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“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this,” Miranda admits. Her eyes linger on Andy, following the lines of her body beneath the borrowed dress. The Mrs. Meyer’s soap is still slick between Andy’s fingers, and she wonders, heart pounding heavy through the sun and wine with which Stuart plied her, if Miranda recognizes it.
“Congratulations,” Andy says again. She can hear the unsteadiness in her voice and wonders if Miranda can, too. She clears her throat, smiling wide. “You deserve it.”
“Oh, Andrea.” Miranda’s laugh is light and airy. “It’s never about what women deserve in this industry. It’s what we ask for.” She gestures to the room around her with her glass. “You think I would have gotten all of this if I’d waited around for someone to hand it to me?”
“No,” Andy says, and she doesn’t have to force the smile this time. “You’ve always known exactly what you wanted. It’s something I really admire about you.” She laughs at the sudden candor of her confession.
“Is it?” Miranda tilts her head. Her face is still flushed with wine and sun, but there’s something else lingering beneath the surface.
Andy, too, feels a liquid heat pooling inside her, pressing against her skin as though her body is too tight to contain it. She watches Miranda sway closer, perspiration dripping down the side of her glass. “Well…yeah. I mean, just because you aren’t always easy to get along with doesn’t mean I don’t still…ad-admire you.”
Miranda stands inches from her now, so close she can smell her perfume (Prada’s Infusion d’Iris, the same as twenty years ago; every time Andy smelled it between then and now, she was transported to the back of a car and the lilt of Miranda’s voice). The dress, so chic on the hanger with its open lattice stitching, now leaves Andy feeling exposed.
Naked.
“Is that,” Miranda asks, pinching the fabric between two fingers, “the Gabriela Hearst?”
Andy can feel the heat of Miranda’s fingers through the linen. “Yes.” Her throat is so dry it comes out as a rasp.
Miranda’s fingers move lower, brushing Andy’s. “And is that…a stain?”
Andy swallows. “Uh. Maybe.”
“I see.” Miranda rubs the fabric between her thumb and forefinger. “Do you know what’s so unique about this dress? Or, should I say, one of the aspects that makes this dress unique, and why it is part of the Runway collection?”
Andy shakes her head, having given up on speech.
“Each strand of linen was hand-painted.”
Andy feels faint.
“It took forty people to make this dress. All so you could dribble some…” She rubs her thumb over the stain again. “...beurre blanc…on their hard work.”
A chastened Andy finds her voice. “Miranda, I am so sorry, I will, I will have this professionally cleaned, you can take it out of my paycheck, I, I will do whatever you want–”
“What I want,” Miranda says, fingers moving even further down the length of the skirt, disappearing beneath its patchwork folds, “is for you to stop talking.”
Andy couldn’t talk even if she wanted to; not with Miranda’s hand between her thighs, stroking her through her underwear. Her thumb circles Andy’s clit the same way it circled the beurre blanc, and for some reason this makes Andy wetter than it has any right to. Her back connects hard with the sink, hands scrabbling for purchase against the quartz countertop. Miranda never breaks eye contact once, a flintiness behind her eyes as she slips her fingers beneath the scrap of fabric.
A ragged, Chardonnay-laced gasp tumbles out of Andy’s mouth. The coolness of the quartz offers little relief against the heat billowing from beneath her dress, her skin melting like wax beneath a flame. She begins to sweat just like the glass Miranda set down on the counter, perspiration rolling down every inch–
A laugh carried in from the open door makes her crane her neck to see if someone is coming. She can just see barely see the party outside, and they, she assumes, she hopes, can just barely see her and Miranda.
“Don’t look at them, Andrea.” The instruction is whispered so close to Andy’s face that she can taste it, basil and a cold, crisp white wine that has her mouth watering. “You are not here for them. You are here for me.” She punctuates the end of her sentence by curling two fingers inside Andy.
Remembering how easily outside noise was carried in, Andy bites her lip, gripping the countertop lest inside noise be carried out. She has never wanted a party to be over more in her life.
“Keep your face straight,” Miranda orders, thumb rolling over her clit again. “And hold still.”
“I’m trying!” Andy leans back into the counter and breathes deeply, trying to look as casual as one can when getting fingered by their boss.
Miranda’s upper lip, beaded with perspiration, curls in amusement. “You are so excitable, Andrea. Haven’t you ever been fingered before?”
“Not while Jenna Bush Hager is sitting fifty feet away.” Andy gasps, her hand falling to grip Miranda’s wrist. “There, there, fuck, shit–”
“There, you see?” Miranda’s voice is a soft purr in Andy’s ear, the hand that is not buried inside her maxidress reaching down to knead the back of her thigh. Their hips are nearly flush now, legs a hopeless tangle within the folds of the dress that is a sodden ruin of sweat and cyprine. She moves her face closer, teeth grazing Andy’s earlobe. “You know how to get exactly what you want, too.”
It all hits Andy at once, writhing on Miranda’s fingers in her kitchen in the Hamptons with a table full of luminaries waiting on them. She topples over the edge as she does all things: eagerly and without grace. Her hips buck greedily into Miranda’s hand, her own fingers clutching at the damp linen of Miranda’s blouse as she rides out the waves of her orgasm.
When she finishes, thighs slippery and trembling, Miranda withdraws her hand, wet and sticky with Andy’s cyprine. She leans close, and for a moment, Andy thinks (hopes? fears?) she’s going to kiss her–but Miranda moves around her, turning on the faucet and pumping the Mrs. Meyer’s into her palm. “Don’t worry about the dress. We’ll send it out for dry cleaning.”
Andy looks down at the dress and then up at Miranda, who is calmly wiping up the puddle left by her sweating glass as though she wasn’t just knuckle-deep in her features editor. “Oh. Thank you, Miranda.” She waits. The relief of not being in trouble is, she has to admit, somewhat dampened by Miranda’s back to her. “Well, uh…I guess, just tell me which room is mine and I can go change–”
Miranda lets out a small, tutting laugh that makes Andy’s heart soar like she’s twenty years younger. She takes two clean glasses out of the cabinet and fills them with water. “Don’t be ridiculous, Andrea; lunch isn’t over yet. It would be bad manners if you disappeared now, and I do not tolerate bad manners in my home. Do you understand?” She holds out one glass to Andy, eyes raised pointedly.
Andy takes the glass, both afraid and desperate to feel Miranda’s fingers against hers. Her touch is cold and all too brief, but Andy still feels it jolt all the way down to her core. “Okay,” she says slowly, looking down, “but I’m kind of–I mean the dress–”
But Miranda is already sailing out of the kitchen. Andy deliberates for less than half a second before gulping down her water and tearing after her.
“Everything alright?” Irv asks as they retake their seats. “Thought you two got lost in there.”
Andy flushes, sure that the entire table can read what happened on her face, but Miranda waves an airy hand. “Oh, no. Andrea just got a stain on her beautiful dress and we were trying to get it off.”
Andy reaches for her abandoned glass of wine, even though it’s probably warm by now, even though the flies have probably been in it, just to have something to hide her face.
“Any luck?” comes Stuart’s voice.
“Not yet, but we will. These things take time.” When Andy lowers her glass, she sees Miranda smirking at her. “As Andrea so eloquently pointed out…I always get exactly what I want.”