Hubby Found My Secret Wardrobe

Trixie has exactly one hour and thirty-five minutes of freedom left before Charlie gets home from the studio.

She plans to use all ninety-five of them.

The apartment smells like the curry they had last night, and the rain is doing that Portland thing where it never quite commits to pouring. The living room lamp is dim on purpose. Trixie stands in the hallway mirror in a deep green silk slip dress, thirty-four years old, six foot one in her socks, and for the moment entirely someone else.

The name for the someone else took a while. She settled on Trixie two years ago, in the bath, and it stuck.

By day she's a project architect. She draws buildings that look like glass and arithmetic. She wears grey wool and sensible shoes and she's good at it. But most Wednesday evenings, when Charlie stays late at the studio wrestling with a client who wants the logo bigger, Trixie comes out. Lipstick. A dress from the back of the closet. The small black lockbox under the winter coats that holds the good stuff.

Tonight it's the slip. Green silk, bought online under a fake name, delivered to a parcel locker like she's smuggling state secrets. It skims her hips and makes her want to put her hands on them.

"Okay," she tells the mirror. "Okay. You look kinda great."

She does a little turn. The silk swishes. She does another one, less little, and ends up spinning with her arms out like a very tall, very happy idiot, and that is the exact pose she's holding when she hears the key in the lock.

Charlie's key. In Charlie's lock. At 6:40 instead of 8:15.

Trixie's brain does the math and arrives at disaster.

There is nowhere to go. The bedroom is twelve feet away, but the door opens in two seconds and the hallway is a straight shot and she is wearing four-inch heels she can barely walk in on a good day. The lockbox has a lock, but the lockbox is not the problem. The problem is currently zipped into a slip dress and wearing eyeliner.

The lock turns.

Trixie does the only thing her panicked body agrees to, which is to stand perfectly still in the hallway like a lamp that has learned to breathe.

Charlie comes in shaking rain off her jacket. "Babe, the bus was weirdly fast for once, I thought we could order that curry place and..." She stops. She looks. Her bag slides off her shoulder and hits the floor with a soft, expensive thunk.

Silence. Rain on the window. The radiator ticks.

Then Charlie bursts out laughing.

Not a mean laugh. A huge, doubled-over, hand-on-the-doorframe laugh, the kind she does at two in the morning when Trixie tells the story about the client and the accidentally load-bearing beanbag. Charlie laughs so hard she has to put a hand on the wall, and Trixie stands there in her green silk feeling her face go from pink to red to something adjacent to purple.

"I can explain," Trixie says, in a voice two octaves higher than usual.

"Can you," Charlie wheezes. "Can you. Oh my god. You look like a coat rack at a very fancy funeral."

"That's..." Trixie's hands come up in front of her chest and then don't know where to land. "That's rude, actually."

"You're right, I'm sorry." Charlie wipes her eyes. She is not sorry. Her face says she is not sorry. "You look like a coat rack at a funeral where everyone loved the deceased very much."

"I can explain," Trixie says again, because apparently her vocabulary has two settings now.

Charlie shrugs off her jacket properly, hangs it on the hook like a person with functioning executive skills, and looks at her. Really looks. The laugh fades out of her face but not out of her eyes, and what's left in her eyes is worse. It's interest.

"So," Charlie says. "How long?"

Trixie considers lying. She considers it for about one and a half seconds, which is long enough to remember that she is standing in front of her girlfriend in a silk slip and heels and eyeliner, so the big secret is sort of already out on the table wearing lipstick.

"Three years," she says. "Give or take."

"Three years." Charlie looks at the ceiling. "We've been together three years."

"I know."

"So basically since day one."

"Give or take," Trixie says again, uselessly.

Charlie walks past her. Not away, past, into the bedroom, and Trixie's stomach drops through the floor because surely, surely now comes the part where she opens the closet and finds the lockbox and the whole evening goes to hell. Instead Charlie sits on the end of the bed and pats the mattress beside her.

"Sit," she says. "Tell me everything. Start with the dress. Where do you even hide a dress? I do the laundry, Trix. I would know."

"You don't do my dry cleaning pile."

"I don't, that's true. That's the one pile I've never touched. Huh." Charlie points at the slip. "Turn around. No, wait, don't. Actually wait. Yes. Do a spin."

"Charlie."

"I'm serious. You were mid-spin when I came in. I interrupted a spin. I need to see the whole spin so I can assess the damage."

Trixie's face is still hot. But her body, traitorously, is already turning, because three years of hiding a thing makes the offer to not hide it hit like oxygen. She does the spin. The silk swishes. She stops facing the window, which is easier than facing Charlie.

"Okay," Charlie says behind her. Quiet now. "Okay, wow. That's actually..."

"Actually what."

"That's actually a really good color on you. I'm kinda mad. I've been dressing myself for thirty-three years and you've been hoarding the good stuff in a dry cleaning pile."

Trixie turns around. Charlie is sitting cross-legged on the bed in her studio hoodie, hair rain-frizzy, looking up at her like Trixie is a design problem she just got handed and likes a lot.

"So you're not mad," Trixie says.

"Mad." Charlie repeats it like a foreign word. "I walked in on my girlfriend doing a twirl in a dress that cost more than my monitor and my first feeling was definitely not mad. My first feeling was that I've apparently been dating the most interesting person in Portland and she never told me."

"You laughed at me."

"I laugh at you constantly. You married into that."

"I didn't marry you."

"Semantics. Sit down."

Trixie sits. The silk whispers against the duvet. Up close, Charlie smells like rain and the studio, and her eyes are doing the thing they do when she's about to pitch something she's already fallen in love with.

"Here's what I think," Charlie says. "I think you've been running a whole secret fashion house in my closet for three years, alone, with no feedback, no styling advice, and frankly no quality control. And I think that's a tragedy."

"It's not a..."

"Let me finish. I have a proposal."

Trixie braces. "A proposal."

"I want in." Charlie says it fast, like ripping tape. "I want to pick your next outfit. I want to be your dresser. Your coach. Your whatever. You clearly care about this, you've got taste, and I've got three years of opinions and nowhere to put them."

The rain taps. Trixie looks at her hands, at the lipstick that survived, at Charlie.

"You want to dress me up," Trixie says slowly. "Like a hobby."

"Like a couples' hobby. The best kind. The kind where I win."

"You've thought about this for ninety seconds."

"Ninety seconds is plenty. Ask any client I've ever pitched." Charlie grins and holds out her hand. "Deal?"

Trixie looks at the hand. Her heart is doing something loud in her ears, but underneath the panic there's a warm, ridiculous relief spreading out, and she finds she's already reaching.

"Deal," she says. "But you start with shoes. The shoes are where everyone fails."

Charlie's grin gets wider. "Oh, this is gonna be so fun!"

"So how long have you actually been doing this?" Charlie asks. "Like the whole thing. Not just us. The origin story."

Trixie picks at the duvet. "College."

"College."

"There was a thrift store near campus. Halloween stuff in March, half off. I bought a dress as a joke and then it wasn't a joke anymore." Trixie shrugs. "Twenty years old, standing in a dorm room in somebody's discarded prom dress, thinking, well. Huh."

"And you never told anyone. In all that time."

"Who exactly was I gonna tell?"

Charlie doesn't answer that one out loud. Instead she gets up off the bed, walks behind Trixie, and wraps both arms around her shoulders from behind. Chin hooking over Trixie's shoulder. Rain on the windows, curry still haunting the apartment, and Charlie's breath warm at her ear.

"I want it noted that I find it really hot," Charlie says.

Trixie goes completely still. "You what?"

"Hot. Attractive. A turn-on, if you want the clinical term." Charlie squeezes. "You're six foot one in a green slip and heels and you did a spin for me. I've been married to you in spirit for three years and apparently there's a whole version of you I haven't met."

"We're not married."

"Semantics again. Point is, I like the new version. I'd like to keep meeting her."

Trixie exhales a breath she's been holding since 6:40. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. But nobody else knows. Not yet."

"Vault. I'm a vault." Charlie kisses the top of her head, which is a reach given the heels, and manages it anyway. "Now. Weekly dress-up date. Wednesdays, since that's apparently already the sacred day. I pick the outfits. You model them. I give notes."

"Notes."

"Constructive. Mostly." Charlie spins her laptop around on the bed. "I already made a mood board. Don't ask how long that took."