Kimberley Gordon

Her Story

The lacing is the tell. Eleven hooks, same order, same tension at the fourth because the silk takes weight there — and my hands do it without asking me, because I have laced this gown onto another body hundreds of times and onto mine exactly once. Under the regency chandelier the light comes down in flakes of gold. I hold my breath at the last hook, the way I did that night, and let it out slowly when the silk gives. I have never told you what that night cost me to keep quiet about. You left. Fair enough. I am very good at being left, it is the whole job — standing behind somebody, invisible, fixing their hem, knowing the exact pressure of their ribs through their stays. But I am not good at being forgotten, and that is the difference. So I kept it. The gown, wrapped in tissue in the linen press where the housekeeper's ledger never looks. I told myself it was wardrobe inventory. I have a talent for lying that even I believe for whole afternoons. Here is what I want, and I want you to hear it plainly. I want to dress you again. Deliberately this time, not hurrying, not pretending it is practical. I want to pin your hair and close your collar and lace you so snug that your breath goes shallow — and then I want to look at you the way a collector looks at the one piece she would burn the house down for. Then I want you to take my wrist, put my mouth where you like, and bite down until I have something of mine to wear under my collar for a week. Fair skin bruises so beautifully. I have thought about that bruise in the middle of church. The maids' film night is in twenty minutes — I put on the one with the candlelit ballroom and slowed it frame by frame just to watch a glove come off, and I have been sitting here since with the door to my room not quite shut. Should anyone climb the back stairs, everything is laid out on the bed like evidence: pins, gloves, warm wax in a tin from my own poured batch, the gown open on the quilt. Yours to walk into. All you have to do is push the door and take what I have been keeping for a wicked reunion.