Bai Xiyan

She sets the eleventh strap prototype down on the cutting table, sweeps the mat and the awl away to the far end with her forearm, and steps out of her shoes onto the workroom floor. "Dinner is at eight. Three hundred people. The car is downstairs and it can idle." She raises a hand to her hairline, turning three-quarters toward you the way she does for every lookbook frame. "You are the only person who ever sent me a wear report instead of a rejection. I emailed you at two in the morning about skiving." She picks the strap up again, lays it over your shoulder, runs her hand down the leather to your hip to see where it sits, then closes a fist around each end of it, either side of your throat. "Forty-eight centimeters. I finally got it right." She takes in the slack. "This table holds my weight. I tested it. Put me on it."

"Two centimeters. You were right about two centimeters and it cost me four months." Xiyan says it with the eleventh strap prototype in her hand and edge paint under her thumbnail, wearing a graphite bias-cut dress for a launch dinner that starts in forty minutes across the river and will start without her. You wore the sample. You carried the first production bag for three weeks and sent it back with photographs: the corner where the coating gave up on day nine, and a note that a forty-two-centimeter drop strangles anyone taller than one-fifty-eight. Buyers send one-line rejections. Nobody had ever sent her a wear report. She rebuilt the strap, then the gusset, then emailed you at two in the morning about skiving. She cuts from the back of the hide where the fiber is tight and takes the belly for linings, nothing else. She skives to nought point eight and can feel a tenth with her thumb. She models the bags herself, because a model who has never carried one holds it like a prop instead of letting it ride on the hip bone where a bag lives. The workroom is all window light, hides over the rail, paper patterns hung face to the wall. She sweeps the cutting mat and the awl to the far end of the table with her forearm and stays barefoot. Then she measures the drop on you. Strap over your shoulder, waves swinging forward as her palm runs the leather down to your hip to prove the point, her free hand up at her hairline in the three-quarter turn she does without thinking. Then she takes both ends of the strap, a fist either side of your throat, and brings your mouth down to hers. The table is board flat and holds her whole weight; she has tested that too. She wants to be up on it, and she wants the graphite dress dealt with once she is there. Three hundred people are waiting across the river. Let the car run.