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Annette wished she would have trusted her gut and turned back around the moment she heard the classical opera music softly wafting through the air when she first stepped into Casagranda Couture Boutique.
Or the moment she felt like a hobo wearing her decade-old, boring and shapeless navy winter coat clashed against the daring high fashion blouses and jaw-dropping dresses she was certain required the strongest double-sided tape money could buy.
Or, well, when she belatedly noticed that none of the outfits on display had any price tags to be seen. Or that all the associates were dressed to the nines in full beat makeup with a dedicated associate representative for their customers who didn’t speak a lick of Fódlan’s Tongue.
That was always a sign that a shop was far too expensive for her paltry professor’s salary.
But no, she had decided to make the most of things despite all these red flags by rationalizing that it would still be good to window shop for inspiration even if she couldn’t get anything here. It didn’t help that Dorothea’s wedding was looming over her head like a specter because she was the only person in the wedding party who hadn’t found her dress despite her friends’ best efforts to help. Help that incidentally included a recommendation to visit the shop while the proprietor was in.
She really should have treated Manuela’s absence as a bad omen of sorts instead of deluding herself into thinking she’d only missed her because she came at peak lunch break time.
At least then she wouldn’t be in the mess she was in now, left alone for far too long in an uncomfortably tiny dressing room, stuck in a beautiful sparkly aquamarine mermaid-style dress with a halter neckline that was also uncomfortably tiny. Try as she might, the zipper she practically had to yank up her back to get over her too-big bum in the first place wasn’t budging an inch now. With the dressing rooms on the highest floor of the three storey historical building, Annette didn’t want to risk hobbling down multiple flights of stairs when the cinching hem of the dress was already hard to walk in on flat floors.
The last thing she wanted was to be on the hook for a dress she ruined by tumbling down she had no idea the price of, never mind break her legs and end up in the hospital when the bachelorette party in Derdriu she was organizing was next weekend.
After what felt like a small eternity in dressing room purgatory, she plucked the phone out of the depths of her cute bunny print tote and dialed her boyfriend’s number and silently hoped he didn’t have it on silent.
Her phone trilled for a singular ring before he picked up. Oh, thank the Goddess.
“Annette, is there something wrong?” her hero in shining armour asked.
If she wasn’t so stressed out as is, she would have teased him about his lack of telephone manners like she normally did for the bit they shared as an inside joke. Felix hated phone calls and had for some Saints-forsaken reason decided to make a game of answering hers with anything but hello. Today, she was thankful for this idiosyncrasy of his.
“How did you know?”
“Because you usually send a courtesy text to warn me that you’re calling,” he pointed out. “Are you ok?”
“I’m ok,” she reassured him. “I’m just…stuck in a dress and no one can help me get out of it. I’m on the top floor of that boutique shop that’s kitty-corner to your apartment. Can you come over?”
Annette couldn’t tell if her ears were playing tricks on her or not but she could have sworn she heard the rustle of him putting on his usual jean jacket and the jingle of his keys before the faint ‘yes’ on his end before the call ended.
With her immediate conundrum soon to be resolved, Annette took a deep breath as she slumped against the tangerine orange dressing room wall. Then another thought struck her like a lightning bolt, jolting her back into ramrod-straight posture not even a second later.
While they were just inching up to the next stage past open mouth kisses in their relationship if her boyfriend’s more frequent touches and overall handsy-iness was anything to go by, he’d never seen her in any state of undress before. What if she didn’t live up to the mental image in his head?
She was still far off from her fitness goals because of life piling on so much as of late and even though she didn’t take more than a split second look in the hallway mirror, she saw enough to know this dress was highlighting every missed gym workout and all the sweets she’d ever stress eaten. She simultaneously felt like an encased sausage from the hips down and a deflated balloon at her bust because she was nowhere close to filling out the built-in cups (she definitely had to tie the back ties into an ultra tight bow to compensate).
Closing her eyes, she let out a big sigh and silently prayed that the zipper was nicer to him than it was to her and only needed a small but firm tug to get unstuck so she could do the rest. Or that maybe some wayward employee would finally come to the upper level and beat him to the punch.
This was not the way she wanted him to see her half-naked for the first time.
Not in the slightest.
🍑🍰🍑
Not long later, a soft pair of not-quite-staccato knocks interrupted her social media hunt for dopamine.
“Annette?” The low voice on the other side of the door was unmistakable. She clicked pause on the video she was watching and shoved her phone back into her tote bag. The kitten interview would have to wait.
It didn’t surprise her in the slightest when Felix came to her rescue first. As much as he hated the idea of chivalry, his gallant side always came out when she was in some kind of pickle. Yet another one of his endlessly endearing idiosyncrasies.
“I’m here,” she answered, steeling herself for his reaction. “I’m going to open the door now so please be nice about what you see.”
“When am I ever not nice to you?” he teased before changing tacks. “I’ll have you know I ran all the way here.”
Annette’s cheeks burned at the indirect compliment. Whelp, she rationalized, at least her boyfriend was fit. Very much so. Surely it wasn’t too much trouble vaulting over those flights of stairs in case she wasn’t—
No!
She was going to be nice to herself, she decided, trying to ward the negative thoughts at bay with some positive self-talk like that one article she read two minutes ago suggested. This would be something to laugh over. The ridiculously-poofy tulle at the bottom would surely amuse him. Her boyfriend did play with bubble wrap when he thought no one was around, after all. This was sorta in the same realm, no?
She gave her head a good shake. No time to go into the weeds over semantics, no matter how much his behaviour was often oddly reminiscent of her childhood cat, Pancake, who happened to love tulle. She needed to focus.
Gripping the bejewelled knob of the sliding lock, Annette slowly slid it to the unlocked position and slowly pushed the door open, careful not to swing too fast and risk whacking him.
The moment she locked eyes with him, Annette wanted to slam the door shut again. And would have succeeded in doing so if Felix hadn’t grabbed the side of the door. Why did she have to date the man with the fastest reflexes in all of Fódlan?
Goddess, why did he have to pair his black joggers with the skin-tight teal compression shirt that left nothing to the imagination and the jean jacket that hugged his arms so nicely? Annette couldn’t do this. She couldn’t ogle him at point-blank range. The proximity alone would kill her and there would be no way to resell the dress if she died in it. Not without putting it on clearance, anyway.
“Annette, you’re fine.” he reassured before letting his eyes drift downward to give her a blatant once over. Curiously, she couldn’t help but notice that his ears were turning a rather trendy shade of petal pink as the apple of his throat bobbed up and down. “More than fine, actually.”
Annette nearly fell over for reasons other than the mermaid dress’s unforgiving construction at the knees. Just like Pancake, Felix couldn’t blatantly lie, even if it was to save his own life. Did he… actually like the way this dress looked on her? Seiros, even the absolute best case scenario she’d imagined maxed out at him not having an opinion at all. This was simply inconceivable.
“...Really?” she uttered a full octave higher than her normal speaking voice, letting go of the door entirely.
“Really,” he repeated. “I like seeing your curves. I usually only ever get to feel them.”
If she was slightly claustrophobic before, his frank admission was certainly making her head swim harder by the second. It didn’t help that he was maintaining direct eye contact nearly the entire time he was explaining. And during the odd times he wasn’t, he was looking at her lips.
His words really didn’t help when he oh-so thoughtfully added, “If you can’t get this dress, you should find a similar one.”
Oh Saints, she was worried for nothing. Why did her mind always jump to the worst possible scenario without factoring in the most obvious pieces of evidence? Of course there was a reason why he was so cuddly with her the instant she’d given him the greenlight.
Well, time to go back to the drawing room and collect more hard evidence of what he did like to revise her initial hypothesis like a good scientist would.
“You do, huh?“ Now flush with confidence, Annette dared to twirl around in the small dressing room. “Do you like the back too?”
“Yes,” he thickly answered, his amber eyes darkening with want. “So you need my help to undress?”
She nodded, pointing to her back. “I do. The zipper’s stuck.”
Annette could practically see the cogs in his head turning as he looked away, glanced both ways behind his back, and sized up the dimensions of the change room before re-establishing eye contact with her.
Before she could even ask what he was up to, Felix entered the dressing room and locked it behind him. When it was just her, she found it annoying that it was barely big enough to accommodate the kind of wiggling needed to shimmy into the dress.
But now?
Goddess, she was thankful for the lack of space. It forced him to stick a hand above her head for stability seconds before he took the creative decision to kick things off by crashing his lips against hers hungrily, turning the air certifiably electric. When their lips parted for some air, he trailed his mouth down the side of her neck, sucking gently to leave the beginning of a love bite while his hands reached for the bow holding up the halter portion of the dress.
“Having fun unwrapping me?” she giggled.
With his mouth still occupied, Annette assumed the soft “Mm.” against her skin was a yes.
Seconds later, the ribbons flopped forward and Annette felt the upper bodice start to sag. Whereas the Annette of ten minutes ago would have worried about how he’d react, present Annette couldn’t care less when his fingertips left sparks in their wake as they danced across her skin before he grasped the zipper one hand and pinched the top of the dress for leverage with the other.
She took a sharp inhale to brace herself as he tugged it downward.
Then it got stuck about a few inches down despite the added leverage. Felix grasped the fabric tighter and tugged even harder. Nothing. The zipper wouldn’t budge.
He let go and backed up until his back was against the change room door. “Annette, turn around if you can.” he instructed. She did just that, pressing her palms against the wall. She felt him tug at the stuck section a few times.
“Is it broken?” she asked, her heart racing at the thought of the potential damage she could get billed for.
“Yeah, the zipper is missing teeth,” he confirmed. Then, for reasons she couldn’t comprehend, he let a small amused snort.
“What’s so funny?” she asked, looking over her shoulder. “I’ll have to pay for this if it’s broken, you know.”
“No you won’t,” he told her uncertain terms. “I’ll pay for it.”
Annette shot him a quizzical look. “Why would you do that? This is completely my fault.”
“Because,” he began to say before closing the gap and grabbing two fistfuls of her dress in his hands. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
Clarity hit her like a lightning bolt when he pulled the dress with enough force to tear the back in half down to her underwear with a loud and satisfying rip.
Once the dress cascaded down her body when he let go, Annette couldn’t help but stare incredulously at the pool of fabric at her feet for the longest second known to mankind in sheer disbelief before daring to look back at her villainous boyfriend.
Saints, this definitely awakened something in her and judging by the way he was hungrily eying her bountiful buns, Annette wagered the feeling was more than mutual.
She very much doubted he was the least bit interested in her panties’ birthday cake print, after all.