The Dress That Broke the Exes

I want to start by saying I wasn't even supposed to be drinking that night, which is relevant, because everything after this happened on club soda and spite alone. My cousin Dani got married on a warm Saturday in September, at one of those banquet halls out in the suburbs that used to be a golf clubhouse, the kind with carpet that eats your heels and fairy lights strung up like the place is auditioning for a catalog. I'm Lois, I'm 34, I manage HR for a logistics company, and I had been at that reception for about two hours when the whole mess started.

The open bar had a line, so I was nursing a club soda with lime, standing off to the side of the dance floor and watching people I'd known my whole life do the cupid shuffle. Dani looked happy. Her new husband looked terrified in the way grooms do when the toasts are still coming. I was in a navy dress I'd bought for a work conference and repurposed, because I'd forgotten the wedding was the same weekend as a work event and I refuse to buy things twice. It was a fine dress. Sensible. It had pockets.

Standing there, I made the mistake of thinking about Monty, which I hadn't done in a while, or at least not on purpose. We dated for six months when I was 31 and he was 32, and it ended badly, the kind of badly where you block someone and then unblock them a year later just to check they're still awful. He was a freelance photographer. Very casual. Very "the world is my studio, man." The whole relationship had a low hum of him being disappointed in me for owning a blazer. I remember one specific fight, in his apartment, when he told me my power suits looked like armor for a woman who was afraid to be perceived. I told him at least my clothes were ironed. We both said worse after that. There was a thrown takeout container involved. Good times.

The point is, I was mid-memory, feeling smug about having grown past all that, when a voice at my shoulder said, "Very funeral-appropriate. You plan that, or is it instinct?"

I didn't even have to turn around. My spine knew that voice. Monty Steiner, 35 now, still doing photography, still wearing linen like it owed him money. I turned anyway because I refuse to let an ex talk to my back.

"Monty." I looked him up and down, slow, the way you appraise a used car you already know is a lemon. "You showed up to a wedding in wrinkled linen. Again. I see some things never recovered from the breakup."

"It's breathable," he said, sipping something with a mint sprig in it, because of course. "Not everything has to be structured, Lois. Some of us dress for the weather."

"Some of us dress for jobs."

"Ouch." He grinned, and I hated that the grin still worked on me, that it hit some old switch in my chest I'd thought I'd thrown away with the rest of his stuff. "Still corporate. Still pressed. Still Lois."

That last part had a weight to it I didn't appreciate. Around us, the dance floor kept churning, aunties and groomsmen and one uncle doing a genuinely alarming split, and a few people near the bar had started glancing over. Two of the bridesmaids, including Dani's sister Pam, were flat-out staring. I could feel them doing it, the way you feel a draft.

"Look," Monty said, leaning in a little, close enough that I caught his cologne, something woodsy he'd worn the whole time we were together and which I had aggressively not missed. "We're ruining the ambiance. There's a coat-check annex back there, dead quiet. Let's settle this somewhere private before your bridal fan club calls security."

Every sensible part of me said go back to your club soda. I was angry, and I was curious, and in my experience those two things together have never once led me anywhere good, but I set down my glass anyway. "Fine. Lead the way. Try not to get lost without a mood board."

The annex was off the main ballroom, past the coat check itself, which was unstaffed at that point since everyone had already claimed their wraps. There was a little storage room behind it, door ajar, dim light from a single bulb. Monty held the door with a little bow, insufferable, and I walked past him into a room that smelled like cedar and dust. Racks of linens, stacks of folded chairs, and a long rolling rail with garment bags on it, spare bridesmaid dresses probably, in case of emergency spills or a maid of honor meltdown.

He shut the door mostly closed, leaving it cracked for plausible deniability, and turned to me with that photographer's look, the one where he frames you before he speaks. "So. Say what you came to say."

"I didn't come to say anything. You ambushed me at a bar."

"I complimented your dress."

"You insulted my dress and called it a compliment, which is your whole personality in one move." I crossed my arms. "Why are you even here? You don't know Dani."

"Her husband's cousin hires me for shoots sometimes. Small world." He shrugged, drifting along the garment rail like he owned it, fingers walking across the plastic. "You know what's funny? Three years and the first thing I notice is still that you dress like every room is a deposition."

"Careful."

"I'm just asking a question. It's an honest question." He turned, one hand still on the rail. "Have you ever, in your adult life, worn something that wasn't designed for a board meeting? Something with, I don't know, joy in it? Because when we were together I never once saw it, and I've always wondered if it exists."

And look. I know what he was doing. He was poking the bear because poking the bear was our whole relationship, foreplay for people who argue about fabric. I knew it and it worked anyway, because my mouth was moving before my brain filed the paperwork.

"I dare you," I said, "to say that to my face while I'm wearing something of yours. Let's see how brave you are when I'm not in my armor."

I meant a jacket. I meant grab his wrinkled linen monstrosity, throw it over my dress, dare him to laugh. That was the plan, the entire plan, a two-second bit. But then my hands went to the side zip of my navy dress instead, and Monty went very still, and some switchboard in my head lit up with the message that I had just escalated this past the point of jokes.

Neither of us stopped it.

I stepped out of the dress, kicked it aside, and stood there in my strapless bra and the nude heels I'd worn because Dani said no flats at the ceremony. The room was warm, and the dim bulb buzzed, and Monty's face had done something I'd never seen it do in six months of dating and three years of resenting: it had gone honest. No grin. Just him, staring.

"Lois."

"Shut up," I said, and reached for the nearest garment bag. Lavender, what the tag called lilac mist, a chiffon bridesmaid dress with a silky lining that slid cool over my fingers when I pulled the zipper. I stepped into it and dragged it up my body, and the fabric did that thing chiffon does, whispering along my skin, catching at my hips, settling soft against my stomach and chest. The lining was that slippery satin stuff, and every small movement made it shift against me, and I will admit to a moment of pure vanity where I understood why people wear this on purpose.