"The Warning in the Closet"

The suit remained on the mannequin next to the bed for three days, Sofia did not touch it again, but she could not take her eyes off it, shiny under the moonlight, hot to the point of making the air around her sweat, it almost seemed as if he was whispering to her soul "Wear me".

Every night, she woke up with a start, she seemed to hear something moving in the room, a rustle, a whisper, a presence. She got up, turned on the light, looked around but nothing. One night she dreamed that the suit slipped on her while she was sleeping and covered her completely, preventing her from breathing. She woke up with a start, panting, feeling her body, but everything was normal, everything was quiet, so she decided to go for a drink in the kitchen, but when she came back it seemed to her that the mannequin was moved from where she had put it. She shook her head adducing the fact that she was still troubled by the nightmare and went back to sleep.

The next morning she made a decision, she wanted to burn it, cut it, throw it into the river. She was convinced even if it was madness that that suit was conditioning her; How could a dress have that effect on her? She was torn between putting it on and losing herself in that warm embrace and throwing it out of the window, but in the end she didn't do anything, because she knew, in some dark part of herself, that it would be useless, that perhaps, if she destroyed it, she would also destroy something inside herself. So she took it with both hands, felt it quiver, felt the latex vibrate against her palms, as if she were smiling, she brought it closer to her body looking at herself in the mirror.

"No," he said, in a low voice, "you won't have me."

At the back, in the darkest corner, where the sunlight never came, he put his overalls on an old wooden trunk, then locked it with a thick padlock and covered it with blankets he didn't use. He closed the doors of the closet with a sigh and as he walked away, he heard a single thought, clear as a stolen memory: "You want me, I know, you'll come back to me."

In the following days, Sofia tried to return to normal, opened a blog, made collaborations with underground designers and The Second Skin store grew, became a point of reference. She was famous for her taste, her aura, her ability to "understand" who was in front of her, the ability to know how to grasp the hidden desires of her customers, but something had changed, her dreams were full of curved mirrors, red lights, black girls who looked at her without speaking.

She often woke up with her lips sealed by sleep, as if she had pressed her mouth against something sticky and every time she saw a black suit in the window, she felt a cramp in her stomach, not fear, but deep, irrepressible, sacred desire. She went to the gym, she ran, she wrote, she meditated, she did everything not to think about what she had buried but every evening, before sleeping, she passed in front of the closet, opened it, placed her hand on the wood of the trunk and almost seemed   to feel the latex on the other side, and every time, she whispered: "You won't have me."

Weeks passed, the store prospered, customers came from all over Europe, some brought photos of suits worn for too long, others asked for "special" models, with zips that closed by themselves or that fit their bodies as soon as they were worn, with materials "that look warm". Sofia listened to them, smiled, refused with kindness.

But one night, while leafing through a catalog of suppliers, he found a torn page, no name, only an image, A purple full-body suit, shiny, with white stripes to delimit the contours and two curved lines just below the neck, like a smile and underneath, a small inscription:

"Available on request, only for people who feel special,"

Sofia closed the catalog, threw it in the trash, but the next day she took it out of the trash and kept the page, put it in the diary next to the date of her birthday, next to an appointment she had never made, next to a scribbled word, almost erased.

The wardrobe remains closed,

But in the dark, the suit waits,

Because he knows he must not run away,

He just has to miss her,

And when the void is too big...

Sofia will open the lock, alone,

Because some prisons don't have external locks,

They only wish,

And desire, once sown, grows by itself.

Months passed, customers arrived more and more numerous, from all over the country, from abroad. Some with shiny cars, dark glasses, predatory attitude, others with too sweet looks, trembling hands, too precise words and given the fame of his shop they began more and more often to ask him for full-body suits, custom-made pieces, special modifications, but she did not want to give in, knowing what it entailed.

Everyone, in the end, asked the same thing: "Do you have full-body suits? Total-body? That they put on from the neck?" Sofia shook her head every time, "No, I don't keep them, they're dangerous." "Dangerous" was a word she never used in her world, but that time, she said it in a low, convinced voice, and yet, the requests did not cease, on the contrary, they grew.

There were those who offered absurd figures, those who left threatening messages, those who showed up with photos of women in sealed latex, asking: "Can you make me feel like this?". Sofia resisted, but inside her, something broke; Every "no" was a memory that surfaced, a shiver down her spine, a night when she woke up with her hands pressed on the wardrobe, as if she had to check that it was still closed.

One evening, after sending away a man who had tried to follow her home, a rich, insistent customer, with empty eyes and a snake smile, sat in the back of the shop, exhausted, the lights were off, only the glare of the city outside, red and dirty.

He took out an old wooden box, inside, were small pieces, rectangular, of heavy black paper, with a single sentence printed in red letters: "Open for those who are ready," (No address, no number, just one shape: a black drop).

He had found them in his jacket pocket weeks ago, he didn't know when he had taken them, where he had found them and why he had kept them, but now he understood... They were invitations,

And she... she just had to... distribute them