The Shop Assistant Closed the Store and Went Into the Fitting Room

That late-March afternoon I had no plans. I had gone out for a walk through the center of Valdemar because the sun was slanting between the narrow streets and the house felt like it was closing in on me. I liked looking at shop windows with no real intention of buying anything, as if strolling were the true reason and everything else were just an excuse not to stay still.

I’d been going from store to store for more than an hour when I stopped in front of a new boutique, one of those that open between a café and a small bookshop and seem hidden on purpose. In the window, on a white mannequin, hung a dark blue lace bodysuit with very thin straps and a silk detail at the waist. It wasn’t the usual cheap set. It had something about it that made me stop a second longer than I meant to, hand on my bag and my gaze fixed on the reflection in the glass.

I pushed the door open and a small bell rang. It smelled like vanilla and new fabric. Behind the counter, a girl my age —or maybe a couple of years younger— looked up from a notebook. Brown hair tied up in a loose bun, a white shirt open to the second button, a silver ring on her thumb.

“Hi,” she said, smiling the way people smile when they don’t need to sell anything to be kind.

“Hi. I saw the blue bodysuit in the window. Do you have my size?”

She looked me up and down with professional speed.

“A thirty-eight, right?”

“Thirty-six, actually.”

“Ah.” She looked at me again, differently now, not bothering to hide it entirely. “Yes, I have it. I’ll get it.”

While she disappeared through a door behind the counter, I looked around. The shop was small: two walls with clothes hanging, a low chest of drawers, and at the back, separated by a burgundy curtain, a single fitting room. No one else was there. Through the window, the street looked empty. Siesta hour has that strange quality of freezing small cities, as if time has gone off to do something else.

She came back with the bodysuit on a wooden hanger.

“Here. If you need another size or help with the clasps, just let me know.”

I pushed the fitting-room curtain aside and found myself alone in front of the mirror. The cubicle was larger than I’d expected, with a padded stool, a small rack, and a warm light that wasn’t harsh. I undressed slowly. For some reason, I felt as if I were getting ready for more than trying on a garment.

Maybe I’m imagining things, I thought as I slipped the straps over my shoulders. Maybe not.

The bodysuit fit perfectly on top, but down the back there was a row of tiny hooks I couldn’t fasten by myself. I tried three times. On the fourth, I stuck my head out through the curtain.

“Sorry. Can you help me with the clasps?”

She came in two steps. She paused for a moment at the fitting-room entrance, as if waiting for permission, and then came all the way inside and pulled the curtain shut behind her.

“Do you mind if I lock the front door?” she said quietly. “It’s dead time and I don’t feel like leaving you halfway to deal with anyone.”

“Lock it,” I answered, and I heard the click of the bolt even though she hadn’t even left the fitting room. She had a remote for the door. Details like that, I thought later, aren’t invented by chance.

***

She stood behind me. I started feeling her fingers at the small curve of my back, fastening the first clasp with a concentration that wasn’t entirely necessary. The second took her a little more work. Her breath reached the nape of my neck and smelled like mint and cold tea. She closed the third clasp, grazing my skin with the back of her hand, and when she got to the fourth, she didn’t move her fingers away.

“Too tight?” she asked.

“A little.”

It wasn’t tight. I lied because I wanted her hands to stay there.

She loosened the garment at the waist. Her thumbs lingered a second too long on my hips. I lifted my eyes to the mirror and found hers waiting for me. Her irises were very dark, almost black, and she had a way of looking that didn’t ask or beg: she only watched, as if I were making the decision for both of us.

“What’s your name?” I said, because nothing better came to mind.

“Mara.”

“Mara,” I repeated, as if I needed to taste the word before doing anything else.

I turned slowly. We were a few centimeters apart, her back against the mirror, me still in the half-fastened bodysuit. There were no declarations or questions. I leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth, once, then a second time. She didn’t pull away. By the third, she was the one searching for my whole mouth.

She kissed calmly, as if she had all the time in the world and would never run short of air. I slid a hand to the nape of her neck and loosened the bun. Her hair fell to her shoulders and, for some reason, it seemed more intimate than anything else.

Her hands moved down my sides and finished taking off the bodysuit. The garment ended up in a crumpled bundle on the stool. I was naked in a fitting room with a stranger, and yet I felt no shame. I felt a strange clarity, like when you understand a decision at the exact moment you make it.

“Are you sure?” she asked, breaking away for a second.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

She laughed without making a sound. I unbuttoned her shirt one button at a time, unhurriedly, watching the skin appear underneath. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were small, with pale nipples, and there was a tiny mole just under her left collarbone. I leaned in to kiss it first, because it seemed like the politest place to start.

I slid her shirt off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Then I ran my hands over her waist, feeling the smooth skin and the tension in her abdominal muscles. Mara inhaled deeply when my fingertips brushed her stomach. I pulled down her pants enough for her to take them off herself and saw the basic black panties, no lace or embellishment, clinging to her pussy. I liked it precisely for that: for the simplicity, for the direct way it showed me what was there without putting on a show.

“You’re beautiful,” I said, without thinking.

She lifted one eyebrow slightly, amused, and pushed me gently against the fitting-room wall. It wasn’t rough, but it was firm, as if she wanted to show me she knew how to take the lead too. She kissed my neck, behind my ear, my throat. Then she bit my collarbone softly and I felt a warm shiver run down to the center of my body.

I took her pants off completely and pulled down her panties. Her cunt was already wet, glossy, open in that warm slit that made me swallow. There was no embarrassment or hesitation; we looked at each other for a second and understood the same thing. Mara put one hand on my hip and used the other to open my legs with slow precision. Her fingers touched me first from the outside, brushing my pussy lips, drawing circles around my clit with almost cruel patience.

“Like that,” she murmured. “Stay still.”

My knees trembled. I grabbed the edge of the mirror so I wouldn’t fall apart. She sank two fingers into me carefully, just a little, enough to test the way in and withdraw again, as if she wanted to measure my heat. Then she did it again, deeper, and I let out a moan that embarrassed me for only half a second before I forgot it completely.

“Don’t hold back,” she said, her mouth pressed to my skin. “I want to hear you.”

She kissed me between the legs, first over the wetness, then without any unnecessary delicacy. She parted my lips with her tongue, licking from bottom to top, and held my ass with both hands to pull me closer to her face. The first direct contact on my clit made my back arch with a shudder that went through me completely. She didn’t stop; on the contrary, she increased the pace, sucking, licking, alternating pressure with little flicks of her tongue that dismantled me layer by layer.

“Mara,” I said, almost voiceless.

“Here,” she answered without lifting her head, and plunged back between my thighs.

I threaded my fingers through her hair and pulled gently, not to hurt her but to ask for more. She answered with a vibrating moan that shook me from the inside. I felt her nose pressing into my mound, her tongue pushing inside me in such a precise way that every jolt tore another gasp from me. The air in the fitting room was thick with heat, with the smell of fabric and sex just beginning, and I no longer thought of anything except Mara’s mouth, her tongue, the way she brought me to the edge as if she knew my body better than I did.

“I’m close,” I said, pressing my legs together.

She gripped my hips hard and pushed two more fingers into me, opening me, matching the tongue strokes over my clit. Pleasure grew heavier, deeper, until it stopped being just pleasure and became a physical need, an unbearable tension that tightened my abdomen and made me breathe in ragged bursts.

I came slowly, without a sound, jaw clenched and hands closed in her hair. It was one of those orgasms that last longer than they should, a long wave losing strength in stages. She didn’t pull away; she kept licking me for a few more seconds, squeezing out the last shudders, until my body finally stopped trembling.

When I was done, she stayed there for a while, forehead resting against the inside of my thigh, breathing. I stroked her temple with my thumb. We didn’t say anything.

***

I straightened up. I held out my hand and helped her up from the floor. I took off the one remaining piece of clothing she had left on and we switched positions: she sat on the stool, I knelt in front of her. I brushed her hair away from her face —it was sticking to her cheeks— and, before going down, I kissed her mouth, long and slowly, so she’d understand I was going to take as much time as she had taken with me.

I kissed her collarbones, her breasts, her abdomen. I stroked the insides of her thighs, parting them little by little, while she gripped the edge of the stool with fingers whitened by force. When I reached the inner thigh, she was breathing in broken pulls and her nipples were hard, pointing down at me like little pink tips. I lowered the last barrier of fabric and found her cunt open, wet, slick, already trembling before I even touched it.

I tasted her slowly, carefully, paying attention to every reaction as if it were an alphabet I had to memorize. She tasted clean, almost salty, and I could feel her pulsing under my tongue. I gave her long licks first, then shorter ones, alternating pressure and suction, sliding my tongue between her pussy lips until she started to moan low in her throat. When I found the exact spot, Mara’s whole body tensed and her hips pushed against my mouth as if she had forgotten she was in a shop and not in a bed.

“Fuck,” she murmured, voice broken. “Yes, like that.”

I held her legs open with my hands, digging my fingers into the flesh of her thighs so I wouldn’t lose the rhythm. I returned again and again to her clit, licking it with steady movements, unwavering, while Mara’s fingers pulled at my hair and her hips began making small, involuntary thrusts. Every time I brushed a particular spot, I could hear another, higher moan escape her, less and less controlled each time.

Then she made me get up. She sat up abruptly, kissed me hungrily, and pushed me back until my spine hit the fitting-room wall again. She crouched, spread my legs, and buried her face between them with an urgency that was no longer patient at all. This time there was no softness: she licked me with a kind of contained fury, alternating her tongue with little bites around my clit until I felt my whole body go slack.

“Don’t stop,” I begged, and I was surprised by how clear my voice sounded.

“I’m not stopping.”

I buried one hand in her hair and used the other to grip the edge of the mirror. Mara slid a finger into me while she kept sucking me, and the double motion made me lose all sense of space. The ceiling, the carpet, the burgundy curtain, everything became secondary against the brutal throbbing growing between my legs. The second orgasm came faster, wilder, with a spasm that bent my back and a moan that escaped me without permission.

When it passed, we were both breathing as if we’d been running.

We stayed like that for a long while. No one spoke. Through the cracks in the curtain came the shop’s yellow light and, beyond it, the street remained empty. I thought that it was the first time in a long time that silence hadn’t bothered me.

***

I dressed slowly. Mara handed me each item of clothing piece by piece, like an accomplice. Before I left the fitting room, she met my gaze in the mirror. I smiled at her without saying anything and, while I tied my bootlaces, she put her shirt back on, fastened the first button, and gathered her hair into a new bun, this time neater.

I paid for the bodysuit in silence. Mara asked me, in her best shop-assistant voice, whether I wanted a paper bag or a cloth one. I asked for the cloth one. When she gave me my change, her fingers brushed my palm a second longer than necessary.

“If you happen by here another Wednesday at this hour,” she said, not looking at me, arranging hangers, “I’m usually alone.”

I didn’t answer with words. I nodded, opened the door, and went out. The little bell rang again behind me. The street smelled of overheated stone and the first hint of spring.

I walked with the cloth bag hanging from my shoulder, feeling the bodysuit wrapped in tissue paper against my hip. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened that afternoon. This is the first time I’ve written it down, and only because someone once asked me to tell a true confession, one of those that stay with you and live there. Two months have passed, and still some Wednesdays, without really thinking, my feet take me through the center to that narrow street where the sun comes in at an angle and the blue boutique waits with its little bell and burgundy curtain.