Chapter 6: Formal Night

The card on the pillow that morning said it in gold: Captain’s Gala — this evening, seven o’clock — formal attire. Valerie had read that same line off the itinerary two weeks and a lifetime ago, standing in the door of my study back home holding the printout like a court summons, and I’d told her not to worry about it — the ship was a floating shopping mall, we’d find her something aboard. I’d been looking forward to the finding ever since.

“It’s tonight.” She’d come to read the card over my shoulder — two days since the beach, and this was the most she’d volunteered at once. She’d gone quiet in them, careful, sleeping jammed to the wall. But there was something under the careful this morning. “Formal. Like — actually formal?”

“Gowns, the works. Captain shakes your hand at the door.”

“And I don’t have —” She stopped, and I watched her weigh whether she was allowed to want it. “I don’t have anything to wear.”

“That’s what the shops are for. We’ll go up after breakfast.”

“Okay.” She said it too fast, caught herself being eager, folded it back down, and went to brush her teeth. But I’d seen it — the wanting, breaking clean through two days of held breath. A kid who’d never owned a real gown, thinking about owning one.

Two days hadn’t fixed the beach. Nothing was going to. But she wanted the gown, and the party, and one ordinary night with an ordinary father — wanted them badly enough to reach for them right over the top of what I’d done. All I had to do was be the one holding them out.

The shop was up on the promenade deck between the jeweler and the duty-free, all soft light and hush. A saleswoman in black came at us the second the door chimed, and I told her my daughter needed a gown for the gala and hadn’t a thing to her name, and I watched the woman’s eyes do the arithmetic — the good dress, the doting father, the open wallet. After that she was mine, working for me and never knowing it.

Valerie hung back just inside the door, reaching to touch a sleeve and pulling her hand back, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed. But her eyes wouldn’t stay put. They kept going to the wall of gowns — the long shining grown-up ones — and drifting back to them even while she held herself shy by the door, and I watched a girl who’d never owned a real dress in her life start to want one off that wall so bad she half-forgot to be afraid.

“That one,” she said, before she could stop herself, pointing at a navy thing, high at the neck and long in the sleeve. Pretty. Modest. A girl’s idea of what a woman wore.

“Try it if you like.” I lifted it down and handed it to the saleswoman, and kept walking, to the end of the rack where the real ones hung. “Try this one too.”

It was gold — a pale, liquid gold, close enough to bare skin that across a room you’d have to look twice to be sure she had a stitch on. Floor-length, but cut to the body the whole way down, low in the front, open past the small of her back, and slit up one side clear to the top of the thigh. The kind of dress that needed a body under it and would find every last line of the one it got. Valerie looked at it and went pink to the ears.

“I can’t wear that.”

“Why not.”

“Because — look at it. There’s no back. Everyone would see —” She dropped her voice, mortified. “You can’t even wear a bra with that, Dad.”

“Then you won’t wear one.” Easy, like it was the price of milk, while the saleswoman found a thing to fold. “You’ve got the shoulders for it and everything else besides. That navy one’ll wear you — swallow you right up. This one, you’ll wear. There’s a difference. Try them both, humor me.”

The fitting room was one of the good ones, a carpeted little room of its own with a curtain and a three-way mirror, plenty big for two. She took the dresses in and pulled the curtain, and I gave her about a minute and then moved the curtain aside and stepped in with her.

“Dad—” She had the gold one half on, one arm through, the front clutched to her chest and the whole side of her bare. “You can’t just — I’m changing—”

“Zipper’s in the back, you’ll never reach it. Turn around.” And she turned, because the other choice was raising her voice and bringing the woman, and she stood facing the mirror in nothing but her underwear with the gold hanging off her front, and I did up the zipper. Slow, my knuckles running the whole bare length of her spine to the nape of her neck, and she watched me do it in the glass with her jaw set and her eyes gone bright and wet.

“Now hold still. It’s got to sit right on you.” And I put my hands on her, and I didn’t hurry them. Down her sides, over the flare of her hips, in at the waist — then up the front under the flat of my palms and over her tits, both of them, cupping them up through the gold where it barely held them, my thumbs finding the stiff points of her nipples through the cloth and staying on them a good deal longer than any fit ever needed. She pulled a breath in and held dead still, the way she’d learned to hold still on the beach, and let me.

“These’ll show through, though.” I pressed a flat hand low on her belly, over the shape of her underwear through the gold. “Lines, all night, right through it. Take them off.”

“Dad.” Her eyes came up in the glass. “You’re right here —”

“I’ll turn around.” I didn’t. “It won’t sit right with your underwear bunching up under it — and you don’t wear cotton under a dress like this anyway. Off.” And she reached up under the fall of the skirt, red to the hairline, worked them down and off, and had nowhere on earth to put them but my open hand — so she gave them to me. Nothing under the gold now. No bra, no panties, my fifteen-year-old bare under a few ounces of it with her father holding her warm underwear in his fist.

“And this slit’s got to lie right, or it gapes all night.” I crouched a little and ran my hand up into it — up the bare inside of her thigh through the long slit in the gold, all the way up, to where she was bare now with the cotton gone, and cupped her there. My fingers along the bare split of her, the heel of my hand pressed up into her. She made a small strangled sound and both her hands flew down and caught my wrist — not to drag it off, just to hold on, her whole body gone rigid, her eyes screwed shut.

I stepped in close behind her and let my cock, hard as a rail through my trousers, press up against the bare cleft of her ass, and I held her like that: one hand up between my daughter’s legs, the length of me against her, ten feet of carpet and a curtain the only things between us and the shop.

The curtain rings scraped. “Let me just have a peek at how we’re getting —” and the curtain moved, a hand on the far side of it starting to sweep it back.

Everything in me stopped dead. My hand up between her legs, my cock against her, a stranger’s hand on the curtain — and for one white second the whole of it hung there on a wire. “Ah — not yet!” I got it out easy, God knows how, over a heart going like a fist on a door. “Give her a minute, she’s not decent — you know how they are at that age.” A laugh under it. The hand stopped. “Course. Take your time,” the woman said, and her footsteps went off across the shop.

I let my breath out slow against the back of Valerie’s neck. She was shaking under my hands. I didn’t take the low one away, not right off — I gave her one more slow press through the bare of her, because I could, because I’d been wanting to since a beach two days back — and then I let go, and stood up.

Then I stepped back and let her see herself.

And there was the thing I’d come to buy. The dress had done just what I knew it would — taken my fifteen-year-old and poured a woman down over her, the gold running every line of her, one bare leg showing to the thigh through the slit, her shoulders bare, her tits held up soft in the front of it, the whole young shape of her turned into something that stopped the breath in your throat.

She stared at herself. Her lips came apart. She almost smiled at the glass — caught it, turned it closed-lipped and careful the way she did, the braces tucked away behind it — but the pleasure got out around the edges anyway, and for a second, before she remembered to be afraid, I watched the wanting win. Watched a girl fall for the woman in the mirror.

Then she caught my eyes on her, and the color climbed, and her arms came up over the front of it.

“It’s too much,” she said. But she said it looking at herself, not at me.

“We’ll take this one,” I told the saleswoman through the curtain. “She’ll wear it out tonight. She’ll want something seamless under it, too — a thong, whatever won’t show a line — and shoes. Heels. Whatever goes with it.”

“Dad, “ Valerie hissed, mortified the woman had heard.

But the woman was already moving, pleased as anything — a whole evening going onto the bill. The gown, a little nothing scrap of a thong, a pair of heels she held up against Valerie’s bare foot for the size while the girl stood there scarlet and let her. “Wrap the navy too,” I said.

Back in the cabin she made a long careful business of getting ready, and I gave her the bathroom and the mirror and sat out on the balcony with a drink and the door open, catching pieces of it — the hair going up, the little gold earrings that had been her grandmother’s, the slow work she made of her face. When she came out in the dress it landed in my chest like a fist — her neck bare, the new heels putting inches on her she didn’t know what to do with yet, one hand out to the wall for her balance, walking careful and tall and unsteady across the little cabin like a girl trying on being a woman and not sure of the fit.

And under all of it, I knew, nothing but the thong. I’d handed her the box myself.

I made her a drink. Mostly the minibar champagne, a splash of something under it to give it a kick, and I put it in her hand while she was turning in front of the mirror, and she drank half of it without thinking — nerves, habit — and I topped it back up.

“For your nerves,” I said. “It’s a party. You’re allowed one.”

“Your zipper’s slipped.” It hadn’t. I came up behind her anyway and ran it the last half-inch to the top, and let my hands settle on her bare shoulders and stay there, the two of us looking at her in the glass. “There. Look at you.”

She looked. Two swallows of the champagne in her already, the flush coming up her neck, the fear gone soft at the edges — and she let herself look, and she liked what she saw, and I let her have it.

The gala was in the big room aft, the one with the two-story windows and the chandeliers, a whole ship’s worth of people poured into their good clothes and the band up on the stage in white jackets. Our table sat near the floor. Half the department was already there when we came in, and I watched every head at it turn.

Diane got to her feet. “Oh — oh, would you look.” A hand pressed flat to her chest. “Frank. Is this the same child who got on the boat? Sweetheart, you’re a vision — turn around, let me see the back —” and Valerie turned, pink and pleased in spite of herself, and the table made the sounds a table makes, and Carl’s wife asked where the little girl had gone, and one of the marketing men just looked and said nothing.