Chapter Text
It is early afternoon and you are sidling into your girlfriend's room. Your shoulders are tense and you continually dart your eyes over them to check behind you. Your girlfriend is out of town. You have no reason you can think of to be so nervous in your own apartment, but you are, veins jittering with anticipation or fear, or both.
You stand in front of her floor-length mirror, as tall as you but not quite as thin, and you strip out of your clothes. The heavy long overcoat gets folded once and placed on the bed, but you start worrying after that and the rest of your clothes just get piled on top of it in easy reach. Your suit is grey, and does not quite reach past your ankles and wrists. It is rather rumpled because you have the bad habit of scrunching the fabric in your hands when nerves hit, which is almost constantly. Your girlfriend has tried to curb you of the habit, but so far, has been unsuccessful. You just forget quickly, is all.
Your fingers shake on your buttons and you take a second to reassure yourself that you are alone, that your girlfriend will not find out. Problem Sleuth says that confidence is just lying to yourself really well; you are trying to internalize it. She won't be back, you repeat to yourself a few times. You stare into your own eyes in the mirror, a watery shade of grey with too much blue in them and shadows like violet stains lurking beneath. Deep breath. She won't be back.
You slide the shirt off your bony shoulders. You can count your own ribs but you don't need to; there are twenty-four. You are long past the point where you worried you might have miscounted and had to double-check everytime you got dressed. You are confident you have twenty-four ribs. You drop your pants on top of the pile of clothes. On your arm is written in blue pen, your shaky-legged script, the word "three". You are not sure when you wrote it or what it was for.
You stand in front of the mirror in your underwear and shiver. It is always cold in your apartment because you keep forgetting to pay utilities. That's alright- the radiator has long since gone missing under piles of books, rumpled jackets, and tea cups with stray, dried leaves. You are not entirely sure where it was in the first place. You take off your underwear too.
You are more comfortable now, and you've stopped looking over your shoulder. Somehow, though being so stripped down makes you tremble, you're just entering that safe zone in your head where you can block the rest of the world out. You open the top drawer of the dresser, idly counting the beads on the pearl strand sitting on the flat top. (Fifty-nine.) You take out a few items and place them reverently beside your own clothes. Your clothes are functional, taking the wear you give them and the beatings other people do. You don't care for them much. These are different.
You hum something softly as you put them on, slow and careful and methodical. These are the only times your mind slows down long enough to be methodical; these and those crystalline moments of imagination alone, before you crash. You remember buying each one of these for your lady friend, each occasion marked out. Equally, you remember shyly slipping into them yourself when she was out, painstakingly careful not to leave a mark on them, to erase all evidence of your small crime.
Surely it's not so bad. You borrow them, but you don't use them. You put them back. You cannot quite lie to yourself enough to be convincing. But you do it all the same. The waist corset is designed for a tall, slim woman; you are not so far from that. There is a slight curve, perhaps an extra eleven-degree angle, that pulls away from your hips and chest, but when you cinch it in, nudging your flat stomach flatter, that angle becomes yours and you are the one with that faint curve.
Thin silk underwear, pale blue, grey lace. This you are extremely careful with. The corset can take a little abuse, and can stand to inflict it on you. The panties are not designed with you in mind. But you wear them anyhow and your brain shakes uncontrollably in your skull. You pull on the gloves, long grey silk and past your elbow, and you stand in front of the mirror.
Your eyes are very guilty, but when you look at your body, lanky and awkward and shivering, your lips part and you almost lose thought entirely at the sight. You always do. You can't imagine anyone ever doing this, and you can imagine quite a lot. Sick guilt wells up in your stomach and roils there; you have never given much thought to being different, but you are aware that this resides on a different level than most of your social botches. This is something very different indeed.
It's too much. Enough for the day. You'll take it off, gently and cautiously, and replace it all in the drawer, and then you won't do this again until the next time your lady friend is away for more than a day. You clasp your silk-clad fingers around your upper arm, where the gloves stop. You begin to slowly roll it down, trying not to relish the feeling, until the voice that comes from directly behind you nearly makes you shock out of your skin.
"Don't you move just yet," comes a low tone, lazy and cool. "You just got that on."