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Moving Up

Ann Marie Gamble

    Noah had barely finished buttoning his shirt when Morgan thrust two more suits through the gap in the changing room curtain. “You’d look good in tweed.” She wiggled the hangers and he took them out of her hand.
    “I like these pinstripes.” Noah smoothed the lapels of the jacket he’d picked.
    “Too gangster, especially for the law library.”
    Noah finished tucking in the shirt, a white button-down, and pulled on the jacket. Now that she’d said “gangster,” he no longer saw power broker in the mirror but Sopranos extra. He grimaced at his reflection. “You just wrecked a perfectly good suit.”
    “Good for what?”
    “How do you even do that?”
    “Show me.”
    “It’s already gone. Over, finito, sayonara.” He shrugged out of the jacket and hung it back up. “This tweed one is going to make me look like a professor.”
    “No it won’t, for I am old and wise, grasshopper.”
    “You can’t lord one year and ten months over me forever.” He changed into the brown tweed that she’d picked out and surveyed the result. He looked like a professor if you imagined your professors climbing out of a Land Rover on their way to meet Sean Connery. She’d done it again.
    “Let’s see. I’m hypothesizing from the silence that I’m right.”
    When Noah came out of the changing room, Morgan was sitting on the back of the velvet sofa in the middle of the fitting room. In contrast to his job interview finery, she wore a baseball jersey, cut-off jeans, and battered deck shoes. She’d draped a rainbow row of dress shirts over the sofa and was futzing with the straw on a lemon ice from the department store café.
    Noah pulled the shirt cuffs. “How did you even get in here?”
    Morgan twirled her finger at him. “Turn—let me see the back. I may have implied there was a wedding involved. What do you want to convey here?”
    “It’s a job interview.”
    “Buying a suit suggests you really want this job. You could wear a sport coat.”
    “I’ll try the other one.” Noah shrugged out of the coat.
    Morgan hopped off the sofa and riffled through the shirts. “With this shirt, though.”
    “It’s navy blue.”
    “It shows you still have a soul.”
    Noah rolled his eyes and headed back for the cubicle. The shirt Morgan had picked out somehow made all the non-gray flecks in this tweed pop. When she complained about colorless administrative jobs, she was being literal.
    “Noah.” The slushy gurgled. “I seriously don’t get gunning for this job. You said you’d never be a lawyer.”
    “It’s the law library.”
    “You’ll be around lawyers all day.”
    “Morgan, it’s a job. It’s a salary, so I don’t have to live at my parents’ house anymore, or in some apartment where the roommates always have somebody crashing on the sofa.”
    “So this enables your desire to be a hermit?”
    “What’s your issue with lawyers?”
    “We’ve blotted out the Harriet bachelorette debacle, have we?”
    “I would’ve attributed that to Harriet or bachelorettes. Schnapps.”
    “Don’t come crying to me when you realize what you’ve gotten into.”
    Noah flipped the curtain aside, stuck his hand in his pocket, and leaned on the door frame. “Would you like to see my ... case law?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
    Morgan took a long draw on the lemon drink, her cheeks hollowing, her mouth curving around the straw, her lips moist and bright red. Some part of Noah broke open. He had never wanted anything more than he wanted a lemon ice—that lemon ice—that straw warmed by Morgan Buonarroti’s lips.
    Morgan coughed. “If you want the job, that suit is how you get it.” She pulled the straw up and down, squeaking it against the lid. “Don’t talk or anything...”
    “I’d better try another one then.” Noah retreated behind the curtain. What the hell? He knew in an objective way that Buonarroti was beautiful—he’d run interference at enough bars to have gotten that. But how had he never realized she was beautiful to him?
    Beautiful, of course, being a euphemism for the rest of his body’s evaluation. It was leaping right into the new frame, leaving his brain to figure out how to get into the next pair of slacks with some dignity. “You know, you don’t—”
    “—Decent briefcase? Wait, what?”
    The body that had found its object of desire walked itself out of the changing room, shirt untucked, to be able to gaze again upon its star. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” the traitorous little cells murmured, ditching his brain’s suggestion that she didn’t need to stand around on the other side of the tissue-thin curtain while he undressed.
    “Do you have a decent briefcase?” That glorious, expressive mouth pushed into a moue. “They’ve also got belts.”
    His brain joined the party, imagining not just a belt but Morgan threading it through the belt loops, caressing his skin as she worked her way around his waist. Ice, he thought. Big chunks of lemon ice. “I don’t need a belt.”
    “The gray one is better.” She smiled a slow lazy smile. “Although this ... interrupted ... thing is ... appealing.”
    “Go. Get me a necktie. Handwoven, cartoon characters, whatever you want.” But he was walking toward her instead of the changing room. He stopped close enough to smell the lemon on her breath. He tilted the few degrees necessary and brushed his lips over hers. She drew toward him, so he really kissed her. Her mouth was cool and tart and—
    A sales clerk outside the fitting room called to another clerk.
    “What’s happening here?” Morgan’s voice was husky.
    He bent to press his lips against the point on her shoulder swept by her ponytail. “I grew up.”
    She exhaled. “You should do that more often.”
    “Once is all I need.”
    “Your own place, eh?” She grinned at him. “I know just the necktie.”

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