The Sommelier's Dress

Vic and I had been together two years when the dry spell hit, and it didn't hit like a storm. It hit like weather. Slow, gray, the kind you stop mentioning to each other because mentioning it makes it worse.

I'm Ophelia. I'm twenty-eight, I do graphic design for a midsize print shop, and I have spent most of this year trying not to take my boyfriend's distance personally.

Vic is twenty-nine. He's a sommelier at a restaurant across town, which means he tastes wine for a living and reads people almost as well. That second part is what made the last few months so strange. He could tell a customer was having a bad day from the way they sat down. Meanwhile I could sit down across from him at our own kitchen table and feel like a stranger with a good parking spot.

We still loved each other. I never doubted that. We just kept orbiting each other without landing. Work, dishes, his late shifts, my deadlines. Some nights we'd fall asleep mid-conversation like two people on a phone call who didn't want to hang up first. The sex had gone from regular to rare to this thing we both pretended wasn't a thing, and the pretending was somehow more tiring than the not-doing-it.

I had a theory about it, though. I'd had it for a while, sitting on it like an egg.

Here it is, stated plainly, because it matters to everything that follows: I thought my boyfriend wanted to wear a dress. Not wanted me to wear one. Wanted to.

I'd noticed it in small ways over the years and never once said it out loud, because you don't just say a thing like that to a cautious man. The way he'd linger when we passed a boutique window with a slinky green number in it, then walk faster. The time he asked me, out of nowhere, what it felt like to wear silk, and I answered like an idiot about temperature and we moved on. The way he held my slipper one evening while I was still in it, turning it over like it was a wine glass he was evaluating. Vic never did anything without evaluating.

So Tuesday night, I brought the bag.

The Last Call is our bar. It's been ours since we met, which happened at a dinner party two years ago when a mutual friend seated us next to each other and Vic spent twenty minutes explaining why I was pairing the wrong wine with the lasagna, and I spent twenty minutes not minding. The bar itself is a small city place with worn leather stools, a jukebox that mostly plays old soul, and one back corner booth where the light comes through a shade someone stained on purpose so it lands soft. We've sat in that booth maybe two hundred times.

Deborah has owned it for ten years. She's forty-five, warm in a way that doesn't leak into nosiness, and she has watched us go from new couple to settled couple to whatever we are now. Jonas sits at the bar most nights. He's fifty-two, retired from teaching high school history, and he has been drinking whiskey there for five years with the devotion other men reserve for sports teams.

We settled in at the booth around eight. Vic had the tired shoulder slump he gets after a double shift. I had the bag in my tote, and my heart was doing a moderate amount of work, which I kept telling to settle down.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm scheming."

"That word worries me." He smiled anyway, and it was the first real smile I'd seen from him in days, which told me how starved we both were.

I ordered us our usual. He talked a little about a Riesling he'd tasted that afternoon that he said tasted like a lie, which is a Vic sentence. I let him wind down. Then, when the jukebox kicked into something slow and we had the corner to ourselves, I slid the bag across the table.

It was a small bag. Matte black tissue paper sticking out the top. It made a soft sound against the wood.

"What's this," he said, and it wasn't really a question, and his hand stopped on it anyway.

"I brought you something."

"For me." He looked at the bag, then at me, then back at the bag. "It's not my birthday."

"I know what day it is."

"Ophelia."

"Open it," I said. "Or don't. It's actually both of those. Open it or don't, and I mean it either way."

I want to be careful here about how I said it, because I'd rehearsed it all day and the rehearsal was important. I was not setting a trap. I was not issuing a challenge. I was a woman handing her boyfriend a gift with no clock on it, and I needed him to feel that. So I kept my voice level and I took a sip of my drink like a person with all the patience in the world, which I don't have, generally, ask anyone.

He opened it.

The tissue came apart and there it was. A dress. Deep green silk, the kind that shifts color when it moves, knee length, cut simple, long sleeves with a small button cuff. I'd bought it two weeks ago on a lunch break and then hidden it in my desk drawer at work like contraband, which felt stupid and also correct.

Vic went very still. I watched his face do four things in about three seconds. Surprise. Recognition. Something that looked like fear. And underneath the fear, unmistakably, want. That last one was the one I'd been betting on for a year.

"Where did you," he started.

"There's a shop on Carver Street. They do this cut in a lot of sizes." I'd guessed his size weeks ago from his jackets, and I was right, and I didn't tell him any of that yet because it would have sounded like surveillance, even though it was.

He looked up at me. His pulse was going in his throat, I could see it. "You're asking me to..."

"I'm not asking anything," I said. "I'm offering. There's a difference. If you tell me I read this wrong, we will never speak of it again and I'll wear it to my cousin's wedding and look incredible, and that's a true promise."

He sat with that. The bar hummed around us. The jukebox moved on to something with a horn section. I could feel the whole moment being balanced on his answer, and I made myself not lean forward, because leaning forward is pressure and I had sworn no pressure.

"How long have you known," he said finally. Quiet.

"Known what, exactly? Say it so we're talking about the same thing."

He looked at the dress again. His thumb moved over the silk like it was a stemware rim. "That I think about it," he said. "That I think about it more than I've ever told anybody."

"Two years, give or take," I said. "Since the slipper thing. Before that maybe, in pieces."

He laughed, once, a startled sound, and put a hand over his eyes. "God. The slipper thing!"

"The slipper thing was a whole speech, Vic."

Deborah caught my eye from behind the bar and gave me a small nod, which I chose to read as the bar itself being on my side. Jonas raised his glass toward us in a lazy, half-interested toast, the way he does every twenty minutes whether anyone is looking or not. He had no idea what was on our table. He would have toasted it too. Jonas is not a curious man, which is one of his best qualities.