Molly Michaels stared at the contents of the large
rectangular box that had been set haphazardly on top of the
clutter on her desk. The box contained a wedding gown.
Over the weekend donations that were intended for one of the
three New York City secondhand clothing shops that were
owned and operated by Second Chances Charity Inc—and
that provided the funding for their community
programs—often ended up here, stacked outside the
doorstep of their main office.
It did seem like a cruel irony, though, that this donation
would end up on
her desk.
"Sworn off love," Molly told herself, firmly, and
shut the box. "Allergic to amour. Lessons learned. Doors
closed."
She turned and hung up her coat in the closet of her tiny
office, then returned to her desk. She snuck the box lid
open, just a crack, then opened it just a little more. The
dress was a confection. It looked like it had been spun out
of dreams and silk.
"Pained by passion," Molly reminded herself, but
even as she did, her hand stole into the box, and her
fingers touched the delicate delight of the gloriously rich
fabric.
What would it hurt to
look? It could even be a good
exercise for her. Her relationship with Chuck, her broken
engagement, was six months in the past. The dress was
probably ridiculous. Looking at it, and feeling
nothing,
better yet
judging it, would be a good test of
the new her.
Molly Michaels was one hundred percent career woman now,
absolutely dedicated to her work here as the project manager
at Second Chances. It was her job to select, implement and
maintain the programs the charity funded that helped people
in some of New York's most challenged neighborhoods.
"Love my career. Totally satisfied," she muttered.
"Completely fulfilled!"
She slipped the pure white dress out of the box, felt the
sensuous slide of the fabric across her palms as she shook
it out.
The dress
was ridiculous. And the total embodiment
of romance. Ethereal as a puff of smoke, soft as a whisper,
the layers and layers of ruffles glittered with hundreds of
hand-sewn pearls and tiny silk flowers. The designer label
attested to the fact that someone had spent a fortune on it.
And the fact it had shown up here was a reminder that all
those romantic dreams had a treacherous tendency to go
sideways. Who sent their dress, their most poignant reminder
of their special day, to a charity that specialized in
secondhand sales, if things had gone well?
So, it wasn't just
her who had been burned by love.
Au contraire! It was the way of the world.
Still, despite her efforts to talk sense to herself, there
was no denying the little twist of wistfulness in her tummy
as Molly looked at the dress,
felt all a dress like
that could stand for.
Love. Souls joined. Laughter
shared. Long conversations. Lonely no more.
Molly was disappointed in herself for entertaining the
hopelessly naive thoughts, even briefly. She wanted to kill
that renegade longing that stirred in her. The logical way
to do that would be to put the dress back in the box, and
have the receptionist, Tish, send it off to the best of
Second Chances stores, Wow and Then, on the Upper West Side.
That store specialized in high-end gently used fashions.
Everything with a designer label in it ended up there.
But, sadly, Molly had never been logical. Sadly, she had not
missed the fact the dress was
exactly her size.
On impulse, she decided the best way to face her shattered
dreams head-on would be to put on the dress. She would face
the bride she was never going to be in the mirror. She would
regain her power over those ever so foolish and hopelessly
old-fashioned dreams of
ever after.
How could she, of all people, believe such nonsense? Why was
it that the constant squabbling of her parents, the eventual
dissolution of her family, her mother remarrying
often,
had not prepared Molly for real life? No, rather than
making her put aside her belief in love, her dreams of a
family, her disappointment-filled childhood had instead made
her
yearn for those things.
That yearning had been drastic enough to make her ignore
every warning sign Chuck had given her. And there had been
plenty of them! Not at first, of course. At first, it had
been all delight and devotion. But then, Molly had caught
her intended in increasingly frequent insults: little white
lies, lateness, dates not kept.
She had forgiven him, allowing herself to believe that a
loving heart overlooked the small slights, the
inconsiderations, the occasional surliness, the lack of
enthusiasm for the things she liked to do. She had managed
to minimize the fact that the engagement ring had been
embarrassingly tiny, and efforts to address setting a date
had been rebuffed.
In other words, Molly had been so engrossed in her fantasy
about love, had been so focused on a day and a dress just
like this one, that she had excused and tolerated and
dismissed behavior that, in retrospect, had been
humiliatingly unacceptable.
Now she was anxious to prove to herself that a dress like
this one had no power over her at all. None! Her days of
being a hopeless dreamer, of being naive, of being romantic
to the point of being pathetic, were over.
Over and done. Molly Michaels was a new woman, one who could
put on a dress like this and
scoff at the beliefs
it represented.
Round-faced babies, a bassinet beside
the bed, seaside holidays, chasing children through the
sand, cuddling around a roaring fire with him, the dream
man, beside you singing songs and toasting marshmallows.
"Dream man is right," she scolded herself.
"Because that's where such a man exists. In dreams."
The dress proved harder to get on than Molly could have
imagined, which should have made her give it up. Instead, it
made her more determined, which formed an unfortunate
parallel to her past relationship.
The harder it had been with Chuck, the more she had tried to
make it work.
That desperate-for-love woman was being left behind her, and
putting on this dress was going to be one more step in
helping her do it!
But first she got tangled in the sewn-in lining, and spent a
few helpless moments lost in the voluminous sea of white
fabric. When her head finally popped out the correct
opening, her hair was caught hard in one of the pearls that
encrusted the neckline. After she had got free of that, fate
made one more last-ditch effort to get her to stop this
nonsense. The back of the dress was not designed to be done
up single-handedly.
Still, having come this far, with much determination and
contortion, Molly somehow managed to get every single
fastener closed, though it felt as if she had pulled the
muscle in her left shoulder in the process.
Now she took a deep breath, girded her cynical loins, and
turned slowly to look at herself in the full-length mirror
hung on the back of her office door.
She closed her eyes.
Goodbye, romantic fool. Then
she took a deep breath and opened them.
Molly felt her attempt at cynicism dissolve with all the
resistance of instant coffee granules meeting hot water. In
fact everything dissolved: the clutter around her, the files
that needed to be dealt with, the colorful sounds of the
East Village awaking outside her open transom window,
something called out harshly in Polish or Ukrainian, the
sound of a delivery truck stopped nearby, a horn honking.
Molly stared at herself in the mirror. She had fully
expected to see her romantic
fantasy debunked. It
would just be her, too tall, too skinny, redheaded and
pale-faced Molly Michaels, in a fancy dress. Not changed by
it. Certainly not
completed by it.
Instead, a princess looked solemnly back at her. Her red
hair, pulled out of its very professional upsweep by the
entrapment inside the dress and the brief fray with the
pearl, was stirred up, hissing with static, fiery and free.
Her pale skin looked not washed out as she had thought it
would against the sea of white but flawless, like porcelain.
And her eyes shimmered green as Irish fields in springtime.
The cut of the dress had seemed virginal before she put it
on. Now she could see the neckline was sinful and the rich
fabric was designed to cling to every curve, making her look
sensuous, red-hot and somehow
ready.
"This is not the lesson I was hoping for," she told
herself, the stern tone doing nothing to help her drag her
eyes away from the vision in the mirror. She ordered herself
to take off the dress, in that same easily ignored stern
tone. Instead, she did an experimental pose, and then another.
"I would have made a beautiful bride!" she cried
mournfully.
Annoyed with herself, and with her weakness— eager to
get away from all the feelings of loss for dreams not
fulfilled that this dress was stirring up in her—she
reached back to undo the fastener that held the zipper shut.
It was stuck fast.
And much as she did not like what she had just discovered
about herself—romantic notions apparently hopelessly
engrained in her character—she could not bring herself
to damage the dress in order to get it off.
Molly tried to pull it over her head without the benefit of
the zipper, but it was too tight to slip off and when she
lowered it again, all she had accomplished was her hair
caught hard in the seed pearls that encrusted the neckline
of the dress again.
It was as if the dress—and her romantic notions—
were letting her know their hold on her was not going to be
so easily dismissed!
Her phone rang; the two distinct beeps of Vivian Saint
Pierre, known to one and all as Miss Viv, beloved founder of
Second Chances. Miss Viv and Molly were always the first two
into the office in the morning.
Instead of answering the phone, Molly headed out of her own
office and down the hall to her boss's office to be rescued.
From myself, she acknowledged wryly.
Miss Viv would look at this latest predicament Molly had
gotten herself into, know instantly
why Molly had
been compelled to put on the dress and then as she was
undoing the zip she would say something wise and comforting
about Molly's shattered romantic hopes.
Miss Viv had never liked Chuck Howard, Molly's fiancé.
When Molly had arrived at work that day six months ago with
her ring finger empty, Miss Viv had nodded approvingly and
said, "You're well rid of that ne'er-do-well."
And that was even before Molly had admitted that her bank
account was as empty as her ring finger!
That was exactly the kind of pragmatic attention Molly
needed when a dress like this one was trying to undo all the
lessons she was determined to take from her broken engagement!
With any luck, by the end of the day her getting stuck in
the dress would be nothing more than an office joke.
Determined to carry off the lighthearted laugh at herself,
she burst through the door of Miss Viv's office after a
single knock, the wedding march humming across her lips.
But a look at Miss Viv, sitting behind her desk, stopped
Molly in her tracks. The hum died midnote.
Miss Viv did not look entertained by the theatrical
entrance. She looked horrified.
And when her gaze slid away from where Molly stood in the
doorway to where a chair was nearly hidden behind the open
door, Molly's breath caught and she slowly turned her head.
Despite the earliness of the hour, Miss Viv was not alone!
A man sat in the chair behind the door, the only available
space for visitors in Miss Viv's hopelessly disorganized office.
No, not just a man. The kind of man that every woman dreamed
of walking down the aisle toward.
The man sitting in Miss Viv's office was not just handsome,
he was breathtaking. In a glance, Molly saw neat hair as
rich as dark chocolate, firm lips, a strong chin with the
faintest hint of a cleft, a nose saved from
perfection—but made unreasonably more
attractive— by the slight crook of an old break and a
thin scar running across the bridge of it.
The aura of confidence, of
success, was underscored
by how exquisitely he was dressed. He was in a suit of
coal-gray, obviously custom tailored. He had on an ivory
shirt, a silk tie also in shades of gray. The ensemble would
have been totally conservative had it not been for how it
all matched the gray shades of his eyes. The cut of the
clothes emphasized rather than hid the pure power of his build.
The power was underscored in the lines of his face.
And especially in the light in his eyes. The surprise that
widened them did not cover the fact he radiated a kind of
self-certainty, a cool confidence, that despite the veneer
of civilization he wore so well, reminded Molly of a gunslinger.
In fact, that was the color of those eyes,
exactly,
gunmetal-gray, something in them watchful,
waiting.
She shivered with awareness. Despite the custom suit,
the Berluti shoes, the Rolex that glinted at his wrist, he
was the kind of man who sat with his back to the wall,
always facing the door.
The man radiated power and the set of his shoulders
telegraphed the fact that, unlike Chuck, this man was pure
strength. The word
excuse would not appear in his
vocabulary.
No, Molly could tell by the fire in his eyes that if the
ship was going down, or the building was on fire—if
the town needed saving and he had just ridden in on his
horse—he was the one you would follow, he was the one
you would rely on to save you.
An aggravating conclusion since she was so newly committed
to relying on herself, her career and her co-workers to save
her from a disastrous life of unremitting loneliness. The
little featherless budgie she had at home—the latest
in a long list of loving strays that had populated her
life—also helped.
The little
swish of attraction she felt for the
stranger made her current situation even more annoying. It
didn't matter how much he looked like the perfect person to
cast in the center of a romantic fantasy! She had given up
on such twaddle! She was well on her way to becoming one of
those women perfectly comfortable sitting at an outdoor
café, alone, sipping a fine glass of wine and reading a
book. Not even slipping a look at the male passers-by!
Of course, this handsome devil appearing without warning in
her boss's office on a Monday morning was a test, just like
the dress. It was a test of her commitment to the new and
independent Molly Michaels, a test of her ability to
separate her imaginings from reality.
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