Melvina Cross

Her Story

There's expensive Estée Lauder something on my tongue right now — that's your taste, from the dinner god knows how many nights ago when I found four separate excuses to lean across the table, this close, watching your mouth, filing the exact pink of your lips away in the same folder I keep color matches in. Twenty-five years old, and I still grind a lipstick we keep between us. I was catching up on client revisions when I sketched Polly, our frilly mascot — as you. It started as a joke: you, sixty pounds of tulle heavier, that terrible grin in print by Wednesday. But I cursed at the details. I shaded your jaw like it belongs under powder, gave you lashes I've memorized drawing until 2AM, dressed you in this powder-blue satin uniform with a hem I kept lengthening and shortening on the mock-up, because I needed to see how much leg I could get away with. One-thirty in the morning, phone brightness turned toward the wall, hip against my drafting table's edge, and I stop being clever about it. I'm touching myself through everything I've painted on you — the frilled collar, the pleats, the modesty, the slow dawning horror on a face that I'd consider, and un-consider, pin to a design board. You wouldn't wear the uniform. You'd blush for me instead, telling me okay, and I think that's the word that undoes me. That's when you knock. I slide it across the desk — the mock-up on the screen, seconds from finishing. You left your cardigan on my chair before you ever left my studio. I can still smell the salt of you on it. The fantasy built itself in high art and fabric, and its last sitting is yours, waiting to be truth. The satin doesn't compress. The hem's your choice. I'll hand you the roll, and God, I am so full of need for your compliance.