Page 50 of Love, Academically
“You’re taking cookies on a shopping expedition?” he asked, eyebrows drawn together.
“Expedition? It’s not like we’re trekking through the jungle. It’s just the Bull Ring.” On a Saturday. So it pretty much would belike a jungle. “And yes, I will have to bring cookies if you are going to continue to be the most pedantic person in the entire world.”
“I don’t think—” he started, but snapped his mouth shut. “Okay.”
Lila rewarded him with a grin. He was learning.
“Also, I have a request,” she said. Rhys gestured for her to continue. “Can I be in charge of the radio? I don’t want to listen to the news this morning.”
Because the news was depressing, people were awful, and she didn’t need that kind of energy when she was preparing for dress shopping.
Rhys narrowed his eyes at her, and she gave him the sweetest smile from her arsenal.
“Fine.”
There was nothing in the first shop, or the second. There was more selection in the next few, but nothing that screamed ‘wear me to a posh family dinner whilst pretending to be a work colleague’s girlfriend’. Trying stuff on in high-street shops with their unflattering lighting and tiny changing rooms, and then parading herself around in front of Rhys-Tuxedo-Aubrey was not her idea of fun and Rhys certainly didn’t look as if he was enjoying it.
She’d managed to pry out of him the type of thing that his sister would wear, so hopefully she wouldn’t look like a complete idiot. With a couple of good accessories and maybe a couple of alterations, she could make a dress look less high street and more high end.
“So?” she asked, as she pulled at the satiny fabric around her hips. “What do you think?”
The thin spaghetti straps would need shortening and possiblya bit off the length. The green-y colour wasn’t great, but it fit all right across her boobs and hips.
“It’s fine,” Rhys said with a shrug.
Her shoulders drooped. ‘Fine’ was not what she was going for.
“I’d take the hem up a little, so it would fall here,” she said, pulling it up slightly so it wasn’t draped on the floor. “Would that be okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” he repeated.
“That’s what you said about the last one and the one before that,” she said, pushing a despondent half smile onto her face.
“They’re all fine, Lila,” he said with a huff.
“Okay,” she said quietly, stepping back into the changing room to scrape her ego off the floor and put on her own clothes again.
It was the best so far. She snapped a photo of the dress on her phone, just in case she couldn’t find anything better. Hanging it, and the other three that she’d discarded on the ‘not today’ rack at the entrance to the changing room, she gave a wan little smile to Rhys.
“Not that one, then.”
“Maybe, if I don’t see anything else.”
“Okay.”
Shopping sometimes was like purgatory. A purgatory full of dresses that were too tight, too loose, too long, too short, didn’t fit across her boobs, didn’t fit around her hips, too cut-out-y.
She sighed as they headed out of the shop and into the bright lights of the shopping centre. Despondency was creeping in, and her feet were starting to hurt.
“What about that shop?” Rhys stopped and pointed at one with tall, skinny mannequins in the window.
Lila shook her head. “I don’t fit into clothes there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rhys, women come in all different shapes and sizes and I’mtelling you, that shop does not make clothes that fit my body shape.”
“Oh.”
