Eden
I take Nat to a dress shop we’ve only joked about visiting before.
It’s situated close to the high-flying, Hollywood-Hills houses, the types of houses where women with more cash than sense can do whatever the hell they want. Nat and I have driven past this dress shop many times, smiled at each other, and laughed.
“When our game is a hit, we’ll be able to buy all the dresses we want,” Nat jokes as we pass.
“Oh, yeah, I agree. “We’ll be able to buy the entire store.”
But we both know that’s foolishness. It’s too expensive.
Or perhaps not, I think, the cash pressing against my thigh in my jeans pocket.
“Where are we going?” Nat asks, as my car chugs through LA. The sun is high, and the sky is blue. Attractive, plastic-surgery-laden women walk tiny groomed dogs, in heels, talking on cell phones. They scowl at my old beat-up Ford as we pass.
“It’s a surprise,” I say.
“Oh.” She pauses, and then bursts out with, “I can’t believe our game is working. A friend of the biker’s, you said? But he won’t tell you who it is? We need to find out who it is. If we did, we could easily add the new features before the deadline. You’d finish your dissertation in time. Hey, we might even get money from a big studio to work on a larger project. You never know.”
“Hmm,” I reply, dancing away from the question. “I don’t want to bring on a stranger.”
“We’ve brought on artists, voice actors—”
“Contractors, but a coder? Someone who’s actually tampering with the game? I don’t know, maybe, but what if he didn’t share our ideas? What if he caused problems? I’d rather keep the game as is—”
“Without the sub-level, and the boss at the end?”
“Yep,” I said.
“But we’ve already paid for the voice and art,” Nat mutters. “Wouldn’t that be a waste?”
I sigh, turning a corner. “I suppose it would,” I agree. “But still, it’s better than having some friend of a biker tampering with it. But I’ll think about it, okay?”
Nat shrugs and turns back to the road. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going yet?”
“I need to buy a dress,” I say.
“Oh!” Suddenly she brightens up. “For the party Mr. Maddox has invited you to?”
A smile twitches the corner of my lips against my will. Thinking of Maddox brings confusion, but it also brings a warm lust and happiness. What the hell came over me in his office? I ask myself, for perhaps the twelfth time. I went wild, that’s what happened. I’ve never gone wild like that before, not with any other man. I was just so ecstatic from the game working, and then I looked at his handsome face, his strong body, and I needed it. Needed it, like I never have before. My pussy still aches from it, but it’s a soothing, content ache: a two-day, a that-was-awesome ache.
“Yes, for the party.”
“Fine, fair enough,” Eden says, her chirpy voice uncertain, “but around here? There’s only one dress shop I know around… No! Eden!” She taps the dashboard with her fingernails. “What the heck?”
I pull out the front of the dress shop. It sits on a long, thin street beside a jewelry store, which probably holds enough goods to buy twenty mansions. The front of the jewelry store glitters in the morning sunlight, reflecting the light of its wares into the street. The dress store is closed off to the world; red curtains are pulled across the windows, making it look like somewhere secret, somewhere elite. The open sign on the door is tiny, giving the impression that you have to know this store before entering. As though you have to be friends with the person who owns it.
I climb out of the car, and Nat turns to me, mouth opening into an O. “Are you serious?” she gasps. “Here? How are you going to afford that? I hate to remind you, Eden, but you’re a grad student. I didn’t realize you had money coming out of the wazoo.” Her nose crinkles and she squints at me, and then she nods. “Ah,” she says.
“Ah?” I ask, leaning on the roof of the car. “What’s ah?”
She grins. “I think I’ve figured it out. Maddox is paying for the dress, isn’t he?”
I’m about to lie, but then I stop myself. Nat is my friend, and I don’t lie to her. Still, the desire to lie is there, and it’s curious. It takes me a second to pinpoint the reason. Of course. I don’t want Nat to think I’m the sort of woman who can be bought with a dress. But is that because I know I’m not, or I fear that I might be?
“Yes, he is,” I say, watching for her reaction.
Nat just giggles, as she often does, and then gestures toward the shop. “You should go in first,” she says. “You know, just in case they have any traps to stop the masses coming in. What if they have salary detectors and a trapdoor opens on the floor if you’re not rich enough? What if they have dogs?”
“You are a strange lady, Natalie. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Many people, yes. Too many, in fact. I’m starting to wonder if they’re right.”
“They absolutely are,” I say. “Now, shall we?”
Together we walk toward the dress shop, famed across LA for its fashion and its prices. I know it’s where some of the red-carpet debutantes buy their dresses, where some of the reality-TV stars shop. Buy the nicest dress you can find. A dress that highlights your figure. Maddox’s words replay in my mind.
My annoying inner voice mutters, Are you really going to play dress up for a man? You, Eden Chase, a feminist and a gender theory student, are going to play dress up for a man!
I ignore the voice, and in a moment I’m pushing open the door. A bell rings – much like the bell that signaled Maddox’s entrance into my life – and a stick-thin, plastic-faced lady emerges from the back.
***
The woman wears a tight black jacket, a shirt open at the collar, and tight suit pants, with heels so high it’s a wonder she can walk on them. Six inches at least. She’s so tall she even looks down on me, and I’ve always thought I was tall. In her hand, she holds a clipboard, and a pen is slotted behind her ear. Her hair is pitch-black and bound up in an intricate cone pattern. She walks out from a red-curtained room at the back and into the greater shop, which is less glamorous than I expected: just a series of racks and dresses set within a golden-wallpapered room.
“Can I help you?” she says, looking from me to Nat, from Nat to me, as though we are aliens. If her face was not so plastic, I’m sure she’d be frowning. The only indication that she’s discomforted is the way she taps her clipboard and a minute tic of her eyes.
“I’m here to buy a dress,” I say, looking the woman straight in the eye.
The woman tilts her head. “Um…” She looks at Nat so intently that Nat shifts back and forth on the balls of her feet. “This is a very expensive store,” she offers. “Maybe you’ve come in by mistake?”
“Now why would you say that?” I snap, anger blooming in my chest. “That’s a tad presumptuous.”
“I mean no offense,” the woman says. “It’s just that… Well, you don’t look like our usual clientele.”
“If it helps, I can leave and return with a little handbag poodle,” I say.
Nat hides a snigger behind her hand.
The woman looks me up and down: at my faded jeans, my old black boots, and then up to my loose tank top and strappy bra. Then she looks at Nat, who’s dressed in a simple off-white dress, with little images of dogs at the hem. She lets out a sigh between Botox-inflated lips. “The cheapest dress is seven-hundred dollars,” she says.
I reach into my pocket and take out the wad of bills, a wad so large that the rubber band that holds it in place is frayed and almost snapped. I toss it from one hand to the other. “That won’t be a problem,” I say. “Now, can we browse, or is there some special etiquette I don’t know about?”
The woman’s demeanor changes in a second. One second her nose is raised, and her eyes peer down the length of it at me. The next she drops her gaze, relaxes her body, and looks at me eye-level. “Oh, of course you can browse,” she says. “And if you need anything, I am here to help.”
“Fantastic!” Nat cries, dancing to the closest rack.
Fantastic, I think, following her. It’s amazing the difference a wad of cash can make.
***
“I wish I were going to this party,” Nat laments as we go up and down the aisles. The dresses, I have to admit, are beautiful. I’m not usually a dress-wearing kind of girl – a loose summer dress, or a casual skirt, maybe – but never a full-on party dress. But as I run my hands across the fabrics, the sparkling beads and elegant cuts, I feel like a little girl.
“I bet it’ll be boring,” I say. “Just a bunch of bikers running around drinking whiskey and starting fights. By the end of the night, I’ll have a black eye. I’ll probably wake up in hospital.”
Nat pouts at me. “Yeah right,” she says. “It’s at a billionaire’s mansion, you said. I bet it’s going to be amazing. I can’t believe it. Really, I can’t. No offense, but you meet a biker—what, three days ago? You meet a biker, and he takes you on a ride and now you’re going to a party many people would kill to be invited to. How does that happen?”
“I have no idea,” I answer, honestly. “I really don’t.”
“You must have more feminine charm than you think,” Nat says, smiling faintly. “All this time, you’ve thought of yourself as a tomboy—”
“I don’t think I ever did,” I interrupt.
“Really?” Nat shrugs. “I thought you did.”
“Oh.”
Maybe she’s right, I reflect. Never wanting to play the girly girl, never wanting to be a lady. In public, anyway. But in secret? What do you dream of, Eden? Do you dream of being a strong woman, or do you dream of being a submissive lover? Do you dream of being arm candy? Do you dream of being spoilt because of your looks?
I stop at the end of one of the racks. A dress; red and sparkly, cut short on the leg, but cut high on the chest (the chest-or-leg rule should be followed as often as possible, after all), leaps out at me. It’s the same shade of red as my hair, and I have some red shoes, which would go nicely with it. Maddox wanted me to buy a dress that highlighted my figure. Well, I have no hourglass figure. My legs really are the only part of my ‘figure’. I take the dress of the rack, find the label, and look down at the price.
Despite the fact that the ghoulish plastic woman is watching us, I gasp. One thousand and two hundred dollars!
Nat stands on her tiptoes and peers over my shoulder, looking down at the dress. “It’s lovely,” she says. “You should try it on.”
In a few minutes, I’m standing in the changing room, looking at myself in the mirror. The dress hugs tight to my body, the top going all the way up to my neck and the bottom cutting short on my thigh. It’s elegant and sexy, showing just enough flesh to provoke the imagination without being slutty. But you don’t think about things like that, eh, Eden?
I push that notion from my mind and take off the dress, change back into my regular clothes. Then I carry it to the counter, remove the rubber band from the bills, and slide the money across to the money. She counts it, opens the register, and slides the bills in.
“It’s beautiful,” Nat says, and her chirpy voice is sad and low. “Really beautiful.”
The woman hands me the dress in a fancy patterned bag. “What a lovely purchase!” she cries, her lips barely moving, a ventriloquist’s lips.
When I take the bag from her, I’m struck from nowhere by Maddox’s confidence. He just threw money at me and told me to buy a dress, and I did it. It annoys me. I clench my fist around the handle of the bag, standing still where I am for a moment.
“Aren’t we going?” Nat asks.
Just go and buy a dress. Something nice. Do it, woman—and I did! Ah, he’s so infuriating! So cocky!
“No,” I say. “No, not yet. I have some cash left, Nat. Why don’t we find you a dress?”
I turn to her, and her face lights up at my words. “Are you serious?” she pants.
“Yeah? Why not?”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure!” I exclaim.
Nat claps her hands together and then prances down the aisle.
No change for you, you arrogant prick. No change for you, you cocky asshole. No change for you, you sexy smug bastard.
As I stand at the counter, watching Nat, I try to imagine what it must be like to be her. Filled with childish enthusiasm. Never seeming to worry about who she is. Never giving it a second thought.