Chapter 16
Rose
Rose had expected something architectural.
Lizanne wore clothes the way other people used punctuation—deliberately, for effect—and Rose had spent the last few weeks building a mental blueprint of the dress.
Statement shoulders. A neckline that took risks.
Something that preceded her into a room and forced the air to rearrange itself.
Rose had spent all day bracing for a dress that would demand an audience.
What actually came out of the garment bag stopped her cold.
It was ivory silk, yes, and undeniably beautiful, but it had a restraint Rose hadn’t seen coming.
The lines were Regency—high-waisted, the skirt falling in soft, clean waves, with short puffed sleeves that sat neat at the shoulder.
The lace traced the neckline and the hem in a pattern that looked considered rather than decorative, as if every single inch had been a decision rather than an afterthought. It was actually stunning.
She realized she was staring.
“It’s not what I expected,” she said.
“People rarely expect what I actually want,” Lizanne said. No edge, just a statement of fact.
The attendant watched Rose’s face with the practiced, terrifying patience of someone who’d spent a career reading clients before they’d even finished processing a feeling.
“Something similar?” she asked.
“Similar, yes. But longer sleeves. To the wrist.” Rose kept her voice in her professional register—the one she reserved for discussing floral budgets and lighting rigs. “The puffed sleeve is lovely, but I want more coverage.”
The attendant vanished. Lizanne sank into one of the low cream chairs, her coat draped over her arm. She didn’t say a word, which Rose appreciated more than any platitude she could have offered.
Three dresses came back. Rose worked through them with a sense of duty.
The first was too stiff in the bodice; the second had sleeves that bunched at the elbow.
But when she held the third one against herself in the mirror, the decision was made before she could even think to argue with it. And she wasn’t the only one.
“That one,” Lizanne said from the chair.
“I haven’t even tried it on.”
“Try it on anyway.”
The changing room was cramped, and the dress had sixteen tiny buttons up the spine. Rose was halfway through a struggle when she realized she was trapped. The attendant stepped in, and between them, they worked the silk closed. Rose turned to face the glass.
She looked like a bride.
The lace hit her wrists exactly where it should. The waist sat right. The skirt fell in those same soft waves as Lizanne’s, and the whole thing was so far from the I don’t care narrative she’d been telling herself that she had to look at the wall for a second just to get her face under control.
She stepped out.
The attendant made a noise that was mostly just a handful of exaggerated vowels.
Lizanne stood up. “Well,” she said. A grin spread on her lips.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You had a face.”
“I always have a face. It’s a common feature on humans, I hear.” Lizanne looked at her steadily, and Rose felt that gaze land somewhere she didn’t have a defense for. She pivoted to the attendant instead.
“The hem?”
“An inch, maybe an inch and a half.” The attendant was already on the floor with a pin cushion.
“We can have it done by Thursday. It’s no trouble.
” She adjusted a pin and glanced up. “You look absolutely extraordinary. Truly—this wedding is going to be a dream. To be marrying a woman like Lizanne Connors—” She pressed a hand to her heart.
“You must be just overwhelmed. How do you even keep your head? Don’t you just freak out every day? ”
“Every day,” Rose said. She forced a smile, and the attendant beamed back, satisfied.
Outside the front window, two photographers were already staked out on the sidewalk. Rose clocked them and looked away instantly.
The attendant saw her see them and made a call. “Come through to the back, the light is better for the pinning anyway.”
The back room had a single large mirror, a low platform, and a blessed lack of windows. Rose stepped up, and the attendant knelt, working along the hem with the quiet, rhythmic efficiency of someone who genuinely loved the craft.
Lizanne had slipped away into one of the larger rooms Rose hadn’t noticed exactly when she’d left. Then, the changing room door hit the wall.
Lizanne emerged in a ballgown so massive it barely cleared the frame.
It was layer upon layer of aggressive tulle—a skirt that preceded her by a good foot in every direction.
She had her arms out for balance and wore the expression of someone who had committed to a bit and intended to go down with the ship.
Rose laughed. It was genuine, unguarded, and out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“I’m considering it,” Lizanne said.
“You look insane.”
“I look bridal.”
“You look like a very glamorous lampshade.”
The attendant, still pinned to the floor, let out a muffled snort.
Lizanne crossed the room in a cloud of tulle and stepped up onto the platform.
They stood side-by-side in the mirror. It was funny—it was genuinely ridiculous—and Rose was still smiling when the reflection shifted.
Lizanne had stopped performing. She was just standing there, looking at the two of them in the glass with an expression Rose couldn’t quite decode.
The humor drained out of the room. What was left was the thing Rose had been avoiding for ten days.
This was real. A week from now, she’d be standing exactly like this. The cameras would be live, five hundred people would be staring, and she would be marrying this woman. It wasn’t a rehearsal. It wasn’t a metaphor. It—
“Hey.” Lizanne turned to her. “Look at me.”
Rose looked.
“Our wedding is almost on Halloween,” Lizanne said. Her voice was flat, even, totally stripped of the act. “Look at it as an expensive costume and a very long party, and at the end of it, you go home. You’re just wearing a dress in a room, Rose. That’s the whole thing.”
Rose let her breath out, slow and shaky.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.” Lizanne turned back to the mirror. “I do think I could pull this off, though.”
Rose laughed again, shorter this time, but the weight had lifted enough to let the air back in.
***
The attendant finished the pinning and Lizanne retreated to wrestle her way out of the tulle. Rose went back to her own stall and reached around for the buttons after the attendant had taken herself off to tend to something elsewhere.
Her arms didn’t bend that way any better now than they had twenty minutes ago.
She managed three from the bottom before her reach gave out. She stood there, arms wrenched behind her back at an angle that was starting to ache, and accepted that she was stuck.
“I need a hand,” she called out.
“I’ll come in,” Lizanne said from the other side of the curtain.
“The attendant—”
“She’s on the phone.” A pause. “It’ll take thirty seconds.”
Rose looked at the heavy fabric of the curtain. “Fine,” she said.
Lizanne stepped in. The room was tiny, the dress took up three-quarters of it, and they were closer than any apology could fix.
Lizanne found the top button and started working her way down—efficient, businesslike, her fingers moving with that same focused competence she brought to every contract she signed.
Six buttons. Seven. The dress loosened across her spine, the sudden draft hitting her skin as the silk parted. Rose felt every button give, felt the heat of Lizanne’s knuckles brushing her back, and forced herself to stay still.
Then Lizanne’s hands slowed.
It wasn’t a stop. It was a deliberate deceleration, and Rose felt her own breath hitch—short, shallow, trapped high in her lungs. She didn’t move. Neither did Lizanne.
Rose turned.
She hadn’t planned it. Her body just moved, and then Lizanne was right there, so close Rose could see the exact, sharp line where her lipstick ended. Neither of them said a word. Lizanne’s arm hooked around her waist, pulling her flush against her, and then they were kissing.
It wasn’t tentative. There was no asking in it.
Lizanne kissed her the way she occupied a room—like the space already belonged to her, like the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
Rose’s hand went to Lizanne’s shoulder to push back, but then Lizanne angled into her, and the thought just.. . dissolved.
Lizanne walked her back one step until Rose’s shoulders hit the wall. The wedding dress slipped from Rose’s grip and pooled at her feet, and neither of them looked at it.
The air in the room felt cold against her chest until Lizanne’s mouth moved from her lips to her jaw, then her neck, taking her time at the pulse point there — she could feel Lizanne’s lips curve slightly against her skin, and the fact that Lizanne was smiling made Rose’s knees go soft.
Then lower. When Lizanne took Rose’s nipple between her lips, Rose’s head cracked back against the wall and a jagged sound left her throat — something she hadn’t given herself permission to make.
Lizanne’s hands moved to her waist, then her hips, pinning her there while her mouth worked with a slow, agonizing deliberation that Rose was starting to suspect was intentional cruelty.
Her tongue traced a wet circle and Rose’s hips rolled forward of their own accord.
Lizanne made a low, vibrating sound against her skin that Rose felt directly between her legs.
“You don’t have to—” Rose started.
Lizanne’s teeth closed gently and Rose forgot what she’d been about to say.
Then Lizanne’s hand slid to the inside of her thigh.
Rose’s breath cut out completely. Lizanne’s fingers moved higher, unhurried, tracing up the inside of her thigh with a patience that was genuinely obscene, until they found her, pressing against the fabric first, just enough pressure that Rose actually whimpered, before they slipped beneath it. Stroking along her slowly.
Rose was wet and Lizanne paused for one full heartbeat before she pushed the fabric aside entirely.
The first direct touch dragged a sound out of Rose that she would be ashamed of later.
Lizanne stroked through her slowly, spreading her wetness, her fingers moving with that same maddening deliberation she brought to everything.
Long strokes that avoided where Rose needed her most, circling close and then retreating, until Rose’s hips were chasing her hand without any input from Rose’s brain whatsoever.
“Lizanne.” It came out less like a word and more like a plea.
Lizanne finally settled at her clit, two fingers moving in slow, steady circles, and Rose’s grip tightened in her hair, her other hand pressing flat against the wall behind her.
The pressure built fast. Rose could hear herself breathing, ragged and too loud in the small room, and she couldn’t make herself care.
Lizanne’s mouth returned to her breast, tongue and lips working in a rhythm that matched her fingers, and Rose’s hips fell into it, grinding forward, chasing the contact, her whole body narrowing down to Lizanne’s hands and mouth and the slow, inexorable build of it.
Then Lizanne’s fingers slid lower and pressed inside.
Rose’s mouth fell open on a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
Fingers, slow and deep, curling slightly, and the heel of Lizanne’s hand pressing against her clit with every measured thrust. Rose felt herself clenching tight around her, felt how wet she was, felt the slick slide of Lizanne moving inside her with that same composed, deliberate patience like she had nowhere else to be, like she had thought about exactly this, like she knew precisely what she was doing to Rose and had decided to do it anyway.
“God—” Rose gasped. “God, Lizanne—”
Lizanne’s fingers curled and Rose’s vision went briefly white at the edges.
She was going to come. Against a fitting room wall, with Lizanne’s fingers inside her and her wedding dress on the floor between them.
She was going to come and she was going to be completely undone.
Lizanne was going to watch it happen with that expression she always wore, composed and unreadable and intent, and Rose was actually going to—
“No… I can’t…”
She got no further. The orgasm steamrolled her and her eyes closed. Colors exploded before them and her breathing grew ragged as she let it consume her.
When it was over, she could not make herself look at Lizanne.
Lizanne stepped back. Her fingers slipped free and the loss of it made Rose’s breath catch all over again.
The room was too small for Lizanne to go far, but she went and stopped.
She stood there with her hair wrecked, where Rose had pulled it, and her lipstick smeared, and her chest rising and falling a little faster than usual, which was the only concession she made to what had just happened.
She wore the expression of someone who had done exactly what she’d intended to do and felt no particular need to explain it.
Rose stared back. Her legs were still shaking. She could still feel Lizanne’s hands on her, in her…
“Is this part of the story?”
“No,” Lizanne said.
Just the word. Nothing else. She held Rose’s gaze and let it hang there between them.
“You should go,” Rose said.
Lizanne looked at her for a long moment—a look Rose felt in her sternum. Then she reached down, picked the wedding dress up from the floor, and hung it carefully on the hook beside the mirror.
She pulled the curtain back and stepped out without a word. Rose heard her footsteps cross the floor, heard the attendant’s bright, professional chirp start up somewhere in the main room, and then the sounds of the salon rushed back in as if nothing had happened at all.
Rose stood with her back against the wall, her pulse thudding in her ears. She looked at herself in the small mirror—flushed, undone, a total disaster—and reached for her jeans.
Her hands were shaking. She noted it, refused to acknowledge it, and got dressed.