Chapter Text
New York was nothing like Paris. Where Paris was elegant, layered, steeped in centuries of beauty and restraint, New York was raw, brash, and loud. The air smelled of ambition, exhaust, and the faint burn of possibility. Miranda Priestly stepped onto American soil with her chin held high, clutching her portfolio like armour. She had not come across the ocean to falter. She had come to conquer.
Her first day at American Runway was a blur of sharp heels on polished floors, a cascade of faces she barely registered, and the endless drone of typewriters. She had been installed as a junior fashion editor, a position prestigious enough to be envied but low enough to remind her that she had miles yet to climb. She thrived on the rhythm of it; the deadlines, the edits, the negotiations with designers. Her accent, still Europe-stained, lent her a certain mystique. Her beauty, sharpened now into angles of precision, was impossible to ignore. And yet, it was not until she met Nigel Kipling that she began to breathe in the city fully.
He had arrived in the Art Department the same week as she, his hair wild, his wit even wilder. He greeted her with a grin that made her pause. It was warm, unapologetic, and utterly devoid of fear. Within days, they were fast friends, bound by their mutual hunger to succeed and their outsider energy. They went to clubs together, drank too much cheap vodka, laughed until dawn spilled over the skyline. For the first time in years, she felt young.
Miranda observed with something close to envy, how authentically Nigel managed to live his life. He was discrete of course, in the way that gay men had to be in the mid-1980s, but he was simply dazzling in his freedom. He dressed however he pleased, said whatever he thought, and seemed immune to judgment. Miranda watched the way he danced with men under strobing lights, kissed them boldly in corners of smoky bars; living in ways she could only dream of in the quiet darkness of her own thoughts.
One night, long after midnight, they sat side by side on a curb outside a club in Greenwich Village. Their laughter had faded into quiet, replaced by the weight of exhaustion and too many drinks. Miranda toyed with the edge of her cigarette, watching smoke curl into the air, and said softly, “I don’t know how you do it.”
Nigel turned his head, squinting at her. “Do what?”
“Live like that. Open. Comfortable. As if it costs you nothing.” She forced a small smile, but her eyes betrayed her envy.
Nigel’s laugh was sharp and ironic. “Darling, it costs me everything. You think it’s easy being a gay man in a world that would rather I disappear? Half the time I’m terrified. The other half, I’m just tired of pretending. But easy? No. Never easy.”
Miranda looked down, cigarette trembling slightly between her fingers. She felt a sharp stab of hopelessness, a reminder of Claudine’s cool dismissal, of her grandmother’s cruelty, of every whispered lesson from childhood that love, real love, was dangerous, forbidden, doomed. She had buried her desire in ambition, in steel walls and careful control, but here under the neon glow of New York, it pulsed again, raw and tender.
Her silence stretched long enough that Nigel’s expression softened. He tilted his head, studying her with eyes too perceptive for comfort. Then, in a quieter voice, he said, “It’s…maybe a little different for women, you know. People don’t notice the same way. They don’t see it as dangerous in quite the same sense. Maybe they think it’s just…” he twirled his left hand in the air as he tried to find the right words. “…girlish silliness.”
The words landed like a knife and a balm all at once. He hadn’t said it outright; he hadn’t needed to. Somehow, impossibly, he had seen through her. He seen what she carried like a brand beneath her skin. Her cheeks flushed, not from vodka but from shame, from recognition, from a fear that she had been too obvious. She took a long drag of her cigarette to cover the tremor in her lips. “You imagine too much,” she said, voice cool, but her heart raced as if she had been caught stealing something forbidden.
Nigel only smiled faintly, looking back at the darkened street. He did not push, did not pry. He simply let the silence settle between them, thick with unsaid things.
Miranda lay awake long after, staring at the ceiling of her small New York apartment. The city buzzed faintly outside her window, restless and alive. She thought of Claudine’s hands, of the way she had once trembled with both terror and desire, of the laugh that had broken her heart. She thought of Vincent, of his warmth, his pleas for children she could never give, of the quiet dissolution of a marriage she had tried to want. She thought of Nigel, bold and fearless, even in his fear, and of the way he had looked at her tonight as if he knew, as if he understood the thing she’d buried deepest.
For the first time in years, Miranda felt the ache of loneliness like a physical wound. She was young, brilliant, ambitious, admired. But the part of her that longed for tenderness, for passion, for truth, was still locked behind walls she did not know how to scale. She turned onto her side, pressing her palm against her flat stomach, trying to steady the twist of hunger there; not for food, not for ambition, but for something softer, something she still did not dare name.
-0-
New York was a city of appetites – money, power, beauty. Everywhere Miranda looked, women glided through the halls of Runway like wraiths; sleek, impossibly thin, their cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, their clothes hanging with casual elegance. They were the image of perfection, and Miranda – already slender, already meticulous – felt her body like a liability.
So, she tightened. She perfected. She measured herself not only against their work but against their forms, shrinking herself until she nearly disappeared. Coffee for breakfast. A few forkfuls of salad for lunch. And when she did eat more, when the hunger howled too loudly to ignore, she would slip away to a bathroom stall, fingers down her throat, until she felt clean again. In those moments, bent over porcelain, tears pricking the corners of her eyes, she told herself it was control. She told herself it was discipline. She told herself it was survival.
Her ambition sharpened in the same way. She arrived earlier than anyone, stayed later, memorized every designer, every fabric, every whisper of a trend. She was relentless, and people began to notice. Whispers floated through the corridors: Miranda Priestly…she’s going places. It fuelled her. It was something she could hold on to when everything else slipped through her fingers. It was something she could control when an altogether different hunger managed to claw back to the surface.
She and Nigel partied through the city together, slipping into clubs that pulsed with heat and music, with bodies pressed close in defiance of the world outside. Miranda, strawberry blonde hair lacquered into precision, lips blood-red, drank too much and let herself be led onto the dance floor, her body moving against strangers in a way she would never allow under the unforgiving lights of day.
And sometimes, when the alcohol softened her fear and Nigel’s knowing smile egged her on, she let herself go further. A woman’s hand at the small of her back, guiding her to a corner. The taste of lipstick not her own. Fingers tangling in her hair. Quick, urgent encounters against a bathroom wall, the press of silk against her palms, the sweetness of a gasp in her ear. During those moments, Miranda was alive. Her body hummed with the pleasure she still remembered from Claudine, the spark she had buried for years. It was real, undeniable, intoxicating.
But the morning after was always the same. She would wake with her head pounding, her mouth dry, sometimes with a woman beside her smiling sleepily, sometimes the impression of a woman already gone. And Miranda would feel the ice rush back in. Shame. Fear. The echo of her grandmother’s voice. Shameful. Wrong. Unnatural.
She would pull herself together in silence, slip into her clothes, paint the mask back onto her face. She would walk to work as though nothing had happened, burying the memory so deeply she almost convinced herself it wasn’t real. Almost.
Nigel never spoke of it directly, but he knew. Sometimes, after a night like that, he would give her a look over their morning coffee. Gentle, non-judgmental, simply knowing. And Miranda would arch an eyebrow, icy as ever, daring him to say aloud what they both understood. He never did. It was their unspoken pact.
-0-
The weeks blurred into months. Miranda’s name carried weight now at Runway. Editors began to defer to her tastes. Designers sought her approval. She was climbing, step by precise step, and she would not stop until she reached the top.
But alone in her apartment at night, she still felt the hunger gnaw. For food she would not let herself eat. For love she would not let herself want. For something, anything, that would fill the emptiness left behind by Claudine’s laugh, by Vincent’s gentle devotion she could not return, by her grandmother’s bitterness echoing in her blood.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Bones sharp beneath her skin, eyes rimmed with exhaustion, mouth set in a perfect, immovable line. She told herself she was winning. She told herself she was strong. But sometimes, when the city outside quieted and there was no one left to perform for, Miranda Priestly pressed her hands against her ribs and wondered if, in her endless pursuit of control, she was hollowing herself out entirely.
-0-
By her early thirties, Miranda Priestly had become a name. Not the name, not yet, but recognisable. Whispers followed her at Runway events, her presence noted, her opinions quietly courted. In the hushed, merciless circles of fashion, she was no longer an ambitious outsider clawing at the walls. She was inside. And she intended to climb higher. On the outside, she glittered. Sleek clothes, impeccable tailoring, the aura of icy authority that made people step aside without quite knowing why. Inside, though, she was a study in deprivation. Food was still rationed - an apple here, black coffee there, the occasional indulgence offset by self-punishment. Discipline was her creed.
Desire, when it came, was rationed too. The nights she let herself indulge were fewer now. She had learned that discretion was everything; reputations in fashion were fragile as silk. But still, sometimes, she found herself in the dark corners of a bar, or the quiet back room of a club, where music throbbed low and a woman’s perfume lured her in.
However, the encounters had changed.
Once, she had trembled with nerves and ecstasy, allowing herself to be touched, to be unravelled, to feel. Now, she never allowed it. She controlled everything – the pace, the pressure, the pleasure. She became an expert with her hands, her mouth, coaxing sighs and moans from strangers who would remember her as intoxicating, commanding, unforgettable.
But she never lay back. She never surrendered.
A brunette pressed her against a velvet sofa once, trying to kiss down her neck, but Miranda gripped her shoulders and spun her, pressing her flat against the cushions instead. She slid a hand up the woman’s thigh, watching her writhe, feeding on her cries, but when the woman reached for her in return, Miranda caught her wrist and stopped her cold.
Another night, a blonde model begged her to stay, to let her “return the favour.” Miranda only laughed, low, amused, dismissive. She fastened her blouse, touched up her lipstick, and walked out into the night, heels striking the pavement like gunfire.
She didn’t take pleasure anymore. She gave it. Always. It was safer that way.
Pleasure made her weak. Pleasure made her want. And wanting was dangerous.
At work, her reputation sharpened in tandem with this new habit. She was brilliant, uncompromising, merciless with mistakes. She demanded perfection and delivered it herself. Younger editors whispered about her behind manicured hands, but no one denied she was indispensable.
Nigel, of course, noticed. He always noticed.
“You’re becoming stone, darling,” he told her one night over drinks. His tie was loosened, his eyes glassy from whiskey. “Cutthroat at work, cutthroat in bed. You’ll snap in half if you don’t let yourself bend.”
Miranda arched an eyebrow, swirling her martini. “Stone doesn’t snap, Nigel,” she smoothly countered. “It breaks what tries to crush it.”