A Dress to Die For (3 page)

“You knew you were going to have your way,” she said from under the towel.

He rubbed her hair briskly. “Yep.”

“Because I can’t disappoint Ruby, and I want to do my own thing. And yeah, I know I’m going to end up working with you anyway. But you should have slept with me
after
you made the offer to back us. Doing it the way you did was wrong.”

He snapped the towel away and looked at her. “If I’d offered you backing first, I never would’ve gotten you into bed. Never. I know you at least that well.”

She couldn’t get her eyes off him. The admission was so bald, so coldly vulnerable that she couldn’t believe he’d made it. Yet, he didn’t seem uncomfortable with the confession, only slightly bemused at her frozen stare.

“Yes, I’m a manipulative asshole. If you’re bothered by what I’d do to be with you, you can go. I’d like you to stay.”

“I’m bothered.”

“Enough to walk out?”

“Do you think you can talk me into forgetting it?”

“No.” He’d put his arms around her waist. “Of all the women who didn’t deserve that, you’re at the top of the list. But you’re the only one worth the trouble.”

She looked up at him and wanted to kiss him so badly, despite everything he said. Her judgment was extremely poor when it came to him. “Even if I forgive you, you’re still down credits with me.”

“I understand. So before I drag you into bed again, I need to tell you the hundred other reasons you should walk out. Are you ready?”

“Do you want to kiss me first?”

“No. I need those credits.” He put his arm around her and led her to a kitchen counter bar that faced into the loft. Barstools with red leather lined the living room side.

She sat, and he set about making coffee.

“Do you take milk in this? You always change.”

“Black’s fine.”

He put two cups on the counter and slid onto the stool next to her. “Okay, so. Ah...” He took her face in his hands and brushed her lips with his thumb, as if to draw her refusal out sooner rather than later. But the touch only made her want to kiss him more. “You know I have this thing. It’s genetic, so you can’t get it, and I can’t get rid of it.”

“Okay, stop. There’s this thing called the Internet.”

“So you know all about cystic fibrosis.”

“You can live a long time.”

He sipped his coffee. “Sure, and I intend to. But I’ll be sick sometimes, and I have to maintain a routine.” He slid a chrome box from a hiding spot in the corner and popped it open. He looked inside, then at her. “This is very attractive. Drives the girls crazy.” He pulled out a clear plastic container with pill-filled compartments. “Morning, right here. Night, right here. Three kinds of antibiotics.” He fished around inside the chrome box and came out with a tube that had an opening at the bottom. “This is DNase, a nebulizer that breaks down the mucus in my lungs. The CF makes it very sticky, and if I leave it, I can’t breathe. Without this, it’s really hard to open my lungs, and I lose capacity, get infections, all kinds of fun stuff. One day, I’ll suffocate on my own fluids.” He shook the chrome box. “The rest are vitamins. Twice a day, I have to do physical therapy to clear my lungs. That means I spit out a gut-load of mucus, which you will never see if I have my way, which I will. And I must,
must
exercise, or I feel crappy. Twice a year in the hospital for infections and… what else?” He looked away as if his mind had really gone blank on something super important.

“You can’t have children,” she said.

“That.”

“Okay, I don’t think we have to solve that right this very minute.”

He nodded and pushed away his coffee. “I’m going to stop being controlling for thirty seconds. That’s how long you have to walk out, and I won’t hold it against you. We can do our business arrangement any way you like. After thirty seconds, I go back to having everything my way.”

“Wait. I have demands.”

“Speak.”

“One, you are not my boss. I’ll work with you because I love working with you, but if this is a boss-employee thing, we’re over before we start.”

“I always said work
with
me. But it’s my company.”

“How thin are you going to slice that?”

“Can we try it before we dismiss it?”

“Fine. Two. And this is long. A week ago, while you were doing your show, I was behind the tents catching Thomasina Wente’s killer, which by the way, I’m very proud of. But meanwhile, her brother, Rolf, had gotten three girls into the country by saying they worked for Sartorial. They’re getting deported unless I can give them a job. But Sartorial doesn’t have the cash flow to do that.”

“So I’m employing them?”

“
We
are.”

He thought for a second, then said, “I reserve the right to fire anyone who steals from me or stabs me in the back. And they need to pull their weight, whatever they’re doing.”

“Agreed. Third. Are you ready? Because this is the most important.”

“Okay.”

“Third, all my jokes are funny.”

He laughed and put his arms around her. His smile was different from the ones he gave in the office, taking up his whole face. “Do you want your thirty seconds back?” he asked, but he was kissing her, so it was hard to remember what the deal with the thirty seconds had been at all.

“Do you? You know what I’m going to say.” She was engulfed in the salty smell of his skin, a smell she’d fallen in love with when they met and a symptom of his disease.

“Yes. I know what you’re going to say. Here’s how it’s going to be. What I have, it’s ugly. It’s messy. I’m going to protect you from it. You’ll see as little of it as possible. You’ll have the best of me.”

“You have an unbelievably huge ego.”

He laughed again but didn’t deny it. “I just need to talk you out of being with me one more time.”

“This is really turning me on.”

“I just wanted you. It was all I could think about. You weren’t with that Stu character, and I was backing you in two days. I panicked. Usually, I think things through a little better. This week, something occurred to me.” His face expressed a genuine sadness and regret, and even as she slid away from him to sit back on the stool, she couldn’t help but slip her hand into his.

He squeezed it and continued. “If you’re working with me, and I’m backing you, and we’re sleeping together, I think, as two people, you and me, it’ll be fantastic. But for the rest of the world… well, you’re going to get shredded.”

“By whom?”

“The media, for one. Gracie worked them like children. They adored her. So you have her, my last backer and lover, murdered six months ago. And now you’re partnering with me, and I’m backing you, and you’re my lover.” He shook his head. “I don’t know the solution. Because I’m not willing to decide which to give up.”

“So you want me to choose? Which is the exact reason for this whole conversation?”

“
We
have to choose. Something has to go.”

Then, at that moment, she realized she’d been given everything she ever wanted, nearly unconditionally, and that she was happy. Yes, she’d groused endlessly all week about his deceit and manipulation, but she’d only been manipulated into taking everything she wanted because she would have been too staunch to accept it all for herself. “What if we don’t tell anyone? About us, I mean,” she suggested.

He arched one eyebrow. “You haven’t told Ruby yet?”

“Well, yes, Ruby knows, and yes, I know she has a big fat mouth, but let’s keep it under wraps, generally. Like just a little close to the vest. And they’ll find out, but in the time it takes for that to happen, maybe they’ll take me seriously as a designer.”

He contemplated her hand in his. “You’re giving me everything, but you’re a lousy liar, and they’re going to find out. I don’t think you realize what it’ll be like.”

“Let me be ignorant and happy then. Please.”

He put his hands on her cheeks. “Happy, I can try, but your ignorance won’t last.”

**

Jeremy ran at least five miles every day. When she’d been his patternmaker and they met at seven-thirty every morning for coffee, he woke up at five-thirty, did his physio and medication routine, ran, showered, bought coffee, and sat with her, talking about the business as if it were a badly behaved mutual friend.

Once they were together and his loft became their almost nightly meeting place, another routine took its place. He got up before her and did his physio routine to clear his airways. Though he tried to shield her from it, the sounds coming from the second bathroom were disturbing, loud, and guttural. If it was a workday, which was usually, she left while he was on his run and met him in the office. If they decided to take a weekend day off or go in late, she lounged around the loft and waited for him, while making breakfast, flipping through a book, or napping. She wasn’t good at biding time, so sometimes she answered emails or had a conference call with their people in Hong Kong, because even though she officially didn’t work on Jeremy’s import stuff, Sartorial was expanding, and she needed to learn that side of the business.

The morning after the Brunico Saffron Gown had been discovered with a drooping cuff button, Laura, wearing only a shirt, was sprawled on the rug, sketching for Sartorial Sandwich. Jeremy came in coated with sweat and coughing. He had newspapers tucked under his arm, real paper, made from trees. While everyone else checked the news on the Internet, Jeremy still read the paper.

He coughed a lot after his runs. “You’re killing me,” he said between hacks. “You know what happens when you don’t put clothes on.”

“I get cold,” she muttered, even though it wasn’t true. The ventilation system kept the temperature at a solid seventy-six degrees no matter what the season. What made her grumble were the twisted-up figures in her sketchbook. She couldn’t draw. She could drape and sew, but a pencil and paper weren’t her friends. She wound up with stick figures in clothes that didn’t at all represent what she wanted to make with little patterns next to them, which she understood. Ruby, however, was like most people and couldn’t infer what something looked like from a mini-pattern, and Ruby was the one she had to sell the ideas to.

“I have to go.” He pointed to the back bathroom, where he did his physio, and held up a finger. “Stay here,” his twice-daily admonition to keep away so she wouldn’t hear him.

“Your vanity’s going to kill you one of these days,” she said, but he was already in the bathroom, door closed and locked.

She pulled the open paper close. The third page displayed a picture of Philomena of Brunico, alive, well, and in the saffron dress, posed to within an inch of her life. The headline read, “Stolen.” In the corner, Jeremy and Barry looked thrilled to be there.

Jeremy returned from the bathroom twenty minutes later, showered, shaved, teeth brushed, breathing easier, and looking like a god in jeans and a T-shirt.

She held up the paper. “Oh, look. According to the New York
Post
, it’s your fault for not cross-checking provenance.”

“Bernard Nestor’s taking a beating. The insurance company’s threatening not to bond his next show.”

“You need to read the
Times
.” She handed him the paper, revealing what had been under it.

He pointed at her spastic sketches. “What the hell is that?”

“Leave me alone. You know I can’t draw.” She threw down her pencil and rolled onto her back. “Come down here.”

But he didn’t, which was unexpected. Instead, he went to his little office in the corner.

She heard him rummaging around and sat up. “What are you doing?”

He came out with an armful of magazines and dropped them on the floor in front of her.

She checked the covers. “These are, like, from the nineties.”

He tossed a handful of Sharpies on the rug and lay down next to her. “Okay. Here’s what you do. You find a pose that shows the parts of the body you want to see.” He peered at her sketchbook and pointed at one of her little patterns. “For this one, you’re going to want to see the armhole, so...” He found a picture with a model who had her arm up and wore a gauzy, bangly dress that looked plain dumb and outdated. He uncapped a Sharpie with his teeth and drew on the page, his hand deftly putting dark-black lines around the body, ignoring the old dress. He talked around the cap in his mouth, which he’d jammed into the left corner like a toothpick. “Your problem is you’re trying to get the body right so you can get the clothes right, but you just don’t have the coordination. And your croquis are the wrong pose entirely. So you need a body done already so you can just visually drape the pattern onto it.”

“It’s perfect,” she said as he filled in the last of the lines. He could draw circles around just about anyone. “Let me try.”

She found a pose and pattern to match. He watched as she drew a long skirt with a bustle and a little vest on the magazine picture of a woman in jeans and a tube top, filling in where she needed to shade and exaggerating the bustle.

“It’s not as good as yours,” she said.

“Your collection is beautiful.” He gathered her in his arms. “I don’t tell you that enough. Sartorial is the line I wish I could be doing.”

She didn’t know what to say. Creatively, he kept himself so far removed from Sartorial Sandwich that she had no idea how he felt about it at all. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He unbuttoned her shirt. “Now. It’s Monday in China. So I scheduled a conference call with Walter about the new label package. It’s in an hour. You in?”

“Of course.”

“But first, this shirt is all wrong.”

“I hate what you’re wearing, too,” she said, reaching for him. “But Ruby told me I shouldn’t say this after or during—”

“You love me.”

Laura felt cheated and somehow as if the risk she was about to take had been appropriated without any pressure for reciprocity on his part. “No, you love me.”

“And I trust you, which took longer.”

“How long?”

“You saw me in the hospital room, the day after you got beat up. When you were looking for Gracie’s killer. And I told you.”

“About the cystic fibrosis?”

“Yes. You were the only person I’d told in years, and I did it on impulse. When you walked out, I had a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe. I thought they were going to have to intubate me.” He smiled as if that was the silliest idea he’d ever had. “And for months after, I thought, ‘How is she not going to tell Ruby?’ I waited for the lid to blow on the whole thing. But it didn’t happen. I thought maybe Ruby was tighter-lipped than I imagined. And the reporter. He terrifies me. I beat myself up over telling you. So one night, I was in the showroom, and I heard Ruby and Thomasina giggling behind that ridiculous partition wall. And I guess I was coughing, because all of a sudden, Ruby calls out, ‘Jeremy, could you go to the doctor, please? Bronchitis has been curable for, like, a zillion years.’ And I knew then. You didn’t tell.”