The Jewels of January by Julia Heart

Author:Julia Heart [Heart, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Julia Heart
Published: 2023-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

I Melt with You

Jewels

We hadn’t spent much time together in the last couple of weeks, between my working every night and James trying to dig up investors for his club. Last week during a rushed phone call, he said, “Please get out of work next Tuesday night. I want to cook dinner for you, a very nice romantic dinner. You can wear girl clothes.”

He was great at picking little bits and pieces out of our conversations and finding opportunities for me to do things I typically didn’t get to do. Wearing girl clothes was one of them. When I was at the house, I wore the clothing Frank told me to wear. While at work, I wore hootch clothing. While running errands, I wore trendy clothes. None of them felt like me.

I almost wore out the salesperson at Dillard’s, looking for a dress to buy for the occasion. My initial instructions to her were anything but black, because Frank taught us black meant we had father issues. She brought me twenty dresses in every conceivable color. It took about twenty seconds before my brain flooded me with the rest of Frank’s theory about how to tell where people were stuck by what colors they gravitated toward. Light blue was rejection, grey was anger with your mother, and orange was sex issues. Every dress I tried on led back to a trauma I might or might not be stuck in.

About halfway through the pile, I came across one that made me feel like a supermodel. I walked out of the dressing room to look in a larger mirror.

“That one looks great on you,” the salesperson cooed from behind me.

I had to agree with her, but it was red. What I saw more than how well it fit or how sophisticated it made me feel was that it screamed, You have birth issues.

I finally said screw it and went with the one the salesperson liked the best, a beautiful A-line dress made of a cotton rayon blend that swished when I moved. It made me feel feminine and elegant. It was dark blue—the color of rebellion.

I walked through the mall on auto-pilot, humming along with “I Think We’re Alone Now”as it played through the sound system. All the typical stores were here: Sharper Image, The Merry-Go-Round, and Glamour Shots. I stopped walking as soon as I got off the escalator, nearly creating a pile-up behind me. A Victoria’s Secret store was tucked between Merle Norman and Crabtree & Evelyn. When did they put one of those in here? I had bought things from their catalogs for a couple of years, but their closest store was at the Galleria Mall in Houston.

Once in the store, I held out my hand to paw at every garment I passed. It was like I had walked into a pop-up book; everything I used to see in the catalogs had sprung to life. This wasn’t like the hootch stuff you found at Fredrick’s of Hollywood or the old lady things you could buy at Foley’s department store; this was undergarment heaven.

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