Cocktail Dress in a Montreal Gallery Bathroom

She can hear Dominique through the wall — that particular carrying laugh, the one she uses for collectors — and the thin percussion of glasses touching. The vernissage is still entirely intact out there. No one has noticed she is gone.

The bathroom is small and bright and not hers. White subway tile. A single bulb above the mirror with no shade, the kind of light that shows everything. She had come in meaning to blot her lipstick and found herself standing at the sink not moving, looking at her own face, and understanding that the specific wrongness of this room was the reason.

Not desire in general. Desire here. In someone else's gallery bathroom, with her gallerist twenty feet away explaining her work to strangers.

She set her clutch on the edge of the sink. The tile was cold against her hip through the dress — the crepe so thin she felt the temperature of the wall when she leaned — and the contrast moved through her in a way she hadn't expected. Her thighs were pressed together inside the dress, the hem just above the knee, the fabric holding its shape without helping her hold anything.

She looked at herself in the mirror. This was the part she understood: the looking. The specific quality of watching herself want something in a room she had no right to want it in.

Dominique's voice again, muffled, warm, performing. The soft collision of a glass set down.

Her right hand was at her side. Her left hand had found the edge of the sink and was holding it, not hard, just resting there, keeping her in place. She was aware of her own stillness the way you are aware of stillness before it ends.

The hem of the dress was light enough that when she shifted her weight to her left hip, it moved. Not much. Enough that the air reached the inside of her knee, and she felt that — the specific coolness of it — before she had made any decision at all.

A breath came out of her that she had not planned. Shorter than the inhale that had preceded it. The mirror showed her mouth opening slightly, then closing.

She was still looking at herself when her right hand moved to the hem.

Not lifting it. Just touching. The back of her fingers against the outside of her thigh, the crepe between her skin and her skin, the fabric so thin it was almost a formality. She felt the warmth of her own leg through it and held very still, the way you hold still when you are deciding whether you are actually going to do something.

Through the wall, the party continued, indifferent. Dominique laughed again. A new voice joined — a man's, low, interested in something.

She was interested in something too.

Her knees were still together. The dress was still down. Her left hand tightened once on the edge of the sink, and she exhaled through her nose, slow and deliberate, the kind of exhale that is also an admission — and then she let her right knee move, just slightly, just enough that she felt the fabric across her inner thighs go slack.

The space she had made was small. It was everything.