Page 58 of A Taste Of Darkness

When I looked down at myself, I was met with yet another reminder. I was wearing his shirt. Not my clothes. Not even freaking pants. Just his stupidly soft T-shirt.

I brushed a hand down the front of the shirt, my eyebrows drawing together.

I knew that fabric.

It was my absolute favorite before my local fabric shops stopped selling it, and I had to settle for a less soft material.

If I remember correctly, it was about ninety percent vicuña, and the remaining ten percent was cashmere. It wasn’t very popular back then, but super expensive either way due to the rarity of the fabric.

Nobody but me bought it, or only a few people did, so the fabric shops couldn’t afford the material anymore. Also, I didn’t trust online stores, so I never ordered the fabric online either. It was a very sad day for me.

All of my old designs were somewhere in the trash by now as I no longer associated myself with them. Beginner designs were straight-up trash, at least mine were. I used to love them when I first started, but the better I got, the more flaws I noticed and so I threw them out.

“Where did you get this T-shirt from?” I asked, still touching the fabric like there was no tomorrow. It was so soft, softer than a pillow or a fluffy blanket. It was simply the softest fabric I’d ever touched.

I gave up hoping to ever feel it again.

“Flora gave it to me,” he answered, then took a spoonful of his breakfast.

My eyebrows quipped up. “Flora?”

I stood, abandoning my breakfast—though I would come back to it—to rush into the bathroom.

Milo’s place here only had one bathroom, and one awful mirror. While this apartment was great, it seriously lacked mirrors and good lighting.

But that didn’t matter right now.

As I stood in front of the mirror, I first stared at the shirt on my body. It was so big on me that I didn’t even recognize it at first.

The seams felt better than they looked. To my eyes anyway. I was sure if you had no idea about fashion, you didn’t even notice that I sewed it wrong. The T-shirt wasn’t a hundred percent even, meaning one side was hanging lower because I didn’t bother to cut it in a straight line.

It wasn’t too visible, but I noticed these kinds of flaws.

This goddamn shirt was one of my first attempts at sewing a T-shirt dress for myself. I couldn’t have been older than sixteen.

I wasn’t the best when it came to taking measurements, or converting them, or doing anything with numbers. Math was my biggest nightmare. That was why this dress turned out to be far too big for me.

However, I was proud of the dress, especially since it was the first one where I didn’t entirely mess up the sewing. I still told Flora to give it to one of her college friends since they were bigger than me.

Like I said, the shirt or dress wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t the greatest. Plus, I would’ve never fit into it the way I wanted to.

My body changed over the years, and it was still too big.

“This doesn’t hang too low on you?” I asked as I noticed that Milo was standing in the doorway.

“Is it supposed to?”

I nodded, then shook my head. “I made it,” I told him. “It was supposed to be a dress.”

“It is on you.”

Yeah. A dress that turned me into a doormat. It was so bulky on me; didn’t even highlight any curves, which, yes, these types of dresses never did. Still, it was so unflattering in every way possible.

But it wasn’t bad, I realized. I could understand why Milo wore it.

Well, I understood why he wore it once upon a time, not why he still owned it.

“You know this shirt or dress is super old, right?” I said as I watched him get closer to me. When he stood right behind me, looking into my eyes through the mirror, my heart was skipping an involuntary beat. “And it’s not even designer.”

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