DORIAN
I’m a grown man.
A grown man who runs an operation spanning three boroughs and two states.
I have sat across from federal prosecutors and not blinked.
I’ve made decisions that altered the trajectory of men’s lives while finishing a glass of scotch.
I have never, not once, lost control of a situation I walked into prepared for.
I am currently sitting in an armchair in a women’s boutique with my suit jacket folded across my lap because I have an erection that won’t go away, and the twenty-year-old nanny I brought here to buy a dress just made a sound behind a curtain that I’m going to hear in my sleep for the rest of my natural life.
It started with the green dress. Honestly, it started before the green dress.
It started with the navy one, the way the fabric sat on her shoulders, the bare strip of collarbone.
She walked out, and I told her no, because the color was wrong—that was true.
I also said no because if I’d said yes, we would’ve left, and I wasn’t ready to stop looking at her. I can admit that to myself.
The black one was worse. She moved in it. The skirt did something when she turned, and I watched her turn, and something in me tightened and didn’t let go. Something low down in my core. Something dangerous.
Then came the green.
She walked out in the green, and I had to put my glass down because I needed both hands to grip the chair.
That is not something I’ve ever needed to do before in response to a woman in a dress.
It fit her the way I would fit her if I were a dress: close, deliberate, aware of every line underneath it.
The neckline sat just low enough. The fabric moved with her like water.
She stood there looking at me, waiting for my verdict, and what I wanted to say was not something that belonged in a boutique with an audience.
I said, “That one.” My voice sounded like it had been dragged through gravel. I saw her notice it, too.
And then she went back behind the curtain to change while I sat in this chair and thought about baseball statistics and cold water and the time Tristan accidentally shot a hole in his own radiator. None of it worked, because my body had already made a decision my brain was not invited to.
Then the sound. Small. Barely there. A caught breath, a tiny, stifled thing most people would’ve missed.
I am not most people, and I was listening.
Not deliberately or consciously, but the way I listen to everything.
My whole system is wired to catalog sounds and assign them threat levels.
The sound coming from behind that curtain was not distress, nor was it a zipper, and it was not a woman struggling with a dress.
I know damn well what I heard.
My whole body went tight in the chair. Everything I had been managing for the past half hour—like the disciplined, controlled man I’m supposed to be—surged forward all at once and settled directly in my lap.
Suddenly, my jacket had a job to do, so I removed it and held it in front of myself in hopes of providing cover.
Her face is roughly the color of a sunset when she comes out.
She’s dressed in her jeans and her T-shirt.
Her hair is slightly wilder than it was when she went in.
She will not look at me. She’s looking at the floor, at the racks, at Adriana, at the champagne she abandoned on the table.
In other words, she’s looking at every single thing in this building except me.
It should help. A girl refusing to meet my eyes should break whatever’s happening to my body.
It does not help. The blush goes all the way down her neck and disappears under the collar of her shirt, and I find myself following it, wondering how far it goes. The jacket stays exactly where it is. It’s more a matter of self-preservation at this point.
She looks like she wants the marble floor to open and swallow her. Something about it sends a surge of sudden, ferocious tenderness for her all through me. I have no right to feel it. I know I don’t.
Especially since underneath that tenderness, there’s something much less gentle. Something much more animal.
“We’ll take the green,” I tell Adriana. It’s a real achievement, the way I’m able to keep my voice level.
Adriana has been pretending to organize a rack of scarves for the past ten minutes with the quiet professionalism of a woman who has seen everything. She boxes the dress quickly, efficiently, and manages to do it without looking at either of us.
With the jacket still held in front of me, covering what needs to be covered, I walk Quinn through the boutique.
I’ve done a lot of undignified things in my life.
I’ve crawled through a warehouse on my stomach.
I’ve hidden in a trunk. But walking through this boutique like a teenager trying to get past his mother’s living room is a new kind of low I feel through every inch of my body.
Quinn walks ahead of me toward the door, and I let her, partly because I’m a gentleman, and partly because if she turns around and looks down, this evening takes a turn neither of us is prepared for.
My driver, Sal, opens the back door for her and doesn’t blink, because Sal has been driving for my family since I was fourteen and has perfected the art of seeing nothing. Quinn slides in with the box in which Adriana packed the dress. She holds it carefully, like something precious.
I slide in after her with my jacket still strategically positioned. By the time I settle in next to her, the air is thick enough to cut.
“Take you home, miss?” Sal asks once he’s behind the wheel.
Her voice is steady when she murmurs, “Yes, thank you.” She stares down at the box, fingers clenched on top. The blush hasn’t left her face.
“Thank you,” she repeats, quieter this time. She’s speaking to me. “For the dress. You really didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to.”
“It’s too much.”
“It’s a dress.”
“It costs more than my car.”
“No offense, but your car is terrible.”
Her laughter comes out surprised and sudden. She covers her mouth, and for one second, the tension in the car cracks open and something warm rushes in. I want to live in that sound.
Then it’s gone, and she’s looking at her hands again. The silence comes back, but it’s different now. Softer. Less like a wall and more like a door that’s been left open a crack.
We don’t talk for the rest of the drive.
I watch the city go past and do my damnedest to forget the sound she made behind the curtain, but that’s a waste of time.
When I try to divert my thoughts, they only land on the way she looked in the green dress.
Then I think about the blush that went all the way down her neck.
I can’t bring myself to think about baseball.
When we pull up to her building, Sal comes around.
She opens the door before he gets there, though, because she’s never been the kind of person who waits for someone to open things for her.
She stands on the curb, still holding the dress like a prize, and she finally looks at me.
Really looks, for the first time since the fitting room.
“See you tomorrow,” she offers in a shaky voice paired with a shaky smile.
“I look forward to it.” And that is the entire truth, laid out plain and simple. I look forward to it, because I look forward to every moment she’s in my presence. I don’t know when it started. I only know that’s how it is.
“Oh. I forgot.” She spins on her heel before the door is closed. “My mom wants me there before five thirty. My dad wants to take family pictures. I hope that’s okay.”
“Absolutely fine. Thank you for letting me know.”
“I was afraid I would forget if I didn’t mention it right now.” She bites down on her lip—fuck me—before turning back toward her building. Do I watch her ass when she walks away? Of course I do.
When Sal’s behind the wheel, I murmur, “Wait until her lights come on.” He doesn’t ask which window, because he’s worked for me and my family long enough to know which questions need to be asked and which do not.
We sit in silence, the car idling out front, and I watch the dark rectangle on the second floor until it goes bright.
She’s inside, and she’s safe. I hope she’s happy. I truly do.
“Take me home,” I tell him. He pulls out, and I press the button to raise the privacy divider between us.
It goes up with a low hum, black glass, soundproof.
The kind of feature that comes standard in vehicles purchased by men who need to have conversations no one else can hear.
I’ve used it for phone calls, and for meetings—the kind of talk that happens between men who share a certain line of work.
Tonight, I’m using it because I am not going to make it home without doing something about the hard-on I still can’t get rid of.
I close my eyes and lean back against the headrest, and I stop fighting it.
My hand goes to my belt, then lower. When I finally grip myself, the relief is sharp enough that I exhale through my teeth.
I’m harder than I’ve been in years, painful with it.
The images come without me calling them.
The green dress, the collarbone. The way she turned, and the fabric moved. The blush on her neck.
And then the sound. That sound. Small and stifled, and unmistakable. The sound of a girl losing a fight with herself thirty feet from where I sat.
I can only imagine what she was doing behind that curtain. What she was thinking about. Whether it was me—and I know it was me, the way I know most things, not because I was told, but because the evidence doesn’t allow for another conclusion.
My fist tightens around my cock, and my breathing goes ragged.
The city streams past on the other side of the tinted glass, and I think about Quinn’s mouth and Quinn’s hands, and how she said I’m coming and then corrected herself.
My overheated imagination creates an image of me walking through that curtain and finding her with her hand between her legs, working her clit feverishly while she thought about me.
The image hits me like a fist, and I come hard enough that my vision whites out for a second, jaw locked, my free hand braced against the door while my fist fills with the hot, sticky results of what Quinn is doing to me without trying.
Then there’s the silence. Just my breathing, slowing down. The car moves through the dark while I sit here slumped against the seat, broken into pieces.
There’s a handkerchief in my breast pocket, and I use it now because I am, despite all current evidence, a civilized man.
By the time I’m finished cleaning up, Sal turns onto the long road that leads to the front gate.
I am now nothing more than a man coming home from a business errand.
I am not the man who just came until his ears rang in the back seat of his car over a girl who doesn’t know she’s taking him apart piece by piece.
The gate opens, and we roll through the driveway. The house is lit and quiet. Upstairs, my daughter is sleeping and dreaming about her pony. Somewhere past the east wall, there could be a car watching.
As I enter my house, nodding to the guards posted at the entrance, I think about Saturday. About how I’m going to control myself when I have her with me in that dress, when I have to pretend we’re in a relationship.
It’s not going to feel like pretending. That’s the only thing I know with absolute certainty as I step into my quiet hall, where the only sound is the echo of my footsteps and not the soft laughter of the girl I wish I had brought home with me.