Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler

looks like what you want. I know that deep down you know what I’m talking about.
    I felt my lips drizzle with the juice of my gasp. “Wow. That— you look—why don’t you ever wear that?”
    She turned around slowly in it. “My father asked me not to.” The music changes. “What?”
    “A few days after I bought it my father came upstairs to tuck me in and asked me never to wear it again.”
    “Your father came to—”
    “Yeah, he did that for years, even when I was in high school.
    I miss it sometimes. He asked me not to wear it anymore.”
    “Why? It’s perfectly respectable.” I looked at her again. “Sort of.”
    Cyn smiled. “Dad never cared much about respectability. He always said that caring too much about society’s rules could lead to—what did he call it— hypervigilance. You know, always wor- rying about what’s happening instead of actually doing some- thing.”
    “Right,” I said. But it didn’t feel right.
    “Yeah. So it wasn’t the respectability. He said it would give him a heart attack. He was really uncomfortable about it. I can understand why; it’s one of the few times I can remember him telling me specifically not to do something. But he said as a favor to him. Please stop wearing it. So I put it up here.” She shut the closet door and with a start I saw that the outside of the door had a mirror on it. My own naked body, leaning against the footboard, swung into view. With Cyn standing by the door I could see both sides of the dress, all of her body offered up at once. I wanted to have sex with her. The foreboding music has dissolved back into the sensual themes of the scene’s opening. Cyn followed my gaze to the mirror and our eyes met in the reflection. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s a little creepy to see yourself
    when you are going to sleep.”
    “But that’s not what we could use it for,” I said, getting up and walking to her. I felt the footboard-brand on my back in geometric, sticky dents, and my erection toggled in front of me like I was taking something for a walk. She watched me in the mirror as I approached her, her face so close to the glass that her breath clouded both of our faces. Do you want to know what she looked like? Imagine her now, so you can be as
    turned on as I was. Aroused. Picture who you want—hips, mouth, hands, birthmarks, curves and skin and all the features you need to keep you here—because she was who I wanted. She was all the features I needed to keep me there. That’s what she looked like, as the cloth of her dress purred against me. With my hands I parted her buttocks so that I could slide thick between them, the folds of the dress cradling me like a ham- mock. She put out one arm to steady herself against the mirror, wiping away the fog. Our eyes met again.
    It’s an important point in a romantic relationship when you can talk dirty, out loud. You’ve achieved a state at which you don’t think your lover is going to repeat your sex whispers over coffee with friends and everyone will throw back their heads and laugh at you. Hopefully opera will achieve a state at which outright eroticism can be sung without giggles or scan- dal, because aside from encores in my mind this opera has only been performed once and it seems sort of a waste. We’ll see. Watch.
    My hand crept up her dress and one of us unzipped it, de- pending on where the costumer puts the zipper. The dress slid down her body catching for a second where we were pressed together. “Look,” I said. “Watch.” Both my hands crept around her shoulders in the mirror. Her eyes went from my eyes to my hands, where my fingers rested on her collarbones like I was feeling a pulse, which of course I was. “Watch my hands.” Un- steadily she stepped out of the fallen dress. Her hand left the mirror and she put her hands on her own neck, nervous but watching my hands. I took each hand and travelled with them down her chest. “Watch your hands. Our hands. Watch your