Drip For Me, Part IV: The Devil Wears Nada

Read parts one, two, and three here.

“Welcome to Prada! Champagne?” a young woman in a starched black-collared uniform adorned with a Saffiano leather Prada name tag greeted them, thrusting forth a tray of bubbling crystal flutes. They each took one, and Camrin offered both Fay and Tessa the crooks of his two arms as they descended the SoHo flagship’s iconic Rem Koolhaas-designed wood and steel stairs to the lower level party like some weirdly proportioned Wizard of Oz revival.

As Tessa’s long legs extended and her pointed white Miu Miu leather lace-up ankle boots hit each step, the light of photographers’ ceaseless flashbulbs increasingly blinded Fay. When they neared the bottom, she glanced over and realized both Camrin and Tessa had put on matching pairs of tiny, rimless, gradient-tinted Cartier sunglasses. This surprise nearly brought them all down with Fay as she tripped and caught herself on an unbothered mannequin’s neon forearm. “Tessa! Tessa, over here!” the photographers chanted. “Tessa, bring your friend Camrin over here! Camrin Abbas! Camrin, can we get a quick picture?”

Fay wanted to crawl into a hole. Surely there was a storage area beneath the giant stairwell? She let go of Camrin’s arm and regained her composure. “Go ahead. I’ll just chill by the shoes,” she assured him. Tessa had already started posing solo, and Fay wished the elevator wasn’t encased in clear glass so that she could just slink up out of there without anyone noticing.

“Hey,” Camrin protested with a grin. “Come on. You’re with me.” He reached his free hand around her side and gave her toned obliques a comforting, gentle squeeze.

They turned to face the photographers, and Fay gave her best “I’m neutral, if bemused, about being here” face. Then another socialite hit the stairs, and they were manumitted.

“More champagne?” another Prada FW18 name tag behind a tray of flutes intoned as the white flash burns faded from her bleary sight. Tessa, to Fay’s great relief, had run into friends and moved on.

They sipped and flirted as they wandered into the mint-colored labyrinth of clothing display rooms. Camrin ran his hand across a perfectly sheer, neon pink sleeveless organza top with a pussy bow.

“I think it’s my turn,” he said, pulling it off the rack and holding it up to Fay’s collarbone, which was gleaming with Fenty Beauty Body Lava, “to style you now.” He grabbed a café-colored Panno Doppio logo’d wool bustier and white cropped leather trousers with a matching belt.

“You think those black gloves would work with this?” His eyes sparkled with earnestness, and Fay wanted so badly to kiss him. She wanted his hands on her again. She stood still as he moved down the racks toward her, pretending to examine the ostrich feather detailing of a silk blouse, and as he passed her body he brushed, ever so slowly, against her backside, grazing the nape of her neck with his jaw and kissing her as he breathed in her scent (Portrait of a Lady by Frédéric Malle). She could feel him getting hard through his oppressive vinyl trousers as her body shivered with desire.

“Let’s go,” he growled. She picked up a pair of pointed-toe black, white, and baby pink spazzolato slingback pumps to complete the look and followed him towards the mauve-carpeted dressing rooms, away from the noise of the party.

Camrin opened the clear glass door to one of the Prada dressing chambers walled with mirrored glass that fades into a frameless TV, in a way that made you feel like maybe the technological obsolescence of human labor was a sexy idea. Like if the singularity was personified by a young Sharon Stone. Fay let the door shut and turned to question him. “Translucent dressing rooms? What kind of—”

Camrin reached behind her to press a button that activated the room’s Priva-Lite technology, rendering the glass opaque.

“Magic,” he quipped. He leaned forward and ran his fingers along her cheekbones and around her jaw, kissing gently as she tried to keep her pleasure silent.

“I think…if we fuck in the clothes,” she teased, “we probably have to buy them.”

Camrin tugged loose the tiny string that held the Saudade dress together and exhaled deeply as it fell to the floor, his lips on her neck as his hands cupped her breasts.

“My pleasure,” he whispered.