The best part of sewing a garment is pressing the finished seams. The glide of the iron over parallel stitches, two lines a quarter inch apart. The coy slip of the edge rolling under itself. The joining obscured.
My hand follows the iron, satin clammy with heat, then reverses back over the seam, skin licking away the warmth. The flattened line of the bubble teases my fingertips like feeling the vein under her skin at the crook of her elbow. It is so prominent in the left arm; the hot-wet of her, thrumming under a single finger.
I lift the skirt, fold fabric like sheets of pastry over my arm, and carry it back to the dress form. The bodice is pinned already in place. Sweetheart neckline curving into sheer sleeves. Two pressed seams, arrows pointing down to the hips.
The skirt slips over missing shoulders, and the seams slot into place. The lines of the bodice bleed down into the skirt, curve over the waist, and yawn wide to the floor. My hands follow the form’s cold hips to find the triangle of her back, and not a bubble of air escapes. She fits like a glove.
I step back to admire my work. The two pieces are not yet connected, bodice and skirt unwed, but from six feet back, I can’t see the raw edge of the fabric. Just skull-white satin kissing the floor over layers of gathered tulle.
She’s an angel, this dress, but she’s for a devil of a woman.
Lady Melinoe is sharp shoulders and twiggy ankles, raven hair and bruise-pink lips. Her skin shines translucent, like the tongue of a clam cupping its dark pearl. I am beneath her in height and station both, but the slice is so sweet, to be cut by her sharp gaze.
I must remove the bodice to pin it into place, inverted over the skirt, sewn front-to-front.
We have seamed our bodies together this way. My kiss never leaves her mouth. My lips are always under hers, though no one sees them. If you pulled her inside-out, I’d be there, just as she is always lodged in me.
I pluck the pins from the waistline and stab them into the bulb of red fabric hanging from my hip. I keep everything accessible at my waist: scissors and seam ripper on my belt, apron pocket full of thread scraps, thimbles, needles arrayed in leather. Only my pencil gets a place of higher honor, pricked through the meat of my bun, messy though she is. I never can get those flyaways down, a halo of golden-brown frizz on my brow.
I pull everything up and over the dress form, skirt first, then the bodice with a more delicate hand, like peeling a pomegranate. Without clothes, she’s a little grotesque. A floating torso, flesh colored, chiseled to memorized measurements.
Melinoe dropped her slip so easily, the first time I pulled the tape from her nape to her wrist. Always unashamed, that woman—though she was hardly a woman when we met. Freshly eighteen, a bud waiting to bloom. She asked me to drape her in wine-red silk, and I fit the garment so close to her flesh, it was easy to forget she was a debutant, undebauched.
By all accounts, she still is. She will wear white for her wedding day because the love we make doesn’t count.
I connect the raw edges of the skirt to those of the bodice, pins making a silver crown of the waist. The loop of fabric slots over the sewing machine’s bedplate, and I push the lever to depress the foot, leaving a five-eighths allowance on the other side of the needle. With the gentle pressure of my foot on the pedal and the guiding glide of my hands on the satin, I begin to sew.
The needle punches through the waistline, draws waist into hips. Careful with the direction of the pleats, the small mounds of the seams. She’s a miniscule 26 inches, but I make such slow work of it, my ankle cramps hovering over the pedal.
Melinoe worships my wrists when they get tight like that. Her thumb, rubbing circles over radius and ulna, lips kissing my pulse. These hands make wonderful things, she tells me, and I know she means more than the clothes.
I make a swan of her, back arching like a long neck, indignant sounds squawking from her elegant mouth. Gone are the rounded vowels trained into her tongue with cheeks full of marbles. In our bed, she is no lady. She is just my Melinoe.
But the moments we have in midnight solitude are fleeting. She is a woman of the court, and I her seamstress. She is engaged to Duke Anthony, and I will dress her in the finest white gown so he can drape her in gold, like offering a shiny key to the door you intend to break down.
He should thank me for oiling the hinges.
I secure the end of the seam with an inch of back-sewing, then lift the foot and slide the dress from its jaws. Scissors deployed, I follow the circle of the waist and snip the loose threads, then roll the bodice back up so I can see it attached, dress nearly complete.
Everything is aligned. Though the skirt is heavy, I chose strong thread, and the seam already holds its weight securely. Still, I must finish it.
I must obscure the joining.
Melinoe tells me she will kill the duke, that she already knows how she will do it, but she will not tell me so I will be of an innocent mind if she is caught. I imagine poison in whiskey, smothering under silk pillows. Stinging scorpions and scalding oil. I do not know if I believe her, but I am already designing black dresses in my mind, and I am sick with shame for thinking she will be so lovely in a wardrobe so dark.
I trim one side of the seam allowance and begin to pin the other tucked shut over it. The motion is repetitive, practiced. My mind wanders and my stomach twists.
I feel so strongly that she is mine. She tells me so when it pleases her. But I do not need to tell her that I am hers. She knows, like the tape-measure-tail trails from my waist when it unravels, that I will follow her endlessly. I will beg for naught but a taste of her shadow upon the ground and smile with dirt in my teeth.
My anger is for both of them, then. The man who does not know that I exist, and the woman who grins like a wolf when she tells me she is going to marry him for the money.
One more loop through the machine and the seam is finished. Raw edges veiled, twin tracks of white thread running around the waist. Now comes my favorite part: the pressing.
Out come the wrinkles. Gone are the lumps. This garment will reveal no hiccups, make no confessions. Guilty threads, shushed. Angry bumps, smoothed. All she needs is a hem, and this dress will walk down the aisle, make a virgin of my Melinoe.
I wonder, as I lift her from the ironing board if she would look just as lovely in red.