Chapter 6 #2
I clung to that number like it might cleanse the rest of it. Five thousand was practical. Five thousand was not fantasy. Five thousand was enough money that a woman could rebuild herself, save, think, leave when she wanted. That last thought was probably the least honest of all, but I let it stand.
My fingers trembled when I typed.
I’d like to meet.
I read the sentence three times before sending it, as if maybe on the third reading I would become someone else. Then I pressed send and dropped the phone onto the bed as if it might scorch me.
It buzzed less than two minutes later.
Meet me at Café Fleur, on Connecticut near Dupont Circle, at three this afternoon.
Then, on the next line:
Wear nice lingerie in case I decide I want to sponsor you.
I stared at that message until the words seemed to separate from one another and become almost meaningless sounds in my head. Then meaning came back all at once, in a rush so strong I had to put the phone face down and get out of bed.
Nice lingerie.
In case I decide.
My face burned so hot I could feel it in my ears.
I made my shower last much too long, standing under the spray while my thoughts ran in stupid circles.
He might not sponsor me. He might look at me over coffee and decide I was too stiff, too inexperienced, too proud, too expensive, too something.
Or he might decide otherwise. The uncertainty made every part of me feel awake and thin-skinned.
By the time I had gotten the conditioner out of my hair, my breathing had changed.
I became aware of it in that embarrassing, bodily way where I knew exactly what was happening before I admitted it.
I was thinking about meeting him. About him knowing what I wore under my clothes because he had ordered it.
About the possibility that he might ask to see.
About the fact that if he did, I had all but agreed in advance.
My hand slid between my legs before I had made any kind of decision to touch myself.
The first brush of my fingers over my clit made me gasp, but not from pleasure.
It was too much at once. I was still sore from the day before, rubbed raw by my own hand and my own ugly imagination.
I tried more gently, circling, then pressing lightly through the slickness the shower had not caused, and still the oversensitive ache stopped me almost at once.
“Oh,” I said under my breath, half in frustration, half in shame.
I leaned my forehead against the tile and tried again because apparently that was the kind of girl I had become overnight: one who stood in a shower on a workday morning trying to make herself come while thinking about a rich man she had never met telling her what underwear to wear.
But the soreness only sharpened. The arousal remained, embarrassingly intact, while my poor overused body refused to cooperate.
That felt somehow more depraved than if I had simply gotten off.
I turned off the water and stepped out, dripping, my skin prickling with cold and awareness.
As I dried myself, I kept thinking about the drawer where I kept the ivory underwear.
The same set I had used for the photographs.
They were the only things I owned that could reasonably be called nice lingerie.
I stood wrapped in a towel in front of the dresser for a full minute before opening it.
No one was making me wear it, I told myself. He had told me to, yes, but until I chose to obey, the choice remained mine. That distinction mattered. I wasn’t sure why, but it mattered enough that I repeated it silently while I took out the bra and panties.
When I put them on, my hands were less steady than they should have been.
The bra lifted my breasts and made them look fuller than usual. The panties, low and pale and indecently delicate, made me feel as if my own body had suddenly become visible to me in a new way. I turned toward the mirror and then wished I hadn’t.
I did not look like myself.
Or rather, I looked like myself in the face, flushed and blue-eyed and red-haired and far too aware, but from the throat down I looked like the kind of woman I had spent weeks pretending I had not become, that night in Senator Gowry’s office: displayed, expectant, dressed to be evaluated.
There was nothing especially vulgar about the set.
It was tasteful, even pretty. That only made it worse. I looked prepared.
A pulse went through me low in my body.
Almost without thinking, I let my hand drift down over my stomach and between my thighs. The lace shifted under my fingers. I pressed once, experimentally, over the little hot ache there.
Again the soreness stopped me, but not before my body had answered with a deep shuddering throb that made my knees weaken.
I drew my hand away and just stood there, staring at the woman in the mirror with one palm half-lifted and her mouth parted in a way I would have found theatrical in anyone else.
She looked flushed and nervous and excited.
She looked as though being told to wear pretty underwear under her dress had reached directly into her and touched something hidden.
I think what frightened me most wasn’t that I could see it.
It was that seeing it excited me more.