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“What girl in her right mind would wear underpants that look like that? No wonder you don’t have a date on a Friday night.”
I couldn’t think of a response. From the gossip, I knew who this dark-skinned Amazon beauty was: a recent transfer student from Nevada. From the girls, I’d learned that she was thirty-six, and had been working in Las Vegas as some sort of wine steward for the last twenty years. From the boys, I’d learned that she was a bombshell beauty, gorgeous enough to have been approached by Playboy magazine, not once, but twice. At eighteen and again at thirty-four.
“Guys can’t tell what your panties look like through your clothes,” I said, sounding lame even to myself. Had she guessed that I didn’t care what guys could or couldn’t tell? Boys meant nothing to me at all.
“You walk different when you wear pretty lingerie,” she insisted, proving her point by doing an impromptu catwalk across the tiled floor. She had long legs revealed by tiny white denim cut-offs and a perfect stride. I admired her in silence, before she nodded toward me. I’d heard that she was opinionated, strident, and already feared. And yet I had no idea why she was focusing her dark feline eyes on me. “Now you.”
“Now me what?” I still had my cobalt-blue toothbrush in my hand.
“You try.”
I didn’t want to walk across the cold tiled bathroom floor; especially with this stunning she-cat watching my every move. And yet I found myself unable to refuse. Quickly, I rushed across the floor to the far wall and then back again, as if the goal had been speed rather than poise. Doreen doubled up laughing. “That’s how you walk when you’re trying to be sexy?”
“You didn’t say—”
“You knew what I wanted. Try it again.”
“I’m not sexy,” I said, feeling heat rush to my cheeks.
“Not like that. Not in those baggy-ass shorts. Not with that piss-poor attitude. But you could be.”
Why was she doing this? Was she simply dateless on this Friday night, with nothing to do but harass the do
rm-floor loser?
“Try again.”
“I don’t want to.” I was starting to feel my old defenses come up. What had made me do what she’d said at the start? She’d simply caught me off-guard. That was all.
“With a swivel in your hips this time,” she added, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“I don’t want to,” I repeated, more forcefully this time.
“Better yet,” she continued, clearly deaf when she wanted to be. “Take those off.”
“I’m not taking my underwear off!”
“And the T-shirt, too.”
I stared at her, incredulous. Who the fuck did she think she was?
“I’m waiting.” She said this last in a sing-song voice, and she tapped her bare foot for emphasis. Was the woman crazy? Why on Earth would I strip down for a stranger, simply because she’d said she was waiting? We locked eyes for a minute, the gazelle and the lioness, and in that brief span of time I realized that I was the crazy one, pulling off my T-shirt and kicking out of my red-and-white striped boxers. And why was I doing that? Because nothing like this had ever happened to me before.
While Doreen watched, I strode across the bathroom floor, and this time, I put a bit of swivel in my walk. She was right. I felt better not to be in the baggy clothes, felt as if I were more animal than human as I strode across the floor.
“That’s it!” She sounded truly excited. “I knew you had it in you. You were muffling all that power under those stupid underclothes.”
I returned triumphant to the sink, then made the mistake of looking in the mirror, and my confidence evaporated in a heartbeat. All I saw was a pale-skinned girl with a heart-shaped face and untamable curls. What the fuck was I doing? Prancing naked in the girls’ room in front of a virtual stranger. Doreen didn’t let me wallow for a second.
“Now,” she said, “let’s get you into some pretty knickers, and we’ll see what you can really do. Follow me.”
She started out of the bathroom, and I bent to scoop up my T-shirt, but she returned before I could slip it back over my head. “You’re done with all that,” she commanded, grabbing up the Hanes men’s shirt and tossing it into the nearest garbage, along with the boxers.
“Wait,” I said, breathless. “I don’t have any other clothes in here.”
“Then I guess you’ll just have to come naked.”
I shook my head. There was no way.
