Ha Behind the Fitting Curtain

The rain in Ho Chi Minh City that afternoon did not so much fall as lean its whole grey weight against the glass, and I stood just inside the boutique door with my collar already damp while Ha Vo, twenty-two, finished whatever she was doing on her phone and only then lifted her eyes. I am Bao Dinh, twenty-five, a friend from her district, and for a long time I had mistaken the calm way she carried herself for a closed door. She had asked me to come while she tried pieces, as if a second opinion were all a man who already knew her face could be good for. She had come to me after leaving another man’s photograph unopened, looking for a smaller public, and I had said yes before I understood what she was actually offering.

She moved through the racks as if the weather belonged to other people and chose a dark dress and a pair of trousers without asking what I liked. When she turned her head I followed. The fitting rooms sat at the back behind a curtain of heavy cloth, and a woman in black waited near a low stool with a tape measure at her neck. Ha spoke to her in a voice that made the request sound ordinary, almost dull.

“He is going to tell me if the back sits right,” she said, and the attendant looked at me once and then at Ha again, as if the arithmetic of a man in a cubicle were not her concern.

Inside, the mirror ran from the tile nearly to the ceiling, and the curtain did not meet the floor. Shop light cut a pale strip across the grout. Ha hung the dress on the hook and regarded me the way she regards a face she has already decided to work on, which meant she was more interested in what I would do than in the clothes.

“You can stay,” she said. “Unless you came only to be polite.”

I told her I had not come to be polite. She smiled without hurrying and reached behind herself for the zipper of the dress she had worn in from the rain. The fabric loosened and slid. She stepped out of it in a thin bra and a scrap of damp cotton that hid almost nothing, and the air in the cubicle was close, scented with new cloth and her skin. I put my hands on her waist because waiting any longer would have been a kind of lying. She let me. When I kissed her she opened her mouth as if she had been waiting for that more than for the clothes, and I felt her teeth, then her tongue, then the small sound she made when my palm found the heat between her legs.

I went to my knees on the tile while she held the curtain closed with one hand and my hair with the other. The strip of shop light lay across her calves. I hooked my fingers in the cotton and drew it down her thighs, and she stepped out of it without glancing toward the gap. She was already wet. I put my mouth on her cunt and heard her inhale as if she had been holding that breath since we left the street.

I licked her slowly because I had watched her work and I knew she noticed who paid attention to the doing and not only to the finished thing. Her clit was swollen under my tongue. I sucked it, then dragged the flat of my tongue through her folds until her hips tipped toward my face. She tasted like skin and salt and the faint soap she used on herself when no one was booking her. When I pushed two fingers into her she was tight and slick, and she clenched around them in a way that made my cock ache hard against the seam of my trousers.

“Someone is going to hear you,” I said against her, not as a warning so much as an offering she could refuse.

She looked down at me and her voice stayed even, as if we were discussing a hem and not my mouth on her.

“Then you should keep your mouth busy enough that I do not have to answer them.”

I did. I fucked her with my fingers while I sucked her clit, curling against the spot that made her thighs jump, and her standing legs began to shake. The attendant’s shoes moved somewhere beyond the curtain. Ha’s hand tightened in my hair, not pulling me off, holding me there so I could not pretend this was accidental. I could hear a customer asking about sizes in the main room, a woman’s voice, adult, faintly bored. Ha’s wetness was on my chin and on my knuckles. I kept going until she had to bite the inside of her own wrist to stay quiet, and even then a broken sound escaped her and vanished into the rain and the shop music.

When I stood my mouth was shining and she reached for my belt as if that had been the plan from the moment she sent the message. Her fingers were steady. She got the buckle open, got me out, and wrapped her hand around my cock with a pressure that was almost professional in its attention, except that she was breathing through her mouth and her cunt was still glistening from my tongue.

I turned her toward the glass because I wanted to see her see it. She let me hook her thigh up with my hand. She reached back and guided the head of my cock to her cunt, and I pushed into her in one slow, thick slide that made her forehead drop toward the mirror. She was hot and so wet I could hear it. I fucked her like that, standing, her palms on the glass, my mouth at the side of her neck, each thrust lifting her onto her toes. The curtain trembled when my hip caught it. I did not look at the gap. I looked at her face in the mirror, at the way her mouth opened and closed without a word, at the way she watched herself being filled and then, when she noticed I was watching her instead of the door, tried to look away and found she could not.

“You wanted this thin curtain,” I said into her hair. “You wanted someone on the other side of it.”

She did not deny it. She pushed back onto my cock and took me deeper, and I had to grit my teeth not to spend too soon inside that grip. I reached around and found her clit with my fingers, rubbing her in time with the way I was burying myself in her. Her cunt squeezed. A hanger clicked against the wall. Somewhere out there a shopping bag rustled.

The attendant’s voice came first as footsteps, then as a question through the fabric.

“Do you need another size, miss?”

Ha’s eyes met mine in the glass. I did not stop. I drove into her again, slow and deep, and she had to swallow before she could make her voice behave.

“Not yet,” she said, and it was almost steady. “I am still deciding.”

The attendant lingered. I felt Ha’s whole body go tight around my cock, not from fear, from the fact of being heard while she was full of me. I kept looking at her face. That was the thing that made her shiver harder than the risk, and I saw her understand it in the same instant I did. She had come here for the thin door. What she had not budgeted for was a man who would rather watch her than watch the curtain.

There was a padded stool in the corner meant for putting on shoes. I sat on it with my trousers open and my cock wet from her, and Ha climbed onto my lap with the dark dress still hanging on the hook like a witness who would never speak. She kept the bra on. She sank down onto me with a long breath, taking every inch until her ass rested on my thighs, and then she began to ride me in small grinding circles that kept the stool from scraping the tile.

I held her hips. She put her hands on my shoulders and used me, lifting and dropping with a control that was filthy because it was so precise, her cunt dragging up my shaft and swallowing me again. I could feel how close she was in the flutter of her muscles. Outside, a woman said she would wait for the room. An adult customer, patient, standing three steps from the curtain that did not reach the floor.

Ha heard it. She did not stop. She rolled her hips and let her mouth fall open against my temple, and her whisper was warm enough to fog the thought of stopping.

“She can wait,” Ha said, and then she fucked me harder, still quiet, still exact, her wetness running down onto my balls and making a soft filthy sound each time she seated herself.

I put my hand between us and rubbed her clit while she rode. The attendant asked again, closer this time, whether everything was all right in there. Ha answered with a yes that broke in the middle, and I felt her clench so hard I saw white at the edges of my vision. I kept my eyes on her. I did not check the gap. She noticed. Something in her expression slipped, not performance, something nearer to being seen than she had planned to allow.

“Look at me,” I said.

She did. She kept looking when the customer outside cleared her throat. She kept looking when I thrust up into her and held her down on my cock so she could not escape the depth of it. Her bra strap had slipped. Her mouth was wet. I could feel my own pulse in the head of my cock, pressed against the end of her, and I knew if I moved the wrong way I would finish before she did, which was not what this afternoon was for.

“You can come on me,” I told her. “You do not have to look at the curtain to do it.”

Her breath hitched. For a moment I thought she would glance anyway, the old habit of managing who watched her do the thing. She did not. She looked at my face as if that were the more dangerous public, and she kept riding.

I told her I was going to come inside her. She nodded once, as if we were agreeing on a neckline, and then her face changed because I still had not glanced at the cloth. The attendant spoke again, something about a different size in the same colour, and Ha came with her hand clamped over her own mouth, her eyes on mine instead of the gap, her cunt pulsing around my cock in waves that pulled the spend out of me whether I was ready or not.

I spilled into her in thick pulses, buried to the hilt, holding her down on the stool while she shook. I kept looking at her through it. She kept looking at me. The intimacy of that, more than the voices on the other side of the cloth, was what made her thighs tremble after the peak had already taken her. I felt my come leaking around my cock as she clenched again, smaller now, chasing the last of it with little helpless rolls of her hips. Her hand stayed over her mouth until she could trust her breath not to give us away.

When she took it away she was flushed and wet-eyed and still composed, which was worse, because it meant she could put the distance back on if I let her. I was still inside her. I could feel how full she was with me. The customer outside shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The attendant said they would check the stockroom. Footsteps receded. We stayed joined for another few breaths because standing would have made a sound, and because I was not ready to be only a risk to her, and because she, for those few breaths, did not seem ready to make me into one.

She kissed me then, not as a performance for the gap, as something private she had not meant to hand over in a room with a curtain. I tasted her mouth and the effort she had spent staying quiet. When she lifted off me, come slid down the inside of her thigh, and she looked at it with an expression I could not name, interest and alarm in the same glance.

We dressed in the small silence that follows being filthy in a public place and getting away with it. She used a tissue from her bag and did not quite get all of me off her skin. I watched her step back into her street dress and zip it herself, her hands sure, her breathing almost even. I asked the question while those hands were still busy, because I knew she was better at answering when she could pretend to be occupied with a task.

“Are you mine, Ha?”

She looked at the mirror instead of at me. She smoothed the fabric over her hips with that same exacting care she used on other people’s faces, and she did not say no. She also did not say yes. The refusal cost her something. I saw it in the pause before she reached for her bag, in the way her mouth shaped a word and then set it down unused.

“You saw me,” she said, which was not an answer. “That is already more than I usually give.”

I wanted to press. I did not, because pressing would have turned her composure into a wall, and I had just been inside the place where that wall did not hold. She hung the unworn dress back on the hook as if we had only been deciding on a neckline after all. Then she took a photograph of the cubicle in the mirror, her own face half in the frame and the curtain behind her, the pale strip of shop light still cutting the floor. She did not delete it. Proof she had been almost watched. She would keep it, the way she kept other almosts.

“I will go out first,” she said. “Wait two minutes.”

I waited because she had decided it, and because walking out together would have made a story the attendant could tell. Ha slipped through the curtain with her poise intact for anyone who had not been on the stool. I tucked my shirt in and listened to her thank the woman in black for the time. Her voice was unhurried. No one would have known my come was still in her.

When I stepped back onto the shop floor the attendant was with another customer and did not look at me twice. The rain had thickened into a sheet that turned motorbikes into smears of colour. Ha was already under a different awning down the block, phone in her hand, the distance she used on everyone settling over her shoulders like a coat she knew how to wear in any weather.

I caught up enough to see her type. She did not hide the screen when I came alongside. A comment thread, a man who had written as if he already knew her, asking to meet. She answered him while I stood there. After dark. A park. She would not tell me she was mine, and she was already arranging a public that would not ask her to belong.

She glanced at me then, the teasing returning in a full sentence that treated my face as the only subject worth her time.

“You look like a man who expected a cleaner ending than this afternoon was ever going to give you.”

I told her I had not expected clean. I had expected her. She did not correct me. She put the phone away with the photograph still in it and the new message sent, and we left the block in two different directions because that was the only way she would walk away from a fitting room that still smelled like sex and rain-damp cloth. It cost her a clean no. She walked out still my unanswered question and still hungry for a public that would not ask her to belong, and I stood in the doorway long enough to watch her disappear into the grey, knowing she would keep the picture and knowing the park would get the next version of her that a curtain had not been enough to satisfy.