Dressed for Her Pleasure

*This one came from a moody image of an empty school gym at night and the idea of finding intimacy in the most unexpected places. Thanks for reading something a bit darker and quieter.*

The order said deliver before midnight, and I pulled into the loading lot of Westfield High at 11:40, so I figured I was doing fine. Four boxes of cleaning supplies, the industrial stuff the district orders, floor wax and solvent and a case of those blue paper towels that feel like sandpaper. I've been driving delivery for nine years now, and schools are easy stops because the night custodian signs and you go.

Except the night custodian was my girlfriend.

Bianca had texted me that afternoon, all casual, saying she'd be working late Friday and wouldn't it be nice if I brought the delivery myself instead of some stranger. I should have known something was up, because she never invites me to her job. She's been the janitor at Westfield for a few years, and she keeps the two halves of her life pretty separate, the mop half and the other half, the half I don't talk about at barbecues.

I hauled the boxes through the double doors she'd propped open and followed the sound of a floor buffer to the gym. The lights were off except for half a row of fluorescents over the far court, and the place smelled like wax, that warm chemical smell I actually like.

Bianca was leaning against the bleachers with her arms crossed, watching me set the last box down.

"You're late," she said.

"It's 11:50. The order said before midnight."

"You're late in spirit." She was grinning. She pushed off the wall and walked over, and the first thing she did was touch my hair, right at the temple, where the gray has been coming in thick the last couple years. I'm 53. I know what my hair is doing. I don't need it cataloged.

"More silver this week," she said, rubbing the strand between her fingers like she was checking thread count.

"It doesn't grow overnight, Bianca."

"It does with you. You're going full silver by Christmas." Her hand slid down and flattened against my stomach, over the work shirt, no pressure, just resting there where I've gone soft since my forties. "And this. My favorite part."

"That's not a part. That's the result of gas station food."

"It's a part. It's my part." She kept her hand there and looked up at me, and she had that look, the one I've learned means the evening is not going the way I planned. "I have a project for you."

"It's midnight. I have a route at six."

"The route will forgive you. I found something in the drama department storage," she said it very evenly, which is how she says everything that should be said with a warning label. "Come on."

She led me along the wall to the storage room off the gym, the one with the mops and the spare bleacher parts and apparently a rack of old costume stuff the theater teacher never reclaimed. She pulled a garment bag off the hook and unzipped it, and inside was a dress. Black satin, some kind of sleeveless cut, the kind of thing that looked like it belonged to a play about a woman with secrets.

"Put it on," Bianca said.

"That's not going to fit me."

"It'll fit you. It's a size 22 dress from a play where the character was a bigger woman. I checked the tag." She held it up against my chest, and the satin made this whispery sound, and I felt my face go hot at 53 years old, standing in a high school gym after midnight, being measured by eye against a costume.

"Bianca, somebody could..."

"Nobody's here. Building's empty, I'm the only one on shift, I locked the front myself." She stepped closer. "Rhys. You've been telling me for four years you want to be surprised. Here I am, surprising you."

That was true. I did keep telling her that. She used to be a dominatrix back in her twenties, before the school job, and she doesn't do that work anymore, but she never stopped being that person either, and every so often she points it at me like a flashlight. Usually I like it. Usually I'm ready for it. This time I wasn't sure.

"What's in it for me?" I asked, which was stupid, because we both knew the answer was whatever she decided.

"Me," she said simply. "Watching you. Then whatever happens after."

I took the hanger. The dress weighed almost nothing.

* * *

The storage room is narrow, shelves on one side, a rolling rack of junk on the other, one bare bulb with a pull chain. There's no lock on the door, which Bianca solved by standing in the doorway and leaving about a two-inch crack, and I could see her through it, leaning on the frame, waiting.

"You could give a man privacy," I said, working my belt loose.

"I could. I'm choosing not to." I heard her settle her shoulder against the frame. "Take your shirt off first. I want to see."

So I did that, which felt absurd, undressing on a stage with an audience of one, and she made a low happy sound when the shirt came off, at my chest and my stomach and everything I'd been complaining about for a decade. Four years with this woman and she still looks at me like the delivery she ordered showed up correct.

"Underwear too, eventually," she said. "The dress doesn't work with boxers bunching under it. There's a package on the shelf behind you, by the way."

There was. A plain cardboard box, school-district plain, and inside were a pair of black seamless shorts, some kind of shapewear, and a pair of heels. Heels, actual heels, size 13, which meant she had gone looking for a size 13, which meant this had been planned for longer than one night.

"Bianca. When did you get these?"

"Tuesday. The drama teacher owed me a favor." I could hear the smile in her voice through the crack. "You're stalling."

"I'm not stalling. I'm having a crisis at a reasonable speed."

Step by step I got into the shapewear, which was its own small humiliation, a 53-year-old man wrestling into compression fabric in a mop closet, and then I stepped into the dress and pulled it up and worked my arms through, and it was tight. Tight across the chest, tight across the hips, and tightest of all across the shoulders, which are wider than whoever the costume was sewn for. The satin pulled and I could feel every seam. The zipper hung open down