Page 38 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
“It’s not like that,” Chloe said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“Thinking what?” He poured himself more champagne.
“That I… that he… Oh, never mind!” Chloe grabbed the bottle and poured herself some more, too.
They just sat there, drinking silently, for a few minutes.
“Knock, knock,” Greta said. She rolled an entire rack of dresses into the room. Boxes of shoes were stacked on the bottom platform. Christian Louboutin. Manolo Blahnik. Jimmy Choo.
“Oh, wow…” Chloe went to set down her champagne but didn’t bother looking for the table. Tolly caught her glass right as she let go.
Greta had chosen a rainbow of gowns. There was a pale lavender one with fluttery ostrich feathers. An iridescent dress with a comet tail of sequins. A gown made of sapphire taffeta, another of orange-gold chiffon, and more that Chloe couldn’t quite see other than the swishing of their hems between the others.
“Which one would you like to try first?” Greta asked.
Chloe just gaped at the dresses. She couldn’t stop touching them, running her fingers through the fabric.
“She’ll never be able to choose if you put it like that,” Tolly said, that lopsided smile back on his face. He set down his own glass on the little table and rose. “Beautiful clothes seem to have a paralytic effect on her. So this is how we’ll do it.”
Tolly pulled a soft pink satin dress off the rack, the first one she had touched. Then he took Chloe by the shoulders, pivoted her toward the mirrors and raised platform, and put the hanger in her hands. “Try on this one, Chloe.” He nudged her gently forward.
She nodded, still speechless, and went into the separate dressing room. Greta closed its door behind her.
“I’ll come back and check on you in a while,” Chloe heard Greta tell Tolly. “But if you want me sooner, push this button. I’m at your service for different sizes, more gowns, anything at all.”
A few minutes later when Chloe opened the door of her dressing room, Tolly was alone in the suite. His eyes sparkled when he saw her.
“What do you think?” she asked, twirling in the pink dress. It had puffs of tulle at the shoulders, and on the hem as well.
“You look… like a cotton-candy poodle.”
Chloe burst out laughing. “Okay, that was blunt, but I’m glad you said it. I actually thought so, too. But I was second-guessing myself, like, maybe this is what high fashion is supposed to be and I’m too much of a peon to understand it.”
Tolly smiled. “It doesn’t matter what fashion issupposedto be, it only matters if you like it. Besides, you don’t need those poof balls. That’s to spice up someone ordinary, which you’re not.”
She stopped laughing and just looked at him. “Thank you, Tolly.”
His expression went serious, too. “It’s the truth.”
A moment later, he cleared his throat and turned to the rack. “Okay, next, try this.” It was a sleek, full-length spaghetti-strap gown made of cerulean blue silk, with no embellishments in sight. “This one seems like the philosophical opposite of the pink.”
It took only a minute for Chloe to change into it, because the fabric was so light. The silk fell across her skin like cool water, slinky but in an elegant way, not slippery like the faux silks at other stores that were heavily treated with softening chemicals. Being at Bergdorf’s felt like she’d stepped through another dimension. Chloe had thought she knew fabrics—she’d been dabbling in making her own clothes for half her life—but this was beyond anything she’d put on her body before.
Barefoot, she opened the dressing room door again.
“Ta-da!” she said. “What do you—”
Tolly’s mouth dropped open.
This time, she felt fire on her skin as his eyes traced over every curve. The arch of her bare shoulder under the thin strap. The deep V made by the drape of azure silk on her chest. The softness of her stomach, the swell of her hips, the waterfall of almost-sheer fabric skimming her legs.
And the crazy thing was, it felt right. Him. And her. An electric current between them.
“That one,” Tolly said.
