Page 18 of Honey Cut
I blink and look down at the two tailors kneeling at the base of the pedestal, murmuring in worried tones over a portion of the hem. The director of sales stands behind them with a sharp line between his brows and his knuckle pressed to his mouth while my wedding planner is pacing behind me, her phone pressed to her ear, dealing with some sort of errant catering situation.
“It’s a beautiful dress,” offers my best friend, Bryn Flores-King, from behind me. I give her a small smile in the mirror. She’s taken a long lunch from the Wall Street firm she’s interning with, and so she’s in her office clothes: a crisp emerald pantsuit with black pointed Louboutins. Her dark hair is in a loose braid over her shoulder, and her camisole drapes just below her collarbone, exposing the bronze arch of her throat.
I kissed that throat once. On a dare at a party I’d attended in high school, one of the few times I’d paused studying and training long enough to do something for fun. We didn’t kiss on the lips or anywhere else, but she had given a surprisedohwhen I’d sucked on the skin just under her jaw.
I remembered pulling back with hot cheeks and a restless swirl in my hips.
It won’t matter when I’m a nun, I’d told myself about that swirl, about the way my mouth had watered for more.
But now I won’t be a nun, now everything about sex and sin has changed, and I have to wonder if I’d believed different things about sin, about whom my mouth was allowed to water for when I was younger, what could have happened? Not even necessarily between me and Bryn, but between me and anyone? Would I still be wearing a wedding dress now, readying myself to marry a former killer who got off on people crawling to him? Would I still be restless at night, knowing his tortured bodyguard was just on the other side of the wall, hard and aching for me?
Maybe not.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and I’ve come to see that my mouth waters for everyone—and just as well, if I’m called to be Esther and Ruth and Rahab all at once.
But it’s hard not to wonder about what could have been different. About whatcouldbedifferent.
“So sorry about this hem,” one of the tailors offers from below me. “It’s a bit too long, and the lace scallops might catch on the floor when you walk. Unfortunately, it’s hard to fix without taking the bottom half of the dress apart.”
“What if she wore taller shoes?” asks a voice from the doorway of the fitting area.
Shock fills the space—the director of sales steps forward—Bryn stands—but I stay still, not turning and instead meeting Mark’s dark-blue eyes in the mirror.
It’s unthinkably taboo for the groom to be here at a wedding dress fitting, but Mark himself is unthinkably taboo. He probably walks under every ladder he sees and breaks mirrors on purpose.
I hold up a hand when I see our wedding planner walking toward him. “It’s okay,” I say. Both she and Bryn still look ready to escort Mark right out the door, no matter that he has nearly a hundred pounds of muscle on them and an employment history involving duct tape and tarps.
Mark for his part seems indifferent to their reactions; his eyes are only on mine in the mirror’s reflection. He’s dressed as sharply as ever—immaculate suit, large wristwatch. His hair doesn’t have a single strand out of place, and it makes the once-broken nose and white scar along his hairline look even more dangerous.
He’s carrying a pair of shoes in his hand.
I’m not shallow. I’ve grown up in a bower of wealth, I spend every day handling antiquities with incalculable value now, and I’m jaded by it all. When I look at myself in my princess clothes, my tailored dresses and heels and understated jewelry, I seeIsolde Laurence, not myself. Myself, I only see in oil-slicked puddles, in the reflection of my knife in the dark.
But I can’t look away from the shoes Mark’s brought me.
They’re a blue so delicate that they’re almost silver—the London sky on a cold winter’s day. Slender vines wrought in gold twist over the vamp and along the sides, and they crawl up the gold stiletto heel to open into leaves and blossoms. I recognize the furled petals and seeking stamens immediately.
“Honeysuckle,” I say. I find his gaze to see that he’s staring at my dress. At the custom Chantilly lace that I commissioned.
“Honeysuckle,” he says, looking at the pattern tatted into the lace. And then he meets my eyes.
“I heard it was good luck,” I say.
The corner of his mouth curls the smallest amount. “Now who would say a superstitious thing like that? May I?”
I nod, and the tailors move out of the way as he approaches the pedestal. Bryn stays standing and is giving me an apologetic look. I realize why when he says, “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion, but I asked your maid of honor if you had anything blue yet, and she said no. I commissioned these as a wedding gift, but then it occurred to me that you’d need to make sure the dress was tailored correctly for them.”
As he’s talking, he’s kneeling in front of me, as smoothly as anything, his suit trousers pulling tight across his thighs and the toe box of an expensive Italian shoe rubbing carelessly against the floor. I see that the sole is scuffed badly, with small rocks embedded in the leather, a small detail utterly at odds with the rest of his careful appearance.
I’m not studying the sole of his shoe very long because Mark is lifting the hem of my dress, and the sight of it—him on a knee, his eyes on where he’s pushing up my dress—I could be a Victorian for how abruptly erotic it feels. But I don’t feel powerful, oh no, even though I should as his long fingers find my ankle and draw my foot forward. He’s the one kneeling, the one flexing my heel just so to work the white-satin pump I’d planned on wearing off my foot.
But when he looks up at me, I somehow feel dizzyingly small, lost in the midnight abyss of his stare.
His hands are expert and unhesitating as he replaces my shoe with the honeysuckle heel, and I am nothing more than a blown petal in his palm when his eyes drop to my foot, now clad in this thing he had made expressly for me.
He runs his tongue across his top incisors. Like I’m a delicacy being prepared for a banquet where he’s the only guest.
He does the same with my other foot, replaces the shoe I’m wearing with the matching honeysuckle heel, and soon they are both clad in silk and gold, the honeysuckle vines looking like they’re twisting their way up from the ground to snare my feet. Under the hem of my wedding gown, under the layers of silk and lace pouring over his wrists, his thumbs trace matching paths up from the vamps of the shoes to my ankles, where his fingers make small circles. He squeezes, once, briefly, and then lets go.
