Lily was the perfect moral support. Kind and funny, she distracted me or made me laugh every time I started getting overwhelmed. In a few hours, I’d amassed a collection of shopping bags I wasn’t sure we could carry back to the car, much less fit in Alice’s small trunk. Somehow, we managed.
Our last stop was a small boutique tucked into an upscale shopping center in Buckhead on the way back to the Sinclair Security building. I walked through the door on autopilot and stopped as soon as I saw the filmy bits of lace and satin filling the racks of the store. Lingerie. I’d forgotten I’d meant to buy lingerie. Sometime in the last few hours, my recklessness had begun to wear off.
I followed Lily and Alice through the store, listening as they joked about how long the men would let them wear the filmy bits of nothing before tearing them off. My cheeks burned at the thought. I couldn’t even pretend sophistication here.
I bought my underwear from the big-box store off the highway, usually in bulk packages. One bra for seventy-five dollars? Did it come with an extra set of boobs? I couldn’t even comment on the matching scrap of lace for almost fifty. Fifty dollars and it wouldn’t come close to covering my butt.
Okay, I knew I was missing the point of lingerie versus underwear, but still. I didn’t belong here. Not even with my new haircut and pretty makeup. I didn’t know what to do with any of this.
I stood in front of a floor-length midnight-blue nightgown fingering the soft silk and delicate lace. I wanted it. It was soft and beautiful and I wanted it. Not because it was sexy—maybe there was too much fabric for it to be sexy.
I didn’t know what Griffen found sexy. I didn’t know what any man found sexy. I had no business wearing sexy clothes. Not me. Not Hope.
All of the confidence I’d gained from the makeover drained away. I stood there listening to my new friends laugh and wondered what the heck I thought I was doing.
Was I going to seduce Griffen? Why?
So he could break my heart and leave me later when my usefulness had run out?
I was temporary. A stop-gap measure with a five-year expiration date.
The day so far had been about me, and I was glad we’d done it. I loved my new hair and the piles of new clothes. But this? Sexy underwear would only lead to heartbreak.
“You okay?” I looked down to see Lily standing beside me.
“Yeah. Just, uh, tired, I guess.”
Lily didn’t buy it, but she let me off the hook for the moment. Flipping through the nightgowns I’d been looking at, she found one in my size and took it off the rack. “You should try this on. While you’re in the back you can get fitted for new bras. This place is pricey, but everything is great quality.”
I let her lead me to the back of the store, passively standing there as the saleswoman stretched a measuring tape around me and pronounced my bra size—not the size I’d been wearing all these years, by the way—and told me to pick out some fun things while she put together a selection of bras to choose from.
I followed Alice and Lily to a wall in the back covered in camisoles, bustiers, bras, and panties so brief I wondered why they bothered to exist. They didn’t cover anything. And I mean anything.
Alice pinned me with that incisive stare I’d grown familiar with. “Spill it. What are you stressing about? Is it the lingerie? Is it Griffen and the lingerie? Because you don’t need to buy anything for him, you know. That’s the big secret. Men think this stuff is for them, but really, it’s for us.”
“Well, sometimes it’s for them,” Lily said with a secret smile.
“Sometimes,” Alice agreed. “But not today. Today it’s about Hope. We can worry about Griffen later.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing with him,” I heard myself say in a whisper. “I can’t control myself when he… I haven’t ever… I don’t…” I forced myself to choke out the words now that I’d begun. “We’re married. And we haven’t had sex yet.” The last words came out in a rush of breath. “Every time he touches me it’s like my brain shuts off and I just—I can’t breathe and I can’t think and I… I want. I don’t even know what I want. I don’t know what to do about it and it’s scaring me to death.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, too embarrassed to look at either of them. I bet neither of them were virgins. I mean, I knew neither of them were virgins. They were both happily—and actively—married. But I bet neither of them had been virgins when they’d met their men either. Or for long after adolescence.