Despite the bare hours of sleep, Yves still woke at eight to take Diana to the theater. With the covers up to her nose, she caught the sight of her wife standing in the bathroom mirror, combing back her snow-white hair and making her cloud of perfume. Diana lifted her chin as she spritzed beneath it and set the bottle with a polite clink back upon the marble surface. Before reddening her lips, she crinkled them, and turned her face to the side, leaning far forward to observe the skin next to her eye. Her index finger touched her eyelid a solid minute before she stepped back, squarely, standing in the mirror and sighing. Diana then applied her red and came out of the bathroom.

"Oh, Liebling," she took a few steps closer. "You look exhausted. You didn't sleep at all, did you, you little goose?" She used Yves's cheek to blot her lipstick. "I don't mind to take the subway if you want to rest."

"Absolutely not—" Yves rose from the sheets immediately and began fixing the out-of-place front curls of her pompadour. "I said I would take you and that's what I intend to do. I only need five minutes."

"Five minutes? But we have fifteen before we have to go—"

Yves had already begun to dress, standing mostly nude upon casting her night gown to the floor, covered only by a pair of cute black panties. Her precise and picky fingers dove through her wardrobe of sunshine and removed a buttercup yellow dress that she tossed over her head, ruining her hair again. She smeared the print upon her cheek and marched to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

Diana watched all the while, fingering her necklace of Pearls.

Yves emerged no more than two minutes later, looking presentable enough with a terrible bite against her neck and the ghost of a kiss upon her raw cheek.

Diana touched the imprint of her canines as she walked by. "Do you want breakfast before we go?"

"There's no time. I'll eat when I come home. Let's go, Diva."

"Why don't we take a coffee on the way? No one will care if I'm a little late."

"'I vill care.' Come along now." She had already began walking down the hallway and to the garage.

"Don't make fun of my accent! I'm doing my best!" Diana finally followed.

"I love your accent, Schatzi!" Yves had paused at the door and held it wide open as her wife clacked forward on her tall heels, but Diana stopped and pouted before the threshold, standing perfectly in place. "We're leaving so early. I want to take a coffee and maybe a croissant, please."

"Tu veux un croissant?"

"Oui, je veux prendre une croissant, et du café."

"D'accord. Croissant is masculine, by the way."

"I don't care," Diana finally crossed the doorway. "Let's go."

"Okay. On y va."

Yves drove Diana to the coffee shop, through the slow-moving and crowded streets, and after several minutes of waiting in the car and watching as the apathetic blue numbers changed, Diana returned with two coffees in a small carboard tray and an obese brown paper bag, rolled up at the top. She got back into the car and set the clear plastic cups into the cup holders, and Yves immediately started the engine.

"You didn't have to do that, Schatzi."

"Do what, Leibling? Both of these are for me."

Yves took her eyes off the road for just one moment to gently glare at her wife, who had already begun to drink her tan iced coffee. "Are you really going to drink it black? I thought you said it was too bitter."

"It is. I was only kidding."

"Well, darn. You got me, hahaha. Golly. What a trick."

Diana began to laugh, but because her mouth occupied itself with the straw, she kept her joy confined to her body, and every part of her shook while her cheeks turned a little pink, but she did stop for a moment to say, "Yeah, I got you." Even then, she kept expelling her mirth and leaned forward a bit, filling the car with her playful high notes.

Yves pinched her cheek, "You useless European."

That only made the sound louder, and they headed toward the theater as Diana pinched off pieces of a croissant and put them into her wife's mouth.

Upon arriving, Diana kissed Yves goodbye and clacked through the front doors, turning back to wave before entering. In response, Yves simply lifted her hand and drove away, heading directly back home to work on her queen's dress.

From the car, she called her assistant Pauline.

She picked up after two rings.

"Bon matin, Madame Diamant—"

Yves cut her off with more French. "Pauline, I need your help today."

"Yes, Ma'am. Are you working at home?"

"Yes. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

"I'm heading over right now. I'll see you momentarily."

"Thank you. Good bye."

By the time Yves had pulled into her garage, she had already finished about three-fourths of her coffee and had fixed her pompadour in the short time she spent waiting at the red lights. From the driveway, she saw Pauline waiting at the front door with her big bag of supplies. Even the smallest edge of her purse stretched larger than her tiny waist and all of those possessions made her lean slightly.

Yves let her in immediately and both began walking towards the workroom the moment Pauline's foot touched the perfect tile floors.

"We're working on my wife's dress for the opera she's going to be in. It opens in two weeks and she's playing The Queen of the Night. I want her to look fabulous."

"That sounds excellent, Madame Diamant." Pauline's short blond hair bobbed as she attempted to keep up, occasionally breaking into a run. "Have you begun working on it?"

"I have. I might need you to go out and pick up silver flowers, along with a few other things, but I've completed my sketch." Yves opened the door and both of them entered. The taller woman marched straight to the closet and pulled both its sides far apart and took out her mannequin.

Adjusted to stand at Diana's height and width, it wore a black bodice of lace and glitter, but had yet to possess any skirts.

Yves looked at Pauline after setting it in the center of the room, and found her eyes wide.

"What?"

"Madame, are you alright? What happened to your neck?"

"Diana bit me last night because she's a damned animal, but let's focus." She moved to the machine and the table it sat on and pulled a piece of paper from one of the drawers. Unfolding it, she handed it to her assistant, who released a little breath upon observing the sketch. Yves continued, "I haven't drawn on the flowers yet, but after a lot of reflection I've decided that I want them to come up the skirt from the left and swerve to the right until they stop at the shoulder." Her serious nail indicated the end of the dress' right collarbone, and Yves continued, "I want her to have a powdered wig as well—nothing too heavy—and we could put the same type of flowers on there but I'd like them more evenly spaced, like polka dots."

"Oh, that sounds lovely."

"I'll need to send you to the store, Pauline. If you can't find decent silver flowers, we'll have to make them ourselves." Yves sat herself at the sewing machine and, from one of the stand's drawers, took a pair of spectacles and set them onto her face. "In fact, I'm sure you won't be able to find flowers lovely enough. Please come back with two yards of silver chiffon and the receipt so I can reimburse you."

"Yes, Madame. I'll return as soon as I can." Pauline removed an even smaller bag from her enormous sack of supplies and left immediately as Yves began working.

With her gold-rimmed glasses, she manipulated the pile of black, precise fingers securing each piece into place as the needle traced over her work and made it permanent. Every so often she pushed her spectacles back upon the bridge of her nose as one of her prints went for a button on the machine. Yves never took her eyes from the skirt; she merely worked as though she had four arms instead of two, and had nearly finished by the time Pauline returned.

Softly, the assistant knocked upon the door before entering, holding a small paper bag with elegant black words printed across it. She gasped a little when she caught the skirts beneath Yves's needle and drew closer to take a better look at the frothy and fantastic mountain of fabric.

"Madame, that looks beautiful."

"Thank you, Pauline." Yet again, the designer didn't move her attention from her work. Those frenzied hands merely kept going. "Show me what you've picked out."

Pauline pulled the chiffon from the bag and brought it to Yves, who finally moved her head to look at it. She adjusted her glasses and, with two of those strict fingers, touched the light, nearly transparent fabric that had a slight metallic sheen.

"Very good. Thank you, Pauline. I'm almost ready with the skirt, so if you could draft a few flowers for me, I would appreciate it. I was considering roses or camellias."

"Yes, Madame. I'll get started immediately."

The assistant sat inside the stiff chair in the corner of the room and went to work with her sewing supplies. Her precise and floral print fabric scissors chewed up perfect cuts of chiffon while she shaped them into flowers and stitched the pieces together. All the while, Yves finished the Queen's skirts and came to the mannequin to pin them to the bodice. Once properly affixed, she stole the entire garment, attached both halves and brought it back to the naked form in the middle of the room.

Pauline looked up from her camellia and widened her eyes at the gown. Even in the unkind light of the workroom, it sparkled with its flowing fabrics that gently kissed the floor. The light and airy skirts divided into several sections like the petals of a rose and the ensemble appeared almost as a calm wedding dress, but in black, of course.

Yves let out a long breath and placed her hands atop her twice-ruined pompadour. Feeling a few curls out of place from her recent sweat, she amended them and came to Pauline without sparing another moment.

"That looks nice, but I need the flowers to be smaller."

"Yes, Ma'am." Pauline put the bloom aside and started anew, while Yves stole the scissors to briefly bend the silver chiffon to her will. "Madame Diamant, I think Diana will love the dress. It's beautiful."

"I appreciate that, Pauline. I intend on making it even more beautiful by the end of today. In fact—" She put the petals and the scissors down to lift the mannequin and hide it back in the closet. "Let's just work on the flowers while you're here today. I can attach them myself."

"Of course, Ma'am. Whatever you like."

That was precisely what they did. For hours, both of them sewed together petals they had made from chiffon and tossed them into a large cardboard box Yves took from the closet. The blooms accumulated like ripe camellias dropping from a rich tree and set almost entirely full after the six hours they worked together, including a few short coffee, food, and cigarette breaks.

Pauline left around four, nearly as disheveled as her bite-marked boss with her messy pompadour, who saw her assistant off by waving at her from the driveway.

Then Yves returned to her dungeon and pulled the dress from behind the two doors again, having only about an hour before Diana arrived. With her tired hands, sweat-fogged glasses, and vast basket of sharp silver pins, she went about attaching the loveliest camellias, beginning from the waist and branching out from there, like a path of close stars sitting in the milky way. The blossoms bunched together tightly at the waist and expanded, until more of that black space came between them the further each went, until one sat pinned directly upon the dress' right shoulder and another would hover above Diana's left foot.

Yves stood back and regarded her work for only a moment, taking the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. She only watched and remained for a few seconds until hiding the entire ensemble behind the closet doors again, as Diana would come home any second. Yves wrote a note that she fixed to the closet, reading, "Unfinished. Please don't look," and finally left her workroom to shower before Diana could find her caked in not only one day's, but two days' worth of sewing-hell sweat.