I narrowed my gaze. “Did you peek?”
She placed her hand on her heart. “Cross my heart. I promise I . . . did.”
“Paige!” I jumped off the couch and flew to my workspace. “I told you not to look!”
Our loft wasn’t spacious enough for me to have an actual workroom. For that reason, Paige deserved a ton of credit for tolerating just how much of our shared space was dedicated to fashion. Racks lined two of the four walls in the living room, full of things I’d made through the years. And the back half of the room—the half I’d commandeered as wedding dress central—was the happiest of my happy places. My sewing machine sat on a table against the back wall, underneath tall windows that let in tons of natural light. On either side of the table, huge bins held fabric, buttons, zippers, and other notions I might need while working. Years of collecting had yielded a pretty impressive assortment—impressive enough that I probably shouldn’t have been spending a third of every paycheck at Mood. But it was hard to resist the siren call of a great fabric store. Paige’s obsession was shoes. My mom couldn’t resist buying pretty paper and fancy pens. But me? Fabric was my weakness.
I crossed to the back corner where a dress form was hidden by an old sheet. Paige was great. Not Bridezilla at all. But working with someone watching over your shoulder, observing the minute-by-minute progress of a dress they hoped to eventually wear was intensely stressful. Creation was a process. And rarely did the finished product look anything like the first few versions. By the end of week two of dressmaking, I had stopped working on the dress whenever Paige was around, covering it with a sheet when I wasn’t home, and threatening to turn it into a mermaid dress with puffy sleeves if she came within three feet of my sewing area.
Little cheater.
I pulled the sheet off the dress form and studied the half-made dress, intentionally angling my body to block Paige’s view.
“Oh, come on!” Paige called.
I turned around to face her, my hands on my hips. “Did you seriously look?”
She stood and walked toward me. “Of course I didn’t. But I really wanted to.”
“The skirt isn’t even finished yet,” I argued. The dress had a skirt, but it was just simple white satin. I still needed to embellish and make it pretty.
“But you said the bodice was done, right? Please oh please? Just one tiny peek?”
I bit my lip. I wanted her to see it. Because I was pretty sure she was going to love it. But I was still terrified. That she trusted me to make something this big, this important to her was huge. It felt a little like I was standing in front of Heidi Klum on an episode of Project Runway. “Okay,” I finally relented. “But you can’t try it on yet. I still have to stitch the lace in place and secure the buttons up the back.”
Paige raised her eyebrows. “Oh. I thought—”
“We did.” I interrupted her. “We decided an open back was best. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how much you loved the idea of buttons, so . . .” I turned the dress form around and pulled off the sheet. “I’m hoping maybe this will work.”
Paige’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped. “Ohhh, Dani. It’s beautiful!”
“Do you really like it?”
“It’s perfect.” She reached out and touched the back of the dress. “So this whole middle part is completely sheer?”
“Right. You’ll barely see it when it’s against your skin, except for the buttons, obviously, and the little bit of lace that comes over your shoulder here and trims the opening. And then, look.” I turned the dress back around. “The same lace wraps around to the front and will continue down the skirt.”
“All over?”
I crossed my fingers. It was a sheath dress, per Paige’s request, so no giant full skirt walking down the aisle for her. With such a simple outline, lace all over was exactly what I was hoping for. “I really think it will be beautiful.”
She nodded. “Oh, me too!” She reached out to hug me. “Seriously. This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“I can’t wait to see it on you. There might still be a few pins on the skirt, but a few more hours of work and I should have it ready for you to try on before your Mom leaves town.”
Paige smiled. Her mom was slightly less confident in my ability to make a wedding dress than Paige was. To have a finished product to show her would probably do a lot to relieve some of the wedding tension Paige was feeling. She got along with her Mom. Most of the time, anyway. But they’d definitely had it out over more than a few wedding details. “I’m so glad. I didn’t want to push you, but man, Mom’s been driving me crazy over this dress.”
“She’s here through next Thursday, right?”
“Yeah, but her flight is super early Thursday morning, so it’ll have to be on Wednesday.”
Five days. I looked back at the dress. “I can finish in five days.”
Paige gave me a hug, squeezing extra hard before letting me go. “Alex is stupid, Dani,” she said, her voice close to my ear. “Don’t even give him another thought.”
Chapter Eight
Alex
“How long has it been?” Isaac leaned forward, stretching his arms far over his head.
I closed out the book I was reading on my phone and looked at the clock. “Three hours,” I said. “We’ve now officially been on the airplane on the ground, twice as long as we will be in the air. If,” I added, “we ever leave the ground.” The flight crew had cited ambiguous “delays” and a backlog of planes trying to leave JFK, but three hours? I’d done a lot of flying over the years and had never waited so long before takeoff.
Isaac groaned. “I think Charleston is going to sink into the ocean before we make it home.”
“Probably not,” I answered dryly. “But you aren’t going to be home in time to film. Did you leave anything for Tyler to post?”
He scrubbed his hands across his face. “No. I thought I’d be home in time.”
“Can he do it without you?”
He pursed his lips. “Most of it, yeah. But also . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked around the plane. “I think I’ll do a little something from here, too.”
“From the plane? Can you do that?”
“Why not? I’ll talk to a few people, do some trivia, then we can send the footage back to the studio and Vinnie can splice it in with Steven’s tech news stuff. I mean, look around. Everybody’s bored. This will be fun.”
For the next thirty minutes, I watched in awe as Isaac morphed into a full-scale entertainer. All he did was talk to people, ask them questions, play a few random trivia games. But he had a way of engaging people that was unparalleled. My part was easy. I simply followed behind him with a digital consent agreement I’d worked up on the fly and made sure everyone who appeared on video signed it and gave us rights to publish.
It was fascinating seeing Isaac in his element. I’d watched his show, and the process of filming and production countless times, but this was different. Isaac was interacting with people—many of whom knew who he was and seemed very excited for the interaction—face-to-face. It brought him to life in a way that his studio stuff didn’t quite capture.