Yes...

"Fine," you say, perhaps wishing your hadn't. "It is not ideal. If that is what is needed, I will do it."

Hemm’s mouth ticks. He jerks his chin at the back passage.

"Room behind the green curtain. Outfit on the bed. Put it on and do not come out at all unless I tell you. Got it? I have a customer to contact."

The back room is dim and smells like sizing and old perfume. One lamp. A narrow bed. On the coverlet, ivory-and-black laid out the way Sera’s try-on was laid out the first time, only the straps and the little charms along the band are doing a faint wrong light, like coals under ash. Your novice linen is the only unused thing you own. You take it off and fold it onto the chair.

You put it on.

The band closes on a chest that arrives with it. Weight first, then the rest, the way it did in the glass: height dropping, blonde hair coming down your back, the beard gone, Sera’s mouth, Sera’s hips filling the tiny bottoms. You make a sound in her throat and grab the bedpost, and for a second all that felt familiar.

Then the charms go violent.

Light punches through the embellishments until the room is white at the edges, and the lingerie is not only cloth. Spools wake in the corners. Drawers slap open. Bolt-ends slither off shelves you did not see. Fabric comes for you in flat, hungry ribbons — leftover lining, a measure of black cord, a strip of the same ivory — and it wraps your wrists before you can get the band off. It takes your ankles. It cinches your waist above the lace and hauls.

You leave the floor.

The cords hitch to a hook in the beam that was always there for drying samples, and they pin you above the bed in a pose that is not for sewing. Knees bent and opened. Wrists drawn up and out. Chest pushed forward by a harness that uses the enchanted band as its center. The extra strands crisscross your thighs and hold the bottoms aside without tearing them, tied up "shibari" style like the japanese pornos you used to watch, and every time you fight the wrap another ribbon comes out of a drawer and finds a gap. The charms pulse in time with the cinch. Sera’s breasts hang in the ivory, heavy, and the room is very quiet except for the whisper of cloth tying itself.

You hang there and listen for Hemm. The green curtain does not move yet. The novice set is still on the chair, male and folded, and you are the queen again, bound over a tailor’s bed, waiting on the caveat you agreed to.