by Xavier Mayne
“No self-respecting woman can come to Paris and not do a little shopping,” she said. “I could tell you were getting bored with the art thing, so let’s mix it up a bit.” She pulled a small folded map out of her purse and unfurled it, taking her bearings from the street signs on the corner. “This way,” she pointed, then turned 180 degrees and headed off the other direction.
“Do you have any idea where you’re going?” he asked, following her lead.
“Of course I do. According to this map, the main shopping district is just a couple of blocks over this way.”
“What are you shopping for?”
She stopped in midstride and looked at him. “Well, that’s a guy question. People don’t shop for things. ‘To shop,’ I’ll have you know, is an intransitive verb. It requires no object. It is complete in itself.”
“Oh, goody.”
“If you aren’t careful, you’re going to have your gay card revoked with an attitude like that.”
He shook his head. She had no idea the kind of card he was carrying.
She ducked into the first shop they came to, which offered a wide range of—to Brandt’s eye at least—identical dresses. But Kerry seemed determined to look at all of them.
Every. Single. One.
“What do you think?” she asked, over and over again, holding one of the dresses up to herself and turning to him.
“Nice,” he said, over and over again, varying the word until he’d run through his mental thesaurus and started over again, back at “Nice.”
“Well you’re being no help at all,” she finally blurted. “I’m going to have to try these on. Here.” She handed him several dresses on hangers. “Let’s go.” She strode purposefully over to the fitting room and swept the door wide open. She stood aside expectantly. “Well, come on.”
“In there?” he asked, aghast.
“Yes, in here.” She rolled her eyes. “You have to help me choose.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Move it, mister!” She pointed authoritatively into the fitting room.
As he entered the small room, holding a pile of dresses, he wondered how he had managed to descend from hell into something worse. He dropped that line of thought when she dropped the dress she’d been wearing and stepped out of the puddle it made at her feet.
She stood before him in her bra and panties, holding out her hand for the first dress.
He couldn’t move.
Brandt had never had what he would consider a long-term relationship before Donnelly came into his life. He’d been too busy finishing college in three years and blasting his way through the police academy to have much time for more than a date once in a while, mostly when his brothers bugged him about the monk-like life he was leading. He didn’t consciously avoid dating, but between the intensity of his studies and his dedication to duty, he met a limited number of eligible women—and the ones he did date tended to be those who introduced themselves after a spin class when he tugged the cuffs of his T-shirt down over his biceps. Though most turned out to be far more interested in his body than his mind, the main advantage these women brought was that he didn’t have to go looking for them. The main drawback was that there was nothing for them to say once their limited pool of conversation topics (kale, hot yoga) had been exhausted.
So he had little experience with smart, funny, thoroughly good women, especially the kind who stood before him in simple but sexy underthings—sexy not because of their design or fabric but because of the confidence with which she wore them—and asked him to hand her a dress.
He blinked hard and handed her the dress on the top of the stack draped over his arm. She smiled, took it from him, and stepped into it. After she pulled it up, loosely arranging it on her shoulders, and swept her golden hair to one side, she turned her back to him. He had no idea what to do.
She looked up and met his gaze in the mirror. “Zip me up?” she prompted, as if he should have known what he was there for.
“Oh yeah, sorry,” he blurted, then spent the next agonizing thirty seconds trying to make his fingers work. He finally got the zipper pulled up, up to the base of her skull, where the fine hairs softly brushed his hand….
He stepped back, dropping his free hand to his side.
She flipped her hair, and it somehow flowed back into perfect, glamorous order. She turned to him, eyes bright. “Well?” she asked, putting a hand on one hip.
“You’re… beautiful,” he said softly.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, thanks for the compliment, buddy, but what about the dress?” She turned to look into the mirror. “Is it the right color? What about this neckline?” She turned side to side. “Now that I see it on, I’m starting to think that this pattern is a little last-year. I have a sinking feeling that all anyone’s going to think is Anne Hathaway at the Tony awards. Remember that amazing thing she wore, the one with the flowers and all the stuff around…?” She wiggled her fingers around the neckline, eyebrows up, as if he surely must know what she was talking about.
He shook his head helplessly. “I think it looks amazing on you. Anne Hathaway never even occurred to me.” This was the truth.
“Oh, you,” she scolded. She turned and swept her hair out of the way again. “Here, undo me and I’ll try the others. And if you tell me they all look amazing on me, I am totally firing you.” She smiled into the mirror and laughed as he fumbled with the zipper.
The next four dresses all looked amazing to him, though they all reminded her of some celebrity he should have immediately thought of as well. It was exhausting.
The fifth dress seemed to catch her fancy, as she kept it on longer than the previous four and did some additional turn-and-looks in the mirror.
“No, seriously,” she said, dismissing his initial evaluation of “looks nice,” and tucking up the corner of her mouth as she studied her reflection, “what about the way this one fits up top?” She tugged at the sides of the bodice, frowning. “I love the fullness of the skirt, but I’m afraid it leaves the girls on their own.” She ran her hands under her breasts, pulling the fabric taut. “Although, a dart at each side might take care of that….” She chewed her lip and studied the effect from several angles.
“Yeah, that could do it,” he said, hoping what she said was something she would want him to agree with.
“I know what’s wrong,” she blurted, clapping her hands in a eureka dance. “It’s the bra. It’s never going to work with this bra.” She stepped over to where he was trying to disappear into the corner of the fitting room and turned her back to him, hair pulled aside.
This he was ready for. He knew his role well enough at this point to unzip her.
She shucked the dress down off her shoulders, then unhooked her bra and tossed it onto the chair over which she had draped the rejected dresses.
This he was not ready for.
She pulled her hair to the side again, and Brandt was greatly relieved that the dress was back in place before he caught sight of her braless reflection.
She stood before the mirror, considering again. “Hmm. What do you think? Better?”
He tried hard not to think about her breasts, free and full, brushing against the fabric of the dress as she casually stepped side to side. He tried hard not to think about how he was getting hard.
“Much—” His voice failed him, and he had to clear his throat and start again. “Much better.”
“Do you think I can pull it off at my advanced age? Not getting too saggy?”
“Your breasts are beautiful,” he said, shocked at the husky note in his voice.
She glanced at him in the mirror, eyes bright. “You’re such a sweetheart.” She studied herself more, then nodded. “This is the one,” she said definitively.
Brandt glimpsed his exit from hell.
“Now, unzip me, and then we can go find you something.” She presented her pale, shapely neck one last time, and he unzipped the final dress. She carefully lowered it and stepped out o
f it, then turned to hand it to him.
She stood before him, wearing only panties and the bright smile of the successful shopper. Time stopped for Brandt.
He had seen her breasts from the side, he had seen them silhouetted in the dim midnight of their hotel room. He had not seen them in their full splendor, in the thorough lighting of an elegantly appointed fitting room.
He was fourteen again.
Breasts are, to the adolescent boy, the most powerful things in the world. They are everywhere visible, but nowhere exposed. The very possibility of seeing bare breasts—in person—would inspire most teenage boys to crawl across broken glass, to make any imaginable deal with the devil. They are his constant thought and his goal in life, his dream and his reason for being.
Brandt at fourteen had been outwardly more mature than his peers, but he was no less intoxicated by the idea, the outline, the potential heft and wiggle of breasts. And all of that adolescent yearning came crashing back into his chest, bringing with it the embarrassed flush he could see rising in his cheek, the tightness he could feel continuing to grow in his pants.
He had forgotten about breasts. He remembered now.
She reached for her bra, humming happily as she celebrated her shopping victory. He hoped she would turn away from him as she put it on, but she seemed to have forgotten he was in the room. He busied himself with gathering up the reject dresses, arranging them with a consuming diligence so he wouldn’t have to look anywhere else. Mercifully, by the time he had exhausted every distraction at hand she had finished dressing and was picking up her purse, tucking a stray ringlet behind her ear.
“Good to go,” she said, smiling.
He smiled back, but all he could see were her breasts. He bowed and motioned for her to precede him, mainly so they would stop pointing their perky nipples at him accusingly. They knew his secret.
Get a grip, Brandt.
She made her purchase, and he handed off his armful of dresses to a whippet-thin young man who reminded him of Nestor, particularly with his eyes fixed on the front of Brandt’s jeans, still awkwardly tightened by the semiboner caused by those breasts. That he was being ogled by a man because of the erection caused by a woman made his head spin; he couldn’t help but smile in surrender to the sheer insane irony of it all.
“Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Kerry said as they stepped out onto the sidewalk. “I was starting to worry about you in there, looking overwhelmed by a half-dozen little dresses.”
“I’m out of practice, I guess,” he replied as they walked. “I like the simplicity of things like jeans. I only have to know two numbers, waist and inseam, and I can just grab the color I want. Don’t even have to try them on.”
“And they end up looking like that,” she said, falling back a half step and glancing down at his ass. “Lucky bastard.”
“Lucky? Because I don’t have to shop? I thought you loved shopping ‘as an end in itself.’”
“I do. I meant Gabriel’s the lucky one.” She winked at him and laughed that damn musical laugh of hers.
“I’ll be sure to remind him of that.”
She suddenly stopped walking. “Now, here’s the place for you,” she announced, looking into a shop window.
Brandt stood beside her and looked in as well. The display held three mannequins, arranged as if they had just stepped off the catwalk at a runway show for a designer whose main style note was “skintight.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Brandt demurred. “My style is more… well….”
“Butch?” she suggested, her voice laced with irony.
“Sure. Let’s call it that.” He looked desperately up and down the boulevard for another store, and luckily spied one two doors down that seemed to specialize in things like hats and shoes. “How about there?” he asked, pointing.
She smiled knowingly. “Shoes, right? I knew we had a lot in common. Let’s go.” She marched smartly off toward the men’s furnishings shop, swinging her parcel gaily as she went.
Brandt followed, practicing his deep breathing as he walked slowly and calmly behind.
Once in the store, Kerry was in frantic motion, picking up shoes, exclaiming over them, and putting them down once the next one caught her eye. Brandt made a beeline to the scarf-and-leather-goods section, thinking to find Gabriel something cashmere, or perhaps a wallet or something. Anything that would keep him out of the fitting room.
“I found it!” Kerry called suddenly. She was holding aloft a colorful moccasin-style shoe, which also—for reasons Brandt could not fathom—boasted sections of black patent leather.
He grimaced. “It looks like something a clown would wear to a funeral.”
She burst out laughing, surprising Brandt and utterly terrifying the shop employee who had been hovering near her. “I know! I just had to see what you’d think of it—you guys are always so quick with the snappy judgment.” She was still laughing and shaking her head as she set the gaudy shoe back in place. “Clown funeral, oh my God.”
You guys.
He knew exactly what she meant. She hadn’t meant to offend him, he knew that as well. But he couldn’t pretend to be her gay best friend and shopping companion much longer.
“I like this,” he said, holding up a scarf made of three different layers of soft cashmere fabric in cool, slaty tones of blue and gray. What he really meant was that Donnelly would like this.
Wait. He really would like this, Brandt knew. He’d never known such a thing before, at least not with this certainty. When he told Kerry that he was terrible at picking out gifts, he wasn’t kidding—he’d always dreaded having to guess what Donnelly would like and usually ended up getting something that he was sure would end up in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. Not that Donnelly would ever let on that it wasn’t just exactly what he’d been hoping for, of course, but Brandt was never confident in what he chose.
Until now. This scarf, he knew—he just knew—was perfect.
“I’ll take this,” he said to the clerk, who had retreated behind the counter to be a safe distance from Kerry and her shoe-related outbursts.
“Oui, monsieur,” he replied, taking it from Brandt. “Est-ce un cadeau?”
Brandt looked helplessly at him, and then at Kerry.
“Oui,” she answered on his behalf, and the clerk pulled out a box and began wrapping the scarf in tissue. “I’m assuming this is penance to Gabriel for experiencing Paris without him?”
“Oui,” Brandt replied. “How did you know?” Though the fact that it was mostly for experiencing a boob-induced boner in Paris, he didn’t say.
She winked at him. “We know men, don’t we?”
“Indeed we do.” It’s women I can’t figure out.
The clerk took Brandt’s card and soon handed it back, along with a small shopping bag containing the scarf, neatly wrapped in a box with a tidy bow.
“Thank you,” Brandt said, grateful to have made a purchase that did not require a trip to the fitting room.
They walked a little farther down the boulevard, then caught sight, between two buildings, of the river. They exchanged a quick nod and soon were strolling along a tree-lined riverbank, laughing at squirrels and squinting in the bright sunlight. For a moment, Brandt forgot about the anxieties and general panic he’d been experiencing for the last twenty-four hours.
“How about we head back,” Kerry suggested, “and get a little nap before we go looking for an amazing place to have dinner?”
A nap. In bed.
Shit.
“You know, I may grab something to read.” Nodding toward a newsstand at the next corner. “I have a hard time sleeping during the day.”
“I’m beginning to think you have a hard time sleeping in general,” she said. “It’s like you’re always ‘on.’ I know you’re stressed about this whole situation, but it might help if you relaxed a little.” Her tone was helpful, not critical, and she looked genuinely concerned.
“I’m trying, I really am,” he said.
“This whole thing has been such a mess. But since Gabriel often has to give me the same pep talk, I should probably reflect more on my general stress level, shouldn’t I?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “As a sort of medical professional, I prescribe rest. Let’s go crash for a bit—I promise you’ll feel better.”
He smiled and agreed, though he knew full well it was only going to get worse.
Back at the hotel room, Kerry immediately put her new dress on—again, sans bra—and looked at it from every possible angle in every possible mirror. “Do you really like it?” she asked as she studied it in the mirror.
Brandt knew from watching his younger sister discover fashion that this was an integral part of the shopping experience—the postgame critical commentary and second-thoughts session. Even though he suspected that Kerry was still quite pleased with the dress, he knew he must indulge her in this moment of pretend doubt. He perched on the edge of the bed and tried to be supportive.
“It’s lovely, and you look amazing in it. You’ll have them falling at your feet when you wear it.”
She looked deeply pleased. “I certainly hope so, given what I paid for it.” She turned to view the back in the mirror. “Maybe I should wear it tonight to dinner, see how it performs?”
Brandt held up his hands. “You do not want to get that dress anywhere near me and a bottle of wine,” he warned. “Nothing good will come of that, given my general clumsiness.”
She turned to look at him, her face far more serious than he expected. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Run yourself down that way. You’re clumsy. You don’t know anything about fashion. You didn’t make it to New York in time.” She leaned against the armoire and looked at him hard. “When I look at you, I see a genuinely good man with a charming personality and a body that was sculpted by the angels themselves.” She studied him for a moment, then stepped aside so he had an unobstructed view into the mirror behind her. “What do you see?”
He looked at his reflection for a long moment, something he rarely—never, really—did. What did he see? He saw a man alone. Even in this city, even with Kerry right here next to him, watching him right now, he was utterly alone. No one knew the struggle inside him, no one except Donnelly, and even he could only listen to Brandt’s anguished utterances and say loving, reassuring things—he didn’t really understand what it was like. Donnelly had gone from thinking he was straight to knowing he was gay, and he’d never looked back. Brandt, however, had gone from knowing he was straight to thinking he was gay, and though he never for a moment doubted his love for Donnelly, he had come to realize that he was not, and would never be, gay. At least not in the way that Donnelly—and, heaven forbid—Bryce and Nestor were. He was something in between, or perhaps he was nothing. Like no one ever. Brandt didn’t know anything but that he was alone.