Chapter Nine

Tiny romances were lovely.

They were even more lovely when the man you’re having a tiny romance with is a clothing designer, and a good one too. In the open dressing room, Ornette saw the other designers working with their models.

They were backstage, quite far backstage, but Ornette could already see the clear winners. She didn’t calculate herself in those numbers. She couldn’t see herself. Fen had her facing away from the mirror while he worked. What she felt were his hands all over her. He was fitting her bodysuit and he wanted to make sure it pulled correctly. It would have been the same ordeal if any man insisted on helping a woman put on pantyhose. Except, the pantihose covered most of her body. The fit was tricky. He was gentle but very possessive.

She wanted to lean over and tell him that it didn’t do any good to be possessive over a model from Sleeping Beauty Inc. They were yours for the time that they were yours and then they belonged to someone else.

“What was your last owner like?” he asked suddenly, crouching at her feet and smoothing the fabric out over her stomach.

If she had answered honestly, with no filter, the answer was, ‘He was a quadriplegic.’ She couldn’t answer like that. Fen wouldn’t know what to do with that and it would change the way he saw her. It was in her best interests to say something that kept his illusions of her in place.

“He knew what he wanted,” she replied, giving her voice a warning edge.

Fen glanced up at her as if to ask for more information.

She shut him down. “You shouldn’t ask about old owners.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to hear about them,” she replied as he helped fit her arms into the bodysuit.

“But I said I did,” he replied.

“Then you should have asked me about them on a different day. Right now, I’m a little busy preparing myself for the catwalk,” she said, reminding him she needed to keep a clear head.

Those were words Fen appeared to understand. He promptly shut up and finished helping her bring the bodysuit over her elbows, breasts, and shoulders.

With the first step complete, he took a step back to admire her. “You look fantastic. I wish I’d had more time to prepare the bodysuit. I could have fitted jewels intermittently through the fabric. It would have been captivating, except we didn’t have the time or the resources for that level of design. It’s a shame.”

The goldish transparent dress that went over was lovely. It flounced in all the right places. Looking down at herself, Ornette almost burst into tears because she’d never worn anything that lovely in her whole life and she probably would never wear anything that lovely again.

“Don’t cry, Baby,” Fen said, taking her hand in his and kissing her palm because her knuckles were covered.

“Can I look in the mirror now?” she asked, breathing hard through her nose as she tried to dry out her sinuses.

“Not yet. Frankie is coming with your headpiece.”

“I have a headpiece?” she asked in wonder and surprise.

Fen smiled widely. “I knew you’d be excited when I told you. I’ve been keeping it secret from you. It’s a headband, but it looks like a crown even though it’s not made of metal. It should be very comfortable. You should be able to wear it all night.” He leaned in and said, “I also managed to arrange for two to be made for the outfit so that you can take one with you at the end of the night.”

Ornette shrieked in joy and threw her arms around Fen’s neck.

That was what he wanted from her the whole time and his arms came around her eagerly.

“Calm down,” he said after a moment passed. “I need to get your jewelry on you and Frankie isn’t here yet.”

Carefully, he secured her dangling gold earrings and clicked the closure mechanism on the bracelet around her wrist.

Frankie did arrive on time and presented Ornette with the two crowns. They were gold and pointed upward like an eagle beak. Fen and his assistant finished arranging Ornette’s curls and finally, when the crown was in place, they turned to show her herself in the mirror.

It was better than anything Ornette had ever seen. Everything the other women were wearing backstage fell back into nothing. It didn’t matter what they were wearing anymore. She didn’t care what they had on. She had the best dress and the best designer and the best everything.

She couldn’t stop thanking Fen. Even when they called her number and told her where to stand, she had trouble leaving him. She had to be behind the curtain ten minutes before the catwalk. She stood where she was supposed to, but she couldn’t think straight. She looked too beautiful to think straight. She was too happy to think straight. She was supposed to start walking, just to get to her position behind the curtain, but she was in a daze.

She was walking through a corridor.

She was going through a revolving door.

She was supposed to come through on the other end, but something happened. A door opened inside the wall of the revolving door and she was pulled the wrong way.

Was she in a closet?

The next second, Desmond was in her face. He was very close in the small space and the scent of his cologne made his next words more powerful. “You look beautiful,” he said hurriedly as he grabbed her hands.

“What are you doing?” she asked, confused and defensive.

“I need to change your bracelet. The one you have on is no good.” He figured out which wrist wore the offensive piece of jewelry and he took it off her.

Then to Ornette’s surprise, he replaced it with one that looked exactly the same.

“Have a good show,” he said pleasantly, before chucking her out of the closet back into the revolving door. She had to rush three steps to catch up with the other models.

Ornette was lucky she was number twelve and that the fashion show they were doing was not a normal fashion show where someone was out on the stage for two minutes and then back behind the curtain for a wardrobe change. They weren’t there to show off a designer’s collection. Instead, Claudia (number one) went out. The designer she had been paired up with explained his design while Claudia showcased the outfit.

The girls behind the curtain could watch on a screen. Ornette watched. Claudia was the finest model they had and it made the dishrag the designer had made for her look like gold.

That was when Ornette realized that she was going to have to watch everyone else have their turn before she got to go on. It had been good because she needed time to collect herself after Desmond surprised her in the revolving door, but she was also losing the energy she had for the show as she cooled her heels.

She started evaluating the other models. They started looking at her.

That made Ornette nervous. The Coordinator was behind the stage with them, but he was a skinny dude with a lot on his mind.

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“Ornette, your dress is so golden,” Tania, the blue mermaid girl huffed over her shoulder.

It wasn’t her fault, she told herself. Tania was just in a bad mood because the designer she got hadn’t finished her dress and it was looking spotty because she had been sewn in it at the last minute.

Ornette turned to her and said, “You won’t get eliminated tonight. I know you’re nervous. No one is getting eliminated tonight and it might even work in your favor if your designer sucked because if you can make enough of the voters feel sorry for you, that might work better for you than if he nailed it.”

“Mack Strap said it was finished,” Tania crabbed.

Ornette had never heard of that designer. She had heard of Fenrir Charming.

“Who did you get again?” Tania asked Ornette.

She said.

Jane whistled (the contestants she shared a helocarrier with were the only women near Ornette in the line). “I like his designs. He looks like he knows more about comfort than other designers. Are you comfortable in your gold dress?”

“Yeah. It feels like snug pajamas,” Ornette confessed.

“I envy you,” Yilin said with an emotionless mask on her face. Her dress was a skeleton of a dress, with all the bones out and nothing to wear that kept her warm or even covered. Her panties and bra straps were completely visible.

More models went out, but because of the way they were arranged, Ornette could only really see Tania, Jane, and Yilin. It was like that until the models appeared on the screens over their heads. Then they could see what everyone watching Goldilock Zone could see.

Some of the designs were good. Some of them were average, and very few of them were spectacular.

As the models went out one by one, Ornette remembered the day she met Fen. He had been so fired up to make her something so beautiful because of what she said to him.

Ornette felt a little bad about it. She meant what she said to him, so she shouldn’t have felt bad, but the other models had failed to ignite their designer the way she had. Maybe they were saving themselves for further into the competition, but what if they weren’t matched up with the same designer again by lottery? There were twenty-five designers and only twelve models. The number of models would go down as they got deeper into the episodes. There would be fewer opportunities. Saving yourself seemed like a horrific waste of time.

When it was Ornette’s turn, she felt hot like fire. A fire ready to ignite the stage and impress everyone with her blaze. She was a tiny girl. She was never the star of the show. It was her time, even if she got eliminated in the second round.

She went out and did her catwalk the way she had been instructed. Her heels were high, but Fen had been careful to get her heels that were natural for her to wear before he fitted them into her bodysuit.

He stood behind a podium, holding a microphone for traditions’ sake, even though he had a second microphone at his collar. It was just nicer to hold something when you talked in front of a crowd and Fen loved the attention. For once in his life, he wore a plain tuxedo because the last thing he ever would have wanted to do was outshine his creation (and the man could have outshone Ornette if he put his mind to it).

He stood up in front of all of them, the three bears, the designers, and the businessmen. “Good evening. I’m Fenrir Charming. Doubtless, you’ve all heard of my brand. Tonight, I’m here dressing contestant number twelve, Ornette. I want to give her the last name of Charming as well because she is truly charming. As I’m sure all of you designers know, dressing a woman with only seven days' notice is asking a lot. It’s asking a lot more if she doesn’t have the standard model frame. Ornette is tiny. When my name was drawn for the lottery last week and I got her, I thought I was so lucky to be selected in the first round. When she came out to be introduced, I thought I was unlucky. When she turned out to be Varner’s favorite, I thought I was lucky again. When I got her in my studio and I realized again how tiny she was, I believed I was unlucky again. But then Ornette started talking with me. I won’t share with you what she said, but she lit a fire in me I haven’t felt in years. Let me walk you through our creation.”

Ornette beamed when he used the word ‘our’. It was so generous of him, she almost spilled her heart out onto the floor.

“Her name, Ornette, means little eagle. Let me take you through the different parts.” He named the types of fabric, the types of stitches, and the inspiration behind each aspect. He finished with, “What you must understand about this design is that it was able to come about so quickly because Ornette found beauty in my existing designs and wished for something that was a mild, but powerful, variation. Each and every part of this dress was something I was familiar with making and could have made in my sleep, but she was the one who envisioned something so fresh. She said she wanted to look like Venus, not the goddess, but our world and an eagle flying through it.” He said his last line in such a breathy romantic murmur that Ornette turned to see his face.

His brown eyes were alight with the yellow reflection of her dress and all the lights on her.

He was in love with her.

He snapped out of it and turned to face the crowd. “Thank you very much.”

After Ornette had been shown, Varner got up and spoke to the audience and the cameras. “Now that you’ve met our models for the second time, I hope you’re getting more comfortable with them and choosing your favorites. The next part of the show is the lottery we did at the beginning of last week’s show. All the models will line up under their numbers and we’ll choose the businesses they’ll represent in next week’s episode.”

Ornette went and stood under her number. Yilin was next to her but didn’t say anything even though they were quite close together.

The names were called. None of them meant anything to Ornette. She saw Desmond in the crowd. He was easy to spot because of his white hair, but he wasn’t chosen.

Her businessman for the next week’s show was a man named Joel Fibers. He owned a sporting equipment business. Ornette was deeply jealous of Jane’s man. She got a soft drink company president. If only!

After the episode would be a reception with drinks and food where everyone could talk to the models. It was almost the exact same party they’d had on the first episode, except this time it was a more intentional speed-dating scenario.

Ornette was passed around from man to man to man, never getting anywhere near Fen, Desmond, or Crois. Instead, she ended up paired with a businessman who confused her. His name was Albert Gilt. He was older, ordinary-looking, and boring. Him possessing those attributes didn’t confuse her. What confused her was why she wasn’t getting passed off to the next man. No one came to claim her, so she just ended up stuck in a conversation with him where he droned about the unfairness of doing business in the new world. He thought everything was rigged to make him fail.

Having a conversation of that nature with a model from Sleeping Beauty Inc. was the most ridiculous thing Ornette could think of. He thought his freedoms were being removed (she bet he had never been refused reasonable pay and resorted to selling himself in a form of legalized slavery). He thought doing business in the new age was hard (she bet he’d never had his ass slapped). He thought everyone was out to get him (she bet he’d never been thrown across a room or electrocuted for saying no). Because Ornette couldn’t bang him over the head with her champagne goblet (she actually would have preferred to shatter it and stab him with the pointy end), she decided to just start agreeing with him as loudly as possible.

“And then they started taxing the fuel,” Albert complained, his face getting redder.

“Can you believe that?” she uttered in the most dumbfounded tone.

“And then they started limiting how much fuel you could buy,” he went on, getting redder still.

“No way!”

“They fine us if we go over the limit,” he wheezed.

“How dare they!”

He raised his goblet in Ornette’s face to make his point and then he fell on the floor. He was having a heart attack. Ornette got on the floor with him and yelled for someone to call a doctor. She put her hand to his throat to measure his heartbeats. Her bracelet fell against his neck and he gasped all the harder.

There was a doctor in the building who came running.

He was the president of a medical supply company and he couldn’t do a thing except shoo helpless Ornette away from Albert and wait for the ambulance like everyone else.

It was quite the scandal. The cameras were all over it.

When things quieted down, Ornette got back to her place as twelfth in line as they toddled the girls back to their rooms. When she went through the revolving door, Desmond grabbed her again.

“You need your bracelet back,” he said pleasantly, grabbing her wrist and switching her bracelet for the one Fen had originally put on her.

She wanted to question him. She wanted to ask him a million questions, but as soon as the change was complete, she was shoved back into the circle of the revolving door and the little closet Desmond had opened was shut tight. She had to catch up to the other girls.

Fen was waiting for her in the dressing room. Apparently, he got to have one more moment with her for him to ensure the dress he designed was packed up properly for cleaning and then for auction.

“Thank you for saying all those kind things about me,” Ornette said gratefully, “but are you sure it was the right thing to say them?”

“What are you talking about?” he said pleasantly.

“You made me sound so wonderful. If you sold those designers and businessmen on me, it might be harder for us to be together later on in the show.”

He scoffed. “I thought about it too. I think it’s in our best interest if you go as far in the show as you can. I don’t know which way it will go, but I decided I want to play the long game.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, breathless.

“It means I want us to be together when your contract is up, no matter what happens on the show,” he said with a look of determination on his face.

“Are you sure? What if I do badly? Won’t that be an embarrassment to you?”

“Don’t do badly. Kill them.” He kissed her one more time and said goodbye.

His last words were still dangling in the air over her head when she lay down to go to sleep that night.

He said, ‘Kill them’, but she didn’t think she could put on a better show than the other models. She couldn’t beat Claudia. The woman looked like gold even if she wore a dishtowel.