She Found My Panty Drawer

I install car stereos for a living, which mostly means I spend my days lying on my back in the footwell of somebody's pickup truck with a flashlight in my teeth, trying to get a wire through a hole that the factory never meant to have a wire in it. I'm good at it. I'm patient, I don't mind tight spaces, and I like the moment at the end when the customer turns the key and the bass kicks in and their whole face lights up. I'm thirty-two. I have grease under my fingernails most days and a sunburn on the back of my neck from May to September, and if you saw me at the gas station you would not look at me twice.

June would tell you that's my best trick.

We'd been together eight months when this happened. She owns a tiny shop on the corner of Elm and Fourth that does alterations, mostly wedding dresses, and she is thirty-nine and five foot nothing and the most terrifying person I have ever met when she has pins in her mouth. She has short dark hair she cuts herself and glasses on a beaded chain and hands that are always moving: pinning, smoothing, tucking, measuring. She once took in my work jacket while I was still wearing it, just because it bothered her. I didn't ask her to. I just stood there with my arms out like a scarecrow while she circled me, and when she was done it fit like it had been made for me, and that was the day I knew I was in serious trouble.

She'd started staying over three or four nights a week. Her toothbrush lived in my bathroom. Her books were on my nightstand. And I had been very, very careful about one particular drawer.

It was the bottom drawer of my dresser, under the T-shirts I never wore. In it, folded small, were seven pairs of women's panties. Satin, mostly. A pale pink pair with a little bow at the front. A black lace pair I'd been too scared to wear more than twice. A white cotton pair, soft as a cloud, that I wore under my work jeans more days than I'd admit, because something about the feel of it against me all day, hidden, felt like carrying a secret in my pocket. Which I was.

I'd bought the first pair when I was twenty-six, on a lonely Saturday, at a department store two towns over where nobody would know me. I paid cash and walked out with my heart pounding like I'd stolen it. I put them on in my car in the parking lot. I remember how they felt sliding up my legs, cool and smooth and impossibly soft, and how they held my cock and balls snug so that I went instantly, painfully hard. I sat in that car for twenty minutes before I could drive.

Six years later, I still felt that way every time.

On a Sunday morning in October, June got cold in bed and went looking for a T-shirt to sleep in. I was in the kitchen making coffee. I heard my dresser drawer open, and then another one, and then the bottom one, and then nothing at all for a long, long time.

I stood there with the coffee pot in my hand.

When she came into the kitchen, she was wearing one of my old T-shirts, and she was holding the pale pink pair with the bow between her finger and thumb, the way you'd hold up a dress you were checking for a stain. Her face was perfectly neutral.

"These aren't mine," she said.

"No."

"And they're definitely not your ex's, because they're brand new, and they've been washed with your towels." She turned them over and looked at the tag. "And they're a size that would fit you, sweetheart, and not much of anyone else in your life."

I put the coffee pot down very carefully. "June."

"Do you wear them?"

There was no point lying. She'd find out in about four seconds anyway; she always did. "Yes."

"Every day?"

"Most days. Under my work clothes."

She looked at me for a long moment over the top of her glasses. Then she looked at the panties again, and smoothed the little bow flat with her thumb, the way she'd fix a seam. "The waistband's rolled on these," she said. "You're buying the wrong cut. You need a higher rise." And then she looked back at me, and I saw something in her face I'd only seen when she was undressing for bed. "Go put them on. I want to see."

I went to the bedroom and put them on with my hands shaking. When I came back into the kitchen in my T-shirt and the pink satin panties, my cock was already straining against the front of them, hard and obvious, and the little bow was sitting right on top of it. June leaned against the counter and drank her coffee and looked at me, top to bottom and back again, and didn't say anything for so long I thought I might pass out.

"Turn around," she said.

I turned.

"Hm," she said. And then, much more quietly, "Oh, I can work with this."

"You're not mad," I said. It came out more like a question.

"Mad?" She set her mug down. "Sam, I have spent fifteen years making other people beautiful on the most important day of their lives. I've pinned two thousand brides. Do you know how many of them ever looked at themselves in my mirror the way you just looked at yourself in that window?"

I glanced at the dark kitchen window. I hadn't even noticed I was doing it.

"None," she said. "Not one. They look at the dress. You were looking at you." She came around the counter and stood in front of me and hooked one finger in the waistband of the pink panties, and tugged, gently, so the satin pulled snug across my cock. I made a sound I wasn't proud of. "How long?"

"Six years."

"Alone?"

"Always."

"Do you want to be pretty for somebody? Or do you want it to stay a secret?"

Nobody had ever asked me that. I hadn't even asked myself. I stood there in her kitchen in pink satin with her finger in my waistband, and the true answer came up out of me before I could stop it.

"I want to be pretty for you."

Her eyes went soft and dark behind her glasses. "Then that's what we'll do," she said. "But we're going to do it properly. I don't do anything halfway."

That was how it started. Not all at once. June doesn't do anything all at once. She is a woman who will spend forty minutes pinning a single hem.

The next weekend she brought her tape measure home. She stood me in the middle of my bedroom in my white cotton panties and nothing else, and she measured me the way she measured brides: bust, waist, hips, inseam, the length from my shoulder to my wrist, writing every number in a little notebook with a pencil she kept tucking behind her ear. Her hands were brisk and impersonal and they were all over me, and by the time she got to the inseam I was so hard I was leaking through the cotton, and she noticed, and wrote that down too. I asked what she wrote. She showed me. It said responsive.

The weekend after that she brought home a garment bag.

Inside it was a slip. Pale blush satin, cut on the bias, with thin straps and a band of cream lace along the hem. She'd made it herself, from my numbers, in the back of her shop after closing. She held it up against me. "Arms up."

I put my arms up. She slid it down over my head, and it poured down my body like cool water, and settled. It fit perfectly. It skimmed my chest and hugged my waist and ended just at the tops of my thighs, and when I moved, it moved with me, whispering against my skin. June turned me to face the long mirror on the back of the closet door and stood behind me with her chin on my shoulder.

"Look at you," she said softly. "You look like a Sadie."

I looked at the woman in the mirror in the blush slip. I didn't look like a woman. I looked like me, broad shoulders and short hair and a sunburned neck, in a slip that was making me feel more naked than naked. And I wanted it so badly my eyes stung.

"Sadie," I said.

"Mm. My pretty Sadie." She kissed the side of my neck. "Sit down. I'm doing your lips."

She sat me on the edge of the bed and tilted my chin up and painted my mouth a soft rosy pink, carefully, with her tongue between her teeth in concentration. When she was done, she kissed me, very lightly, so she wouldn't smudge it. And then she pushed me back on the bed and climbed on top of me in her jeans and sweater, and she rubbed my cock through the satin slip with the heel of her hand until I came all over the inside of it, gasping, with her watching my face the whole time.

"You owe me a slip," she said afterward, and I laughed until I almost cried.

The next Saturday, after she closed, she took me to the shop.

I'd been inside a dozen times, but never after hours. With the blinds down and only the work lights on, it was a different place. Racks of white gowns in plastic hung along one wall like a row of patient ghosts. In the middle of the floor was the little round platform where her brides stood, carpeted in pale gray, facing a three-way mirror taller than me.

"Up," June said.

I stepped up onto it in my jeans and work shirt and felt ridiculous. She stood behind me and unbuttoned my shirt, one button at a time, watching me in the mirror, and slid it off my shoulders. Then my jeans. Under them I was wearing the white cotton panties, and she smiled at them like an old friend.

From the back room she brought a dress. Not a wedding gown. A simple fitted cocktail dress in dusty rose, sleeveless, cut to the knee, that she said a client had ordered and never collected. She'd let the seams out as far as they'd go. She stepped me into it and drew the zipper up my back, slowly, and it closed, just, snug over my ribs. Then she knelt at my feet with her pincushion on her wrist and started to pin the hem.

"Hold still," she said, around a mouthful of pins.

I held still. In the three-way mirror there were three of me in rose pink, and three of June kneeling at my feet, and her hands moving up the backs of my calves as she worked. Every time she pinned, her knuckles brushed my skin. By the time she got to the last pin I was hard enough that the front of the dress tented, and she looked up at it, and then up at me, and took the pins out of her mouth.

"Do you know what I do," she asked, "when a bride can't stand still?"

"What?"

"I make her stand still longer." She got to her feet and stood behind me and slid both her hands up under the hem of the dress, slow, all the way up my thighs, until she found my cock straining in the white cotton. "Look in the mirror, Sadie. Don't look away."

I didn't look away. I watched her stroke me through the panties under that rose pink dress, three times over in the mirror, until my knees shook and I came, gasping, with her other arm wrapped tight around my waist holding me up on the brides' platform.

"Well," she said into my ear, "I'll have to have that one cleaned."

That went on for a month. Every weekend, something new. A lace bra she'd stuffed with soft padding. Thigh-high stockings that she taught me to roll up without laddering. A pair of pale pink panties in exactly the right cut, which turned out to make a ridiculous difference. She'd dress me and do my lips and sit me in her lap and make me tell her how it felt. She'd make me walk across the bedroom and back until I stopped clomping like a man in work boots. And every single time, she'd make me come in whatever I was wearing, with her hand or her thigh or her bare foot, and I'd lie there afterward in ruined satin, wrecked and grateful.

But she hadn't fucked me. I wanted it so badly I'd stopped being able to think about anything else. I didn't know how to ask.

In the end I didn't have to.

On a Friday in November I came home from work and found a long flat box on my bed, wrapped in tissue paper, with a note in her handwriting that said: Put on everything in here. Then wait on the bed, on your knees. Don't touch yourself.

Inside were new things. A pale pink satin bra and matching panties, cut high on the hip. White thigh-high stockings with lace tops. And at the bottom, in its own small box, a smooth pink silicone butt plug with a jeweled base, and a bottle of lube.

I put on all of it. The plug took me a while, kneeling on the bed with my hand behind me and my face burning, easing it in a little at a time until it slipped past the wide part and settled inside me with a jolt that made my cock jump against the satin. Then I knelt there in my stockings and lingerie, full and aching and so hard it hurt, and waited, and didn't touch myself, for twenty minutes that felt like a year.

When June came in, she stopped in the doorway.

She was wearing a black silk robe I'd never seen before. She looked at me, kneeling there in pink, and her lips parted. "Oh, Sadie," she said. "Oh, look at you. Turn around. Let me see."

I turned around on my knees and bent forward on my elbows, and I heard her breath catch when she saw the jewel. She came up behind me and laid her hand on my ass and pressed the base of the plug with one finger, and I moaned into the bedspread.

"Good girl," she said. "You did exactly what you were told."

Then she untied her robe and let it fall.

Under it she was naked, except for a black leather harness buckled snug around her hips, and rising from it, a long, smooth, pale pink cock. Not small. Not even a little bit small. She took it in her fist and stroked it, slowly, watching me watch her.

"I've been wanting to do this since the morning I found that drawer," she said. "But first you're going to make me wet."

She sat on the edge of the bed with her legs open, the strap-on standing up from her hips, and she pointed at the floor between her knees. I climbed off the bed and knelt there in my stockings, and she pulled the base of the strap-on aside, and I put my mouth on her pussy.

She was already wet. She tasted sharp and sweet, and I licked her slowly, the way she'd taught me months ago, long strokes and then little circles on her clit, and she put her hand in my hair and held me there. She didn't let me stop until she was grinding against my face and swearing softly under her breath, and she came with her thighs clamped around my ears and her fingers tight in my hair.

When she let go of me, she was breathing hard. "Up," she said. "On the bed. On your back. I want to see your face."

I lay down on my back on the bed in my pink lingerie. She knelt between my legs and slowly drew the plug out of me, and I gasped at the emptiness. She poured lube into her palm and stroked it over the long pink cock until it shone. Then she hooked my stocking-clad legs over her arms and lined the head of it up against my ass.

"Tell me you want it, Sadie."

"I want it. Please. Please fuck me."

She pushed in. Slowly, with total control, the way she'd guide a needle through silk. The head stretched me, and stretched me more, and then slid past, and she kept going, inch by inch, until her hips were pressed against my ass and I was filled so completely I couldn't breathe. My cock was pushing at the front of my satin panties, leaking a dark wet spot onto the pink.

"Look at me," she said.

I looked up at her. Her face was flushed and her glasses had slipped down her nose and she was looking at me like I was the most beautiful thing she'd ever made.

Then she fucked me.

She started slow, long deep strokes that dragged against something inside me that made my whole body light up, and then she sped up, and then faster, her hips snapping against me, the harness creaking, my stockings rasping against her arms. I couldn't stop the sounds coming out of me. High, helpless, pretty sounds. Sounds I didn't know I could make. She reached down and wrapped her hand around my cock through the satin panties and stroked me in time with her thrusts, the slippery fabric sliding over the head of my cock with every pull.

"Look at my pretty Sadie," she panted. "Taking my cock like she was born for it. You're going to come for me, aren't you? Right in your new panties."

"Yes," I sobbed. "Yes, June, please, please."

"Then come."

I came so hard my vision went white at the edges, spilling into the pink satin under her hand, my ass clenching around her cock while she kept fucking me through it, slow and deep, until every last shudder was gone. She ground the base of the strap-on against her own clit with a few hard rolls of her hips, and I watched her come again, her mouth open, her head tipped back, her hand still wrapped around me.

She eased out of me, so slowly. She unbuckled the harness and set it on the floor. Then she lay down beside me, warm and damp and naked, and pulled me into her arms, my smeared pink lips against her neck.

She took care of me after. She always does. She got a warm cloth and cleaned me gently, and peeled the ruined panties off me and dropped them on the floor, and wiped the lipstick off my mouth with her thumb, and then kissed me where it had been. She rolled the stockings down my legs one at a time and kissed both of my knees.

"I'm going to make you a whole wardrobe," she said into my hair, after a long time. "A proper one. Things that fit you right."

"June." I was half asleep. "What do I do about the drawer?"

She laughed. I felt it against my cheek.

"Oh, sweetheart," she said. "I already emptied it. Everything's hanging in my closet now. You're going to have to come to my place to get dressed."