Slow Surrender by Cecilia Tan Read Free Book Online Page B

sitting in a little pile on the corner of the futon. It only occurred to me as I looked at the pile that it didn’t include a top. Maybe he wanted me topless…? He probably thought I had a bedroom to myself like a normal person. He hadn’t said whether this was just phone sex or if we were going out. He wanted me to wear shoes—that probably meant going out, didn’t it? Oh, how could he have specified some things and not others? He had said figuring out the rules of the game was part of the game itself, though.
    I could hear Becky’s voice in the hall as she came toward our door from the elevator, singing one of her favorite songs. I picked up the clothes, went into the bathroom, and stripped down to a T-shirt and my white cotton underwear and started putting the stockings on. This turned out to be more complicated than I expected.
    “Becks?” I called into the hall, holding the bathroom door open a crack.
    “I’m home!” she yelled back from where she was still getting her coat off. “Rina, the most amazing thing happened!” She came running up to the door and held up a white square of cloth, slightly smeared and stained-looking. “Look at this!”
    “A handkerchief?”
    “It’s his !” She rubbed it on her cheek. When she said his like that, I knew she meant her rock-star idol. She had her mystery man and I had mine.
    “How do you know it’s his?”
    “At the Madison Square Garden show, you know how he always wears a mask, right? He kept wiping his forehead and then throwing the handkerchiefs into the crowd!”
    “But you weren’t at that show.”
    “No, no, I wasn’t. But one of the other girls was, and she got two, and she put one into a raffle for charity that the Lord’s Ladies were running, and I won it! I won it! I never win anything!” She positively bounced.
    “That is awesome!” Her glee was infectious and I found myself grinning. “But, hey, can you help me with this?”
    “Of course. What do you need, Rina?”
    “Um…” I opened the door all the way so she could see the disaster I was making. Among other things, one of the stockings was twisting around my leg like a barber-pole stripe.
    “Here. Sit.” She dropped the lid down on the toilet and I sat. She took the stocking off and bunched it as she went, then handed it back to me. “Just let a little of it out at a time as you go up your leg.”
    “Aha! I knew there had to be a trick to it.”
    “You’ve really never put on stockings before?”
    “Well, only a few times. I always just kind of tugged at them until I got them on all the way, like you do with dance tights.” I started pulling it up my leg and she put a hand on mine to slow me down a little.
    “I didn’t know you danced,” she said.
    “I used to, just for fun, when I was in high school and a little in college. I wasn’t very good at it, though.” I shifted as I got the stocking most of the way up my thigh. “And dancing was something feminine, so my mother approved.” That was before I’d figured out that I’d never be feminine enough to please my mother.
    “You’ve got the garter belt on backwards,” Becky pointed out.
    “How can you tell?”
    “There’s a little bow that goes in front.”
    I shimmied the belt around while she bunched up the other stocking.
    “I had ballet and violin lessons,” Becky said, “but so did every girl I knew. I started both when I was five and quit ballet when I was ten.”
    “Why?”
    “So I could spend more time on the violin. Ugh,” she said. “That was my mother’s idea, too.” She fastened the stockings to the dangling bits of the belt and then made a face.
    “Rina, those panties totally don’t go.”
    “Well, I wasn’t gonna borrow those from you,” I said. Then I blushed furiously as I realized panties hadn’t been on his list of things to wear. Maybe he intended for me to go without. I felt a deep thrill between my legs thinking about it.
    Becky was still sitting on the bathroom floor. She