Page 81 of Wild About You
I step back and pull the curtain open. The woman on the other side has one dark brow arched up and a smug smile.
“The zipper was stuck,” Piper says, cheeks red. She pulls the curtain back to shield herself while she changes.
“We’ll take the dress.” I retake my seat and anxiously wait for the next outfit.
We go to several more stores. I lose track, but the shopping bags looped over both arms are starting to add up.
“No more,” Piper insists. “This is too much.”
“We haven’t even looked at shoes yet.”
She shakes her head and peers down at the ones on her feet. “These aren’t so bad.”
“Baby, you look great. You’d look great in anything, but you shouldn’t need to color your shoes every morning.”
“I do love a good art project.”
I tip my head toward the shoe store. “One pair.”
Man, it makes me happy to buy her shit. Is that wrong? I don’t care.
Piper and I walk hand in hand as she looks at shoes. Every pair she gives a second glance, I nod to the sales guy to get her size.
When she finally sits down to try them all on, she has a stack of boxes nearly as tall as her.
“How am I going to pick just one?” she asks as she slips on a pair of tall, strappy-looking heels in bright red. Standing, she does a short walk in them, staring in the mirror at her feet. “These are gorgeous, but not very practical for school sadly.”
She gives them one last longing look, and then takes them off and places them back in the reject pile.
The guy tries to take them back and I give him a subtle head shake. So, I lied. There’s no way she’s walking out of here with just one pair of shoes. My girl needs at least as many pairs of shoes as me, right? And I have a lot of sneakers.
The funny thing about having money—people give you free stuff because they know you have the cash to buy more of it if you like it. I don’t have any big sponsors or anything like that, but stuff randomly shows up. A pair of shoes here and a few protein bars there.
Piper finally narrows it down to black shoes that look nearly identical to the ones on her feet.
I hold out my hand and she gives me the box. “This is it. We’re done.”
“This is the last store,” I say with a wink. She doesn’t notice the stack I’ve already had put at the counter until the guy starts ringing them up.
“Wait. No,” she says. “Just the black pair.”
The guy stops and looks from Piper to me.
“All of them.”
“Tyler,” she whisper-screeches.
“Yes, Pipes?”
“You don’t need to do this.”
“I know.” I hand over my card and we get four more bags to add to our collection.
Outside, Piper watches as I load her bags into the trunk. Happy laughter turns into a worried, nervous-sounding giggle.
“Oh my gosh, Tyler. Are they even going to fit?”
“Maybe we should have stopped at three pairs of shoes, eh?” I close the trunk and put the remaining bags in the small space behind our seats.
