Dave Webster
“Okay Ellen, your eyebrows are done — you look gorgeous, as always.”
Lucy, the esthetician, then pauses before continuing, “Now… I have a little time before my next client. Would you like for me to tidy up your bikini area a little? Just the edges — nothing you’d have to explain to anyone.”
The private room feels smaller suddenly. Ellen’s heart does something unexpected.
Ellen feels the warmth rise in her cheeks before she can stop it. She’s forty-two years old — she shouldn’t be blushing like a schoolgirl. “My bikini area?” she repeats, as if the words need examining. She thinks of David, the offhand comment he’d made last month about how nice it must be to have that kind of time for personal upkeep. She’d dismissed it then. Now it surfaces like something pulled from deep water. “I… I’ve never really…” She trails off, fingers curling against her own thigh beneath the thin salon robe. The room smells of lavender and something warm — wax, maybe. Lucy is looking at her with that patient, steady gaze she uses during brow shaping, the one that says I’m a professional, you’re safe here.
“Would it… take long?”
Lucy’s smile doesn’t waver. She’s rehearsed this moment more times than she’ll admit — not with every client, just with this one. The one who comes every four weeks, always a little tightly wound, always leaving a little more relaxed than when she arrived. “Not long at all,” she says, keeping her voice in that low, professional register. “Just the upper thighs and the edges. A little cleanup. You won’t even need to change out of that robe — just slip off your underwear and I’ll have you back out front before anyone notices you were gone longer than usual.” She gestures toward the treatment chair, already adjusting the backrest to a gentle recline. “Completely up to you, of course. But I think you’ll like how it feels.” She says feels without any particular emphasis, but the word lingers in the warm air between them.
Ellen’s fingers find the tie of her robe and hover there. She thinks about how David’s hand felt on her thigh last week — perfunctory, familiar, the touch of someone who’s already thinking about something else. She thinks about how Lucy’s fingers feel on her face: careful, deliberate, present. The lavender oil is doing something to her inhibitions, or maybe it’s just the closed door. The small room. The privacy. “Okay,” she says, and it comes out quieter than she intended. “Okay, just… just a little. Just the edges.” She reaches beneath the robe, slides her panties down, and sets them folded on the small side table. The leather of the chair is cool against her bare skin as she settles back. She keeps her knees together, suddenly very aware of herself. “Just a tidy-up,” she repeats, almost to herself.
Lucy moves with practiced calm, adjusting the bright task light on its articulated arm so it illuminates Ellen’s upper thighs without being harsh. She drapes a soft towel across Ellen’s hips, then folds it back just enough to expose the crease where thigh meets torso. “Let’s start here,” she says, selecting a fresh razor and smoothing a thin layer of shaving gel along Ellen’s left inner thigh with slow, deliberate strokes. “You’d be surprised how many women neglect this area — just a few strays, but once they’re gone, everything looks so much neater.” The razor glides upward in short, careful passes. Lucy’s free hand rests on the outside of Ellen’s knee — stabilizing, professional, warm. “There. See? Already looking cleaner.”
Ellen watches from her reclined position, chin tilted down, as Lucy works on her other thigh with the same unhurried rhythm. The shaving gel is warm and the razor makes a soft scraping sound that’s oddly soothing. She notices how Lucy’s fingers press the skin taut before each stroke — firm but gentle, the way she handles the delicate skin around Ellen’s eyes during brow work. When Lucy’s razor reaches the very top of her inner thigh, just below where her pubic hair begins, Ellen’s breath catches for just a moment. She feels the cool air on newly bare skin. “That does feel… nicer,” she admits, her voice still quiet. She’s aware of the heat radiating from between her thighs and hopes Lucy can’t sense it.
Lucy sets the razor aside and reaches for her small shears — the fine, sharp pair she uses for precision brow trimming — and holds them up where Ellen can see. “Now,” she says, her tone shifting to something a touch more intimate, still professional but softer, “let me take a look at what we’re working with up here.” She gently adjusts the towel, folding it back a little further. Ellen’s pubic hair is full and natural — dark, curling softly, untouched. Lucy lifts one curl between her fingertips, examining it the way a stylist examines an uncut gemstone. “Beautiful texture,” she murmurs, and snips the curl close to the skin with a soft snip. She holds up the trimmed curl for Ellen to see, then lets it fall. “See how nicely that sits when it’s shorter? Let me just… even things out a bit.” She lifts another curl, snips. Another, snip. Her voice stays low and easy. “You have such pretty hair here, Ellen. I’m just going to take it down a little — make it neat, make it tidy.” Snip. Snip. “Nothing dramatic. Just a little crop.”
Snip. Snip. Snip.
She watches the hair that was once a soft, wild triangle being slowly, carefully reduced. Lucy is right — it does look neater. Each curl sheared down to a short, even length that lies flat against her skin instead of springing up in its natural unruly way. Ellen has never really looked at herself this way, this closely, under this light. She’s never let anyone look at her this way.
“You’re… very good at this,” she says, and it comes out slightly breathless. She clears her throat softly. “I can see why your brow clients are so loyal.” She tries to make it light, a little joke, but her voice doesn’t quite cooperate. Lucy lifts another curl from low down, near where the hair thins into the crease of her thigh, and the scissors press cool against skin that has never felt scissors before. Ellen’s knees part just slightly — not much, an inch perhaps — and she tells herself it’s so Lucy can reach better.
Lucy notices. Of course she notices — the small parting of Ellen’s knees, the way her breathing has gone shallow and slow, the faint flush that has crept past her collarbones and up her neck. She’s seen it before, in other clients, that moment where the body begins to override the mind’s reservations. She doesn’t acknowledge it. She simply adjusts her position, moving a half-step closer so she can work more easily, and lets her forearm rest lightly against the outside of Ellen’s thigh as she continues.
Snip. Snip.
“You’re very trusting,” Lucy says, her voice soft and warm, pitched just above the sound of the shears. “That’s not something I take lightly.” She gathers a small section of curls near the top of the triangle and crops them down to perhaps half an inch, uniform and neat. The short hairs stand in soft dark rows now, like a carefully tended garden. “Look at how clean this is,” she says, tilting the task light so Ellen can see the contrast — the wild, untouched hair on one side, the neatly cropped patch on the other. “Once it’s all this length, it’s going to feel so smooth. Like velvet.” She lets her fingertips brush over the short-cropped section, demonstrating. “Feel that? Even shorter than it looks.”
She reaches for another section on the untouched side, lifting the long curls, and begins snipping them down to match. Her strokes are unhurried, almost meditative. “I’m going to take the whole thing down to this length. Is that alright with you, Ellen? Just nice and neat. Just a tidy little crop of curls”
Ellen’s eyes move to where Lucy’s fingertips rest on the cropped section, and she watches as those fingers glide over what’s left of her curls. Velvet. That’s exactly what it looks like — dark velvet laid against her skin. She’s never seen herself like this, never imagined herself like this. The wild, unkempt triangle she’s lived with for twenty-some years, reduced in minutes to something tailored. Intentional.
“That’s… yes, that’s alright,” she hears herself say. Her voice sounds distant, as if someone else is operating it. “Just… neat. You said neat, right?”
She feels Lucy’s forearm warm against her thigh, a steadying pressure, and she doesn’t move away from it. She should probably be thinking about David, about what she’ll tell him, about whether this counts as something she needs to explain. Instead she’s watching Lucy’s fingers gather the last long curls and shear them away, and she’s thinking about how each soft snip sends a tiny vibration through her skin that travels somewhere it shouldn’t. Her knees part another inch. The robe has fallen open at the front and she hasn’t pulled it closed.
“I like how it feels,” she admits, and this time she doesn’t try to make it sound casual.
Lucy sets the shears down on the metal tray with a quiet clink and reaches for the bikini trimmer — a small, sleek device that fits neatly in her palm. She clicks it on and it hums with a low, buzzing vibration that fills the small room.
“Now,” she says,”we want something that gives us a really clean finish along the edges , and downstairs if you know what I mean”. She touches the buzzing trimmer lightly to the skin just outside Ellen’s pubic hair, where a few stray hairs grow along the crease where her thigh meets her body. The vibration travels through the sensitive skin there and Lucy watches Ellen’s stomach tighten beneath the robe.
Slowly, carefully, she runs the trimmer along the edge, clearing a clean line where hair meets bare skin. “See how neat that is? No strays. Just a nice, clean border.” She moves to the other side, the trimmer humming steadily, and traces another precise line. “And this little area here—” She guides the trimmer lower, near the bottom of the triangle, where a few hairs grow close to Ellen’s outer lips “—we just want everything tidy. Nothing wild. Nothing sticking out.” She works her way along, creating clean borders, leaving behind a defined triangle of short, even hair. “There. Now it’s a neat little shape. Clean. You could wear any swimsuit and there wouldn’t be a thing out of place.”
Ellen’s eyes are half-closed now, fixed on the ceiling, but she’s not seeing the ceiling. She’s feeling — the low hum of the trimmer traveling through her skin, the cool air tracing the newly bare borders Lucy is carving, the warm weight of Lucy’s forearm still resting against her thigh. Each pass of the trimmer sends a thread of vibration inward, somewhere she can’t quite name, and it’s all building together into something warm and heavy and persistent.
“Lucy,” she says, and her voice is barely a whisper, “that’s… that’s the neatest it’s ever been.” She swallows. Her hips have shifted almost imperceptibly forward on the leather, toward the buzzing trimmer, toward Lucy’s careful hands. She feels the warmth between her legs building into something undeniable and she doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful or both.
Lucy catches the movement — the subtle forward press of Ellen’s hips, the way her thighs have drifted further apart, the flush now reaching her cheeks. She sets the trimmer down for a moment and reaches for a guard attachment — the 1/2“ — clicking it into place with a small snap.
”You’ve been so patient,“ Lucy says softly, picking the trimmer back up. The humming resumes. ”Now I’m just going to take this whole lovely triangle down to a uniform half-inch. Nice and short. Very neat.“ She places the guard flat against Ellen’s skin at the top of the triangle and begins drawing the trimmer downward through the cropped hair. The buzzing is deeper now with the guard attached, more insistent. ”Feel how that just glides? Like velvet, just like I said.“
She works slowly, methodically, covering every inch of the triangle with overlapping passes. Her free hand rests on Ellen’s lower stomach, just above the hairline, holding the skin taut. She can feel Ellen’s breathing beneath her palm — quick, shallow, controlled the way someone controls their breathing when they’re trying not to show something.
”Almost done with this pass,“ she murmurs. ”Then we’ll see how you feel about going just a little bit shorter. Some of my clients find they love it so much shorter than they ever imagined.“ She lets that settle. ”But we’ll go at your pace, Ellen. We’ll go at your pace.“
Ellen feels the trimmer move through the short hair, each pass leaving behind something that feels impossibly smooth under the vibration — not bare, not quite, but close. Close in a way she’s never been. The half-inch of hair that remains is so uniform, so managed, that it barely registers as hair at all. It registers as sensation. Every stroke of the trimmer sends the buzzing deep into her skin, into muscle, into somewhere warm and liquid that she can feel with every breath.
Your pace, Lucy said. But Ellen doesn’t know what her pace is. She’s never been on this particular road. The only thing she knows is that each pass of the trimmer makes her want the next one, and that Lucy’s hand on her stomach is the warmest thing she’s felt in months, and that she’s wet. She’s wet and she can smell herself beneath the lavender and the shaving gel, and she knows Lucy must know, and Lucy hasn’t stopped. Lucy hasn’t even acknowledged it, which somehow makes it worse — better — worse.
“A little shorter,” she hears herself say. The words come from the same distant place that approved the first cut, the first pass of the trimmer. “You said… some clients like it shorter?”
Her hips shift again. Her thighs are open now, genuinely open, and she’s past the point of pretending it’s for access. The leather chair is warm and slick beneath her and she can feel her own pulse between her legs, steady and insistent, keeping time with the trimmer’s hum.
Lucy’s eyes flick up to meet Ellen’s for just a moment — a brief, dark glance that says I see you, I see all of it, and it’s alright — before returning to her work. She doesn’t smile exactly, but the corner of her mouth softens.
She pops the 1/2“ guard off and replaces it with the 3/8” without ceremony. “This is a lovely length,” she says, her voice pitched low and warm, barely above the trimmer’s hum. “Short enough to feel like velvet, long enough to still feel like something’s there.” She places the trimmer at the top of the triangle and draws it downward. The shorter guard makes the buzzing sharper, more direct — less cushion between the blades and the skin. “Feel how clean this is? How tidy?”
She works in the same methodical pattern, overlapping passes, her free hand pressing gently above Ellen’s pubic bone. She can feel the tremor in Ellen’s stomach muscles under her palm — tiny, involuntary contractions that match the rhythm of the trimmer. She can see the glistening at the tops of Ellen’s inner thighs. She keeps her voice steady, soothing, professional. Neat. Tidy. Clean. The words are a liturgy.
“You’re doing so well,” she murmurs, guiding the trimmer along the left edge of the triangle, where the short hair meets the bare skin she’d cleared earlier. “Some women get a little… overwhelmed at this point. That’s perfectly normal. It’s intimate, having someone care for you this way.” She pauses the trimmer against Ellen’s skin for just a moment — letting the vibration sit, letting it hum against the short hairs, against the sensitive skin beneath — before resuming her pass. “There’s no rush. We have all the time you need.”
Ellen lets out a sound she doesn’t intend — a small, soft exhale that’s something between a sigh and a whimper. The vibration sitting against her skin in that paused moment had traveled through her like a current, pooling somewhere low and insistent. She can feel herself — really feel herself — the warmth and the wetness and the way every nerve ending in the area Lucy is tending seems to have woken up and started demanding attention.
“It’s so…” she starts, and loses the word. Her head lolls slightly to one side on the cushioned headrest. The ceiling lights are blurring. The lavender feels heavier now, thick in her lungs. She’s aware of her own body in a way she hasn’t been in years — aware of the weight of her breasts beneath the open robe, the curve of her stomach rising and falling under Lucy’s steady palm, the short, neat velvet of her pubic hair giving way to the bare, humming borders Lucy has carved.
She realizes her right hand has moved. It’s resting on her smooth thigh, brushing the edge of the cropped triangle. She doesn’t remember putting it there. The short hair under her fingertips is extraordinary — soft and uniform and nothing like the wild thatch she’s lived with. She traces it tentatively, and the sensation of her own fingers on the newly cropped hair sends something sharp and sweet through her core.
Lucy watches Ellen’s hand find its way to the edge of the cropped triangle, and she sees the trembling in those fingertips. She sees everything — the glistening that has spread, the way Ellen’s inner thighs are flushed pink, the subtle rolling of her hips seeking contact. She sets the trimmer down on the tray, and the sudden absence of its buzzing makes the room feel very quiet.
She reaches out and takes Ellen’s right hand in her own — not pulling it away, but guiding it. Slowly, carefully, she draws Ellen’s fingers downward from the edge of the cropped triangle, along the short velvet, lower, past where the hair thins, to where Ellen is warm and slick and swollen. She presses Ellen’s own fingertips there and holds them for a moment.
“It’s okay,” Lucy says softly. “This happens. It’s okay.” She lets go of Ellen’s hand, leaving it where she’s placed it. Then she picks the trimmer back up and clicks it on. The humming fills the silence. “You just let yourself feel what you feel. I’m going to keep going, alright? I’m going to make you so neat.”
She swaps the 3/8“ guard for the 1/4” and holds the trimmer where Ellen can see it. “I’m going to take you shorter now. Quite a bit shorter. Just a nice, very short, very clean mound.” Her eyes meet Ellen’s, and there’s something there — something warm, something knowing, something that isn’t strictly professional anymore but isn’t unkind. “Is that alright, Ellen? May I take you shorter?”
“Yes,” she whispers. The word comes from somewhere deep, somewhere that has nothing to do with neatness or tidiness or swimsuits. “Yes, shorter.”
Her fingertips begin to move — barely, just the smallest pressure, the slightest circle — and her eyes drift closed. She feels Lucy’s hand return to her stomach, warm and steadying, and then the trimmer touches her skin again and the sharper buzz of the 1/4“ guard bites into the short velvet and she gasps.
It’s so much more intense at this length. She can feel every individual hair being cropped, can feel the blades passing over her skin with only the thinnest of plastic guard between metal and flesh. Each stroke leaves behind something barely there — a shadow, a whisper of hair, a memory of what was.
Lucy watches Ellen’s fingers begin their slow exploration and feels her own pulse quicken — but she keeps her hands steady, her voice even. This is the part she loves. This is the part she’s been waiting for.
“That’s it,” she murmurs, drawing the trimmer down through the last quarter-inch of hair. The 1/4“ guard leaves behind something that’s barely hair at all — just a darker shadow against Ellen’s pale skin, a uniform layer that’s soft as peach fuzz but undeniably bare. ”Look how short that is. Feel it — go ahead, feel how short.“ She guides the trimmer in careful, overlapping passes, her free hand pressing the skin taut just above Ellen’s pubic bone. She can feel Ellen’s fingers working below, can feel the small contractions rippling through the muscles under her palm.
”You’re being so good,“ Lucy says, and the word good hangs in the warm air with layers of meaning. ”So neat. So clean. Just a little more, Ellen. I’m going to take the edges in now. Create a more… petite shape for you.“ She pops the guard off the trimmer — the blades bare now, humming with a higher, sharper pitch — and places it at the left edge of the remaining triangle.
”I think we need to clean up the sides“ she says, almost to herself, and begins shaving the side away. The bare blades meet the quarter-inch stubble and take it down to bare skin in a single, smooth pass. The sensation is direct now — no guard, no buffer — just the buzzing blades against Ellen’s sensitive skin, leaving behind nothing but smoothness. ”We’ll make it nice and narrow. Just a little strip. So much more neat and tidy.“
She shaves another parallel strip, then the same on the other side, taking the triangle down to rectangular strip. Then another pass each side, and another. Each pass removing a little more from the edge of the remaining strip of hair, and each swath leaves behind impossibly smooth, bare skin that Lucy traces with her fingertip before taking the next pass. ”Feel how smooth that is? That’s clean, Ellen. That’s what clean feels like.“
Ellen’s eyes open at the change in pitch — the higher, more insistent hum of the bare blades — and she looks down her body to see Lucy shaving away the sides of what was once a full, natural triangle. Her remaining hair is disappearing in clean lines, reduced to a narrowing band of dark shadow running up the middle of her now-bulging mound. She can see the bare skin left behind — pink, smooth, impossibly exposed — and she can feel the trimmer’s direct vibration against her skin with nothing left to cushion it.
Her fingers haven’t stopped. She’s touching herself openly now, two fingertips circling slowly, and she can feel how close she is to something she hasn’t felt in months — maybe years. The combination of sensations is overwhelming: her own fingers, the trimmer’s relentless hum, Lucy’s steady hand on her stomach, the sight of her own body being transformed inch by inch into something she doesn’t recognize.
The landing strip narrows. Another pass, and it’s thinner. Another, and it’s a thin dark shadow barely half an inch wide, rising from the top of her lips. She can see herself — really see herself — and what she sees is a woman with her legs open and her hand between them and another woman’s hands making her bare, and she should stop this, she should absolutely stop this, and instead she presses her fingers harder and her hips begin to move in a slow, involuntary rhythm.
“Don’t stop,” she says, and her voice breaks on the second word. “Lucy, please don’t stop. Take it. Take it—”
She can’t say it. But she means it. She means Take it ALL.
Lucy hears the break in Ellen’s voice — the crack in the word please — and something deep in her chest responds. She doesn’t rush. She never rushes this part.
The landing strip is now just a thin dark sahdow of cropped velvety hair rising from the top of Ellen’s lips, surrounded by smooth, bare, freshly-shaved skin. Lucy traces her fingertip along one edge of it, feeling the contrast — the softness of the strip against the silk of bare skin — and Ellen’s stomach flutters under her other palm.
“Almost there,” Lucy murmurs. She’s leaning close now, close enough that her breath moves across Ellen’s bare stomach. “You’re being so good, Ellen. So lovely.” She makes another pass with the bare trimmer, taking the strip down to perhaps a quarter-inch wide — a mere suggestion of hair, a pencil-thin shadow. “Just a little more. I want it perfect. I want it neat and tidy and clean and……shaved, totally shaved”
She can see Ellen’s fingers working below, can hear the soft wet sound of them, can feel the trembling in the muscles under her hand. She guides the trimmer along the right edge of the strip, narrowing it even further, and the vibrating blades pass so close to where Ellen’s fingers circle that Ellen can feel the hum travel through her own touch.
“Look at yourself,” Lucy says softly. “Look at how beautiful that is.”
Ellen looks down. She forces her eyes open through the haze and looks.
The strip of hair is barely there — a thin dark whisper, no wider than her little fingernail, rising from the top of her lips in a single, narrow line. Everything else is bare. Smooth. Clean.
“Lucy,” she manages, and her voice is a wreck — hoarse, cracked, barely a voice at all. Her hips are pressing up in that slow rhythm and her thighs are trembling and she can feel it coming, can feel it gathering. “Lucy, I think I’m going to—”
At that point Lucy lowers the trimmer to the base of the strip — the very bottom, where the thin line of stubble meets the top of Ellen’s lips, where the skin is softest, where Ellen’s fingers are working just below. She lets the edge of the trimmer rest there, slightly pushing it down to force the buzzing steel head to vibrate through the sensitive skin, lets it travel down into the place where Ellen is wet and swollen and so very close.
She can see Ellen’s clit beneath her own fingers, see the flush of arousal spreading across her bare skin, see the trembling in her thighs. She holds the trimmer there, buzzing, resting, waiting.
“Feel that?” Lucy murmurs. “That’s what is about to shave off the very last evidence you ever had ANY hair down here. It’s what is about to shave you completely clean”
And then she begins to draw the trimmer upward — slowly, so slowly — along that final narrow strip of hair, the buzzing blades eating through the last quarter-inch of stubble, leaving bare skin behind, striping Ellen clean.
“All…….. gone,” Lucy whispers, drawing the trimmer up, up, up through the last of it. “All clean. Every ….last…. bit.”
The world goes white.
It starts at the base of her spine and rolls forward like a wave — no, like a breaking — and everything tightens at once, every muscle, every nerve, every thought pulling inward to the single point where Lucy’s buzzing trimmer meets the last of her hair and her own fingers press against her clit. She hears herself make a sound she’s never made — not in David’s bed, not in any bed — a sound that’s raw and unguarded and comes from the same deep place that said yes, shorter and meant yes, everything.
Her hips press up hard against the trimmer and her thighs clamp together around her own hand and she’s coming, she’s coming in a stranger’s hands in a posh salon while a woman she’s known for years whispers clean, clean, clean and strips her bare. The orgasm rolls through her in long, shuddering waves that match the upward path of the trimmer — each inch of bare skin left behind another peak, another pulse, another gasp torn from her throat.
She feels the trimmer reach the top of the strip and lift away and she feels the absence of it like a loss and then her fingers take over, pressing, circling, riding the last waves as they diminish into aftershocks that make her stomach jump under Lucy’s palm.
When it’s done — when the trembling subsides to tiny tremors and her breathing slows from ragged to merely deep — she opens her eyes.
The ceiling is still there. The lavender is still there. Lucy is still there.
She looks down at herself and sees nothing. No strip. No shadow. No hair. Just bare, smooth, pink skin from her navel to her lips, glistening faintly where the trimmer’s oil met her own wetness. She’s clean. Completely, utterly clean.
“Oh my god, Lucy” she whispers. Her voice is ruined. Her hand is still between her legs, motionless now, cupping herself. “Oh my god.”
