Chapter 3-1
956 Words
Chapter 3
Perrin woke slowly. She always enjoyed the crawl back from her “hibernations” as Cassidy had dubbed them. She didn’t do it often, but when a design really grabbed her, like Jo’s wedding dress, or that outfit for the opera, she just had to chase it until it was done and purged from her system.
She became aware of voices as she languished beneath the warm blankets.
A deep voice rumbling that she recognized easily. Mr. Bill Cullen. He had such a great voice, a far-off thunderstorm brushing soft sounds across an otherwise peaceful summer evening.
A higher voice, still male, but with a definite swish to it. “This is amazing work, Bill. I’ve been doing costumes since I was a teen, and I can barely tell how she did it. And the hand dyeing here from the white to gold, it’s just magnificent. That’s a technique that I’d like to learn.”
She opened her eyes and looked through the brush of hair that had slid over her face. Black. When had her hair gone black? Last she remembered it was blond.
Oh, the costume. What had people called it? “The Empress.” She liked the sound of that.
Peeking through her hair, she could see two men closely inspecting the costume where it hung by itself on a rack. One was showing the inside of the seams to the other. The second one was Bill Cullen, in his classic, arms-crossed Overlord pose that made her smile.
Further inspection revealed that she was on an office couch and it felt as if she’d been here quite some time. But she’d arrived wearing the dress. She was fairly sure of that. So, she lifted the blanket. A black Emerald City Opera t-shirt, with a lemon-yellow stylized ECO logo over one breast. She brushed her legs together under the blanket. Sweats and bare feet.
Then the last of her came awake and she smelled sugar. That got her upright. Bill and the other man whirled to look at her, but all she cared about was the large cheese Danish that had been placed on the low table in front of the couch she’d apparently slept on.
“Good morning.”
“Uh, hi!” she mumbled around a mouthful. “Morning, huh? How long… Never mind. Overnight. You have milk or tea or something?”
Bill moved to a small fridge and pulled out a carton of chocolate milk. “After school treat for Jaspar. Tamara is now above that, so I also have ginger ale.”
“How old are they? Milk’s fine.” She took it from him, and knocked back half a carton to clear the Danish so that she could speak properly.
“Ten and the oldest thirteen there ever was.”
She hoped not, for the kid’s sake.
By thirteen the world had held no more illusions for Perrin at all.
“And you give her ginger ale? You’d get way more dad-points if you stocked in some caffeine-free diet Coke or Pepsi. Trust me on that.”
He opened his mouth, clearly to say something about knowing his own kids well enough. So, she cut him off by holding out a hand to the other man.
“Hi, I’m Perrin.”
“Jerimy. I’m the manager of the costume department for ECO, I hope you don’t mind that I changed you yesterday. You were really out of it, honey.” Jerimy was a trim man with a shock of bottle-red hair moussed up into a chaotic hairstyle that suited his blue eyes and narrow features. He wore a very tailored white shirt and black pants with lines that narrowed the hips, and good shoes. He looked sharp, standing hipshot like a runway model.
Bill was wearing jeans and an open white shirt from some off-the-rack store, Sears probably. Bought at the same time he was buying a reciprocating drill or a forty-two tooth screwdriver or somesuch.
“Was he here?” She nodded toward Bill and took another bite of the Danish. Weird combo with a swirl of chocolate milk, but okay.
His jaw dropped to protest his innocence. He must really be gone on his wife to have passed up on the opportunity to see her mostly n***d. The b*a had been built into the dress after all. Not that Perrin really needed one very often; the one and only advantage to never really growing breasts. Well, that and she could get away with wearing almost any high fashion design.
“Just me and Patsy, she’s straight and I’m so not, so your secrets are perfectly safe with both of us,” Jerimy offered her a broad wink. She liked him, and not just because he appreciated her dress.
She eyed it critically as she continued to chew.
“The Empress?”
“Yes. You really captured her,” Bill turned once more to the dress.
“Wow! You actually paid me a compliment there, Mr. Cullen. You may want to go easy on that. Making my head spin. You, uh, told me about the Empress?”
Bill looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. Well, what did he expect? She’d been asleep on her feet during their visit to her shop—even before she’d started this dress.
“It just sort of came together from the other two designs I drew.” Perrin remembered Bill rambling on at some length about the opera’s story, but she couldn’t remember a word. This design had simply been a natural extension of the story about the first two male characters. Maybe the tone of Bill’s deep voice as he’d described the character was in there somewhere, but she couldn’t pick it out.
The dress’ lines were good, the balance of s*x and power.
“Is the Empress good or evil?”
“No one is sure. Even at the opera’s end, she is still enigmatic. The powerful unknown.”
Perrin c****d her head trying to see the color and tone without wholly discounting shape and line.
“I think it needs a blood-red lining then, to balance the hope of the gold.”
Jerimy caught his breath and she knew it was right.
But it had come out well for not knowing anything about the story. She remembered Bill’s eyes going dark with heat as he’d first looked at her in the Opera’s lobby.
Yes, the dress had come out very well.
- Writer
