Page 38 of His Good Girl

“So am I. That man probably notices tailoring.”

“I have no tailoring.”

“You have me.”

This turned out to be both a promise and a threat.

We left the wine bar at 4:30 with one basket of fries defeated, my nerves alive and shrieking, and Jules in full campaign mode. She refused to let me go home alone because, in her words, I would ‘dress like a tax deduction and ruin the tension.’ We stopped at her apartment first, which was only four blocks from mine but somehow existed in an entirely different emotional climate. Jules’s place was chaotic in an intentional way, all velvet pillows, stacks of art books, half-burned candles, and a clothing rack in the bedroom that contained more black garments than a Victorian mourning household, with a touch of nightlife, of course.

She made me stand in the middle of her room while she threw options at me.

“No,” she said before I had even touched the first dress.

“You picked it.”

“And I have grown.”

The second dress was green and too tight.

“I can’t breathe.”

“Breathing is for lunch interviews.”

“No.”

The third was black and elegant and so low-cut I stared at myself in the mirror in genuine alarm.

“I look like I’m going to seduce a widowed duke.”

“Is that not the assignment?”

“No.”

“Fine, but we’re keeping the duke option for later.”

“I hate that there’s a later in that sentence.”

“There is always later.”

An hour later, we had created a small textile graveyard across her bed. I had tried on five dresses, three blouses, one skirt, and a pair of trousers Jules called ‘celibacy pants’ with such venom that I removed them out of respect for their service. We finally settled on a navy wrap dress of hers that hit just below my knees and made me look like I had made an effort without declaring war. It had long sleeves, a soft waist tie, and a neckline that was mostly modest unless I moved exactly wrong, which Jules described as ‘plausible deniability.’

“I don’t want to look like I’m trying to be sexy.” I offered my weak protest.

“You don’t. You look like you have complicated boundaries.”

“That is not a category.”

“It is now.”

I sat on the edge of her bed while she knelt in front of her open shoe rack, muttering to herself like a general surveying terrain. My phone rested beside me, silent now, which somehow made it louder. Seven o’clock moved toward me with impossible speed. Every few minutes, my stomach flipped, not unpleasantly, which was the problem. I wanted the dinner. I wanted to see him outside the office. I wanted to hear him say my name again. I wanted to find out whether the warmth from the morning had been real or just the temporary glow of being rescued from myown stupidity. And underneath all of that, more troublingly, I wanted to know whether he had felt it too.

Jules glanced up from the shoes. “You’re doing the face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you try to talk yourself out of wanting something by making it sound legally complex.”

“It is legally complex.”