"Excuse me, ma'am, how are you doing with the dress? Do you need any help with sizes?" She smiled, satisfied, as she replied to the sales clerk on the other side of the changing room door. "Nope! It's perfect. Wouldya please double check the price though, huh?"

She smoothed the dress down over her curvy hips. A reward for her hard work. She had finished the painting she had been labouring over; her daughter was singing at a concert, and she was going out to hear her; life was good and she was going out to have some fun! Yes, yes, yes!

Ralph Lauren, she thought, looking over the dress again. Ex-cellent. It fit. It fit very, very nicely. Crank up the crunches at the gym for a month or two and this roll of fat will be flattened out in time for the flurry of neighbourhood Christmas parties. Yup. Even now the dress was very flattering. Let's see, hair up, or down? She piled her thick dark hair up on her head, away from her pale, graceful neck. Up, for sure, that's it!

As she held her hair up, she noticed the dried acrylic paint on her hands and winced. Oops. She had been painting all day, finishing up that large piece that she had been working on for weeks to have ready for a gallery show. In her haste she hadn't cleaned off the paint, and there were messy smudges of raw umber and cloudberry tan and boysenberry pink and French grey blue all over her hands and up her bare arms. Just like a kindergarten kid, she grinned. Ha! Manicure time!

"Ma'am?"

Oh, the clerk! "Oops - was I talking to myself?" she laughed.
"That dress is 50% off the regular price even though it's not marked on the tag," remarked the faceless clerk politely from the narrow hallway.

"Super! I'll take it." She turned twice, slowly, to check the drape of the dress over the slope of her butt. Yeah, it worked. What more was there to say about the dress? It was a 28-inch cylinder of cotton and nylon and two percent spandex held up over the mounds of her bra-less breasts with two straps as thin as yummy liquorice shoestrings, with tiny black beaded tassels at the ends. She slowly ran her paint-stained fingers along the small tightly embroidered black rosettes at the low bodice. She traced her hands down her body to find the delicate black flowers along the hem as well. Delicious, yes, and very hot.... "Yes, I'll take it."

~~~

"Rob, you better get off the couch and get ready," she barked as she strutted into the room.

"Yeah, yeah," I cracked open one tired eye in my wife's direction. Yeah, yeah. She looked good. For me? I doubt it. I knew better. Still, I'd like to slip my hand down that dress right about now. "Yeah, okay. You're dressing up?" I leaned up on my elbow.

"Just lose the green sweatshirt, eh Rob. Black jeans work, but lose the sweatshirt."

Damn. I didn't want to go out. But I did want to see our daughter sing. She was down there already, helping the boy set up at the club, warming up, hanging out, whatever it is they do.

"C'mon please, Rob. This is stupid. Do you want to be late? You shouldn't have slept for an hour."

Shut up, bitch. "All right, all right. I need five minutes." Five minutes of nagging was about all I could take. Damn. I worked all day; she just played around with her stupid paint by number art shit. A black hole of time and money and it was all that mattered to her anymore. And I worked my ass off all day.

"Just five minutes."