Borrowed Lace

The whole thing started on a Friday afternoon at the depot, the kind of Friday where nobody had a full truck and the fans did all the talking.

Darrell was leaning on the counter with a clipboard he wasn't reading. "You know what I was thinking, Joy?"

"Scary already."

"Bet I could pull off a pencil skirt better than you."

I looked up from the shipping log. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me. That thing you wore Tuesday. The gray one. I've got the hips for it, I'm just saying."

"You do not have the hips for it." I laughed, but I kept looking at him, because honestly, the man did have legs. Six years in the Navy and then six years hauling pallets around the depot. "You're all talk, Darrell. Everybody at the Port Barrow thrift store knows you're all talk."

"Thrift store, huh."

Damn it. That's what I got for running my mouth.

It was supposed to end there. But I own the sort of brain that doesn't let jokes die, and I'd been running the weekend shop on Pine Street for three years, and I knew exactly what was in the donation bins that week. So I said, "Saturday. You come by after we close. You prove it or you buy me dinner for a month."

He didn't blink. "Make it two months."

"Deal."

* * *

Saturday I closed the shop at four and told my weekend girl, Tessa, I'd handle the bins myself. She didn't ask questions. Tessa thinks I sort bras in the back for fun, which, some days, is true.

Darrell showed up at four twenty in his work polo, hands jammed in his pockets like a guy about to get a flu shot.

"Lock the door," I told him. "Customers wander."

He locked it. I grabbed his wrist and pulled him past the racks, past the dusty full-length mirror with the cracked corner, into the back room where the bins live.

"Okay," he said, looking around at the chaos of fabric. "This is real. This is actually happening."

"You thought I'd chicken out?"

"I thought you'd laugh it off Monday." He picked up a red velvet blazer and dropped it. "I kinda hoped you wouldn't."

"Well." I dug into the bin. "Here's the thing. If you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it right. None of this half-assed pants-and-a-blouse stuff." I pulled out a floral dress, cotton, pink and white, size too small for him but that was the point. Then the black lace set I'd been sitting on since Thursday, a bralette and matching panties some widow had donated, tags still on.

Darrell went quiet when he saw the lace.

"Still game?" I asked. "Say so now or go home!"

"I'm game." He said it fast, like he'd been holding the word in all day. "Just... I haven't done this. Ever. So if I look stupid, you have to tell me."

"You won't look stupid. You'll look like a guy in a dress, and then you'll look like something else. Strip."

"Joy."

"What? You want the skirt or not?"

He laughed and shook his head, and then he pulled his polo over his head, and I'll admit I looked. Thirty-four years old, broad shoulders, that soft dark chest hair some guys have. He kicked off his boots and stood there in his boxers, ears going red.

"Underwear off," I said. "You can keep the boxers if you want, but the lace won't sit right over them."

"You're enjoying this way too much."

"Ask me again in an hour." I held out the panties. He hesitated a second longer, then stepped into them and pulled them up, and something in my chest went warm and low that I was not ready for. The black lace sat on his hips like it had been waiting for him.

"Turn around," I said. He did, slow. "See? Nothing stupid about that."

"You think?"

"Hand me the bralette." I reached around him and hooked it, because he fumbled with the clasp twice. The lace stretched over his chest, thin straps on those shoulders. I flattened my palms over the front of it, just to smooth it, I told myself, and I felt his breathing change under my hands.

"Joy," he said, quiet.

"That okay? Tell me if it's not."

"Yeah. Yeah, it's okay." He swallowed. "More than okay, maybe."

I ran my fingers along the lace edge over his chest, once, twice. His nipples came up under the fabric and he didn't say stop, so I didn't stop until I was done teasing both of us.

"Arms up." I got the dress over his head, worked the zipper at his back, and the floral cotton dropped to just above his knees. Too short for him, exactly as planned. I smoothed the skirt over his hips with both hands, and God, the man had not been lying about the hips.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, wait. Don't move."

I stepped back and looked. Then I walked him by the shoulders, three steps, and turned him to face the mirror.

I watched his face in the glass. He'd been grinning this whole time, the joke grin, the we're-having-fun grin. It fell off his face in about two seconds.

"Whoa," he said.

"Yeah."

"That's..." He touched the skirt hem like it might not be real. "That's me?"

"That's you."

He leaned closer to the mirror. The dress pulled across his chest, the lace showed at the neckline, his legs went on and on above the hem. He turned sideways. He turned back. His breath caught, and I heard it catch, that little hitch, and I watched his eyes in the glass and I knew exactly what I was seeing, because I'd seen it in a mirror on myself more than once.

He wanted it. Not the joke. The dress.

"Darrell," I said, careful. "Look at me, not the glass."

He turned. His face was pink and honest.

"What are you feeling right now?" I asked. "I gotta know, because I'm feeling something and I don't want to be the only one."

"God!" He laughed, shaky. "I feel... seen? Is that a dumb word? Like I've been walking around in a box my whole life and somebody finally cut a window in it." He looked down at himself. "I want to keep it on. That's weird, right?"

"It's not weird."

"And you." He rubbed his jaw. "You're looking at me different than you looked at me at the depot."

"I am."

"How different?"

I could have played it cool. I've never once played it cool in my life, so I didn't start then. "Different like I've been thinking about getting you into this dress since Tuesday, and the skirt thing was just the excuse I needed."

His eyebrows went up. "Seriously?"

"Seriously. And if that's too weird for you, we laugh it off Monday and I buy you a beer and we never talk about it."

"What if it's not too weird?"

"Then I'd wanna kiss you. Right now, in this back room, with you in my best find of the spring. But two things first. You gotta say yes out loud, and you gotta know I'm technically your supervisor and that has nothing to do with this. Your job, your shifts, your raise, none of it hangs on what you say next. Same for the bet. It's void. Nobody owes anybody anything."

"Understood," he said. "Separate. All of it."

"Then I'm not moving till you say yes."

He looked at the mirror again, then at me, and took his time, which I liked. A man should know what he's agreeing to.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, kiss me, please!"

I stepped in and took his face in my hands and kissed him, slow, and he made a sound into my mouth like he'd been holding his breath since four twenty. His hands found my waist and pulled the skirt of my own dress against his, cotton on cotton, and we stood there in front of the dusty mirror making out like a couple of twenty-somethings, which we were not, both of us well past thirty and supposed to know better.

When I broke off, his lipstick-free mouth was pink and his eyes were glassy.

"So," he said. "Two months of dinners."

"Forget the dinners. The bet's void, remember?"

"You sure? I make decent chili."

"Darrell. Shut up about chili." I smoothed his skirt one more time. "There's a couch back here that Tessa naps on. There's a lock on that door you already turned. And you're standing there in my lace looking like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you know exactly what happens next and you're deciding if you want it."

He thought about it for maybe one second.

"I want it," he said.

I went and dug the shoe box out from under the counter, the one I'd set aside Thursday night when I had no business doing it. Low heels, black, size eleven, buckled straps, donated by somebody with excellent taste and big feet.

I also pulled a tube of Tessa's lipstick out of the register drawer, pink, called Bubblegum Blast, and held it up. "Yes or no? Your mouth, my hand."

"Yes," he said, and held perfectly still while I did it, like a man defusing a bomb.

"Sit," I said, and pointed at the folding chair by the mending pile.

He sat. The dress rode up and he tugged the hem down, all nervous, and I had to laugh. "Darrell. Six years in the Navy and a skirt hem is what gets you?"

"The Navy never put me in this much lace." He stuck one foot out. "Okay. Do your worst."

I knelt in front of him with the first shoe. His ankle was warm in my hand and his calf was solid, that pallet-hauling muscle he'd built up over six years at the depot, and I buckled the strap and looked up at him while I did it. He was watching me from above, lips parted.

"Other one," I said.

"You're enjoying this."

"Immensely." I buckled the second strap, sat back on my heels, and ran my palm up his shin, over his knee, up his thigh under the cotton. His leg tensed and then didn't. The skirt bunched around my wrist. "So. How far do you want to take this?"

His mouth opened. Nothing came out. His hand came down and covered mine through the dress, and I thought for a second he was going to move it, and instead he pressed it higher.

"Far," he said. "As far as you'll let me."

That was answer enough for me, but I wanted him to say a real sentence. "Words, sailor."