11. Fashion Anxiety
FASHION ANXIETY
NICO
Lucien Ward was thirty-four and made me feel like I'd walked into a room fully clothed and underdressed at the same time.
The tailor's room sat on the second floor at the back of the house, behind a door I'd never have found without Mateo's hand at my elbow steering me through two corridors that didn't exist on any blueprint an inspector would recognize.
It was the size of a small chapel: three walls of full-length mirror framed in dark wood, a fourth stacked with bolts of wool in more weights of black and charcoal than I'd known existed, a row of deep greens, a row of deep blues, and one bolt of a red so dark it read as a wound.
Lucien rose from the worktable when we came in, tall and lean, white shirt rolled to the elbows, a measuring tape draped over the back of his neck. His hair was the color of wet sand, and his eyes were green and bored.
“Mr. Venn.”
“Nico.”
“Lucien. The boss said you were coming. I've got coffee for you, though I see he handled the wine.” His handshake was warm and dry and didn't linger and somehow lingered anyway. “Up on the platform when you're ready. Down to your underwear's easiest, if you don't mind. Mateo, the chair's yours.”
Mateo took the chair. I stepped up.
I'd been measured for a suit twice in my life, both times for funerals, both times by a man who treated my body like a chore.
This wasn't that. I pulled the sweater over my head, stepped out of the jeans, and stood in black boxer briefs under low warm light, three walls of mirror around me, a tailor in front of me and a wolf in a chair behind me, and the wine in my hand, which I'd forgotten I was still holding, became the most useful object in the room.
Lucien didn't stare. He didn't need to. His eyes did the work instead, top to bottom, a quick professional inventory of shoulder and chest and waist, and then he picked up the tape, stepped onto the platform with me, and reached for my shoulder. His hand was warm.
“Arms out, please. Like a scarecrow. Yes. Lovely.”
He measured the shoulder seam first. The tape went across the back of my neck, his fingers brushing the skin under my hairline, and I felt it.
Felt all of it: two days of not sleeping and three of reality breaking open and one glass of red on an empty stomach and the warmth of another person's hand on my neck, and my body, which had been on lockdown since the basement, woke up like a dog that heard its leash.
“Chest now. Big breath. Out. Good.”
The tape came around my chest. He read the number to himself, moved to my waist, and read that one to himself too.
The pads of his fingers were callused along the edges, needle-worn, and the calluses dragged faintly across the small of my back as he passed the tape around me, and I felt that somewhere I was going to have to manage.
He crouched and worked the tape around the top of my thigh, read it, moved to my inseam, and paused, the polite half-second every tailor gave a man on a platform, before he ran the tape down to the inside of my ankle. His knuckle brushed the inside of my thigh.
It was the brush every inseam measurement involved, and on any other day in any other room it would have stayed that. But I had two days of fear and shock still loose in me.
I made a sound that wasn't a sound, a breath that went in and didn't come back out the way breath was supposed to, and Lucien, bless him, fuck him, didn't look up. He read the number and stood.
“Arm next, Nico. Raise the right one for me.”
The tape came up the inside of my arm, wrist to armpit, his thumb following the drag of it.
The briefs were not doing the work I needed them to do, and I wasn't there yet, but I was well on my way, and there was no version of this where I stayed standing on that platform much longer without it becoming a problem everyone in the room could see.
Mateo cleared his throat, the strangled, heroic sound of a man being defeated in real time by his own manners. “Maybe a break, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Lucien set the tape down without looking at either of us and tipped his head toward the velvet curtains in the corner, the ones I'd taken for decoration.
“Fitting room. Take a minute. I'll set up the next round.”
The fitting room was the size of a generous closet, a mirror on one wall, a bench on the other, and a heavy velvet curtain that sealed the front when it fell, private as a confessional. I sat down on the bench, set the wine on the floor between my feet, and put my face in my hands.
Mateo came in after me. I felt him crouch more than I saw it, the big careful settle of him down at the level of my knees.
“Hey. You okay?”
“No. I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what day it is, I watched a man come apart in a basement two nights ago, and now I'm standing on a platform getting hard for a tailor with a wolf in the room, and nothing in my head is doing what it's supposed to do.”
“Okay.”
“That's not okay, that's the opposite of okay.”
“I know. I just mean I heard you. Tell me what you need.”
I lifted my face out of my hands. He'd crouched in front of me without my noticing.
“I need to not think for five minutes. I need to feel anything that isn't fear.”
“Then tell me what you want, and I'll do it.” His voice had dropped low and even. “I won't do one thing you don't ask me for. You're the one choosing here, not me. So you say it, and I do it, and the second you want me to stop, I stop. That's the whole deal.”
I looked at him for what felt like a long time and was probably four seconds.
“Kiss me.”
“Yeah?”
“Don't be careful about it.”
“Yes, boss.”
He kissed me and his mouth was warm. His hand came up to the side of my jaw, then his thumb at the corner of my mouth, and then his tongue.
He tasted like the coffee he had been drinking before we came up.
I could feel his pulse in his thumb. I was hard against the seam of my boxer briefs and he was hard against the inside of his thigh where his hand was now braced on the bench beside my hip, and he was not touching me below the waist, because I had not asked him to.
“Mateo.”
“Yeah.”
“Touch me.”
“Tell me where, boss. I'm not guessing.”
I dragged his hand off the bench and put it on my chest. He spread his fingers over my sternum, palm flat, the heat of his hand on my bare skin a thing my body lurched up to meet, and his thumb found my nipple and dragged. I made a sound against his mouth that was embarrassing and I did not care.
He pulled back half an inch. His mouth was wet, and he was watching me and I nodded before he could ask.
“Yes.”
“Lucien.”
“What?”
“He's right outside, boss. You want him?”
“Fuck.”
“Yes or no, carino. He doesn't come in unless you say.”
“Yes.”
Mateo turned his head toward the curtain without raising his voice.
“Lucien.”
The curtain moved, the heavy velvet swallowing the sound of the rings on the rod, and Lucien stepped into the small, sealed space.
He stopped just inside the threshold. The curtain fell shut behind him, cutting off the warm light of the larger room, leaving us in the dim, shadowed glow of the single fitting room lamp. He looked at me on the bench and then at Mateo.
For a fraction of a second, genuine shock flared in Lucien’s green eyes. It was the first time I had seen the professional mask slip. But the shock didn't last. It melted, almost instantly, into a slow, dark smirk that changed the entire architecture of his face.
“Well,” Lucien said, his voice a low hum that vibrated in the tight space. “I suppose the measurements can wait.”
Three men inside it meant the air was instantly thicker, the temperature rising by degrees I could feel on my skin.
“Mateo,” Lucien said, his eyes never leaving mine. “Are we sharing?”
“Boss's orders,” Mateo said. His thumb stroked a slow, agonizing circle over my nipple. “He wants to be wanted.”
“I can certainly accommodate that,” Lucien said.
He moved in. The space demanded intimacy.
To stand in front of me, he had to step between my spread knees, his thighs brushing the outsides of mine, forcing Mateo to shift slightly to the side, though Mateo didn't take his hand off my chest. Lucien reached out.
He didn't touch my skin. He touched the waistband of my boxer briefs, his long, callused fingers hooking into the elastic.
“Stand up for me, Nico.”
It wasn't a request, but it wasn't a command either.
It was an invitation. I let go of Mateo's neck and stood.
The sudden shift in elevation brought me chest-to-chest with Lucien.
He was taller than me, his white shirt crisp against the heated flush of my skin.
Mateo rose smoothly beside me, a solid wall of heat on my right side.
“Look,” Lucien said softly. He didn't turn his head, but his eyes flicked past my shoulder.
I turned my head. The wall of the fitting room was a floor-to-ceiling mirror.
I looked like a disaster. My hair was a mess, my eyes were dark and wide, and my chest was rising and falling too fast. But I wasn't looking at the disaster. I was looking at the way I was bracketed.
I looked small between them, but not trapped. Anchored.
Lucien’s hands moved. He was a tailor; he understood the topography of a body better than a surgeon.
His palms slid up my ribs, slow, mapping the bones, the drag of his calluses sending a shiver straight down my spine.
He didn't rush. He traced the line of my lats, his thumbs sweeping across my stomach, feeling the involuntary clench of my muscles beneath his touch.
“Such a tense line right here,” Lucien murmured, his eyes locked on our reflection in the mirror. He watched his own hands on my body. “Like a wire pulled too tight.”
Mateo’s hand moved in tandem. While Lucien mapped the front, Mateo took the back.
His broad, heavy palm slid up my spine, pressing the vertebrae, a firm, grounding pressure that countered the light, electric tracing of Lucien’s fingers.
They weren't coordinating, not explicitly, but the contrast was devastating.