The curtain whispered shut behind her and the world went quiet, muffled, the way sound dies inside a confessional. Willow stood in the small mirrored room and watched herself multiply — front, side, back, three of her at once, all of them blonde, all of them watching. The black dress David had chosen clung to her hips like it had been poured on, and when she turned her weight from one heel to the other, the satin slid across her thighs with a sound like a fingertip dragged along a wall.

She smoothed the fabric down over her stomach. The silicone plate beneath the dress sat warm and heavy against her chest, the two pencil-eraser nipples pressing up through the silk like they were trying to get out. She had worn this body for almost a month now and it still startled her every time — the curve of a waist that wasn't there in the morning, the swell where Warren had nothing. Her hands moved on their own, palms flat over her own hips, down the outside of her thighs, testing. Measuring herself. She caught her own eye in the left-hand mirror and looked away.

The room smelled of new leather and warm skin. Racks of garments lined the walls, each hung in its own small silence, and beneath the perfume of the place was something earthier, the smell of bodies that had stood where she was standing, breathing faster than they meant to. Willow's clit had been leaking since she stepped through the door. She felt it now, a hot little pulse against the damp lace of her panties, and she pressed her thighs together and the pressure made it worse, made it good.

The curtain rustled.

Marguerite came in sideways, one hand lifting the velvet, the other holding a tape measure looped over her knuckles like a rosary. She was older than Willow had expected, maybe fifty, with silver threads in dark hair pulled back tight and reading glasses pushed up on her head. She didn't smile. She looked at Willow the way a tailor looks at cloth.

"Arms out," she said.

Willow lifted her arms and the movement pulled the dress tight across her chest and Marguerite's eyes went there, briefly, then back to her face. The tape came off the knuckles. Marguerite stepped in close — close enough that Willow could smell her, cigarettes and something clean like cedar — and dropped the tape around her waist.

"Breathe out."

Willow breathed out. The tape drew snug. Marguerite's fingers found the hollow above her hip and pressed there, reading the number, and Willow felt the touch travel all the way down to the base of her spine. Her clit throbbed. She bit the inside of her cheek and stared at the far mirror and watched a woman being measured.

"Twenty-six," Marguerite murmured, more to the tape than to her. She moved the loop up, under Willow's arms, across the fullest part of the breast plate. Her knuckles grazed the false nipple and Willow's breath caught in her throat and she pretended it hadn't. Marguerite pretended too. The tape slid down again, over the swell of Willow's ass, and Marguerite's palm flattened there for a moment — not a grope, exactly, more like a farmer checking the flank of a horse — before she pulled the tape free and let it snap lightly against Willow's thigh.

"Turn."

Willow turned. In the side mirror she caught the gap in the curtain, no wider than a finger, and through it, in the dim of the shop, a dark shape. David. He was standing where he'd been standing when she walked in, hands loose at his sides, immaculate in the black suit, and he was looking directly at the gap. He could see her. He had arranged to be able to see her. Her clit jumped and a thin wet line of precum smeared the inside of her thigh above the stocking top and she felt it happen and could do nothing about it.

Marguerite's hands were on her again, at the small of her back, fingers spread. "You're small through the ribs," she said. "Good. Most of what I have will hang on you the way it's supposed to."

"Thank you," Willow said, and hated how high her voice came out, how eager.

Marguerite stepped back and looked at her for a long moment, head tilted, and Willow stood there under the gaze with her clit wet and her heart going and her arms still half-lifted like a doll waiting to be picked up. Then Marguerite turned to the rack by the wall and pulled something off it with a hanger's small screech.

Rose silk. A blouse, long-sleeved, with a soft drape and small covered buttons down the front. Beside it on the hanger, charcoal slacks, cut narrow.

"This is what you'll wear to the office tomorrow," Marguerite said. She held the hanger out at arm's length, flat, the way you'd present a flag.

Willow looked at the blouse. The last of Warren's suits was ash in a burn barrel somewhere upstate, and this — this soft pink thing with its little buttons — was what walked into the building now. Priya would see it. The men in the elevator would see it. She reached out and her hand was not steady and the silk was cool and smooth under her fingers and she took the hanger and felt the whole weight of it, which was almost nothing.

"Strip," Marguerite said. "I need to see it on you before I take in the waist."

Willow's hands went to the side of the black dress without being told twice. The zipper came down with a long rasp and the dress loosened and she stepped out of it and laid it over the back of the little velvet stool in the corner, smoothing it flat. She stood in the mirror in her black lace panties and the sheer thigh-highs and the silver wig and the breast plate, and Marguerite looked at her without expression and said nothing about any of it, which was somehow worse than a comment.

"Blouse," she said.

Willow put it on. The silk was cold at first and then it wasn't, warming against her shoulders, and she did up the little buttons one at a time with her press-on nails and the French tips clicked softly against the plastic and she watched her own hands do it in three mirrors at once. The blouse fell to just below her hip. Marguerite came around behind her and took the slack at the waist in both hands and pulled it back, pinching, and Willow felt the fabric draw tight across her back and her breath came shallow and her clit was so wet now that she could feel the damp spreading, a warm spot the size of a coin in the lace.

"Slacks," Marguerite said. She held them low so Willow could step in, and Willow put a hand on Marguerite's shoulder for balance — the shoulder was warm and solid and smelled of cedar — and stepped into the charcoal wool one foot at a time, and Marguerite drew them up her legs, over her knees, over the tops of the stockings, and settled them at her waist. Her knuckles brushed Willow's hip bones. Willow's clit pulsed against the seam of the slacks and she made a small sound and Marguerite did not look up.

"Hem's long," Marguerite said. "You wear a heel with these. Not the platforms. Something with a point." She crossed to the shoe wall and came back with a pair of bone-colored pumps, four inches, sharp as a scalpel. "These."

Willow stepped into them and stood up and the whole room tilted and steadied and she was suddenly taller, longer, more of a line. In the mirrors she was a woman in a rose silk blouse and charcoal slacks and bone heels, and the woman's hips had a sway even standing still, and the woman's face under the silver wig was flushed high on the cheekbones and the woman's lips were parted and wet.

Through the curtain gap, David shifted his weight. She saw it in the mirror more than through the gap itself, the black shape of him settling, and she knew what that shift meant because she had learned to read it over a month of being read. He was pleased. He was watching his property be fitted for its collar.

Marguerite walked a slow circle around her. "Turn," she said, and Willow turned, and Marguerite's hand came out and smoothed the blouse down over her ass, palm flat, fingers spread — a tailor's touch, but slow, and it stayed a beat longer than a tailor's touch needed to stay. Willow's clit leaked. She felt the wet reach the seam of the slacks and she knew that if she looked down there would be a darker patch and she did not look down.

"Good," Marguerite said. "Now the jacket."

She brought one off the rack — soft grey, unstructured, cut short. Willow put her arms in and Marguerite stood behind her and drew it up over her shoulders and then reached around her front and took both lapels and pulled, settling it, and her forearms pressed against the underside of Willow's false breasts and Willow's whole body went hot and loose and she closed her eyes and behind her eyelids saw David's cock, thick and heavy, sliding into her from behind while she stood just like this, held by the lapels, pinned by a hand at her waist. Her clit clenched. Nothing came out of it — nothing ever did anymore — but the clench went through her like a small fist and she bit her lip hard enough to feel it and stayed standing.

"Eyes open," Marguerite said, mild.

Willow opened her eyes. In the mirror, three Willows in a grey jacket, all of them flushed, all of them with wet mouths. She looked at Marguerite's hands on her lapels and then at the gap in the curtain and David was still there, still watching, and she thought: he can see me come. He can see me do it and there's nothing I can do about it and the thought went through her clit like a thumb and she came.

It wasn't the big full-body thing — she couldn't have that without his cock in her mouth or his cock in her ass, she knew that now the way she knew her own name — but it was a real one, a hot tight clench that rolled up from her clit through her pelvis and left her knees soft and her mouth open and her hand gripping the edge of the jacket rack. She made no sound. She bit her lip and rode it out standing up and Marguerite, behind her, felt the tremor through the lapels and did not say anything and did not stop holding on.

When it was over Willow's eyes were wet and she was breathing through her nose and the damp in her panties had spread to the size of her palm.

"Take it off," Marguerite said, and let go of the lapels, and stepped back.

Willow took off the jacket. Her hands were shaking and one of the buttons on the blouse took two tries. She laid the jacket over the stool next to the black dress and stood in the rose silk and the charcoal slacks and waited.

Marguerite was already at the rack again. She pulled a second blouse — ivory, this time, with a tie neck, and a skirt instead of slacks, a pencil skirt in deep navy that came off the hanger with a heavier sound.

"This one you wear Friday," she said. "Client lunch. You'll need the skirt because you'll be sitting for two hours and the men across the table will want to look at your legs."

Willow took the hanger. The skirt had a small slit at the back hem and she ran her thumbnail along it and felt the wool give. She looked at herself in the mirror and tried to see the woman who would sit at a client lunch in a navy pencil skirt and answer questions about quarterly numbers in a soft voice, and the woman was there, she was right there, she was the only one there.

"Off with the slacks," Marguerite said. "I want to see the skirt with the ivory."

Willow's fingers found the clasp. She undid it and drew the charcoal slacks down over her hips and stepped out of them and Marguerite took them from her without ceremony and hung them. Willow stood in the rose blouse and the black lace panties and the sheer stockings and the bone heels and Marguerite looked at the panties for the first time and said nothing at all, and Willow felt the wet patch against the air and wanted to cover it and did not.

"Skirt," Marguerite said.

Willow stepped into it and Marguerite zipped her up and the wool closed around her hips like a hand. She changed the blouse — the rose silk slid off her shoulders and the ivory went on, the tie neck drawn snug at her throat, and through the whole of it she could feel David's eyes on the gap in the curtain like a finger held to her skin. Her clit was still wet from the first one. It had not gone down. It never went down. It just stayed there, small and soft and leaking, and every time she moved the seam of the skirt pressed against it and reminded her.

"Now the boots," Marguerite said. "The tall ones. I want to see the line."

She brought them off the wall — black leather thigh-highs, a heel that had to be six inches, a platform under the toe. Willow sat on the velvet stool to get into them and Marguerite knelt in front of her and pulled them up one leg at a time, and the leather was cold and then warm and it came all the way to her thigh and Marguerite's hands smoothed it up over the stocking and settled it, and Willow looked down at the top of Marguerite's head between her knees and thought about David's head there instead and her clit throbbed hard enough that she had to grip the stool.

Marguerite stood. Willow stood. In the mirrors she was a woman in an ivory tie-neck and a navy pencil skirt and black leather thigh-highs, taller than she had ever been, and she turned and the leather creaked and the skirt slit opened at the back and showed the lace of her panties for a half-second and she felt David see it.

"That's the one," Marguerite said. "That's the one for the dinner."

Willow's mouth was dry. "What dinner."

Marguerite looked at her for the first time like she was a person and not a garment. "He didn't tell you." It wasn't a question. She turned to the rack and pulled a garment bag off the end of it and laid it flat over her arm and unzipped it and inside was the dress — long, black, a single strap, a slit up one thigh — and she held it up against Willow's body and looked at the line and nodded once.

"Saturday," she said. "You'll wear this Saturday."

Through the curtain David's shape did not move. Willow looked at the dress and then at the gap and then at her own three reflections, and her clit ached and the lace of her panties was wet through and her lip gloss had smeared somewhere along the way and she had not noticed and no one had told her. She lifted one hand and pressed her fingers to her mouth and felt the slick of it and looked at herself looking at herself.

Marguerite unzipped the garment bag the rest of the way and folded it back and there, inside, on the hanger, next to the black dress, was a second blouse — rose silk, like the first, but cut lower, the buttons smaller, and Marguerite took it off the hanger and held it out to her.

"This is the one for tomorrow," she said. "The other was a test."

Willow's fingers closed around the rose silk, the fabric cool and smooth against her skin, and she felt a single tear slide down her cheek as she understood there was no turning back.

The tear tracked down past the corner of her mouth and she did not lift a hand to stop it. It landed on the rose silk where she was holding it bunched against her stomach, and the fabric went dark where it hit, a small round stain that spread to the size of a coin. Willow looked down at it. The blouse was ruined now, or marked, or whatever it was that happened when you cried on something that was going to walk into an office building on your body tomorrow morning, and she could not bring herself to care about the mark, only about the fact that she had made it and could not unmake it.

"Marguerite."

The woman had already turned back to the rack. She stopped at the sound of her name and turned her head without turning her body, glasses still up on her head, tape measure back on her knuckles where it lived.

"Yes."

"What dinner." Willow's voice came out lower than she meant it to, softer, and she hated that she could hear Willow in it, the purr under the question. She tried again, harder. "He didn't tell me about a dinner. He told me about the fitting. That's all he told me. That's what he said — he said Marguerite was going to dress me and I was going to walk out of here with the week's clothes and that was the whole of it."

Marguerite looked at her for a long moment. Then she crossed the small room and took the rose silk out of Willow's hands — gently, the way you take something from a child — and laid it over the stool beside the black dress, and smoothed the tear-stain flat with her thumb, and did not seem to care about it either.

"Sit down," she said.

Willow looked at the stool. There was no other seat in the room. She sat.

Marguerite pulled a low bench out from under the mirror wall and set it across from her and sat down on it and folded her hands in her lap, and in the three mirrors Willow watched both of them from three angles, the older woman leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and the blonde in the ivory tie-neck and the navy pencil skirt sitting up straight with her hands on her own thighs, and the whole arrangement looked, suddenly, like an interview.

"What did he tell you," Marguerite said. Not a question.

"Nothing."

"He told you nothing about Saturday."

"He told me —" Willow stopped. She was trying to remember. The week had come at her in pieces and the pieces did not fit together the way she needed them to, and she could feel the audio file at the back of her skull where it always sat now, humming, ready to open if anyone pushed the right door. "He told me you were going to dress me. He said the real work hadn't started. He said — he said the week was a test. He said there was a dinner."

"And what did he say about the dinner."

Willow opened her mouth. Closed it. She had been sitting on the edge of David's bed in the silver-and-black dress with the silver wig and he had said something about Saturday, she was almost sure of it, but when she reached for the words all she got was the weight of his hand on the back of her neck and the smell of his collar and the sound of her own heels on the floor of the room. He had taken the memory in his fist the way he took everything and put it where he wanted it.

"He said I'd wear something nice," she said. "He said there'd be people."

"Mm." Marguerite's hands stayed folded. Her face did not move. "He said you'd wear something nice and there'd be people."

"That's what I remember."

"That's what you were allowed to remember."

The way she said it — flat, without malice, the way you'd tell someone the weather — went through Willow like cold water. She looked down at her own hands on the navy wool of the skirt and saw the French tips of her press-ons against the dark fabric and the small shudder that went through her fingers and she pressed them flat against her thighs to stop it.

"Tell me," Willow said.

Marguerite studied her. Then she reached over to the rack and took the garment bag off its hook and laid it across her own knees and began to fold it, one panel at a time, the way you fold a flag or a shirt you intend to keep, and she talked while she folded, and she did not look up from her work.

"He booked the private room at the club," she said. "The one upstairs. Not the bar, not the floor where the girls get shown. The room with the mirrored ceiling."

Willow's clit, which had been quiet, went hot again at the base of her, a small sharp pulse that had nothing to do with what she wanted. She pressed her thighs together under the skirt and it made it worse, and the wet in the lace of her panties was a warm coin again, spreading, and she kept her face still because Marguerite was still folding.

"The mirrored ceiling," Willow said.

"Every angle. You'll be able to watch it happen to yourself from above, if you can keep your eyes open. Most of them can't." Marguerite smoothed the flap of the bag. "He's booked it for eight. Four of his clients. Men. They'll be seated around the table and you'll be seated with them, not at the head with him, not beside him — with them, on display, in whatever I put you in, and you'll pour their drinks and you'll answer when you're spoken to and you'll do it in front of the ceiling and in front of him and in front of four men who paid to be there."

Willow heard the room go very quiet. Even the shop outside had gone quiet — or maybe David had stopped moving in the dim beyond the curtain, or maybe the whole building had decided to hold still while this was said to her.

"Paid," she said.

"Paid." Marguerite set the folded bag aside and looked at her at last. "You didn't think the silver collar was the whole of it. Nothing David does is one thing. He's been building you for a month and a month is a long time and a man with a month of footage and a month of files doesn't spend it for a dinner he could have at home. He spends it for a table."

Willow's mouth was dry. She swallowed and her throat clicked and the sound was loud in the small room.

"What kind of paid."

Marguerite's mouth did something that was almost a smile and was not.

"The kind where nobody at the table has to say what they're paying for," she said. "You'll be told what to wear and you'll wear it and you'll be told what to do and you'll do it and if he decides you'll be passed around the table like a decanter, you'll be passed around the table like a decanter, and the ceiling will show you your own face while it happens."

Willow made a sound. It came out of her before she could stop it — not a word, a small wet noise like the beginning of something — and her hand went up to her own throat and found the tie of the ivory blouse and held it, the way you'd hold a collar. She was aware, in a distant way, that her clit was dripping now, a slow steady leak soaking the lace, and that her nipples under the breast plate had gone hard enough to press against the silk of the blouse, and that her body was answering a question her mind had not finished asking.

"I don't do that," she said. "I've never — I haven't —"

"You haven't what."

"I haven't been with a man."

Marguerite looked at her for a beat too long. Then she reached out and took Willow's chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned her face to the light and looked at her the way she'd looked at her when she came in — like cloth — except this time there was something else under it, something older and drier and almost kind.

"Girl," she said. "What do you think the last month was."

Willow's eyes filled. She did not blink. She kept them open and let the wet sit there because blinking would have sent it down her face and she had already cried once in this room and did not intend to do it twice.

"The last month was —" she started, and stopped, because she did not know how the sentence ended. The last month was David. The last month was the collar and the cage and the file and the camera and the hotel room and the club and the shop and the men who had touched her in the shop and the woman who had touched her in the shop and the fourteen hours she could not find and the photos on her phone of a bar she did not remember and her own mouth around things she had not seen and the morning in the Christopher Street room with cum cooling on her thighs and the red light in the corner and the way she had stopped looking away from it. The last month was a single long sentence that had no period at the end of it.

Marguerite let go of her chin.

"The last month was the fitting," she said. "This is the wearing."

She stood up and went back to the rack and took down the black dress — the long one, the single strap, the slit — and laid it back in the garment bag on the hanger, and zipped the bag up to the top and hung it on the end of the rack where Willow could see it, a black shape in a black sleeve, waiting for Saturday.

"What did he tell you," Willow said again. "About me. Before tonight. What did he say I was."

Marguerite paused with her hand on the bag.

"He said you were the one he'd been waiting for," she said. "He said you'd come to him already half-made and that all he had to do was finish the work. He said you'd cry at the fitting and then you'd ask me what Saturday was and then you'd get in the car and go home and be good all week and come back on Saturday and do whatever he told you to do."

Willow's throat closed.

"He said that," she said.

"He said that."

"Before tonight."

"Before tonight." Marguerite turned the hanger on the rack so the bag faced the wall. "He's very good at knowing what people are going to do. It's not a trick. It's just that he watches them for a month first."

Willow sat on the velvet stool in the ivory blouse and the navy skirt and the black leather thigh-highs and looked at the garment bag and the rose silk on the stool beside her and the tear-stain on it that had gone dark and would dry lighter and would still be there, faintly, when she put it on tomorrow morning and walked into the office and let Priya see her. She thought about the mirrored ceiling. She thought about four men at a table and her own face above them and David somewhere in the room being pleased. She thought about the way her clit had gone hard and wet the moment Marguerite said the word paid, before the meaning had even finished arriving, and she understood — the way she had understood things for a month, always a beat too late and always in her body first — that she was not going to say no.

"He said you'd know what that means," Marguerite said.

Willow looked up at her. On the stool, the rose silk held its small wet mark, and on the rack the black dress hung in its bag, and through the gap in the curtain David's shape had not moved.