"Kate, you cannot possibly wear that."

Leaning against the old porcelain sink, Kate Scott paused, a glass of orange juice halfway to her mouth. She hadn't left time for breakfast, which was typical. And now she was being maligned for her wardrobe. Also typical. So much for her Big Day being different and special.

Kate confronted her housemate Vanessa, who looked movie star sleek standing in the kitchen doorway. "Should I go naked?"

Gwen, the third of their housemate trio, lifted her teacup from her perch in the bay window. Morning sunlight glittered through the steam. "To nudist court proceedings."

"To nudist court proceedings," Kate echoed, downing her orange juice like it was tequila. She slammed the glass against the granite counter with an exaggerated "ahhhhhh."

Vanessa crossed her arms and cocked her hips. "Kate, Kate, Kate," she said in her I-Vanessa-swim-with-sharks-and-you-Kate-are-a-little-fish voice. "You want to say I’m here to kick ass, right?"

"Um..." Kate worked as a victim advocate, and today was her debut in Bonaventure’s court system. "I wasn’t planning on kicking anybody’s anything..."

"It’s a kick or be kicked world, Kate." Vanessa cocked her head with a pitying expression. "Navy blue pant suits say kick me."

Kate ran her hands over the nubby, poly-cotton blend. "This is my best suit." She’d worn it to land the Bonaventure job, escaping the string of high-crime, major-metropolitan backdrops to her career. "I like this suit. What’s wrong with this suit?"

Vanessa took Kate’s hands in both of hers and led her from the kitchen. "I don’t know if we have time to rescue the hair..."

As if there would ever be enough time to rescue my hair.

"--but we can definitely save you from this pant suit."

Help me, Kate mouthed to Gwen as Vanessa pulled her away.

The house they shared was a more shabby than chic Victorian: the spoils of Gwen’s divorce. Gwen’s painting and sculpting studio was on the second floor of the corner tower. She’d transformed the ground floor, which had been her ex-husband's home office, into an ultra-feminine dressing room cluttered with antique mirrors and looking glasses. Vanessa planted Kate firmly in the room’s center, so that the mirrors repeated and reflected every angle of her blue pantsuit.

"I look just fine..."

Vanessa pulled back the curtains on the bank of rigged clothing rods. Their styles hung all muddled together: Gwen’s earth mother cottons, Kate’s conservative suits, and Vanessa’s reds.

"--and I don’t want to be late."

Gwen appeared in the doorway. "You hear that, Vanessa? She doesn’t want to be late."

"For breakfast," Vanessa said, her suggestive tone muffled by fabric.

"For Breakfast Paul." Gwen grinned over her teacup.

Kate exaggerated a sigh. "I don’t want to be late for work." Although she had been thinking of Breakfast Paul. The rational voice in her head, inherited from her parents, demanded she stay focused on her Big Day. She had more important things to think about than Breakfast Paul.

"This is more like it," Vanessa said, her voice stern and serious. To Vanessa, a local weekend features reporter with aspirations of network anchor stardom, clothes mattered. "We’ll start here."

A red cashmere camisole sailed through space like a kite. Kate caught it, and the fabric snuggled up against her fingers. She expected it to purr. "This kicks ass?"

"It says I am woman, unafraid."

It’s easy to say it. I’d like to feel it. Even red cashmere couldn’t smother her inexplicable jitters. She’d been in courtrooms countless times. She’d worked in much bigger cities, pushed her way through police precincts full of hookers and junkies to reach the women and families she helped. Her experience with violent crimes had landed her this assignment, leapfrogging her over others in her office with more years of service. Still, a thousand butterfly wings fluttered against her heart.

Hangars scraped. A skirt and jacket flapped from the closet, the motion captured by all the mirrors. Kate caught them before they hit the floor. Made from a solid, sensible gray tweed, they seemed perfectly acceptable.

"A gray suit," said Vanessa. "That says I’m playing by the rules, because I can beat you without cheating. And the final touch." She emerged from the closet, cradling in both hands, as if they might wake up and cry, a pair of blood red suede heels. "These say I’m here to kick some ass."

Kate looked down at the sensible blue and beige pumps on her feet. "I can’t wear red shoes to court."

"I still vote for naked," said Gwen.

Vanessa pointed a long, French-tipped finger. "Hush yourself. Damn hippie."

"I’m wearing the blue suit," Kate said.

Vanessa cocked her eyebrows and her hips.

Kate held the gray skirt up to her waist. "It’s way too short. It says I’ll beat you by sleeping with your boss instead of mine. And the shoes." Kate rolled her eyes. "Those aren’t courtroom shoes. Those are follow-me-home-and-stay-for-breakfast shoes."

Gwen giggled. "Then I’m sure Breakfast Paul will like them."

Kate set her teeth. "I don’t want to hear about Breakfast Paul. I don’t have time in my life for men like Breakfast Paul."

Though she'd never met any man like Breakfast Paul before. Theirs was the oddest friendship, a year of breakfasts building up ... to what?

A year ago, alone, trying to pretend she wasn’t nervous on her first day at a new job in a new town, Kate had marched up to the counter of a coffee shop called Café Foy. She’d ordered her usual: an extra-large double mocha soy latte. A man sitting at the counter, a man with wide shoulders and uncombed black curls, a man with the shadow of many unshaven days on his chin, had grumbled rudely under his breath.

On any other day, Kate would have ignored him. Just folded him up in her mind and sailed him away like a paper airplane. But this day, her first day at a new job in a new town, Kate had looked him up and down, turned back to the clerk, and said, "Make another one for Mr. Happy here."

The man surprised her; he laughed. The sound of it seemed to startle him, and suddenly he wasn’t a broad-shouldered nobody with a whiskery chin. He flashed her a look from eyes the color of a sunny winter day. "Save your money. I wouldn’t drink such a thing in my life." Underneath its roughness, his voice had a warm liquid quality. "But thank you for making me laugh."

"Yeah, well, no good deed goes unpunished, buster." Kate had taken her mocha soy latte, left his on the counter, and went on with her day--a day she’d spent pushing away the distracting memory of his laugh.

Kate lifted her eyes out of her reverie and met the knowing smiles of her roommates.

"Give me the damn shoes."

Gwen laughed. "Hurry up. You don’t want to be late." She turned on her heel and disappeared from the doorway. Her voice floated back to Kate like incense smoke. "For breakfast."

"For work!"

Vanessa held out her hand for the clothes Kate wore. "Tick, tick, tick."

Kate shrugged out of her blue jacket. The white nylon shell and slacks followed. "I don’t have time for a relationship."

"Take tomorrow off and make time."

Kate took a deep breath, ready to launch into the Work Comes First refrain. Her parents had dripped it into her mind like water torture, a steady but gentle bombardment. A life of service was the only life worth living. Only by putting others' needs first will you ever find contentment.

Vanessa interrupted. "There’s a run in your stocking."

Kate let out her deep breath in a long sigh and dragged the red cashmere down over her head. One of the pins holding her impossible hair popped loose. She silently started to count backwards from ten.

"I’ll get you fresh stockings." Vanessa rummaged through the bureau drawer. "We’ll fix your hair." She didn’t sound confident.

Kate tugged the skirt over her hips. "There’s always a run in my stocking, Vanessa." She shrugged into the jacket. "There's always a pin loose in my hair. Do you know what I’m saying?"

Vanessa handed her a pair of very sheer thigh highs, a frill of lace around the top. Very firmly, Kate handed them back.

"If it’s not my stockings, it’s my hair. If it’s not my hair, it’s the car breaking down. If it’s not the car breaking down, it’s, I don’t know, the world is about to be smashed by a meteor. Or something."

"A little exaggeration never hurt anyone." Vanessa handed her a pair of sturdy tan reinforced toes. "Besides, you’ll do fine."

Some of the butterfly wings took up residence in Kate's stomach. "What if I mess up?"

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "As if."

Mollified, Kate shimmied into the pantyhose, adjusted the skirt, and stepped into the heels. "For once," she said, bending to buckle the straps around her ankle, "I’d just like to win one."

All dressed, Kate took in all her reflections from the different mirrors. The shoes made her legs feel long, long, long. The cashmere hugged her with every indrawn breath. Except for the tangle of curls that topped her, she looked great. Would Paul notice? He had to notice. Anticipation tingled, followed by a scalding wash of guilt.

Kate had played through her early adulthood, indulging in love affairs, blowing off classes, breaking her parents' hearts. Her mother, the hospice nurse, and her father, the expert on contagious diseases for the World Health Organization, had gone through rigorous and demanding fertility treatments to create a child they could give as a gift to the world, a child they could raise to make a difference, be a healer, continue their legacy. That's what they'd told her in the last big fight, when Kate threatened to leave her master's program in social work. I'm not you, she'd told them. I want something else. Then hung up. Twenty minutes later, her mother and father had died in a car crash. Kate had broken their hearts when they lived. Now that they were dead, she needed to prove herself to them. And that meant focusing on her career, and not Breakfast Paul.

Vanessa nodded with satisfaction. "Okay. Time for the hair. You can’t win anything with that hair."

The grandfather clock in the living room pealed out its on-the-hour song. Kate counted seven bongs. Time was up. If it’s not my stockings, it’s my hair...

With a sigh, Kate pulled the pins from her hair and threw them like confetti. Then she shook her head wildly, until she could feel the static and hear the crackle.

"There."

Vanessa stared, scandalized.

"It’s fixed." She stalked out of the dressing room, got halfway down the hall, and turned around. She popped her head into the doorway. "Thank you. For the clothes. And the support."

Vanessa grinned and waved. "Kick some ass."

As Kate reached the back door, Gwen’s voice reached out and chucked her under the chin. "Have a nice breakfast."

"I’m going to work!" She slammed the door behind her.

On the porch, she stopped. "Damn." And then went back inside for her briefcase.

"Not a word," she said to Gwen's grin, and slammed the door behind her even harder. She skidded down the damp slope of the back yard to her battered blue Chevy.

The engine sputtered and, thankfully, turned over on the third turn of the key. If it didn't catch by the third turn, she believed it was an omen of a horrible day. Running just a little late, she pulled into the gravel lot of Café Foy, parked beside Paul’s lion-colored Mercedes. She hoped the loyal little car wouldn’t expire of humiliation before the engine cooled.

She levered the rear-view mirror so that it reflected her static-charged curls. From the glove compartment, she extracted her emergency hairbrush. She kept crisis coif-kits everywhere--her briefcase, her desk, her purses--to survive the tangled disaster of her own hair.

In a flurry of brushing and twisting and tucking and swearing, she bundled the whole mess up onto her head. Vanessa always comforted her, pointing out that millions of women spent thousands of dollars to create that about-to-come-undone look. The little emergency bottle of hairspray gave up its last aerosol breath for the cause.

Kate glanced up at the window of the coffee shop. She saw Paul’s head turn away. He was already waiting on the sofa in the back. He’d watched her fight with her hair. He’d know if she just gave up and drove away. Kate sighed. Why did facing violent criminals frighten her less than showing Breakfast Paul a little leg? And why did she care if he noticed? Her life was her work now, no time for love.

An internal sigh rippled through her, as the mantra rang hollow. Not even with her dead family's legacy wrapped like chains around her heart could she control this one last expression of her rebellious nature. No matter who told her no, she couldn't resist the forbidden.

Kate tugged the hem of her skirt down towards her knee. She checked her teeth in the rear-view mirror. She jiggled her breasts in place behind the red angora. She patted her hair one more time. What would it be like, to die of humiliation?

She folded up her fear like a paper airplane and sailed it away on the slanted morning rays of sun.