Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(47)
Reluctantly she clutched them to her chest and made eye contact with Kimmie. “I guess I’d like a room.” She walked over to a wall rack of sports bras, knowing he was right but annoyed he’d ambushed her. Since day one she had intended on dropping into Macy’s—wonderfully impersonal Macy’s—to see if she could wear any of the Fite line—but not in a Rockridge boutique with the help of a starved Amazon with buttocks like halved cantaloupes, and certainly not with him looking on.
“This one is totally the best for D cups. And up.” Kimmie held up a white bra that looked more like a very small, thick, short, sleeveless t-shirt.
“That’s quite a lot of coverage.” Bev took it from her. “How do you get into it?”
“You just have to kind of pull like really, really hard. Over your head,” she said. “I can help if you get stuck.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Liam put his hand on Bev’s shoulder and guided her towards the back of the store. “The changing rooms are over there.”
Alarmed he was following so close, Bev said, “You can wait up at the front. Or better yet, go catch your train. No reason for you to be here.”
“Oh, I think there is.” The corner of his mouth twitched.
Kimmie scurried ahead to open one of the doors for her, smiled coyly at Liam, and stepped aside for Bev to walk in.
Bev slammed the door in Liam’s face and locked it. The clothes hung on the chrome bar near the mirror.
She kicked off her shoes and turned away from the mirror to pull off her jeans. Perhaps the excessive reflective properties of the room were meant to inspire, but Bev felt goaded. The walls that weren’t mirrored were covered with artistic, enlarged photographs of naked athletes in motion, just to drive home the message that you really, really weren’t one of them.
Well, Bev wasn’t falling for it; they wouldn't insult her into feeling bad about herself. She got her feet into the leg holes of a pair of pants and tugged them upward, then unhitched her bra and began the struggle to fit the compression top over her chest. At one point both breasts were shoved nearly down to her belly button like stretched water balloons, but she reached down and pulled them up into the high-tech embrace of the sixty-four dollar bra and felt fairly confident she would be able to remove it herself.
“You all right in there?” Liam ‘s voice was too close to the door for comfort. “I heard noises.”
Just the sound of my breasts deflating. “I’m fine.” She jerked a t-shirt off the hanger and pulled it over her head. With her breasts in captivity, the slippery shirt slid down over her chest without a fight, and, bracing for the worst, she turned to squint at herself in the mirror.
She groaned. Why did they put elastic bands all over the place? With waistbands so low on her hips they would give a Rodin sculpture fat rolls?
“I don’t think so,” she muttered, turning to look at her rear end. “Yikes.” Butt cleavage was not a trend she was going to embrace, no matter how many apparel companies she inherited. The waist of her thong panties reached up above the pants several inches past the public school dress code limits. She turned back to the front, noting the yellowish-pink fabric of the top made her skin look cadaverous. She couldn’t rip the shirt off fast enough.
Liam rattled the door. “Now how are you doing?”
Bev jumped and crossed her arms over her chest, glancing at the Fite shirt sitting in a heap on the floor. “It didn’t do much for me.”
“Let me in.”
“No! I already took it off.”
The doorknob turned. “Then put it back on, because I’m coming in.”
The damn thing came unlocked. She threw her body against it. “Stay out there. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“If you don’t want me to see skin, then put something on. I’m coming in.”
“Damn it.” With one foot pushing the door closed, she craned across the dressing room to grab the next top and pull it on. It was as tight as the first, but only half as long. Her freakishly narrow waist-–the one he had been fondling earlier—was exposed no matter how hard she pulled it down. “You gave me a kid’s size!”
“They don’t have kids’ sizes here.” And then he was standing in the open doorway. Big and looming and looking her over. “Interesting.”
She stretched up to her full height and glared at him. “They need to fix the locks in this place.”
He continued to stare. “Turn around.”
“Liam—”
“If you want to be in apparel you’ll have to get over this prissy self-consciousness.”
“Prissy? Tell you what. You put this getup on. Then we’ll see prissy.” She pulled him all the way inside and shoved the door closed. At least the rest of the store didn’t have to see her.
“It’s horrible.” He shook his head at her body.
“Yes. Thank you. Shall we buy it?”
“The rise is all wrong. Did you put them on backwards?”
She hooked her thumbs under the waistband and tugged upwards but the seams dug into her crotch and she had to wiggle to get comfortable. “The only problem is that I’m wearing them at all. Get out of here and I’ll take them off.”
To her horror he stepped right up behind her, stuck his finger under the waistband right at the flesh above her hip, and pulled the fabric away and over to read the tag. “And these are a large, too. They don’t come in an XL.”