. He knew I'd look at the dress he picked and immediately want to wear something else, so he removed the something else. So now I am standing in front of a wardrobe with one option in it like a woman in a fairy tale.
"You smug, calculating, insufferable—" I yank the black dress off the hanger "—who does this? Who does this to a person?" I lay it on the bed. Look at it. "It's not even that I don't like it, that's the worst part, I genuinely — it's a beautiful dress and I still want to set it on fire purely out of principle?—"
I put it on.
The front goes fine. The zip at the back does not. The angle is impossible, the kind of impossible that the dress designer clearly considered a feature rather than a flaw, built on the assumption that women who wear things like this have people to fasten them.
I do not want to call Carla. I do not want to give this house one more piece of evidence that I cannot manage independently. I reach behind myself, get two fingers on the zip pull, and try.
I get it approximately four inches before it stops.
I reposition. Try again from a different angle. The zip holds. My shoulder makes a noise it should not make.
"Absolutely not," I mutter. "You are going up. I am telling you right now that you are going up."
The zip disagrees.
I am still in this negotiation when the dressing room door opens.
Rafael leans in the doorframe. He's already dressed, black shirt, dark jacket, the effortless put-together of a man whose clothes do not require a twenty-minute argument to cooperate. His eyes go to my hands, twisted behind my back, then to the gap at my spine where the dress is half-fastened, and back to my face.
"Do you need help?"
"No."
He stays in the doorframe.
I turn back to the mirror and reach behind myself again. The zipper moves approximately one millimeter and stops. I can feel him watching. I keep my face neutral, which requires genuine effort, and try a third angle.
"You could just?—"
"I said no."
I get another two inches. The zip sticks again, in the worst possible location, and I drop my arms because they are genuinely starting to protest and I stand there with my back half-open in the mirror and breathe through my nose.
Rafael stalks towards me and takes hold of the zipper.
"Don't touch me!” I snap, turning to face him.
That's the mistake.
I've turned too fast and he's closer than I calculated because he'd already moved from the doorframe, and now there is essentially no distance between us. A foot, maybe less. His cologne reaches me before I've finished the sentence, something dark, cedar and something underneath it I can't name, the specific scent of him that my body has apparently catalogued without my permission and the reaction is immediate and humiliating.
The slickness starts, low and sudden, and I press my thighs together and keep my face entirely still.
His eyes are on mine. He doesn't step back.
Oh gods.
