Chapter 4: The Agency Gauntlet
The walk to the agency felt different. The same cracked sidewalks, the same graffiti-tagged bus stop, but the air itself seemed charged, like the city was holding its breath alongside him. Richard’s skin remembered every touch from the morning—the brush of Tiffany’s knuckles, the weight of Chloe’s head. The memories played on a loop, a stark, sensual contrast to the mundane act of punching his keycode at the agency’s back entrance.
The scent hit him first: hairspray, coffee, and the cloying sweetness of expensive perfume. The usual chaos buzzed in the large, open-plan space, but today it felt less like familiar background noise and more like an assault.
“Richard! Thank god.”
Silvie appeared, a clipboard in one hand, a headset dangling around her neck. She looked, as always, impeccably put together in a navy silk blouse and tailored trousers, her sharp eyes softened by the genuine warmth she reserved for him. “We have a crisis. The Zenith Lingerie show. The dressing assistant called in sick. Food poisoning. You’re in.”
His stomach dropped. “In the dressing area?”
“Where else? It’s twelve girls, two looks each, quick changes behind the main screen. You’ve done it before.” She patted his cheek, a maternal gesture that had always comforted him. Now it felt strange. “You’re a professional. And you’re the only one they all trust not to have a mental breakdown or try to hit on them. You’re safe.”
The word landed like a punch. Safe. The ghost of ‘little dickie’ hung in the air between them, a relic she had no idea was obsolete.
“Right,” he managed. “Safe.”
He headed toward the runway hall, the polished concrete floors reflecting the harsh track lighting. The space was a storm of activity. Dressers steamed garments, makeup artists hovered with brushes, and models stood like elegant statues in various states of undress.
He saw them immediately. Chloe and Tiffany were near the mirrored wall, being preened by a stylist. Chloe wore a delicate lace bodysuit in pale peach, the lines of it leaving very little to imagination. Tiffany was in a structured satin bustier and matching shorts, her curves accentuated, her expression focused as she inspected her lipstick in a compact mirror.
Their eyes found his across the room. Chloe gave a small, almost imperceptible smile. Tiffany’s gaze was longer, more assessing, a silent question: You okay?
He gave a tight nod, then busied himself with the rack of garments assigned to him, his hands sorting through scraps of silk and lace. He focused on the practicalities. Hook here. Zipper there. Don’t think.
“Dickie! My savior.”
Daniella glided over, already in a sheer black robe. She was one of the older models, twenty-two, with a reputation for being effortlessly bold. “I need the emerald set. The one with the clips, not the hooks. It’s a devil.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, rifling through the rack. He found the set, a complicated arrangement of straps and delicate jade clasps.
The changing area was just a semi-private space behind a freestanding Japanese screen. Daniella stepped behind it, chatting casually about her horrible date last night. Richard stood facing the screen, holding the lingerie over the top, the standard procedure.
“Okay, ready for it,” she said.
He passed the set over.
There was a rustle of fabric, then a frustrated sigh. “These clips are impossible. Can you just… step back here and help? My nails are too long for this.”
A beat of silence. He’d done this a hundred times. He was ‘safe.’ He was ‘little dickie.’ He was the helper.
He stepped around the screen.
Daniella had dropped her robe. She stood completely naked, her back to him, holding the emerald green fabric against her front as she struggled with a clasp at her shoulder blade. The line of her spine, the curve of her hip, the entire naked landscape of her was just… there. Unceremonious. Ordinary. For her.
“This one,” she said, glancing over her shoulder, completely unconcerned. “It’s stuck or something.”
His brain short-circuited. The clinical part noted the clasp was just fine, it just needed a firm pinch. The rest of him was a torrent of heat and panic. The new, traitorous reality of his body, so recently and wonderfully discovered, declared itself with a violent, rushing certainty. The confined space of his jeans became immediately, painfully inadequate.
He fixed the clasp with two fumbling fingers, his knuckles brushing her skin. He felt her warmth. It took every ounce of his will to not spring back like he’d been burned.
“Thanks, angel,” she said, finally securing the front and turning around. The lingerie did what it was designed to do—highlight and barely contain. She didn’t look down at him. She was already looking past him, her mind on the runway. She swept out from behind the screen, joining the flow of bodies.
Richard stood frozen, trapped behind the screen. He couldn’t move. He was painfully, visibly hard. The thin material of his chinos offered no concealment. It was a blatant, physical betrayal of the ‘safe’ narrative everyone believed.
He risked a glance out into the room.
Chloe was watching him. Her expression had shifted from soft support to something sharper, more intense. Her eyes dipped down, then snapped back to his face. Her jaw was tight.
Tiffany followed her gaze. She saw Chloe’s face first, then looked at Richard. Her eyes traveled down. He saw the moment she understood. Her compact mirror lowered. Her green eyes widened, not with shock, but with a dawning, vertiginous comprehension. The teasing ‘bigger us’ comment from the morning wasn’t just a metaphor anymore. It was a physical fact, stark and undeniable in the harsh light of the runway hall.
Her gaze locked with Chloe’s across the space. A silent, electric communication passed between them, too fast for him to decipher. Possession? Alarm? Amusement?
Then, a stylist called Tiffany’s name, breaking the connection. She turned away, but her posture was rigid, a line of tension he could feel from twenty feet away.
Chloe, however, didn’t look away. She held his panicked stare, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, she licked her lips. It wasn’t a seductive move. It was thoughtful. Calculating. Like she was tasting the new, complicated flavor of the situation.
Silvie’s voice crackled over the headset speakers. “Places, everyone! Two minutes!”
The noise level surged. Richard remained behind the screen, a statue of agony. He had to move. He had to get out, adjust himself, do something. But exiting meant crossing the open floor, past a dozen knowing eyes that suddenly felt less familiar and more like a jury.
He heard the first chords of the walk music pulse through the room. The show was starting. The focus shifted to the runway.
Taking a shuddering breath, he grabbed an abandoned silk kimono from a chair and held it casually in front of himself. He stepped out, keeping his eyes on the floor, and melted into the shadowed wings, his heart hammering a brutal rhythm against his ribs.
Safe was gone. The careful, unspoken balance of the morning had just been shattered by a stubborn clasp and his own body’s ruthless honesty. Now, the real show was about to begin.
Now, the real show was about to begin. The music’s bass thumped through the floor, a physical vibration that did nothing to settle the chaos in his chest. Richard kept the silk kimono clamped like a shield, edging along the mirrored wall toward the sanctuary of the backstage supply closet.
“Dickie, hold this.”
A model—Mia, he thought—pressed a delicate chain-link bra into his hands without breaking stride. She was topless, her skin glowing under the track lights, concerned only with adjusting the waistband of her lace shorts as she walked toward the runway curtain. He fumbled with the garment, its metal still warm from her body.
The first model hit the runway to a wave of applause that seeped through the heavy curtain. Backstage became a more frantic version of quiet, a hive of whispered urgency and last-second touches. Richard made it to the closet, slid inside among the rolling racks, and let out a shaky breath. The darkness smelled of cedar and stale perfume.
He allowed himself one moment, forehead against a cool metal bar, trying to will his body back under control. The image of Daniella’s spine, the feel of that clasp, tangled with the sharper memory of Tiffany’s shocked eyes. Safe. The word was a joke now.
The door swung open. Light sliced across him.
“There you are.” It was Lorna, another regular. She stood silhouetted in the doorway, wearing only a pair of translucent high-waisted briefs and an expression of pure practicality. “The hook on my corset is bent. I can’t breathe. Fix it.”
She turned, presenting her bare back and the misaligned hardware of a complex leather corset. The pale expanse of her skin, the notches of her vertebrae, were just details in a problem to be solved. For her. For him, it was another landslide.
“I… yeah.” His voice was gravel. He stepped closer, his fingers—now clumsier than ever—probing the stubborn metal hook.
“Hurry,” she said, tapping her foot. “I’m on after Anya.”
He pinched, twisted, and the hook slid into its eye with a soft click. She inhaled deeply, the leather creaking. “Lifesaver.” She was gone before he could blink, merging back into the flow.
He didn’t have time to recover. A hand wrapped around his bicep, the grip firm.
“We need you at the quick-change station. Now.” It was Elena, the head dresser, her mouth a line of stress. She pulled him into the epicenter, the space just behind the main screen where models were cycling back from the runway at a punishing pace.
It was a landscape of skin and swift motion. A blur of limbs, the shimmer of sweat on collarbones, the rustle of fabric being shed and donned. The air was thick with the heat of bodies and adrenaline.
“Zipper! Now!” A model he didn’t recognize was struggling, trapped in a velvet gown she needed off. Her back was to him, the zipper jammed at the small of her back. She was nude beneath it. He grabbed the tag, yanked it down with more force than necessary, and the dress pooled at her feet. She stepped out of it without a word, already reaching for the next outfit on the rack.
“Richard, these stockings are a disaster.” He turned. Chloe was there, one leg sheathed in dark, sheer nylon, the other bare. She held up a second stocking, its fine material twisted. Her blue eyes were calm, too calm, holding his with a focus that shut out the surrounding bedlam. “They’ll run if I do it. You have steadier hands.”
It was a test. A callback to a thousand smaller intimacies, now charged with the morning’s confession and what she’d just witnessed. Her tone was light, but her gaze was a interrogation.
He took the stocking from her. Her leg was extended, her balance held on his shoulder. He could feel the muscle shift under her skin as he carefully rolled the nylon up her calf, over her knee, along her thigh. His fingertips brushed her skin, a whisper of contact that burned. She watched him do it, her breathing even.
“See?” she said, her voice barely above the music. “Steady.”
He finished, the top securing just below the lace edge of her sapphire-blue briefs. She didn’t move her leg immediately, letting the weight of it rest in his hands for a heartbeat too long.
“Chloe! You’re on!” Elena barked.
She lowered her leg, leaned in as if to adjust the strap of her heel. Her lips were close to his ear. “Breathe, Dickie,” she murmured, the old nickname a paradox on her tongue now. Then she was gone, a flash of blonde and blue joining the procession to the curtain.
His hands were trembling. He shoved them into his pockets, finding the strained fabric of his chinos and the undeniable, persistent truth beneath. He turned, seeking any anchor, and found Tiffany.
She was watching him from beside a rack of feather-trimmed robes. She hadn’t gone out for her second walk yet. She was fully dressed in her street clothes—jeans and a tight black tank top—her arms crossed over her chest. Her green eyes weren’t shocked anymore. They were hard, analytical, tracking from his face down to his hands buried in his pockets and back up. She uncrossed her arms and walked toward him, each step deliberate.
The music swelled for the finale. A symphony of applause erupted. The show was over. The models began streaming back in a laughing, chattering wave of relief, shedding their final pieces like second skins, talking about drinks, about parties, obliviously reclaiming their space and their casual nudity.
Tiffany stopped in front of him, blocking his view of the room. The noise surrounded them, a cocoon of celebration.
“We need to talk,” she said. Her voice wasn’t teasing. It was flat, final. “Not here. My car, ten minutes.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned, grabbed Chloe’s wrist as she came off the runway, and pulled her close, speaking intently into her ear. Chloe’s eyes flicked back to Richard over Tiffany’s shoulder. She nodded.
Richard stood motionless in the center of the unraveling spectacle. A half-dressed model bumped into him, apologizing with a laugh as she reached past him for a water bottle. Another asked if he could unclasp her necklace, her fingers fumbling at the nape of her neck. The requests, the casual bodies, were a rising tide with no shore in sight.
He looked from the retreating forms of his two best friends to the sea of skin still demanding his help, and for the first time, the thing swelling in his chest felt a lot less like arousal and a lot more like panic.