Free One In A Billion by Anne-Marie Hart

wasn't the kind of girl that used to wear much of anything really, and I certainly hadn't seen her in anything classy or posh, but she had style, and I didn't have anyone else to help me anyway. Besides which, Sophia would tell me honestly whether I looked good or not - she wasn't the kind of person to blow smoke up my arse unnecessarily.
    'Woah', Sophia said as she saw the mess I'd made in my room.
    There were clothes everywhere. I'd emptied out my closet, every single drawer of the chest of drawers, and even gone through boxes and suitcases of old and rarely worn clothes, and every single one of those items sat in a heap on the bed.
    'I'm having a bit of a problem', I said.
    'I can see', Sophia said, tentatively lifting clothes from the pile.
    She had in her hand a tie dyed mini skirt I'd purchased on a whim several years ago at a music festival and the look at her face told me everything I needed to know about what she thought about it. I snatched it away from her.
    'That's not the kind of thing I had in mind', I said.
    'What did you have in mind?' Sophia said.
    'I don't know. Little black number? James Bond style jump suit? Mary Quant short skirt? Tartan?'
    'You want to make sure you make the most of your best points. Both of them', Sophia said and held a dress from the pile against my chest.
    'Sophia', I said, grabbing the dress from her and throwing it back to the bed. 'It's not all about tits.'
    'You know I love your tits', Sophia said.
    'Concentrate', I said. 'I'm in a real dilemma. I need to get this right. If I don't have anything here, I'll have to go and buy something.'
    'What I mean', Sophia said, sorting through the clothes again. 'Is that you need something that shows off your figure. Your blue eyes and your blonde hair. How about this?'
    She had a dress in her hand I hadn't worn for a long time. In fact, I had kind of forgotten I owned it.
    'That's the kind of thing you need', Sophia said, putting it to the side for possible selection. 'Do you have anything more like that?'
    'Possibly.'
    Sophia looked at me.
    'Probably', I said.
    'We can forget about skirts, jeans or suits', Sophia said. 'Too cheap, too tacky or too formal.'
    'Not classy enough?' I said.
    'Not classy at all. What we need are dresses. Preferably 3/4 or full length. Open backed would be nice, off the shoulder even better. And something with a bit of colour, but we can do that with accessories.'
    Sophia rooted through the clothes, dumping the ones she didn't think were suitable into a massive pile of nos, and the few that she thought were, into a tiny pile of yeses.
    There were three dresses when she was finished. The one she'd found first, a light blue tightly fitting dress I'd worn to a friend's wedding years ago and worried was too tight now to fit, and my favourite, the one I had originally thought about wearing, a black figure hugging dress with an open back and split seam up the left leg. It was sexy, I knew it fit, and I knew I'd feel confident in it. The only thing was it didn't have any colour.
    'Do you have shoes?' Sophia said, already looking for them.
    I opened the trunk at the bottom of the bed for her.
    'Which self respecting girl doesn't have shoes?' I said.
    'I did wonder for a moment', Sophia said, and dived into the box.
    I tried all three dresses on, several different shoe and accessories combinations, and each one with my hair up or down. It reminded me of the books I used to have as a child which had several pages of people all split into three sections so you could combine them any way you wanted. Sort of like the books they had at police stations in 80s detective films, for the victim to mock up the face of the attacker.
    The overwhelming winner was the black dress, with a high heeled shoe (I didn't usually like wearing them because I had a tendency for clumsiness, but we both agreed that I wouldn't be walking much anyway so it was worth the risk), a subtle addition of colour through a silk throw borrowed from Sophia,