What I Wore to the Revolution (The Devil Wears Prada, Emily/Andy)

[jae_w]

Title: What I Wore to the Revolution
Author: jae-w
Recipient: starberry_slash
Fandom: The Devil Wears Prada
Pairing: Emily/Andy
Rating: R
Word count: 5,400
Disclaimer: Not mine, not true.
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Four times Emily lowered her standards, and one time she didn't.



i.

Emily was not an unreasonable woman.

The point of a junior assistant, as Emily had been led to understand, was that she should actually help the senior assistant, should bear some of the burden of living up to Miranda Priestley's standards. When she had been the junior assistant, Emily firmly believed, she had been a lifesaver. On one memorable occasion, she had even been called that - a lifesaver. At the very least, she had followed the professional code of all lifesavers: first, do no harm. Emily had done no harm. She had always strived to make the senior assistant's life easier, and if her hard work and effort had, through no fault of her own, happened to emphasize her own competence and fitness to take on the senior assistant position, that was just a happy coincidence. Whatever Emily had now, she had earned.

What she had not earned, she was sure, was Andrea.

"My life is a nightmare," Emily said, as Andrea walked through the door, looking unpleasantly smug and pleased with herself. "No, that's not quite correct. You - you are a nightmare."

"What's wrong?"

"If you don't know, you don't deserve to be told," Emily said sharply, and turned back to her desk. When she looked up, she was pleased to see Andrea standing uncertainly, looking down at her skirt.

"It's not the skirt," Emily said. "I mean, of course the skirt is unacceptable to any person with eyes, yet another bargain, I assume, from the local shop for Sad Girls Who Write Poetry about How the Patriarchy Has Forced Them to Have Hips, but it's no more unacceptable than any other monstrosity you've worn."

"The shirt is from the closet - it's, I think it's Dolce and Gab -"

"Be silent," Emily snapped. "Dear God, it's blasphemy to hear those words come out of your sad little Chapsticked mouth. No, the shirt is not the problem - well, the fact that you can make a Dolce and Gabbana shirt look like that is certainly a problem to challenge more inventive minds than even my own, but the shirt is not the immediate problem. And, before you ask, it's not the shoes, either."

"You like the shoes?"

"Let's not go crazy. The shoes don't inspire me with an irresistible urge to shove this pencil into my own eye, which I realize for you is an almost unheard-of pinnacle of fashion achievement."

"Then what?" Andrea asked.

"As I said, if you don't know yourself, I shan't tell you."

"Fine," Andrea said. She walked behind her desk and sat down. "Fine, whatever, you hate whatever I wear no matter what, you hate me, I get it. Believe me, you've made it crystal clear."

"Then my work here is done, isn't it?" Emily said. Andrea bit her lower lip, her cheeks flushing, and Emily was tempted to tell her that she was inclined to be even meaner - or rather, to give her unvarnished opinion even more frequently - if the effect was to put a little color in Andrea's face so Emily didn't look up suddenly and think the office was being haunted by Casper the Ungainly Ghost. Before she could say anything, however, Miranda's voice rang out from her office.

"Andrea!"

Andrea stood up, looking down at her clothes again, tugging at her skirt desperately and then looking at Emily. Emily, of course, would say nothing. It was a matter of principle to her. This was how people learned. Emily herself, while of course nowhere near the fashion disaster than Andrea was, had had to learn the hard way herself on several occasions. Once Miranda had taken a pair of scissors from the desk and cut the cuffs off a blouse that had cost Emily two paychecks, then tucked the offending fabric into Emily's hand. "Burn this," she'd said, "that's all," and Emily had fled back to the desk and then spent a portion of the ten minutes the senior assistant gave her for lunch and a Starbucks run weeping in the ladies room. It hadn't hurt Emily, not at all. It toughened her up, which was what she had needed. It was what Andrea needed. It would do her good.

"Andrea!"

With one last pathetic tug that only served to wrinkle her shapeless sack of a skirt, Andrea turned toward Miranda's office, squaring her shoulders like a butch little soldier ready to face a firing squad. Before she thought about it Emily was on her feet.

"Come here, you ridiculous thing." Andrea came to her immediately, like a newly-trained puppy looking eagerly for a treat. Emily reached out and took Andrea's face in her chin, holding her face still. At least she moisturized, Emily thought as her thumb stroked the side of Andrea's face. Then she pinched Andrea's face tightly and plucked the flower from behind her ear. It was a carnation. Of course it was.

"You look like a down on her luck flamenco dancer who's had to turn to a life of prostitution. Unsuccessful prostitution. What on earth were you thinking?" Emily said, and Andrea put her hand up, over Emily's, before pulling it away so she could speak.

"I looked at some of the old issues of Runway you gave me and it was in the spring issue - it said, the article said wearing a flower added a jaunty fresh look to work clothes, and this morning they were selling these on the subway -"

"My God," Emily murmured, almost awed at the insanity.

"And so I thought - I mean, I was trying to update my look, and I thought, well, I could look fresh and jaunty -"

Emily put her hand over Andrea's mouth. "Don't say that word again. Dear God. Jaunty."

"Andrea!"

Emily and Andrea both looked guiltily at Miranda's office. "Coming, Miranda!" Andrea called, and rushed toward the door. Just before she entered she turned back and mouthed to Emily, "Thank you."

"You're not welcome," Emily said as she sat back down and reached for the ringing phone.

ii.

The night the clothes finally came back from the tailor was the night Miranda left for a three-week trip with the twins to Australia. The preceding two weeks had been two of the most intense of Emily's life, Miranda a calm-voiced, Chanel-coated demon, devastating the series of admittedly entirely inappropriate temporary assistants human resources sent up to them. Emily couldn't blame her; each of the assistants drove Emily insane in a different way, from the one with the Midwestern accent - really, as Miranda had said, if one was living in New York, shouldn't one strive not to sound like a Disney cow - to the one who bit her nails, right in front of Miranda. Unbelievable and unacceptable, that had been the motif. One would have thought that the supply of even tolerable office assistance had ended with Andrea.

After the two weeks she had had, Emily was looking forward to locking herself in her apartment with the clothes Andrea had brought her from Paris, secure in the comfort that Miranda was on a plane and unreachable for twenty hours and, more importantly, unable to reach out to anyone else. She let herself into her place at the unheard of hour of six in the evening, poured herself a glass of wine, and spread the clothes out on the sofa and the bed. She sat cross-legged on the floor with the bottle next to her, surrounded by beautiful things, and drank her wine and gazed around like a child.

Someone had clearly chosen these for Andrea, Emily thought. They were in exquisite taste.

As she poured another glass and got up to make a closer inspection, she thought that maybe she had been wrong. The dresses, breathtaking as they were, didn't seem to have been chosen with Andrea's body in mind, or her coloring. They almost seemed to have been chosen with someone else in mind entirely.

Emily's apartment was tiny, but of course she was rarely in it. One of the benefits of its small size was that by opening the bathroom door she could stand anywhere in the apartment and see herself in the full-length mirror mounted on it. She looked at herself, a lipstick-stained glass of wine in her hand, and thought she looked tired. Tired, and almost, maybe, a little old, a little worn-out. It was the stress, she told herself, the stress of the past week, and the familiar feeling when Miranda left on a trip, the emptiness after the adrenaline rush of seeing her off. It was the stress that made her feel that way, the stress, and the wine. She clearly hadn't had enough wine.

After another fortifying sip, Emily turned off the overhead light and switched on the small lamp by her bed. In the warmer, dimmer light, she didn't look stressed or tired at all, she thought. She looked sophisticated.

Kicking off her shoes, Emily wobbled and almost fell, catching herself at the last minute with a handful of silk as she grabbed at the sofa for support. She put her wine down as she stripped off her skirt and her blouse, standing in her bra and knickers in front of the mirror. It had just been the light a moment ago, a trick of the light. She looked young still, young and lovely. She reached for her glass of wine and drained it and filled it again. Then she reached for the first dress.

It was like the first few days at Runway, she thought, not the pressure and the strain and the tears, but the giddiness she'd felt when she'd first been ushered into the closet, when she'd had to physically restrain herself from running down the aisles, grasping with both hands at everything she saw, because everything she saw was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen in her life. Only now, she didn't need to grasp and run, because all of these beautiful things were here, in her apartment. All these beautiful things were hers.

She didn't have to rush but she did anyway, because everything was so perfect, and seemingly made to fit her perfectly, to suit her perfectly. It was like being in a fairy tale, she thought, one of the ones she'd never believed about some orphan rescued from drudgery and outfitted in a magic dress to lure a prince. Well, they could keep their prince - all Emily had ever wanted was the clothes, and now she had them.

Be careful, she told herself, be careful, but she didn't want to be careful. She pulled on one dress after another, twirling in front of the mirror, flushed and beautiful, she thought, as beautiful as the dresses. She put one on and then tore it off for the next, and then, as she drank a little more wine, she got even giddier, zipping up a Dolce skirt and then taking off her bra to slip into a corseted Westwood blouse that looked utterly ridiculous with the skirt. She laughed at herself in the mirror and then took the blouse off.

The clothes, she thought, the clothes were delightful. She was delightful. The world was delightful, she thought, and then she spied her cell phone spilling out of her purse on the floor.

It had been beneath her to grovel to Andrea for the clothes, because after all, they were Emily's by right. Emily should have been the one on the trip in the first place. She deserved these clothes. There was no need to scrape and bow with gratitude for something one had earned by right.

Still she picked up her phone.

Andrea's number was still in it, filed under U for useless. She took her glass into the small kitchen, looking for a new bottle of wine, and opened it while she listened to the phone ring. Just before it clicked over to voicemail Andrea picked up.

"Hello?" she said. There was noise behind her voice on the phone, loud bright voices, not like she was out in a club but like she had the tv on.

"It's me," Emily said. "It's Emily."

"I know, I saw the number - how are you?"

"I'm delightful," Emily said, and then laughed. Andrea laughed too.

"Well, well good," she said. "I have to tell you, my heart skipped a beat when you called - I thought for a moment I was going to have to go back to Runway and wait for the book or something."

"No, Miranda's on a plane to Australia," Emily said.

"That's good," Andrea said. "I mean, that's good for you."

Emily said, "It's lovely."

After a moment Andrea said, "So. Did you - was there something you wanted?"

"Oh, yes," Emily said. "Yes, I wanted to tell you. The clothes - the clothes you brought from Paris - they're delightful. I love them. I love them, and they're beautiful, and I deserve them."

"You do," Andrea said warmly. "You really do."

"I deserve them, but the thing is, you know, people don't always get what they deserve. Lots of time people don't get what they deserve, but I did, because you gave them to me. You gave them to me and I deserve them and I wanted to tell you, you're going to get what you deserve too. And I know when I usually say that it sounds bitchy and usually I mean something bitchy but this time I don't, because you deserve what you deserve. In a different way than I do, but still. The thing is, you deserve it, because you - you can be delightful sometimes, occasionally, too, in a very very different way than I am, but still. Still."

Andrea said, "Emily, are you drunk?"

"I'm delightful," Emily said firmly, and Andrea laughed again.

"You are," she said. "But now that we've cleared that up, I have to go -"

"I wanted to say thank you," Emily said. "For the clothes, and - thank you, Andy."

Andrea paused for a moment. "You're very welcome," she said.

iii.

It was still half an hour to lunch so the ladies room was deserted. Emily leaned against the marble counter and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked well put together, she thought, fashionable and sophisticated and important, much too important to be standing in this restroom coaxing a clearly sub-par assistant out of the stalls. This was the definition of beneath her.

"Come out, Jeannette," she said.

There was a horrible honking sound and a sniffle and then a sad little voice said, "My name is Janice."

"Yes, you might want to rethink that," Emily said, and then the sniffling and honking started again.

Emily sighed at her reflection in the mirror. If she had any sense, she'd leave the pathetic creature to sob in the bathroom until Miranda had human resources escort her out into the street and a job to which she was better suited, like panhandling. But Janice was the tenth junior assistant in three months, and if Emily didn't do something she was going to drown beneath the work. Besides, if she didn't get an acceptable junior assistant soon, there would be no one to train to become the senior assistant and Emily would be stuck rushing after Miranda until one day she had a heart attack while screaming into her cell phone on Fifth Avenue when some incompetent screwed up a seating chart.

"Come out, Janice," she said. "Miranda will be back in fifteen minutes and we have to be at our desks."

"You go on," Janice whimpered. "I can't go out there. She hates me."

"Oh, please," Emily said. "She barely even thinks of you."

There was another honking sound, a different kind, and then Janice opened the door of the stall. She pulled at her baggy skirt and wiped at her nose. With her unkempt eyebrows and her woolly sweater, Emily thought that some village in Eastern Europe was missing a goatherder, but she kept her thoughts to herself. It wasn't compassion, she told herself sternly, it was self-interest. She needed a junior assistant, and Janice was the first one since Andrea who didn't seem completely brainless.

"Was that supposed to be comforting?" Janice asked.

"It was supposed to be true," Emily said.

Janice wiped at her nose again and Emily plucked a tissue from the box on the counter and handed it to her.

Janice said, "Why are you being nice to me?"

"If you think this is nice I shudder to think what your personal life is like," Emily said, and Janice made that second honking noise again. She realized Janice was laughing.

"No, seriously, I would have thought you'd be happy to leave me in here until I got fired."

"I need some help with the phones, that's all," Emily said. "Besides, you remind me of someone I used to know."

"Did you like her?" Janice asked as they walked out into the hallway.

"No," Emily said, "she was dreadful."

iv.

She should have changed her email address, Emily thought. That was what women who were being stalked were always advised to do on tv. She'd only given it to Andrea in the first place because when Andrea worked at Runway she'd needed to be able to contact Emily at any moment. She should have known Andrea was the type to deluge her contacts lists with announcements of deadly boring readings and undoubtedly pretentious parties and requests for sources and contacts for stories that were sure to be boring and pretentious.

Emily almost hit delete when she saw the message with the subject: DESPERATELY IN NEED OF HELP - ALL HANDS ALERT.

I'm getting bounced from my apartment this weekend, Andrea wrote, and I need to move. Beer, pizza and my undying thanks to anyone who turns up for a moving party at 10 this Saturday so I don't end up living on the street surrounded by my sofa and suitcases and eighteen boxes of books.

"Beer, pizza, and undying thanks," Emily said. "It's like she's trying to make it sound as unattractive as possible."

Miranda came out of her office and Janice rushed to get her coat. She stood in front of Emily's desk flipping through her mail. "I assume you'll need me in the Hamptons this weekend," Emily said. "Shall I come out tonight or tomorrow morning?"

"Martina went out to oversee the opening of the house," Miranda said. "She should be sufficient this weekend. That's all," she said as she dropped the mail on Emily's keyboard.

The next morning Emily stood in front of her closet, scrutinizing its offerings closely. What did one wear to a moving party? Sweatpants, probably, or something equally gruesome, but Emily certainly didn't own anything like that. She finally settled on a pair of perfectly worn jeans, a camouflage-inspired shirt by Gaultier, and a scarf to loop around her neck. She could use it to cover her hands in case she had to actually touch any of Andrea's things.

"I was right about the sweatpants," Emily said when she arrived at Andrea's apartment. Andrea leaned out of the truck that was blocking traffic and did an exaggerated double take.

"My God, Emily?" she said, and a woman and a man poked their heads out of the truck.

"So this is the famous Emily," the man said. "I can hardly believe it."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Emily said. "I thought I was at Andrea's apartment, but I appear to have stumbled on an ironic facial hair convention."

The woman laughed and stuck out her hand. "Lily," she said. "And wow - are you really going to, like, carry boxes in that outfit? You look fabulous, but - can you lift things?"

"I should hope not," Emily said.

The man said, "Then why -"

"Don't worry, Jake, Emily can direct," Andrea said. "I have a feeling she'll like that."

The move was a nightmare, of course. Andrea was completely disorganized and unprepared, so Emily had to take over, re-ordering the boxes waiting to be carried downstairs. She made them take everything that had been loaded in out of the truck so it could be repacked more efficiently. Packing Miranda's bags for hundreds of trips had finally paid off.

"There," she said when Lily slid the last box into place, "I told you we could get everything in there. Now we only have to make one trip."

"Wow," Jake said, staring at the expertly packed truck in astonishment. "You must be really awesome at Tetris."

"Emily has many hidden talents," Andrea said, tucking her arm into Emily's. "Want to ride up front with me?"

After a chilling drive downtown - Andrea was predictably poor at navigating so Emily had to take charge of the map - and a load-out that took a surprisingly short time thanks to Emily's instructions, they all relaxed in Andrea's new living room, drinking beer from a cooler Andrea had packed and eating pizza. Well, everyone else was drinking beer and eating pizza.

"Seriously, you don't want a piece?" Jake said. "It's really good."

"I haven't had pizza since I was twelve," Emily said. Jake choked on his beer.

"Wow," Lily said. "That's - that's - I don't know what that is."

It's the difference between you and me, Emily almost said, but before she could say anything Andrea said,

"That's dedication, at any rate. Anyway, Emily, do you want something else? I have - I have - oh, I have a peach, I grabbed one at the market this morning when I went for bagels. It's fresh - it looks delicious."

"All right," Emily said. Andrea ran it under the faucet and then brought it out to her wrapped in a paper towel. It was fresh and delicious, and terribly messy, juice running down the sides of the mouth and down her arm. She saw Lily laughing at her and almost snapped, but then she just laughed and licked at her arm. Jake choked on his beer again.

"Here, use this, before Jake has a heart attack," Andrea said, folding a clean paper towel in half and wiping Emily's arm, then her mouth. She folded the paper towel again and closed Emily's hand around it, then sat down on the arm of the couch next to her.

"I don't suppose you have anything else to drink," Emily said.

"No, sorry," Andrea said. "Well, water, but I don't know where the glasses are packed, so you'll have to drink out of the sink -"

"No, God," Emily said, shuddering. "I guess I 'll just drink this," and she let Jake open her beer and then took a sip, gingerly. Jake and Lily laughed and applauded.

"You're a trooper," Andrea said, leaning in so her arm brushed against Emily's shoulder. "You're a good friend."

"Is that what she is?" Lily said. Emily spun to look at her, ready to cut her down sharply, but Lily didn't look mocking or mean. She looked pleased, Emily thought, and curious. When she looked back at Andrea, Emily thought she looked pleased and curious too.

Andrea reached down and touched the scarf at Emily's neck. "Hermes?" she said.

"No, God, didn't you learn anything when you were with me?" Emily said, and took a disdainful sip of her beer.

Andrea said quietly, "I did."

v.

Assistant Features Editor hadn't been the job Emily expected when she was promoted; she'd thought Beauty, or Accessories, or had occasionally dreamed of fashion. But one didn't argue with Miranda Priestly, and once she started the job Emily loved it and found she was good at it, working with freelancers, brainstorming stories about culture and politics and society, even writing a profile or two herself. She was a part of the true making of the magazine, finally, adding insights herself at meetings instead of standing at Miranda's elbow. She was at the center of what was going on, but still she was surprised when Miranda's new assistant ran down with a request for the next issue.

"Miranda's bothering to assign a books profile herself?" Emily said, because really, of all the insignificant parts of the magazine for Miranda to care about, the half-page Books Buzz seemed like the most beneath her notice. "Of course, that's why the magazine is so good, because Miranda cares so much about every detail," she said, but the assistant just shrugged and dropped the book and the note in Miranda's hand on her desk. When Emily read the name written on it she understood Miranda's concern.

No one mentioned it, of course, at least not in the Runway offices, but in bars and clubs and parties far out of Miranda's earshot it was all anyone could talk about, the rumor that one of Miranda's old assistants was writing a tell-all expose about her. The only surprise, Emily thought, was that it had taken so long, though of course it was ridiculous. The woman writing it had lasted four months before leaving in floods of hysterical, unattractive tears, and Emily wouldn't have thought she'd been there long enough to have material for a whole book but apparently the publishing world disagreed. It was going to be terrible, Emily thought, and wondered if she'd appear and how she'd be described. It was going to be terrible for Miranda, so Emily could understand her attempt at damage control. Now was a good time to highlight another assistant who'd made good, one who'd done it without savaging Miranda.

She skimmed the book during her lunch hour and then took it home with her. It was good, quite good, slightly pretentious and overstuffed in the way of first novels but really, it wasn't bad at all. In addition to the obvious Runway connection, the main character was a fashion historian, so there was a clear hook for Emily's article, and the fashion history was well-researched and accurate. Andrea had learned some things in her time at Runway.

The interview was set for a Thursday evening at a bar near Andrea's apartment. Emily had never been there, but when she arrived it was exactly as she imagined, grubby and filled with skinny men who looked like they spent too much time playing bass in bands no one ever listened to to bother to wash. Andrea was sitting at a table in the window wearing jeans and a well-cut vintage jacket and the Chanel boots from a few seasons ago. She didn't look the way Emily had imagined.

It was one of the easiest interviews Emily had conducted, not just because she and Andrea had known each other before. Andrea was smart and funny, and the year she'd spent in Paris writing the novel had been good for her, Emily thought. She looked stylish in a way she hadn't even in her last days at Runway, with a style all her own, casual and warm and just a little fierce. After two glasses of wine Emily told her so.

"Well, Paris will do that for you," Andrea said.

Emily said, "I suppose so." Her trip to Paris with Miranda the previous year had been a disappointment, though she barely let herself think so. The clothes had been divine, and she'd made off with a haul even bigger than the one Andrea had given her, but somehow when she'd gotten them back to her apartment they'd lost a bit of their luster. They didn't suit her as well as she'd hoped, or maybe it had just been a bad season, but she found that she barely wore them. Tonight she was wearing the Vivienne Westwood blouse Andrea had brought her.

The night grew later and the crowd grew louder and Emily stopped her little tape recorder and put it in her bag. She had more than enough for the article, she thought, and she could still leave with plenty of time to make her own evening plans, a dinner date with the new publicist for Marc Jacobs, and a party to go to after that. When Emily took out her wallet, Andrea said, "Hey, would you like to come back to my place for a drink? We can't really talk here."

"Why not?" she said, and paid their bill and followed Andrea out into the street.

Andrea was still living in the apartment Emily had helped her move into, though in the intervening time she'd at least managed to unpack. Emily sat on the same couch that Jake and Lily had dragged down the hallway while she'd shouted at them and watched as Andrea opened a bottle of wine. When she brought in the glasses she sat on the arm of the couch next to Emily.

"Features Editor," she said, touching her glass to Emily's. "Very impressive, lady."

"Assistant Features Editor," Emily said. "And your book is pretty impressive itself."

"Aren't we a living testament to Runway?" Andrea said. "And, I suppose, much as I hate to admit it, to Miranda Priestley. Although I suppose that's the point of this profile, after all. Two of Miranda's assistants who made good, to counterbalance the assistant of Miranda's who is being very, very bad - and doing very well for herself doing it."

Emily said, "You heard about that?"

"I'm not an idiot, I know I wouldn't be getting half a page in Runway about my first novel otherwise. Maybe a mention in the latest books column, I know my place."

"Did you ever think about writing a book like that yourself?" Emily asked. "I mean, after all, you left in a huff, and God knows you'd probably write a better one than that illiterate harpy."

"You know, I never did," Andrea said thoughtfully. "I mean, not really. People asked me, but it just seemed - I don't know, disloyal."

"I never thought you valued loyalty that much. At least, not loyalty to Miranda."

"It wasn't her, though. I mean, not all of it. I just - it seemed disloyal to all of you, too. You were all - by the end, it was like I was one of you and even if I left, it just seemed like - I don't know. It seemed wrong."

"It would have been," Emily said. "It's - she's upset about it, you know. She doesn't like to show it, and she never speaks of it, but - she looks older, and she doesn't like it."

Andrea paused for a moment, then took another sip of wine. "I can imagine," she said, "and I'm sorry for it, but - Emily, let's not talk about Miranda anymore."

"What shall we talk about?" Emily said. "I'd insult your clothes but you actually look quite good."

"Like I said, it was Paris," Andrea said, and when Emily smiled Andrea put a hand on the side of her face and kissed her. When she drew back she looked softer somehow, her lipstick smeared and her hair falling down from its chignon. She looked almost like she had when she started at Runway, fresh and new and eager and a little shy. Emily liked it.

"Paris," Andrea said again, smiling, and then kissed Emily again, slipping a hand back into her hair, easing her down onto the couch on her back. Emily hadn't learned this in Paris but in London and New York, with thin lovely girls who she saw later on the covers of magazines. Andrea sat up again and smiled, her legs on either side of Emily's hips, and Emily had a newfound respect for Paris. She wondered suddenly who Andrea had found there, tall smoky-eyed girls who left her bed for runways or smart dark-haired women who talked non-stop about books, in cafes and in restaurants and in bed.

"What are you thinking about?" Andrea said, and before Emily could answer she pulled her shirt over her head. Emily gasped, and not only because Andrea's breasts were pale and perfect. Andrea smiled again and took Emily's hands in her own, lifting them to her stomach. Emily slid her hands over Andrea's skin, reaching higher, pushing her bra up until she covered Andrea's nipples with her thumbs and then her palms, squeezing until Andrea moaned and reached behind her, unhooking her bra and throwing it to the floor.

"What are you thinking?" Andrea said again, shaking her head so her hair spilled down, dark and soft against her skin, against Emily's hands.

"That was - was that Agent Provocateur?" Emily said breathlessly. "Don't just throw it on the floor -"

Andrea laughed and leaned down to kiss her again. "You're delightful," she said as she reached for the buttons of Emily's blouse.

"I really, really am," Emily said as Andrea opened her shirt and bent down to kiss her throat and then her breasts, sliding a hand down to lift Emily's skirt.

Emily was, of course, wearing Prada.