13. Eliza
— ? —
Eliza
The second fitting falls to me.
The primary stylist is out sick, the backup is swamped with a deadline that can’t move, and Charlie gives me an apologetic look when he asks if I can handle it.
“I know it’s not ideal,” he says. “But everyone else is buried, and he’s already here. If you really can’t do it, I’ll reschedule, but-”
“It’s fine.” I cut him off before he can finish. “I can handle it. It’s just measurements.”
Charlie nods, but there’s something in his expression that says he knows exactly what he’s asking, that he knows it’s not just measurements, not with Gordon, not with everything between us.
I grab the clipboard and the measuring tape and a handful of pins, sticking them between my lips out of habit, and take the elevator down to the fitting room before I can talk myself out of it.
Two other people pass me on the way and I nod at both of them like this is any other fitting on any other day, like my pulse isn’t already wrong, like I haven’t spent two weeks being flawlessly professional from a safe distance and am now about to spend an hour alone with him in a room the size of a closet.
Gordon is already inside, wearing the robe, sitting on the small bench in the corner. He looks up when I walk in, and I watch his whole face change, hope and surprise and something else that makes my pulse jump in a way I refuse to acknowledge.
“Eliza.”
“Mr. Bryce.” I close the door behind me because the room is too small for it to stay open, and suddenly the space feels even smaller. Barely big enough for two people, a full-length mirror on one wall, a small platform in the center, and not nearly enough distance between us. “Arms up.”
He stands and raises his arms, and the robe shifts, and I catch a glimpse of his chest, the familiar planes of muscle, the light dusting of hair that trails down toward his stomach.
I’ve seen this body a thousand times. I’ve traced every inch of it with my hands, my mouth.
I know exactly where he’s ticklish and where he’s sensitive and what makes him groan.
I take the pins out of my mouth and set them on the counter. I force myself to focus on the tape measure.
I wrap it around his chest, and my knuckles brush his skin, and I feel the shiver that runs through him. His breath catches, and mine does too, and I hate myself for it.
“Eliza-”
“This is professional. That’s all it is.”
“I know.” His voice is rough, strained. “But can we just talk? For five minutes? Please?”
“We’re at my workplace. This isn’t appropriate.”
“Nothing about this is appropriate.” He looks down at me, and his eyes are too blue, too close, too familiar. “I’m buying my way into your job just to see you because you won’t answer my calls. You think I don’t know how fucked up that is?”
“If you know it’s fucked up, why are you doing it?”
“Because I don’t know any other way.” His chest rises and falls under my hands, and my hands have stopped taking measurements without telling me.
“I can’t breathe without you, Eliza. I’ve tried staying away, I’ve tried giving you space, and every day I wake up and you’re not there and it’s killing me. ”
“You managed fine for eleven years.”
“I was dying for eleven years. I just didn’t know it until you left.”
I move to his waist measurements. I keep my hands steady. I don’t think about how warm his skin is, how familiar the shape of him feels under my palms, how easy it would be to slide my hands around his back and pull him closer.
“I have something for you,” he says.
“Gordon-”
“It’s not expensive. I swear.” He pulls a folded piece of paper from his robe pocket. “I found this when I was going through old boxes. After you left.”
I take the paper and unfold it.
It’s one of my old sketches. From the broke years, when I used to draw on napkins and receipts because we couldn’t afford real paper.
A dress design I don’t even remember making, the lines faded and smudged but still recognizable, asymmetrical neckline, bias-cut skirt, a design I used to dream about but never had the skills or the resources to attempt.
“You kept this?”
“I kept all of them.” His voice is quiet. “When we moved to the big house, you threw them out. Said they were embarrassing, that you’d moved past them. I pulled them out of the trash and put them in a box in my office.”
“Why?”
“Because they were beautiful. Because they were you.” He takes a breath, and I can see his chest expand with it, can see the way his ribs move under his skin.
“I used to look at them sometimes. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep.
To remind myself what we were building toward.
To remind myself why I was working so hard. ”
My eyes are burning. I blink fast, trying to keep the tears from falling.
“Gordon-”
“I know you don’t trust me.” The words come out in a rush now, urgent, desperate. “I know I haven’t earned it. But I’m not going anywhere, Eliza. However long it takes. However many fittings and measurements and professional conversations. I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give me.”
I should step back. I should put distance between us, finish the measurements, get out of this room before something happens that I can’t take back.
Instead, I’m looking at his mouth.
I remember exactly what that mouth feels like. What it tastes like. The way his lips move against mine, soft at first and then harder, hungrier. I remember the sounds he makes when I kiss his neck, the way his breath catches when I bite his shoulder, the way he says my name when he’s close.
“Eliza.”
His voice is barely a whisper. He’s looking at my mouth too, and neither of us has moved in what feels like a full minute, the tape measure still looped loose around his waist, my thumb still holding my place on it like the number matters, like I’m going to write anything down ever again.
The room is too small. The air is too thick. My heart is going so hard it’s in my wrists, my throat, low between my legs.
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe him. Maybe me. Maybe we both do something incredibly stupid at the same time.
His mouth is on mine, and my back is against the mirror, and his hands are under my shirt, and I’m gasping against his lips because I forgot. I forgot how good this feels, how right, how much I’ve missed being touched by someone who knows exactly what I need.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth. “Tell me to stop and I will.”
I should tell him to stop. I should push him away and straighten my clothes and walk out of this room and never look back.
“Don’t stop.”
He groans, low and desperate, and then he slows down, which is the last thing I expect.
His hands come up and start on my blouse buttons one at a time, deliberate, his eyes on my face the whole time, and the cool glass of the mirror is against my back and his knuckles brush my skin with every button and by the third one my breath is doing things I can’t control.
“Gordon-”
“You said don’t stop.” His voice is low, rough. “You didn’t say hurry.”
He gets the blouse open and his mouth goes to my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast above my bra, unhurried, thorough, and his hands slide up my thighs under nothing at all, just pressure and heat through the fabric of my pants, and I hear myself make a sound I haven’t made in months.
He finds the clasp of my bra with the same ease he always had, and then his thumbs are moving over me and his mouth follows and my head tips back against the mirror with a soft thunk and my fingers dig into his shoulders through the robe.
Then he turns me around.
“Look,” he says, against my ear.
The mirror gives us back to ourselves. My blouse open, my hair coming down, his hands spread over my stomach, his mouth at my neck, the robe hanging off him, both of us ruined already and barely started.
I watch his hand slide down over the front of my pants and press, slow, and I watch my own mouth fall open, and it’s obscene and it’s us and I can’t look away.
“You feel that?” His eyes find mine in the glass. “That’s the woman who hands me a robe every week and calls me Mr. Bryce.”
Voices in the hallway.
We go still. Two people, close, talking about a delivery schedule, their footsteps slowing outside the door.
His hand doesn’t move. My heart is trying to exit my body.
I reach back and cover his mouth with my hand, and I feel him smile against my palm, the absolute lunatic, and the footsteps pass and fade, and neither of us has breathed in fifteen seconds.
The stillness breaks all at once.
He spins me back around and lifts me onto the small counter and I hook my ankles behind him and pull him in, and the robe falls open, and he’s hard against me, and the pins I set down earlier scatter across the surface, some falling to the floor, and neither of us cares.
His hands are on my ribs and this is insane, we’re insane, anyone could walk in.
He pushes my pants down my hips and I help him, kicking them off, and then he’s pressing against me, just the thin cotton of my underwear between us, and I’m so wet I can feel it through the fabric, and he drags his knuckles over me once, twice, until my thighs are shaking around his hips.
“Eliza.” His forehead is pressed to mine, his breath ragged. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Just - now. Please.”
He pushes my underwear aside and slides into me, and I gasp, clutching his shoulders, my nails digging into his skin. He stills for a moment, letting me adjust, and I can feel him shaking with the effort of holding back.
“Move,” I say.
He does.
It’s fast and rough and nothing like the slow tender sex we used to have when things were good between us.
It’s angry and desperate and half-clothed, my blouse hanging open and his robe bunched around his hips, the counter edge biting into my thighs, and in the mirror over his shoulder I can see his back working and my own hands gripping it, and I watch us, I can’t stop watching us, both of us chasing something we probably won’t catch.
But god, it feels good. It feels so good to be touched again, to be wanted, to feel his hands on my body and his breath in my ear and his voice breaking when he says my name.
“I love you.” He’s moving faster now, harder, and I’m meeting him thrust for thrust. “I love you, Eliza. I never stopped. I never will.”
“Don’t.” I’m close, so close, that familiar pressure building low in my belly. “Don’t say that right now.”
“I can’t help it.” He shifts the angle, and I cry out, and he covers my mouth with his hand to muffle the sound. “I can’t help anything when it comes to you.”
I come with his hand over my mouth and his name caught in my throat, and he follows a moment later, shuddering against me, his face buried in my neck.
We stay like that for a long moment, breathing hard, tangled together on the counter in a fitting room that smells like sex and sweat and expensive fabric.
Then reality comes crashing back.
“That was a mistake,” I say.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
I push him back and slide off the counter and start fixing my clothes. My hands are shaking. My legs are shaking. Everything is shaking.
Gordon watches me, still catching his breath, his robe hanging open, his body still flushed from what we just did.
“Eliza-”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t say anything. We’re never talking about this.”
I button my blouse and straighten my hair.
I pick up the scattered pins from the floor and the counter, one at a time, because it gives my hands somewhere to be, and I count them as I go because I brought eleven in and I am not leaving one of them behind in this room as evidence.
I check my reflection in the mirror and try to make myself look like someone who didn’t just have sex with her soon-to-be-ex-husband in a fitting room at work.
I don’t succeed.
“I have to go,” I say.
“When can I see you again?”
“You can’t.” I pick up my clipboard, my measuring tape. “This was a mistake. It’s not happening again.”
“Eliza-”
“I mean it, Gordon.”
I unlock the door. I walk out without looking back.
The hallway is empty. I make it to the elevator, press the button, step inside. The doors close, and I’m alone.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
A news alert. I pull it out automatically, thinking it’s probably nothing, probably just some celebrity gossip or political nonsense.
Sloane’s name is in the headline.
EXCLUSIVE: Gordon Bryce’s Former Publicist Speaks Out - “He Made Me Feel Like I Had No Choice”
I read it again, and then again.
The elevator dings. The doors open.
The entire sample room is staring at me.
They’ve all seen it. Every single person in this room has seen it. I can tell by their faces, by the way they’re looking at me, by the sudden silence that falls when I step out of the elevator.
And I can still taste Gordon on my lips.