Inspire (10 page)

“Ready to go?” I ask Gwen, even though it's me that's kept us parked here as I regrouped. I get a reply somewhere between a humph and a sniff. Probably the best I'm going to do.

I find the store that the lady mentioned on my phone, and it is just a few blocks north of us, so I shift into drive and pull back onto the street. I can tell just from the outside that Caroline's Closet has a much better chance at pleasing Gwen. The store logo is pink with flowers and butterflies, and it appears that the store is specifically focused on kids' clothing. We have to parallel park on the street, and Gwen nearly gives me a heart attack when she takes off running to the store as soon as her feet hit the ground. I slam the door shut, and lock it with my key chain while I take off after her. I swing the door to the store open, and nearly run over her as she stands in awe just over the threshold.

The place is like a little girl's paradise. It's not just the clothes, though there are a lot of them, it's the decorations, the space. Everything about it looks like a child's fantasy. There's enough pink to make me feel like I've overdosed on Pepto Bismal, but Gwen likes it, and I can deal with just about anything to make her happy.

She looks up at me silently, asking for permission, I think. And I nod. She disappears between racks of clothes that are taller than she is, and I scramble to catch up.

She’s struggling to unhook a baby blue dress when I find her, and I lift it off the rack for her. I become her designated dress holder, and my arm is covered by the time an employee finds us and asks, “Can I help you find anything?”

She's short with black-rimmed hipster glasses that make her big eyes look even larger. Gwen is immediately infatuated with the giant flower on her headband. I can see her hand reaching toward it, and I take it in mine before she can accost the employee. Lennox, according to her nametag.

“This is Gwen,” I say. “We're doing some last minute shopping for a holiday dress. For her.”

Lennox smiles, and bends so that she's closer to Gwen's height.

“Yes, you'll look much better in one of our dresses than he would.”

Gwen giggles uncontrollably, and Lennox asks her questions about her size, what colors she likes, and what kind of dresses she's had in the past. Then she asks me what I'm looking to spend, and she doesn't even blink when I tell her what I can afford.

“I think we can handle that. Why don't we go ahead and take these dresses you have”—she takes the scratchy things off my arm—”and we'll get you set up in a dressing room. While you start trying these on, I'll grab some others I think you might like.” 

I'm immediately glad we came here. I was an only child until Gwen came along, so I've not had much experience shopping for kid's clothes or dresses, and I don't realize how much pressure I'd been feeling until it eases.

“We've even got a nice, comfy couch for Dad to sit on while he waits.”

“Oh I'm not—”

Gwen interrupts me to say, “My dad is in prison. That's just Wilder. My brother.”

To Lennox's credit, her eyes only widen for just a second at Gwen's admission, and then she's back to normal.

“Okay then. Brother Wilder, it is.”

The dressing rooms are just as intricately decorated as the rest of the place. There are pink cushioned benches, and ornate mirrors that remind me of Snow White, and soft cream-colored curtains cover each door.

The couch is an old-style. Victorian, maybe? And it's been reupholstered with black and white polka dots that make my vision go blurry. Lennox gets Gwen set up in a dressing room, and I take a seat on the couch to wait.

I've never really done this kind of thing before, and I'm hoping that Gwen can get these dresses on all by herself. She dresses herself every day, but that's usually jeans and shirts and skirts, not fancy dresses.

“You should take notes, so we can remember which ones are our favorites,” Gwen tells me.

Lennox shoots me a smile, and I nod seriously before pulling up the notes function on my phone and holding it up for Gwen's approval.

“I look forward to seeing those notes,” Lennox says before winking at me and heading off to presumably find more dresses for my sister.

I watch her go. She's a little funkier than my usual type. She wears these odd converse shoes that are a cross between tennis shoes and boots. They lace all the way up to her knees. She's got on tights beneath them, shorts and what appears to be two oversized sweaters. But she seems nice.

Not quite as …

I shake my head. I've been in an epic slump for the last month and a half since I'd woken up to find my bed empty of the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in real life. I shouldn't still be thinking about Kalli, shouldn't be comparing every girl I meet to her. It was one night, and she'd been skittish and emotional the whole time. I can't say I'm surprised she ran out on me. She didn't seem like the kind of girl for a one night stand, and I've definitely had my fair share of those to know the difference.

But that's over too. No more wild life. I can't live like that and put Mom and Gwen first.

No point dwelling on things I can't have. My old life and Kalli both.

There's a rustling from the direction of the dressing rooms, and I look up expecting to see Gwen's first dress, but it's the curtain next to hers that slides open.

“Hey Len! Is this how you wanted this dress to hang?”

My eyes snag on the girl's hand as it tugs at a flowy section of fabric over her hips. And somehow I know … just from that voice and her slim hands … I know it's her.

I've spent weeks thinking about her, obsessing over the things I said and did, wondering if it was my fault she felt the need to run away, trying to understand what might have happened to her that night to leave her so on edge. And now she's here.

My eyes track up her body in slow motion. Smooth, olive-brown skin, generous hips and breasts, cinched in at the waist, dark curls spilling over her shoulders.

Then I get to her face. Kalli.

The sight of her hits me like a physical blow, and if I weren’t sitting down, I might have actually stumbled back. She seems just as surprised to see me sitting there, and she blinks, like maybe I'm part of her imagination, and I'll disappear any moment.

I don't disappear.

Neither does she.

We stare at each other, and I swear, the hold this girl has on me after just two meetings is unreal. Fucking scary, actually.

She sucks in a breath, wrapping an arm around her waist in a gesture that's about either comfort or shock, maybe both. And I wonder if she feels it too. If she's just as intrigued and freaked out as I am.

Neither of us has spoken by the time Lennox returns, stepping between us and severing the connection. She tilts her head to the side, surveying the dress that Kalli's wearing. She tugs once at the dress, trying to get it fall in a different way, but nothing changes.

“Hmm …” she says. “I think I've put in too many pleats. If I do half as many and gather more fabric in each one, I think it will sit better.” She steps back, looking over Kalli from head-to-toe.

Guilty
. I totally do it, too. She's just as stunning as I remember her, and I don't know what they're talking about with the dress. It fits her perfectly. My mouth is actually watering looking at her, and Jesus, I've got to talk to her. Have to get her number. I can't go another month thinking about her after another chance encounter.

Fuck chance. I'm not leaving it to luck again.

Chapter Ten

“You can go ahead and take that one off,” Lennox says. “I'll make a note on what to fix. Try the purple one next.”

Lennox hangs two more little girl dresses outside Gwen's dressing room and asks, “You doing okay, Gwen?”

Gwen calls out a yes, then Lennox is leaving, and Kalli is turning to go back to the dressing room. Before I really think it through, I'm standing.

“Hey.”

Her fingers tighten around the curtain, but she doesn't retreat inside. She tosses her head a little, just enough to get her thick curls to swing over her shoulder, and then she looks at me over her shoulder.

“Hey.” Her voice is quiet, and I'm incredibly aware that my little sister is just a curtain away. All I want to do is push Kalli into that dressing room and press her against the wall and show her just what she missed when she snuck out of my apartment.

But I can't.

“I didn't realize this place has clothes for adults.”

“It doesn't.” Her body is still turned away from me, like she's going to bolt any second. “Lennox is studying fashion design. She's part of a showcase coming up in a couple months, and I'm her …” She pauses, as if searching for the word. “I'm her friend. I just play mannequin for her on occasion.”

“Mannequin?” Lennox calls out from where she's flipping through hangers on a nearby rack. “I heard that! Mannequins are plastic. Mannequins are scary life-size fake people with curiously absent genitalia. Mannequins might one day come to life and kill us all.”

The smile Kalli sends in her friend's direction is small, but striking. It's one of those moments where a picture is worth a thousand words. Ten thousand. I don't even know that it's something that could really be captured with anything other than the eye.

And there I go again. What is it about this girl that turns me into such a fool? Or maybe it’s not her at all. Maybe I’ve lost some confidence over the last year. When you used to spend your nights in bar after bar with just about any girl you wanted, and you suddenly shift to spending your nights babysitting … it wrecks your head a little.

But still … it feels like more than that with her. 

I've never had to think about what to say to a girl. I like to think I'm fairly charming, and I've always been good at stringing words together. With Kalli … I'm scared that if I don't reign myself in, I'll frighten her off as I wax poetic about her eyebrows or whatever part of her has caught my attention at the time.

“You are not my mannequin,” Lennox says. “You're my
muse
. Seriously. I was totally stuck on this collection until you came along.”

Kalli's eyes flick to mine, and there's something in them. Unease, maybe?

“I'm going to change,” she says. And I don't know if she's saying it to me or Lennox or both of us.

Her curtain closes, and I strain my ears to listen for her movements. I think I hear the glide of fabric over her skin before it thumps against the floor. I rest my elbows on my knees and shove my fingers into my hair because now I'm thinking about her body, how it had looked against my sheets. All that smooth, unblemished skin. Perfect. It doesn't seem possible, but her body was the closest damn thing I'd ever seen to it. I remember the way her wet dress clung to her after our water fight in the shower.

Shit.
Shit
. I needed to stop thinking about this or I was going to make a fool of myself in more ways than one.

“Wilder,” Gwen's high-pitched voice calls. And that's exactly what I need to distract me. I stand, moving closer to her dressing room.

“Yeah?”

“I need help.”

I blew out a breath. It would probably make me a bad brother to ask if Lennox could help her.

“Can I come in?” I ask.

She doesn't answer, just pulls the curtain aside enough so that I can duck inside.

She's covered. Mostly. But it looks like the black and red dress she has on has some kind of wrapping mechanism, and she's tied it up all wrong. I unknot the bows she's made to start over, but then I'm not really sure how the thing is supposed to wrap either.

“It goes there,” Gwen tells me.

“I don't think so. What about here?”

“That looks stupid.”

We try a few more ways, and we get close, but something about it just looks slightly off.

“Maybe we should just try another dress,” I say when my back starts to ache from bending down to her level.

“Need some help?” a voice asks outside the curtain, and it's not Lennox, but Kalli.

The fabric rustles, and she opens it just far enough to peek inside, but that's enough for Gwen.

“Kalli!”

Apparently I wasn't the only one impacted by that meeting in the grocery store. Gwen can barely remember things I tell her an hour later, but she hasn't forgotten Kalli's name. She shrugs off my hands where I've been messing with the ties to her dress and flings herself through the curtain onto Kalli.

Kalli’s laugh puts her smile to shame, and it moves through me like electricity. She squeezes my sister tight, and as she looks down at her, I swear she’s freaking glowing.

Hell, I think she’s just one of those people who shine a little brighter than everyone else. The ones that always seem to draw your eye in public, the ones you find yourself looking at for a second time for no other reason than simply because it’s where your eyes want to go.

And my eyes definitely want to go to Kalli. Not just a second time, but a third, and a fourth, and over and over again. She pulls back and gestures for my clumsily dressed sister to step inside the dressing room again, and she follows behind her, closing the curtain. I swallow.

The room had felt generously spacious a few moments before. Now I'm all too aware of the inches between us, and the space vibrates with something almost like static. Kalli kneels, putting her farther away from me and closer to my little sister. She undoes the ties I'd been wrestling with, and then she loops one side of the wrap through a small hole in the dress at my sister's waist that I hadn't noticed. There's one on the other side, too. And once she's fed both ties through, she wraps them again around her waist, hiding the holes, and completing a perfect bow in the middle of Gwen's back.

My sister twirls once, the skirt fanning around her, brushing against my knees and Kalli's stomach. She comes to a stop, her eyes meeting Kalli's in the mirror, as if seeking approval.

“Very pretty.”

A blush sweeps over Gwen's apple cheeks and tiny nose.

“Really?”

“Really. You look very special in that dress.”

“This one!” Gwen cries, looking up at me.

“Are you sure? You don't want to get one that's a little easier to put on?”