Falling All Over Again: Chapter One
Title: Falling All Over Again
Fandom: Original/Bible
Characters: Evelyn Summers, Adam White, Lillian
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,387
Summary: Evelyn Summers is engaged to the perfect man. Lillian is far from the perfect woman, but she's Adam's ex-girlfriend and a constant, not-quite-unwanted presence in Evelyn's life. A modern remix of the familiar Bible tale, complete with plenty of femmeslash. Written for brownie_utonium as part of an art-fic trade.
Falling All Over Again: Chapter One
Evelyn had heard about Lillian long before she saw her. Everyone seemed to have their own story to tell about her fiancee’s ex-girlfriend. Her future mother-in-law’s tales were always disparaging; Lillian wore entirely unsuitable clothing, Lillian had no idea how to behave, Lillian had no tact whatsoever, Lillian had no shame. Everything she said seemed to convey how thoroughly improper Adam’s relationship with Lilian had been, and how much of an improvement Evelyn - quiet, well-bred, English Rose - was.
Adam’s uncle was a lecherous old man. He showed Evelyn a photo of Lillian while trying to keep his hand on Evelyn’s knee. He was the one who told Evelyn the rumour that Lillian had been a snake-charmer in a circus, whose grand finale involved the snake doing something quite obscene. As he laughed hoarsely and hacked up a yellow ball of phlegm, Evelyn studied the photo with some interest. Despite herself, she couldn’t hep but be curious about the woman that had come before her, whom so many seemed to have disapproved of but nobody had forgotten.
In the photo, Lillian was laughing. Her head was thrown back, and a mass of dark, wavy hair tumbled down her back. The light came from somewhere above her, giving her lips a glossy sheen and shadowing her eyes so that their colour couldn’t be seen. Evelyn saw at once what Adam’s mother had meant about Lillian’s clothing; the dress was scandalously low-cut and a vivid red, cleavage on display for all to see. The dangling spirals of her gold earrings much too ostentatious, as was the thick twists of gold chains around her neck. Her nails were painted a bright red, and her long fingers, curled around the stem of a wineglass, looked like the legs of spiders to Evelyn’s eyes.
There was something gypsy-like about the woman in the photograph, something wild and lawless.
She could not be anymore different from Evelyn, who always wore stockings and slips under her dresses and skirts, who combed her pale shining gold hair back into a bun every morning and who never painted her nails any colour except a delicate, natural pink.
With a delicate shudder of fastidious disgust, Evelyn handed the photo back to the old man and for the umpteenth time, pushed his hand off her knee firmly. She rose to leave, smoothing her skirts about herself, and firmly refused to wonder why he still kept a photo of Lillian - or if Adam still had any.
As the weeks grow closer to the date of the wedding, everyone seemed to be set on telling her about Lillian and how much better a match she was for Adam. Adam’s father told her that Evelyn would do the family proud, the clear implication being that Lillian - foreign, strange-mannered, outspoken - wouldn’t have. Adam’s boss mentioned at a Christmas party that Evelyn was much more the sort of girl that he’d expect to see a man like Adam marry. Adam’s best friend reassured her that Adam had sown all his wild oats with Lillian and was now ready to settle down with Evelyn for an adult life.
And Evelyn smiled politely through it all, smiled and nodded and murmured the proper, demure things. Just as Lillian couldn’t have done.
She blamed their constant talk of Lillian for the strange dreams she’d been having recently.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Dark hair in a fall around sharp features, and an apple-red mouth. Smiling at her. Smiling up at her. The mouth pressing kisses against her bare stomach, her thighs. Little wet marks that cool rapidly and make her shiver.
The prickling of grass under her back, poking uncomfortably at her knees. She’s naked. She’s unashamed.
And the mouth should be attached to a face, but she doesn’t look at the face. She looks at the mouth only, and the apple that has been resting between her legs, red-ripe and tantalizing. She watches the mouth take a bite and then she tastes the apple in her own mouth as they not-quite-kiss.
The heaviness of breasts against her own chest crushes her; fingers, sleek and clever, shatter her world.
She swallows and the scaled fingers withdraw, taking her heart with them.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The sight of the not-stranger standing at the make-up counter made Evelyn doubt her eyes.
“Lillian.” The name was jolted out of her almost without Evelyn realizing it. She’d looked up from the powder compacts she’d been examining to discuss the relative merits of two shades with the salesgirl, only to see standing right next to her the woman that Adam’s family simply could not shut up about.
Lillian. Tall. The photograph hadn’t shown Evelyn that Lillian was tall, Evelyn was dimly aware of thinking. Beautiful, almost obscenely so, eyes outlined in smoky black and lips glossy red. Dressed in a black dress flowered with red with a neckline that was barely more decent than the one in the photo. The skirt ruffled back from her legs and exposed her bare calves (gleaming, stockingless) from the knee down. The heels of her shoes were too high, the polish on her nails - fingers and toes both! - too red. And she was wearing a hat indoors, a black confection of velvet with a dotted veil.
Who did that these days?!
It was unfair, Evelyn found herself thinking wildly. Unfair, unfair, unfair! In her black dress with its red pattern and ridiculous hat, Lillian stood out like an exotic bird amidst a flock of sparrows. One of which was Evelyn, dressed in her knee-length skirt suit of pale fawn and impeccably ironed white shirt. Evelyn had never felt so mousy in her life; insignificant, pale, forgettable. Evelyn had never been so jealous of a woman.
And she had said the creature’s name and drawn her attention!
Lillian was examining her with an amused smile, the arch of one eyebrow dark against her summer-tanned skin. “Evie Summers, as I live and breathe! What a surprise to see you again.”
The breath was knocked quite out of Evelyn. If she wasn’t so much on her dignity, she would’ve had to grab the counter to steady herself. As it was, her stomach trembled inside her a moment at her pet name (only her father called her Evie) coming from this woman’s mouth. Lillian’s voice was unexpectedly deep, pleasantly smooth like a glass of whiskey but holding a note of innate arrogance that made Evelyn instantly feel in the wrong. She hadn’t met Lillian before. How did Lillian know her name? How had Lillian recognized her? Did Lillian and Adam still talk, after all?
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember --.” Evelyn had to finally admit.
“Where we met?” Lillian interrupted, tossing her lustrous hair back, “Why, Evie, really! You hurt my feelings dreadfully. You mean to tell me that you don’t remember me in the least?”
“No, you see, I’ve only heard of you, we haven’t met before at all--” Before she could go any further into her explanation, Lillian broke out into laughter, undeterred by the fact that they were in public.
She flipped her hair away from her face and tilted her hat back, smiling down at Evelyn with clear delight, “Haven’t we? You addressed me by name, so I thought that you knew me, and I had forgotten who you were. And when I saw your name on your badge, I thought the best thing to do would be to pretend that I knew who you were.”
Her laugher wasn’t lilting but bold. It took up space; people were looking at them to see who had laughed with such abandon, and Evelyn was uncomfortably aware of it. Reaching up to the plastic-covered badge that the botanical convention had given her with her name to mark her as a guest speaker, Evelyn unclipped it from its chain and slid it into her beige pocketbook, glad for the excuse to break eye contact with Lillian. The other woman’s gaze was uncommonly direct; she didn’t seem to blink or understand that it was uncomfortable to stare directly into someone else’s eyes for an extended length of time.
Clutching her pocketbook in one hand, Evelyn extended her hand to Lillian. “Evelyn Summers. Adam’s fiancée.”
There. That hopefully explained why she knew Lillian’s name and got all awkwardness out of the way.
“Adam! Oh, I haven’t thought of the old Boy Scout in ages.” Another burst of laughter, and Lillian took Evelyn’s hand within both of hers, giving it a quick press and then letting go instead of shaking it like any normal person would’ve done. “And now he’s found you.”
Lillian’s gaze turned appraising for a moment as she looked Evelyn over critically, not bothering to hide the fact that she was sizing Evelyn. “Well done to Adam. You even look as if you were born into that family - you could practically be his twin!”
Evelyn felt her cheeks flush with a little pink. Although Lillian was right, because Evelyn was blonde and blue-eyed and pale, just like Adam, just like all his family, the way that Lillian said it made it sound somehow, well, wrong. Narcissistic. Incestuous. All those things that good English girls and boys weren’t, and that only strange, loud-mouthed strangers would dare to imply.
Almost ruefully, but still laughing, Lillian shook her head as she watched Evelyn blush. “Ah, but I’ve embarrassed you. Come, you must let me take you for a drink to apologize.”
“A drink?!” Frankly incredulous, Evelyn stared at Lillian, modesty forgotten in the shock the suggestion had thrown Evelyn to. The veil shaded Lillian’s eyes, making their colour still impossible to see, the shadow of the hat brim throwing the high, slanted cheekbones into even higher prominence. “It’s not even noon.”
What sort of woman offered to buy another a drink? Let alone in a cosmetics store? In the morning?
What had Adam ever seen in her?
“But darling, if you’ve going to marry Adam, you should start drinking early. It’ll make the rest of the time you have to spend with him so much easier to endure.” Lillian shook her head with another laugh, and the black curls that fell down to her back moved like Medusa’s snakes.
Stiffly, very much on her dignity, Evelyn informed Lillian, “I do not endure my time with Adam. I find his company very agreeable. Perhaps if you didn’t, that’s why your relationship with Adam failed.”
“Oh, no, I broke up with him because he wouldn’t let me be on top.” Lillian’s response was so airy that Evelyn couldn’t quite believe that she had heard the other woman rightly.
“Excuse me?” The words were nearly stammered, and Evelyn knew that she should take herself off instead of continuing to converse with this uncouth creature, but shock (and a little curiosity) rooted her to the spot. None of her friends spoke like this. It was generally assumed that if you had sex before marriage, you didn’t discuss it.
“Adam’s such a bore in bed.” Lillian rolled her eyes and heaved an exaggerated sigh. It made her cleavage shift just enough to catch Evelyn’s attention, try hard though Evelyn did to keep her eyes on Lillian’s face. “Always wants missionary. Never wants to experiment. Never wants to let anyone else be in charge. It’s always about him and his orgasm.”
Evelyn didn’t mind missionary. It meant that Adam did all the work and would get away from her once he finished. All she had to do was stare at the ceiling, moan dutifully at points and wait through it.
It had never occurred to her that there was an option besides being bored. None of the men she had ever dated had managed to do anything more than make her contemplate repainting the ceiling. Cosmopolitan was for the lower-class people. Sexual experimentation was for deviants. And this woman was complaining that Adam was a good, pure British man!
Evelyn opened her mouth to inform Lillian that she was not going to stand for such talk but instead, she found herself giggling quietly, “You broke up with him because of that?”
“Sexual compatibility is very important in any relationship, Eve.” Lillian assumed a mock-lecturing tone, clearly pleased with herself for having made Evelyn laugh. “If there’s no passion, you might as well marry a mannequin. Put a blond, balding wig on it, paint its eyes blue and dress it in an expensive suit and voila, you have Adam!”
“That is a terrible thing to say.” Evelyn tried to reprimand Lillian, even as she found herself thinking that at least someone else besides her had noticed that Adam’s hair was starting to thin on the top.
“But not,” Lillian pointed out with pure witchery curving her mouth into a smile, “Inaccurate.”
Evelyn found herself opening and closing her mouth, unable to deny that. She could see now why people found Lillian so memorable. Corrupt and beautiful, a destructive, reckless force, Lillian was like a hurricane. Blew into your life with little warning, stayed around, and then disappeared off somewhere else. And Evelyn, patient, kind Evelyn, had to clean up afterwards. She had to deal with the suspicions that this would be another unsuitable relationship and she had to be proper at all times to soothe the wary family that feared another entanglement on Adam’s part.
“So, a drink? Seven tonight, at The Serpent’s Tooth.” Lillian continued briskly, seizing advantage of Evelyn’s silence to push on with her own plans. “You do know where that is, don’t you?”
“Of course.” Evelyn lied. She hadn’t even heard of it and certainly didn’t think that it sounded like the kind of place she’d frequent, but she wouldn’t be shown up short in front of this woman. Lillian had had the upper hand through the entire conversation so far. Evelyn wasn’t about to give her another advantage.
“Excellent, darling. Then I’ll see you there.” With a rapidity that made her impossible to evade, Lillian swooped in and pressed a kiss to first Evelyn’s left cheek, then her right. They were loud, noisy smacks, not the airkisses that Evelyn exchanged when she had to, and the delicate lace of the veil brushed against Evelyn’s mouth in a kiss of its own.
Then Lillian was gone, and Evelyn was left at the makeup counter, feeling unbearably dowdy and dull, loathing suddenly the ultra-natural blush that the salesgirl had sworn would look as if Evelyn was wearing nothing at all.
For Lillian, Evelyn was sure, the phrase 'wearing nothing at all' had quite a different meaning.
Fandom: Original/Bible
Characters: Evelyn Summers, Adam White, Lillian
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,387
Summary: Evelyn Summers is engaged to the perfect man. Lillian is far from the perfect woman, but she's Adam's ex-girlfriend and a constant, not-quite-unwanted presence in Evelyn's life. A modern remix of the familiar Bible tale, complete with plenty of femmeslash. Written for brownie_utonium as part of an art-fic trade.
Falling All Over Again: Chapter One
Evelyn had heard about Lillian long before she saw her. Everyone seemed to have their own story to tell about her fiancee’s ex-girlfriend. Her future mother-in-law’s tales were always disparaging; Lillian wore entirely unsuitable clothing, Lillian had no idea how to behave, Lillian had no tact whatsoever, Lillian had no shame. Everything she said seemed to convey how thoroughly improper Adam’s relationship with Lilian had been, and how much of an improvement Evelyn - quiet, well-bred, English Rose - was.
Adam’s uncle was a lecherous old man. He showed Evelyn a photo of Lillian while trying to keep his hand on Evelyn’s knee. He was the one who told Evelyn the rumour that Lillian had been a snake-charmer in a circus, whose grand finale involved the snake doing something quite obscene. As he laughed hoarsely and hacked up a yellow ball of phlegm, Evelyn studied the photo with some interest. Despite herself, she couldn’t hep but be curious about the woman that had come before her, whom so many seemed to have disapproved of but nobody had forgotten.
In the photo, Lillian was laughing. Her head was thrown back, and a mass of dark, wavy hair tumbled down her back. The light came from somewhere above her, giving her lips a glossy sheen and shadowing her eyes so that their colour couldn’t be seen. Evelyn saw at once what Adam’s mother had meant about Lillian’s clothing; the dress was scandalously low-cut and a vivid red, cleavage on display for all to see. The dangling spirals of her gold earrings much too ostentatious, as was the thick twists of gold chains around her neck. Her nails were painted a bright red, and her long fingers, curled around the stem of a wineglass, looked like the legs of spiders to Evelyn’s eyes.
There was something gypsy-like about the woman in the photograph, something wild and lawless.
She could not be anymore different from Evelyn, who always wore stockings and slips under her dresses and skirts, who combed her pale shining gold hair back into a bun every morning and who never painted her nails any colour except a delicate, natural pink.
With a delicate shudder of fastidious disgust, Evelyn handed the photo back to the old man and for the umpteenth time, pushed his hand off her knee firmly. She rose to leave, smoothing her skirts about herself, and firmly refused to wonder why he still kept a photo of Lillian - or if Adam still had any.
As the weeks grow closer to the date of the wedding, everyone seemed to be set on telling her about Lillian and how much better a match she was for Adam. Adam’s father told her that Evelyn would do the family proud, the clear implication being that Lillian - foreign, strange-mannered, outspoken - wouldn’t have. Adam’s boss mentioned at a Christmas party that Evelyn was much more the sort of girl that he’d expect to see a man like Adam marry. Adam’s best friend reassured her that Adam had sown all his wild oats with Lillian and was now ready to settle down with Evelyn for an adult life.
And Evelyn smiled politely through it all, smiled and nodded and murmured the proper, demure things. Just as Lillian couldn’t have done.
She blamed their constant talk of Lillian for the strange dreams she’d been having recently.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Dark hair in a fall around sharp features, and an apple-red mouth. Smiling at her. Smiling up at her. The mouth pressing kisses against her bare stomach, her thighs. Little wet marks that cool rapidly and make her shiver.
The prickling of grass under her back, poking uncomfortably at her knees. She’s naked. She’s unashamed.
And the mouth should be attached to a face, but she doesn’t look at the face. She looks at the mouth only, and the apple that has been resting between her legs, red-ripe and tantalizing. She watches the mouth take a bite and then she tastes the apple in her own mouth as they not-quite-kiss.
The heaviness of breasts against her own chest crushes her; fingers, sleek and clever, shatter her world.
She swallows and the scaled fingers withdraw, taking her heart with them.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The sight of the not-stranger standing at the make-up counter made Evelyn doubt her eyes.
“Lillian.” The name was jolted out of her almost without Evelyn realizing it. She’d looked up from the powder compacts she’d been examining to discuss the relative merits of two shades with the salesgirl, only to see standing right next to her the woman that Adam’s family simply could not shut up about.
Lillian. Tall. The photograph hadn’t shown Evelyn that Lillian was tall, Evelyn was dimly aware of thinking. Beautiful, almost obscenely so, eyes outlined in smoky black and lips glossy red. Dressed in a black dress flowered with red with a neckline that was barely more decent than the one in the photo. The skirt ruffled back from her legs and exposed her bare calves (gleaming, stockingless) from the knee down. The heels of her shoes were too high, the polish on her nails - fingers and toes both! - too red. And she was wearing a hat indoors, a black confection of velvet with a dotted veil.
Who did that these days?!
It was unfair, Evelyn found herself thinking wildly. Unfair, unfair, unfair! In her black dress with its red pattern and ridiculous hat, Lillian stood out like an exotic bird amidst a flock of sparrows. One of which was Evelyn, dressed in her knee-length skirt suit of pale fawn and impeccably ironed white shirt. Evelyn had never felt so mousy in her life; insignificant, pale, forgettable. Evelyn had never been so jealous of a woman.
And she had said the creature’s name and drawn her attention!
Lillian was examining her with an amused smile, the arch of one eyebrow dark against her summer-tanned skin. “Evie Summers, as I live and breathe! What a surprise to see you again.”
The breath was knocked quite out of Evelyn. If she wasn’t so much on her dignity, she would’ve had to grab the counter to steady herself. As it was, her stomach trembled inside her a moment at her pet name (only her father called her Evie) coming from this woman’s mouth. Lillian’s voice was unexpectedly deep, pleasantly smooth like a glass of whiskey but holding a note of innate arrogance that made Evelyn instantly feel in the wrong. She hadn’t met Lillian before. How did Lillian know her name? How had Lillian recognized her? Did Lillian and Adam still talk, after all?
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember --.” Evelyn had to finally admit.
“Where we met?” Lillian interrupted, tossing her lustrous hair back, “Why, Evie, really! You hurt my feelings dreadfully. You mean to tell me that you don’t remember me in the least?”
“No, you see, I’ve only heard of you, we haven’t met before at all--” Before she could go any further into her explanation, Lillian broke out into laughter, undeterred by the fact that they were in public.
She flipped her hair away from her face and tilted her hat back, smiling down at Evelyn with clear delight, “Haven’t we? You addressed me by name, so I thought that you knew me, and I had forgotten who you were. And when I saw your name on your badge, I thought the best thing to do would be to pretend that I knew who you were.”
Her laugher wasn’t lilting but bold. It took up space; people were looking at them to see who had laughed with such abandon, and Evelyn was uncomfortably aware of it. Reaching up to the plastic-covered badge that the botanical convention had given her with her name to mark her as a guest speaker, Evelyn unclipped it from its chain and slid it into her beige pocketbook, glad for the excuse to break eye contact with Lillian. The other woman’s gaze was uncommonly direct; she didn’t seem to blink or understand that it was uncomfortable to stare directly into someone else’s eyes for an extended length of time.
Clutching her pocketbook in one hand, Evelyn extended her hand to Lillian. “Evelyn Summers. Adam’s fiancée.”
There. That hopefully explained why she knew Lillian’s name and got all awkwardness out of the way.
“Adam! Oh, I haven’t thought of the old Boy Scout in ages.” Another burst of laughter, and Lillian took Evelyn’s hand within both of hers, giving it a quick press and then letting go instead of shaking it like any normal person would’ve done. “And now he’s found you.”
Lillian’s gaze turned appraising for a moment as she looked Evelyn over critically, not bothering to hide the fact that she was sizing Evelyn. “Well done to Adam. You even look as if you were born into that family - you could practically be his twin!”
Evelyn felt her cheeks flush with a little pink. Although Lillian was right, because Evelyn was blonde and blue-eyed and pale, just like Adam, just like all his family, the way that Lillian said it made it sound somehow, well, wrong. Narcissistic. Incestuous. All those things that good English girls and boys weren’t, and that only strange, loud-mouthed strangers would dare to imply.
Almost ruefully, but still laughing, Lillian shook her head as she watched Evelyn blush. “Ah, but I’ve embarrassed you. Come, you must let me take you for a drink to apologize.”
“A drink?!” Frankly incredulous, Evelyn stared at Lillian, modesty forgotten in the shock the suggestion had thrown Evelyn to. The veil shaded Lillian’s eyes, making their colour still impossible to see, the shadow of the hat brim throwing the high, slanted cheekbones into even higher prominence. “It’s not even noon.”
What sort of woman offered to buy another a drink? Let alone in a cosmetics store? In the morning?
What had Adam ever seen in her?
“But darling, if you’ve going to marry Adam, you should start drinking early. It’ll make the rest of the time you have to spend with him so much easier to endure.” Lillian shook her head with another laugh, and the black curls that fell down to her back moved like Medusa’s snakes.
Stiffly, very much on her dignity, Evelyn informed Lillian, “I do not endure my time with Adam. I find his company very agreeable. Perhaps if you didn’t, that’s why your relationship with Adam failed.”
“Oh, no, I broke up with him because he wouldn’t let me be on top.” Lillian’s response was so airy that Evelyn couldn’t quite believe that she had heard the other woman rightly.
“Excuse me?” The words were nearly stammered, and Evelyn knew that she should take herself off instead of continuing to converse with this uncouth creature, but shock (and a little curiosity) rooted her to the spot. None of her friends spoke like this. It was generally assumed that if you had sex before marriage, you didn’t discuss it.
“Adam’s such a bore in bed.” Lillian rolled her eyes and heaved an exaggerated sigh. It made her cleavage shift just enough to catch Evelyn’s attention, try hard though Evelyn did to keep her eyes on Lillian’s face. “Always wants missionary. Never wants to experiment. Never wants to let anyone else be in charge. It’s always about him and his orgasm.”
Evelyn didn’t mind missionary. It meant that Adam did all the work and would get away from her once he finished. All she had to do was stare at the ceiling, moan dutifully at points and wait through it.
It had never occurred to her that there was an option besides being bored. None of the men she had ever dated had managed to do anything more than make her contemplate repainting the ceiling. Cosmopolitan was for the lower-class people. Sexual experimentation was for deviants. And this woman was complaining that Adam was a good, pure British man!
Evelyn opened her mouth to inform Lillian that she was not going to stand for such talk but instead, she found herself giggling quietly, “You broke up with him because of that?”
“Sexual compatibility is very important in any relationship, Eve.” Lillian assumed a mock-lecturing tone, clearly pleased with herself for having made Evelyn laugh. “If there’s no passion, you might as well marry a mannequin. Put a blond, balding wig on it, paint its eyes blue and dress it in an expensive suit and voila, you have Adam!”
“That is a terrible thing to say.” Evelyn tried to reprimand Lillian, even as she found herself thinking that at least someone else besides her had noticed that Adam’s hair was starting to thin on the top.
“But not,” Lillian pointed out with pure witchery curving her mouth into a smile, “Inaccurate.”
Evelyn found herself opening and closing her mouth, unable to deny that. She could see now why people found Lillian so memorable. Corrupt and beautiful, a destructive, reckless force, Lillian was like a hurricane. Blew into your life with little warning, stayed around, and then disappeared off somewhere else. And Evelyn, patient, kind Evelyn, had to clean up afterwards. She had to deal with the suspicions that this would be another unsuitable relationship and she had to be proper at all times to soothe the wary family that feared another entanglement on Adam’s part.
“So, a drink? Seven tonight, at The Serpent’s Tooth.” Lillian continued briskly, seizing advantage of Evelyn’s silence to push on with her own plans. “You do know where that is, don’t you?”
“Of course.” Evelyn lied. She hadn’t even heard of it and certainly didn’t think that it sounded like the kind of place she’d frequent, but she wouldn’t be shown up short in front of this woman. Lillian had had the upper hand through the entire conversation so far. Evelyn wasn’t about to give her another advantage.
“Excellent, darling. Then I’ll see you there.” With a rapidity that made her impossible to evade, Lillian swooped in and pressed a kiss to first Evelyn’s left cheek, then her right. They were loud, noisy smacks, not the airkisses that Evelyn exchanged when she had to, and the delicate lace of the veil brushed against Evelyn’s mouth in a kiss of its own.
Then Lillian was gone, and Evelyn was left at the makeup counter, feeling unbearably dowdy and dull, loathing suddenly the ultra-natural blush that the salesgirl had sworn would look as if Evelyn was wearing nothing at all.
For Lillian, Evelyn was sure, the phrase 'wearing nothing at all' had quite a different meaning.