“Yeah, true.”
I felt like an idiot.
“Anyway, I’m going to be in the costume competition later if you’re watching it.”
“Oh, okay, I might do.”
There was another awkward pause, and she put the book down when her mum and my dad concluded their discussion. With one final smile she was gone. I watched her go and dearly wished I could do more than just look at her arse.
“She was nice,” Dad said, but another customer came along and cut short any discussion we might have had.
Surreptitiously consulting the convention programme, I saw that the costume contest was being held in the main hall from two until three, and then the costume workshop was immediately afterwards, three-fifteen until five-fifteen. As successful as my career as a fanfiction author was going, I couldn’t stop thinking about Brianne and at quarter to two, I asked Dad if I could go for a look around.
“By all means,” he said, interrupting his conversation with a potential buyer about the colour shades on the Dark Dart. “I’ll text you if I need anything.”
Guiltily, I abandoned our stall and walked towards the main hall, trying not to make it obvious what I was doing. Not that anyone would care, of course, but I had convinced myself that everyone was judging me. At school, I wouldn’t have had more than a passing interest in Brianne: everyone knew she was sexy, but she had her friends, they all ignored me, and that was that. Even in our shared maths class, I sat on the opposite side of the room and we barely interacted. But seeing her dressed up like the characters I had spent two years imagining and writing about had lit a fire under my imagination, and I couldn’t help myself. I needed to see her again. And anyway, she’d invited me, so it wasn’t weird. Probably.
The contest began at two sharp and the MC, a middle-aged lady in a Yoda t-shirt, tried to work up the crowd’s enthusiasm. Half of the entrants were in low-effort costumes, either bought online or just vague imitations of the actual character’s outfit. The other half, though, were generally extremely high quality and even Brianne’s immaculately detailed pilot suit was put in the shade by a couple of fully moulded and painted efforts. She won a few votes back by striking model poses when her turn came to walk up and down the catwalk, her long blonde hair streaming out behind her as she walked, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But inevitably the costumes with internal frameworks and LED lighting were going to win, and she accepted third place with a big smile and a wave at the crowd.
When it was over, I watched her walk to one side of the hall and sit down on an empty chair, looking at her phone. I assumed she was waiting for her mum or something, but when five minutes passed and she was still on her own, I summoned my courage and ignored every impulse in the body, which was begging me to leave immediately. I went over to her.
“Hi,” I said, regretting my decision immediately.
She looked up and smiled and suddenly it was the best decision ever. “Hi, did you vote for me?”
“Yeah, I did. You should have won.”
Her smile turned to a laugh. “Those other costumes were incredible. I think I was lucky to come third.”
I sat down next to her so I wouldn’t need to look down at her. She locked her phone and put it away, and I noticed up close that her cheeks were slightly flushed, like she’d been exercising or something.
“It’s a great costume,” I said, realising that I was rapidly running out of things to say to her.
“Thanks, but really it’s my mum who’s the talented one. I’m just the model.”
“Did you ever read Stellar Aces?”
“Yeah, once through. They’re really good.”
Once through. Dad had probably read the entire series thirty times.
There was a pause.
“So, are you excited to go to uni?” I asked.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she said, hastily. “Listen, do you want to get a drink or something? I wouldn’t mind walking around a bit more.”
“Aren’t you going to your mum’s workshop?”
“Nah, I’ve been to them before. Sewing isn’t my thing.”
We got two bottles of sparkling water from a vending machine and Brianne insisted on paying for her own. As we walked around, not really talking much except when we saw something cool or interesting, I knew what she was thinking. ‘This event is so boring that I’m reduced to hanging around with this tragic nerd’. I didn’t even want to contemplate what she’d say to her girlfriends when she next saw them. Or maybe she couldn’t admit to them that she’d been to a sci-fi convention. Either way, my reputation was in for a trashing, but it was with people I would never see again. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to ever see Brianne again.
We turned a corner into a quieter area of the exhibition space and I knew that one more corner would mean seeing my dad and our stall. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to see me walking with Brianne, but before it became a problem, she let out a little gasp of surprise.
“Okay, um, hold this,” she said, rapidly shoving her bottle into my hand.
“What’s up?” I asked, confused, but she was shuffling over to a wall in a peculiar way, her legs locked together. I followed, and she shook her head and hissed at me to look away.
“One of the seams of my costume has gone,” she said. “Stand in front of me, face away and stop people from looking.”
I did as I was told, a bottle hanging from each of my hands. “Do you need any help?” I asked.
“No, I’ve got some safety pins here. Just look away.”
Waiting, I looked around at the other people who were near us, but none of them were interested in a scrawny teenager carrying bottles of water, no matter what was happening behind him. I tapped one of them against my leg idly.
“Okay, that will do for a minute, but I’ve got to get back to the hotel room to fix it properly,” she said, standing up. I couldn’t help myself and I glanced down, and the inner thigh seam on her pilot suit was being held together by pins from her knee up to her…
“Don’t look,” she said, fiercely, and I looked up at the ceiling.
“I didn’t know you had a hotel room,” I said.
“We always have to get one for all mum’s costume stuff, it’s too much to bring in a car for the day. Come on, I’ll show you where it is.”
I followed her as she cautiously set off, keeping her strides short. The convention was being held in a venue with an attached hotel, so we only had to go through a set of doors and along a corridor to a lift, but the crowds instantly disappeared as soon as we had.
“I said don’t look,” Brianne said when we were in the lift, but I hadn’t.
“I didn’t,” I protested.
“Oh. I thought you did.”
We went the rest of the way in silence until we reached an anonymous room on the third floor, which Brianne unlocked with a card. She stepped in, but I hung around outside, assuming she would want privacy.
“I’ll wait here,” I said, wondering if she’d forgotten me.
“No, come in,” she unexpectedly replied, so I did.
The curtains were open so the room was full of summer sunlight, but the air conditioning meant it felt quite cool. There were boxes of clothes and fabric everywhere except on the twin beds, and when Brianne bent down to get something out of her suitcase, I took advantage of her facing away from me and stared at her bum.
She stood up and looked over her shoulder at me. Embarrassed, my eyes snapped in the opposite direction, which couldn’t have made it more obvious that I was looking at her. I wondered if I’d upset her.
“I need a hand,” she said, and her tone was much softer. I walked over and she stood in the window, the privacy curtain hanging behind her, her pilot suit bathed in sunlight.
“Here.”
Turning to face away, she gathered her hair in one hand, putting it over her shoulder, and pointed to the tiny zip at the top of the suit, on her neck. My hands shook as I reached out and tried to hold it, but the pull was very small and I fumbled at it for a second before I could grip it. Then I pulled it down and the teeth moved smoothly, creating a gap in the suit which ran all the way down to the small of her back. Then it reached the bottom and I let go, and Brianne turned around to face me.
“Want to help me take it off?” she asked, her eyes meeting mine, smiling.
I blinked.
“Uh, yeah.”
She held up her hands and undid her gloves, dropping them on the floor next to her suitcase, then held out her wrists to me.
“Pull the cuffs.”
I did, and she pulled her arms out of the suit. Once they were free, I let go of the cuffs, and the front of the suit fell down into the space between us.
I could see Brianne Water’s bra.
I’d actually sortof seen her bra before: on a day in May, just before our exams, there had been an unexpected rain shower at school, and when I arrived at maths, her white blouse had turned partly see-through. She had been covering it with a book, but she let her guard down for a moment to pick up her bag and I saw her pale blue bra underneath. This time, though, her bra was white and smooth, the perfect thing to wear underneath a tight-fitting pilot suit made of thin material. The top part of her breasts were exposed above the top of the bra and I looked at her cleavage, my boxer shorts suddenly uncomfortably tight.
She didn’t hesitate, though: she pushed the suit down over her hips and inelegantly pulled it off, using zips on the side of her boots to loosen them before getting the whole thing off. Then she stood up straight, her knickers white and plain just like her bra.
“Like what you see?” she asked, tilting her head to one side slightly as she looked at me looking at her.
“Yeah,” I admitted, breathless.
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