Page 53 of Tops
“We’ll take all three. Remove the tags immediately and then send Miss Harlow back into the dressing rooms to try them on. Let her come out in whichever she prefers, but if she doesn’t like any of those, we can repeat this process as often as it takes.” Tanner turned toward me as he said the last part. Using my weakness against me. If I refused to wear one of these expensive dresses, then he would just continue to buy more of them.
The woman nodded and removed the tags immediately before signaling for another woman to come and take me back into the dressing room. The first dress was short, stopping in the middle of my thighs while hugging my body like it was created to make me have curves I didn’t have before. It made me feel powerful and sexy, but it was also hard to move in, and my simple cotton underwear stood out like a neon sign. I would have to go commando. I slipped my underwear into my pile of clothes on the floor.
The second dress was floor length, squeezing in tightly at my chest to push my breasts up until they made little hills under my chin. It loosened up at the waist after first trying to shrink all my organs, to fall limply around me. The third dress also went down to the floor and felt as light as a cloud shrouding my skin rather than fabric. The front neckline came up and around my neck. My back was exposed between the hanging chains of delicate metal filagree that covered my back like a staircase of necklaces. I reached around to unhook my bra, sliding it out the side before taking another look in the mirror. There was enough material in the front of the dress that it wasn’t glaringly obvious that I wasn’t wearing a bra.
I stepped out of the small changing room, where the woman who brought me back here was waiting with three different pairs of shoes. All of them missing their price tags as well, making me roll my eyes, knowing exactly what he had done. At least they were all my size. I knew I would pick the pair of ankle boots with a pump heel without bothering to try them all on.
My other options were thigh-high boots with at least a four-inch heel or a strappy pair of sky-high shoes that Hannah would have bought for the stage. Well, maybe this pair was a little less clunky and not quite as high as the ones she usually wore. There were also bits of glistening light coming from the straps, making me think there were gems weaved into the design.
I slipped on the small boots, finding them reasonably comfortable and entirely hidden beneath the light flowing panels of the bottom of my dress. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had chosen one of the other pairs. With this dress, they were invisible. Looking back over the remaining pairs of shoes, I matched the tall boots with the short, skintight dress and the strappy shoes with the titty topper dress.
While I was busy deciding on shoes, the attendant rushed into the changing room, collecting, folding, and boxing up the clothes I had arrived in and my two other dresses. Guess I wasn’t going to put my underwear back on yet. The dress was long and thick enough despite its featherlight weight. No one would find out before I could get into the bag and slip them on in the car.
“You don’t have to wait for me. I will bring everything up to the front if you want to rejoin your boyfriend,” she said sweetly. Like she wasn’t judging the no-name brand leggings she just neatly placed into a box that likely cost more than the pants did.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling warmly at her and truly meaning every word of it. “Oh,” I said quickly, “he’s not my boyfriend. I’m his lawyer’s date tonight.” I felt it was important to make sure no one was running around New York, thinking I was Tanner’s girlfriend.
“You are meeting Mr. Black then?” the woman said, and I could see her mind working through something with difficulty.
“Yes, but not like meeting him for the first time. I was finishing up a class when Mr. Ryland came to escort me to Mr. Black. But obviously, I was not appropriately dressed for the occasion,” I rambled on in explanation.
The woman’s facial features changed as she regarded me more as a small baby animal than the date of some wealthy lawyer. A wounded animal, at that.
“Come with me for a few minutes and let me put a little makeup on you and pin your hair up. You really have beautiful features, so it wouldn’t be much. But if you go into the event, I believe you are headed for, without a little makeup on your face, you are going to attract too much unwanted attention.” The woman put down the bag containing all my boxes of clothes before ushering me back into the store and into a room that looked like a salon. There was even one of those chairs hairdressers used, and it was sitting in front of a mirror.
“You really are a one-stop shop, aren’t you,” I laughed nervously, not even wanting to know how much this was about to add to the bill. The woman got to work dusting a light coat of clear powder over my freckled cheeks and nose. She used thick black ink to frame my eyes before brushing purple pigment over my lids. When I looked at my eyes in the mirror, their green color was more pronounced, giving my eyes the shine they only had when I was crying. I couldn’t stop looking in the mirror, amazed, while she leaned back and looked at me like she was having difficulty figuring something out.
“What?” I asked after a moment of silence.
“Just trying to figure out what shade of lipstick to put on you. Usually, it jumps right out at me, but right now, I can just see too many colors working.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her head to the side.
“My perfect shade is my nipple color.” The words were out of my mouth, but it wasn’t until the woman started laughing that I breathed again.
“If you say so. Whip it out and I will match it,” the woman laughed, looking at me expectantly.
Ah. Fuck, Hannah.
Hannah was the one that told me she heard from someone else that a woman’s perfect lipstick color was the same as her nipples. Hannah dragged me out to the store that night to buy lipstick in the same shade from the pictures we took of ourselves before we left the house. I had my image zoomed all the way in, so it was nothing more than color filling the screen, but Hannah walked in and showed the first associate she could find a picture of her breast. Her logic was that more people had seen her boobs than she could ever know. One more didn’t matter.
I reached in from the side, pushing the fabric to the side to reveal my nipple to this stranger. She took note of the color before grabbing a few bottles and holding them up one by one against my skin. After a few moments of indecision between the two, she seemed to settle on a shade, which she opened and then applied. She tossed the lipstick into a small clutch before closing it and handing it to me.
“Be careful tonight. You are just a little minnow and about to be thrown in with the sharks. Make sure the one you let claim you is strong enough to fend off the others when they get a whiff of you,” the woman said with all seriousness before grabbing my hair in thick chunks and twisting it up into a messy yet passable design.
I wasn’t sure if I felt offended on Colten’s behalf or if I was grateful for the piece of warning about what kind of environment I was about to walk into. Indecision was my ultimate decision as she finished my hair and then headed out of the room. I followed after her but found her missing along with my bag of items, as she had already headed up to the front.
Tanner was waiting for me, standing like a statue while the attendant I left him with smiled at him, dipping her chest to give him a better view if only he would look over at her. His gaze was fixed on the hallway I walked out of, causing me to stop as he mentally pinned me in place.
I hoped the woman that helped me was not watching the way Tanner devoured me with his eyes. She would never believe I was with Colten and would know that there was more to the story than the one I told her. He handed the woman a card, leaving it in the air to grab instead of looking at her. He was still looking at me, and I couldn’t breathe until he allowed it.
Tanner looked away to grab his card and the receipt from the woman, finally releasing me from our magnetic lock I had gotten trapped inside again. I walked toward the exit, but he beat me to the door, opening it wide for me while he held the bag. He followed me, his hand touching the exposed skin of my back as we moved onto the empty sidewalk.
The night air should have felt cool as a breeze rushed around us, but I could only feel the heat from Tanner’s touch. He walked me over to the blacked-out car we arrived in, Mike situated in the driver’s seat. I looked around the street and noticed pumpkins and arrangements of warm-colored flowers were situated around the buildings. It would be Halloween soon, this coming weekend, now that I thought about it.
“Come along, Nessa. It’s a long drive to Colts Neck, New Jersey.
16
Long Drive
