R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

“Who’d be my date?” I grunted, as I lugged Dorian over the final step.

“Me,” she said.

“What about Dorian?”

She tossed a limp-wristed hand in the air. “Both of you would be my date,” she yawned. “That’d be the double part.”

Dorian’s bedroom was pitch-black, but I still knew it like my own. With a final effort I heaved my charge facedown onto the middle of his four-poster bed. He fell with a cushioned thud, and I crumbled like a demolished building onto his fifteen-hundred-count sheets, just as Madeline’s forehead cracked conclusively against the bedpost and she bewilderedly mumbled something about Dorian’s piano.

I ANSWERED THE PHONE. “RÉGINE.”

“Edmund needs a reservation.” I failed to recognize the voice amid a hectic background of New York traffic.

“Er, sure,” I replied, reaching for a notepad as a distant car alarm filled in my ear. “I’m sorry, who’s calling?”

“It’s me,” he said, and I realized with horror that I was on the line with Edmund Benneton, who had inexplicably referred to himself in the third person. From my end, a sharp intake of breath; I swelled with embarrassment, back straightening as though Edmund was suddenly right there, ominously slapping a ruler against his palm. “I’m so sorry—” I began, but he ignored me and yawned. “Is this the redhead?”

“No,” I replied, “it’s Ethan. black hair.”

He considered this — perhaps trying to remember me — then prodded, “What are you wearing?”

I glanced down at my gray Dior suit, which I had now worn every day for two weeks.

“Not maroon, I hope.” He took a long, audible drag off a cigarette, and sighed, “I hate maroon. Can you make my reservation?”

“Of course,” I gushed, like a tidal wave hitting a city, “yes, yes, I—”

“Good. Somewhere well-reviewed, and new.” He puff-puffed once more, and specified: “New in the past six months. Make sure it’s below Fourteenth Street — eight o’clock for two people, under Edmund Benneton. You can confirm to my personal e-mail.”

The words were still forming on my tongue when he hung up on me. I sat there at the edge of my seat, scribbling furiously while murmuring to myself, “Well-reviewed. New. Eight o’clock. Below Fourteenth.”

I brandished the note in the air like Charlie Bucket with his golden ticket as the significance of the moment descended upon me: This was it. This was my big break. A seemingly insignificant task, but I had guzzled enough Horatio Alger Kool-Aid to know that a few favors here and there, and pretty soon I’d have worked my way up the ladder. I would be traveling the whole world with Edmund, going to photo shoots and helping him dress all the top models, and—

“Who was that?” asked George, fat fingers pressed around a carrot stick.

“Er—” I had a vague idea of what would happen if George learned I had intercepted an assignment from Edmund. “Nobody,” I lied, “just Jenny from HL Group.”

“She’s so loud, I could hear her from over here,” he crunched.

I stood up with an abrupt scrape of chair casters against the carpet. “I’m going to use the bathroom,” I announced in a flat voice.

I enclosed myself in a stall, and began to scroll on my phone through restaurant reviews. Without much time to waste, I settled on the first restaurant I found that fit his description, a Spanish-Japanese fusion restaurant in the West Village that was only three months old, boasting a series of “unclassifiably succulent” squid dishes according to the Times . Good enough for me. It certainly sounded extravagant, like one of those places nobody really enjoyed but that sophisticated people raved about while drinking musty wine and making superior remarks: perfect for Edmund.

On my return to the fashion closet I ran into Sabrina, who was strolling to the kitchenette with an unprecedented air of amusement. Like a Homecoming Queen upon recent acquisition of some third-period gossip, she passed me with a spring in her stilettoed step and her eyebrows elevated by malicious pleasure.

“Who’s D ?” she asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about, until a moment later I found my desk nearly swallowed up by a monstrosity of hydrangeas.

“Somebody has an admirer,” George remarked dryly, “although I can’t imagine who.”

Thank you for last night , the card read, in a familiar, near-illegible scrawl. Love ya, D .

I gulped, feeling as though Dorian had violated a restraining order I had issued against him. He wasn’t allowed to come near here. The fact that Dorian had found a way to invade my life at Régine —with his Trojan horse of colossal flowers, the best that money could buy, surely — well, I ripped up the card into tatters over the wastebasket and, before the last shred had fluttered to the bottom, dunked the bouquet upside-down after it. It sunk with a tremendous thud, and the underside of the vase sparkled cheerfully with cellophane.

AT AROUND EIGHT O’CLOCK THAT MORNING I HAD WOKEN UP at Dorian’s apartment with a hand around my waist, and sunlight on my face.

I had awoken in this same manner almost one year ago, when for my twenty-first birthday, we all dropped acid in Edgerton Park, on a grassy, unnamed hill that thereafter none of us could find again. We danced all night like hand-holding paper figures in a Matisse collage, then crumpled to sleep in the grass. I remember being the first to wake up, finding Madeline’s arm draped around my chest and watching, through one half-open eye, the sun threading quickly through the blades of grass, casting an intricate glow over all the earth’s edges like an endless spool of white Spanish lace.

It felt exactly like that in Dorian’s bedroom as I absently caressed my own fingers over what I assumed to be Madeline’s hand. While I was trying to remember last night’s dream, I felt a whisper of hair on her skin which I didn’t remember being there before.

I turned my head. Dorian .

His naked chest was pressed against my back while the rest of him was clothed, both of us tangled up in his luxurious sheets. Madeline was lying along the foot of the bed, her head tipped facedown over the side of the mattress. Dorian’s gin-cooled breath flowed from his tiny nostrils onto my cheek like an intoxicating gas. I lifted my hand from his. Once, I would have wished it to remain there forever. Now, he felt too warm, as if under his skin his blood was blazing through his veins at a temperature that burned me. With my own cold fingers, I painstakingly removed his limb from around my body and slid away from him, edging toward the side of the rumpled bed.

In the sudden absence of my body, Dorian extended his arm across the bed — eyes shut, like he was looking for something in his dream — then, finding a pillow, drew it toward his broad, smooth chest, and wrapped himself around it like an infant. He licked his lips, and was suddenly at rest again. The bed creaked as I sat up and stretched my legs toward the floor. I checked for my wallet in my back pocket, then stood up and shuffled through a wreckage of storm-tossed clothes. Despite Dorian’s having settled several weeks ago in New York, a rakish pile of suitcases — half-ransacked, a hopeless tangle of socks and spilled sleeves — gave the appearance that he had only yesterday tornadoed off the plane from Paris.

His clothes were all designer — you could tell, even from afar — yet, unlike the piles that formed in the fashion closet at Régine , they were layered with soft carelessness. Everything he owned had adopted from him that quality of aristocratic ease, rumpled and unstarched yet still possessing an intrinsic appreciation of its value.