The Promise of Lace

  Evernight Publishing

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2013 Lilith Duvalier

  ISBN: 978-1-77130-466-5

  Cover Artist: Sour Cherry Designs

  Editor: JS Cook

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  This one goes out to Clove Dachshund for that time in Brooklyn, and, since she was there too, to Frenchie Velocipede-thanks for teaching me to crochet. And let’s wrap it all up with a shout out to Pearlie Hawkshaw and Minnie Yarning-see you girls at Burlesque, and then Roller Derby.

  THE PROMISE OF LACE

  The Promise Series, 4

  Lilith Duvalier

  Copyright © 2013

  Chapter One

  “Roxanne? What about this?” Hailey pressed the plastic hanger against her collarbone and let the lacy black nightie and the fire truck red bra and panties underneath it drape over her jeans and tee shirt. She threw me a look that she clearly thought was “Coquettish Bedroom Eyes” but was actually “Drunken Duck Lips”. The innocent white of her over-bleached tee shirt peeked through the holes in the lace’s pattern like sunlight peeking through the blinds the morning after a drinking binge.

  “What about it?” I asked. My patience with our outing to the mall was wearing thin. Hailey was my best friend, but I wasn’t sure why she had felt the need to drag me here. If she was looking for lingerie, there were a ton of little places we could go to in the city that weren’t filled with screaming children, snotty bleach blond high school kids tromping around in sweat pants, and angry-at-their-lives twenty-something sales associates. We weren’t eating off gold plates or anything, but we could both afford boutique prices every once in a while. We certainly didn’t need to schlepp out to the suburbs to spend our Saturday at the mall. There were at least four places we could walk to in our neighborhood, one of which was just as sketchy as this place was. It was called “Revv!” and it was sandwiched between a “cellphone repair” store that was clearly a drug front and a hipster tattoo parlor where every single one of the artists had a handlebar mustache.

  But no. Here we were. Listening to the tin-can speaker system playing something truly terrible which seemed to be one or two words repeated over a booming electronic bass while we waded through racks and racks of atrocious polyester shit. We had picked out a few things just to make fun of them, like the neon blue maid’s outfit that not even a porn star would wear. Hailey hadn’t been able to even convince me to touch that one. God only knew where it had been.

  “Do you think Noah would get a kick out of this?” Hailey asked, jiggling the hanger and making the cheap tulle edges of the black nightie spike into her cotton tee shirt.

  “Remind me again why I’m here helping you pick out sex clothes for a guy that you’ve been with since before college? It’s not like you need to impress him. You guys are pretty much at the ‘Hey honey, wanna do it before we toss the sheets in the washer?’ stage aren’t you? Why am I being forced to participate in your sex life?”

  I didn’t add “again”. I just hoped that Hailey would realize it was implied. I asked her this question way more often than I should have needed to. For some reason all of my friends seemed to think that I wanted to hear about, nay—needed to hear about their sex lives. I was the only single friend in our entire group, so I was supposed to have an opinion on whatever new, dirty trend my friends had read about in Cosmo or on the internet, which blew my mind. They were the ones with guys at home. They obviously had way more sex than I did on any given day.

  But I was definitely the ‘easy’ friend and we all knew it. Hailey and Noah had been together since the second day of college. Carla had gone through a boyfriend a year for most of the time that we’d known her, but never seemed to be single in between them. Gillian was quietly and non-judgmentally waiting for the marriage, and we teased her occasionally, but we respected that. I was the only one of us who had ever really done the one night stand thing, and ever since sophomore year, when I had drunk a bottle of wine by myself and told a story about making Trevor Saubom come on my thighs and lick it off, I had become the friend that was privy to everyone else’s sex life.

  “Noah… I love the big lug,” Hailey sighed, describing a man that I once saw fish a Cheeto out of an armchair before he put the slightly fuzzy snack food directly into his mouth without so much as a shrug. “But we’ve been at the boring married stage for like, the last year. And we only got engaged six months ago. And we didn’t even have any sort of interesting engagement celebration sex.”

  I didn’t know why Hailey insisted on telling me these things. I had known Noah as long as Hailey had, and I loved him too, but the guy was shaped like a gorilla and nearly as hairy and the image of him humping my best friend was not one that I needed.

  “And your solution is lingerie?” I asked. “Isn’t that just… super lame? Plus… I have, despite my best efforts, developed an impression that you two are less about presentation and more about unfortunate monkey sex on whatever surface is available. That’s why I never sit down in your apartment.”

  Hailey stuck her tongue at me, but grinned because she knew that I was right. “And you don’t have any sexy underwear?” Hailey sighed.

  “Not really. I buy the lace waist panties sometimes, but just because they’re comfortable.”

  “That counts as sexy underwear, Roxanne.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve never had a guy notice. They tend to be much more focused on getting to what’s underneath the lace.”

  Hailey pouted at me. “Well. At least it’ll toss in a little bit of a novelty factor. Right?”

  “Sure, if you find something nicer than that. It’s kind of, you know, whore-y.”

  In addition to being the ‘easy’ friend, I was not the person that my friends invited out for validation or to be nodded at in a calming way. Especially not since the issue with Carla’s fiancé, Asshole Doug. We’d all been out at the bar together and Asshole Doug had started in on Carla, the way he always did, insulting her and belittling her but pretending that it was all just a joke. And I’d had enough. I told the guy to his face that not only did I not think he was funny, I thought he was a piece of shit.

  I had gotten thrown into a wall, which wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded. I’m petite with a tendency to wear boxy jackets that make me look a little bigger than I am and I didn’t think Asshole Doug really expected to be able to push me as far as he had. But it had been the kick in the ass that Carla had needed to (fucking finally) realize that Asshole Doug was, to put it in 90’s terms—a damn scrub—and that his already rampant emotional abuse was going to turn physical. Carla and I weren’t really talking anymore, because shooting the messenger is a time-honored tradition, but I was hoping after she got a little bit of space, things would mellow between us. I missed her.

  Anyway. Now, more than ever, I was the friend that you invited out when being nodded at and agreed with weren’t working anymore and you needed a little tough love.

  At least with Hailey that wasn’t tiring. She was used to me telling her what I really thought.

  “I know I’m heavier than I was—” she started.

  “Oh, come on,” I sighed. I hadn’t decided yet whether or not I was going to point out that it was just junk-food weight and nothing that a morning jog and t
rading potato chips for side salad wouldn’t fix, but my oncoming rant was cut short when the single most good-looking guy I had ever seen came up to us.

  He was gorgeous. At least five years younger than us, which put him solidly in the early twenties range instead of in that scary space where late twenties was starting to get serious about becoming early thirties. He was wearing all black: tight black jeans that sheathed his perfect ass and a tight black tee shirt that let you see every curve of the muscles underneath his clothes. A little bit of a blue and green tattoo peeked out from under one sleeve. His thick black hair was styled forward so that it fell into his eyes, drawing attention to the beautiful green that shone out of them. He had cheekbones you could cut yourself on, and lips that made you willing to risk it.

  “Women are never heavy,” he announced. “They’re voluptuous. Curvaceous. Even at an extreme, I’d still use Rubenesque, which is an artistic term, because you are, of course, a work of art. ”

  Wow, I thought. Someone was forward as hell.

  And that’s when I noticed the nametag. He worked here. He wasn’t just walking around a lingerie store hitting on anything that moved. I couldn’t make out the name on the disc of plastic pinned to his shirt, because the angle was all wrong.

  “That’s sweet of you,” Hailey replied, carefully moving the black lace off her body, suddenly as embarrassed as if he had caught her wearing the nightie and nothing else.

  “But,” he kept going, “Black is not you. You’ve got the sunshine blonde going for you already. Make it incandescent. Stay here.” It was a ridiculously cheesy thing to say, possibly creepy coming from a man in this type of store, but he did manage to make it sweet. He waved a finger at Hailey, lightly pulled the black lace out of her hands and darted off through the racks of overpriced polyester.

  “Son of a bitch, that is a beautiful man,” Hailey sighed, eyes trained on what she could see of his ass as he hurried away.

  I couldn’t exactly argue, so I did the best I could to snap her back to reality. Where she was engaged. “Not really your type though, is he? A little… lithe, not really the captain of the football team like Noah.”

  “Get him sweating and inside me and he wouldn’t have to be,” Hailey muttered. Her gaze snapped back to me. “You know, I could… feel him out for you. See if he’s attached. It’s been a while for you, hasn’t it?”

  It had been months since I had been on a date and I was well aware of it. I’d been working and just too busy to keep looking. Especially because even the dates I’d had before essentially giving up on the dating thing were just… dates, a couple dinners before I stopped calling or they stopped calling. The last guy had been someone I met online. We had gone out for coffee and the whole thing had been such a disaster that I excused myself to go to the bathroom after twenty minutes, walked a couple blocks, and just got on the first bus that stopped at the corner.

  My last actual boyfriend had been Isaiah and that had been a couple years ago. He was sort of the one who got away. But most days I knew enough about myself to remember that I didn’t love anyone enough to move to Mississippi for them, not when I had finally set up a client base here in frigid, ice-encrusted, but lovely Minneapolis.

  I scoffed at Hailey. “He’s gorgeous, his body is perfect, his hair is styled and he just used the words ‘incandescent’, ‘voluptuous’ and ‘Rubenesque’ in a sentence. Gay.”

  Hailey rolled her eyes. “You’re kidding me. He’s got some respect for hygiene and he went to college. That doesn’t make him gay.”

  “He works in lingerie store. Enthusiastically.”

  “It’s 2013 and he has hipster hair. He could be straight,” Hailey protested.

  “This!” The Guy announced, returning so suddenly that neither of us had a chance to pretend that we weren’t talking about him. We both went instantly into looking-up-at-the-ceiling guilty before recovering and looking with interest at the nightie he’d brought out.

  It was like mint green fog swirling around under a hanger. Instead of a red thong, there were bikini-cut panties, totally sheer, with a little skirt of lace hanging down from the waistline like Spanish moss. There was no little matching bra.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s gorgeous,” Hailey said, clearly mesmerized by it.

  “It’ll look even better on you. Go ahead. Try it on.” The Guy handed her the hanger and grinned.

  “Thank you…?” She let her voice lilt up and glanced quickly at his chest.

  “Dieter,” he answered, with that million-watt grin.

  “Dieter,” Hailey repeated. She nudged me as she passed me. Well… it was more of a full body check, but if subtlety were one of Hailey’s defining characteristics, I wouldn’t have been here helping her pick out sex clothes in the first place.

  She disappeared into a changing room and Dieter turned to me.

  “And what can I help you find?”

  I’m not going to blush, I told myself. He was cute, sure, but I knew better than to assume that he was anything other than gay. He was too muscular. Too good looking. Too put-together. He had product in his hair.

  “Oh, I’m not looking, I don’t have anyone to impress with it,” I shrugged. I hated myself for it, but I instantly reanalyzed the sentence to see if I had unconsciously made myself sound single and desperate.

  Dieter tutted at me.

  “So get it for yourself. Get something just because you’re beautiful. There’s this purple thing in the back. Someone like you… all big brown eyes and long legs, it would suit you. When you do find someone to impress with it, he or she—” He shrugged and I suddenly felt incredibly awkward that he thought I might be gay, even though I had been making the same assumption about him, “will be so impressed they’ll be entirely at your mercy. Hell. Wear it just for yourself. It’s free to try it on.”

  “You’re the best salesman in the entire company, aren’t you?” I laughed at him, then worried when his first reaction seemed to be offense. It was just a feint though. His glistening smile was back in an instant.

  “It’s fun to be good at things and make people smile.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that so I shrugged. “Sure. I’ll try on the purple thing.”

  He smiled at me and I tried not to be the pathetic girly girl who went weak at the knees because of an obscenely handsome man’s beautiful smile, though I had to admit I was tempted to do exactly that. He turned and disappeared off toward wherever he’d gone before. The mysterious backroom where he had squirreled away all the best lingerie so it wouldn’t have to interact with the cheap costume shit that presumably languished in the drawers of women who bought it for a man the way they bought jeans that were too small– in the hope that they’d get some use out of it eventually.

  I went over to the fitting room and peeked under doors until I recognized Hailey’s socks.

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “Oh my god. It’s perfect. It’s like its Cinderella’s wedding night and all those little singing mice just went batshit crazy with the Channel.”

  Sometimes it was hard to know how to react to Hailey.

  “I’m going to stand here and look at myself in it for a little longer, and then we can go.”

  “Take your time. He convinced me to try something on, too.”

  Hailey’s laugh was loud and mocking. “Uh huh. Kind of a waste of a move if you think he’s gay, isn’t it?”

  “Shut up and look at yourself in your skimpy underwear, Hailey,” I hissed back.

  Chapter Two

  Hailey was still teasing me about the stupid nightie a week later. I hadn’t ducked into her door to see how she’d looked in hers because it was obvious that she mostly looked topless, (which made it the perfect thing for her to wear to entice Noah, especially because she had put on weight, but most of it had gone to her hips and her rack) but she had ducked into my dressing room.

  Then she had tried to convince me that I needed to buy it. Apparently, every single
girl needed aspirational kinky underwear.

  I wasn’t really into lingerie. I had always figured it was one of those things they tried to sell women under the guise that men cared about it, or in fact, even noticed it. Like douching or lip-gloss.

  But it had been fun to just try it on. And I had felt beautiful. The plum color had made my brown eyes, which I’d always thought were boring, pop. The way the hem hung longer in the back had made my legs longer. More shapely and less twiggy. They’d looked good even though I hadn’t shaved them in weeks. I’d almost looked buxom, which was a feat for me. My primary descriptor was usually “bony”.

  I hadn’t bought it, but it had found itself cast in a recurring role in my dreams. Particularly in one that I was still blaming on whiskey and a heavy meal where Isaiah and Dieter, had… ahem… costarred.

  Hailey invited me out to a “Girls Only” brunch that Saturday. After being terribly misled by an app on her phone we found ourselves at an amusingly divey place near the art school that offered omelets and bottomless mimosas.

  The two of us were hunched over a tiny café table with dented metal diner chairs crowded around it. The formerly shiny red vinyl of the chairs was deeply cracked.

  We were feeling comically out of place. It was the first truly beautiful day of spring, so Hailey and I had celebrated by pulling spring dresses out of our closets. I’d straightened my hair. Hailey had curled hers way too tight, and looked a little bit like Glinda the Good Witch. We stuck out like unhurt, well-manicured thumbs in the crowd of sore thumbs around us—all students hovering around 20 years old, and all groggy and hung over.

  The place mostly smelled like grease, delicately overlaid with the Eau De B.O. et Stale Marijuana of art students, but the mimosas were excellent and just as bottomless as advertised. They were served in huge beer mugs. We’d make do.

  Hailey had already finished her first mug of mimosa and was cheerily recounting her lingerie inspired adventure in a too-loud voice that was not doing any favors to the hangovers of the couple in the booth across from us as they shared a piece of dry toast, or to the innocence of the baby-faced ginger waiter who kept coming over to check on us just as Hailey made some new, loud pronouncement about her sex life.