Red Bob
There are changes in your life that arrive with a lot of noise around them, and then there are the ones that slide so neatly into place that you only notice afterwards how completely the room has changed. Becky had been like that for me.
There had not been a single clean moment where my life split into before and after her.
And at some point, my flat had become ours without either of us making a speech about it.
There were still traces of the separate versions of us in it, if you knew where to look. Her jacket over the chair. My products among hers in the bathroom. Her shoes half under the bed. My hoodie on her. But none of it felt temporary. It felt used-in. Lived-in. Ours.
And by then we were absurdly, unmistakably in love.
The day she moved in, I welcomed her to the flat in a way unique to how we were… with a haircut.
Becky had just come out of the shower and was towelling her wet hair. She looked at herself in the mirror and let out a sigh.
“What’s up?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Nothing.” as she rubbed at the back of her head with the towel.
She dropped the towel over the back of a chair and said, “I fancy doing something different with my hair.”
I looked at her properly. “Any reason?”
“It’s frustrating me.” She touched the top of it, then the side above her ear. “Even when it’s short, if it’s got some shape to it, I’m still arranging it. Still managing it. Still making it be something.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
I waited.
Becky leaned back on the bed. “I liked getting here. Shorter, then shorter again. That part felt right. But this”— she touched the top once more —“still feels like the last version that needs something from me.”
That went through me quietly.
She looked at me then, direct and steady. “I don’t think I want to keep styling my way to the point.”
I did not say anything straight away.
“What are you saying?” I asked
She held my eyes. “I want it buzzed.”
Something low in my stomach shifted.
“For real?”
“Yes. Something like yours”
I looked at her for another second. “Well lets make it happen.”
That landed differently than teasing would have. It was all she needed to hear.
A little later, she was sat on a stool in the bathroom in an old black vest with a towel around her shoulders while I stood behind her with the clippers in my hand. Her hair was dry now. Pale blue still there, but faint and close enough to feel transitional already. She looked calm. More than calm. Settled.
I looked at her head, the shape of it, the short crop that had brought her here. “I think you’re going to suit it too much.”
That made her laugh, but gently this time. Then she looked up at me and said, “That’s lovely. Thank you.”
I set my hand lightly at the top of her head. “Ready?”
Becky met my eyes. “Yes.”
I switched the clippers on, and the hum filled the room. Becky tipped her chin down without my asking. The familiarity of that nearly got me. I set the clippers at the front and made the first pass straight back. The sound changed at once. Blue lengths lifted and fell. A clean path opened through the top.
Becky shut her eyes for half a second, then opened them again.
She had been used to feeling the clippers around the sides of her head from when she had her side shave, but the sensation of the vibrations running over her head for the first pass really captured her.
As did the next pass. Then another.
The top came down quickly. The short crop gave way to something even and close, less texture and more shape. Her head emerged under the blue in a way that made the whole thing feel cleaner every second.
Once the top was done, I moved to the sides and back, evening everything through. The clippers took the last of the softness out of it, leaving only the close velvet underneath. Every so often my free hand settled at her forehead, or the side of her head, or the nape to steady her. Each time, she stayed very still.
By the time I made the final passes and switched the clippers off, her hair was gone in exactly the way she had meant: not skin, not severe, just close. An even all-over icy-blue buzzcut. Soft matte velvet. No asymmetry left. Nothing between her face and the room.
For a second, I just looked at her.
Becky tipped her head slightly. “Well?”
I put the clippers down and brushed the loose blue clippings from her shoulders. “It suits you too much.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, quietly and with no irony at all, “You keep saying the nicest things to me.”
That nearly undid me more than the haircut itself.
I ran my palm lightly over the back of her head. The texture surprised me — softer than I expected, with a faint grain underneath the now brunette stubble. Becky went still. I felt it at once and drew my hand back just enough to give her the chance to move away if she wanted to.
She did not.
Instead she tipped her head back a fraction into my hand and said, quietly, “Again.”
So I did, slower this time, from crown to nape.
When she stood and turned towards me, I saw it properly.
No sweep. No extra structure except the one that was already hers.
I smiled before I meant to.
Becky caught it immediately. “What?”
”I think you need some colour on this.” I said stroking my palm against her velvet hair.
“I’ve got something in my work bag you could use on me.” She replied.
In her bag was a box of hair bleach and a toner that she had made up. It wasn’t labelled specifically so I couldn’t tell what colour it was.
Over the next hour I transformed her hair from her natural brunette to a now foxy icy-blue.
“You look good… like really good” I said, admiring how the new colour and cut make her eyes pop.
She laughed once, but there was warmth in it now instead of defence. “Thank you,” she said. Then, even quieter: “I’m really glad it was you that did this for me.”
Then she kissed me, with some remnants of the clippings still stuck to the collar of her vest.
The rest of that night spoke for it’s self
—-
My thirtieth, meanwhile, had begun looming.
Becky asked what would I want.
The answer, once I was honest about it, was very little.
I did not want a party. I did not want a dinner where half the evening went on smiling at other people while they watched me have a birthday. I did not want balloons or booked tables or cocktails with my name attached to them.
What I wanted was sun.
And Becky.
Preferably somewhere that did not ask anything else of me.
It was Becky, unsurprisingly, who found the holiday.
She was sat on the sofa one evening with her laptop balanced on one knee and one foot tucked under my leg, looking half like she was working and half like she was trying not to grin. I was stretched out beside her with my head against her hip, pretending to read something on my phone and mostly failing.
“What?” I said eventually, because I could feel the grin above me.
“Nothing.”
“That’s never true.”
Becky looked down at me. “Some of us are trying to improve your life.”
I put my phone face-down on my chest. “Go on, then.”
“There’s a late deal for 7-nights going in Mykonos”
I sat up a little. “Is that one of the Greek Islands?”
“Yeah,” she replied, “I’ve heard it’s really nice there. Judging by these pictures it looks it too.”
I leaned over and looked at the screen properly. Flights. Hotel. Dates that fell almost exactly across my birthday. Close enough to feel spontaneous. Cheap enough to feel slightly suspicious. Warm enough that the rest of the conversation almost did not matter.
I looked at the screen, then back at her.
“You want to take me there for my birthday?”
Becky tipped one shoulder. “I want to go somewhere hot with you where neither of us has to do a thing if we don’t want to.”
“That’s not exactly a no.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
I looked at the screen again and felt something bright and stupid open up in me. “Book it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Becky did not make me say it twice.
—-
Less than a fortnight later, we were half-awake at the airport with coffees in our hands and too little sleep behind us, waiting for a flight full of people dressed for warm weather.
The airport part of a holiday has never felt glamorous to me. The endless waiting and processes to go through. But there was something about being there with Becky that made even that feel charged. She had her all-over icy-blue buzzcut under a cap.
I kept catching her eye and smiling for no good reason. She kept doing that tiny private smile back that made it worse.
—-
Mykonos was exactly what we had paid for and somehow better than that.
Bright. Slightly tacky. Loud in places, lazy in others. Salt in the air. Music drifting from bars before the sun had fully gone down. People already pinking in the heat. Groups on their way somewhere. Couples walking back from the beach with damp hair and sandal marks on their feet. A place built, in one way or another, for appetite.
It suited us more than I would have guessed.
Not because we became different there, but because everything else dropped away. Work disappeared. Routine disappeared. We had nowhere to be except with each other. Time loosened. Breakfast slid into sea swims, swims into showers, showers into naps, naps into late dinners. The days softened at the edges.
My birthday itself fell two days into the trip.
We spent most of it lazily. Breakfast stretched into midday. We went down to the sea and lay there too long.
Becky kept reapplying suncream to the back of my neck with maddening thoroughness and then kissing the same spot afterwards as if she could not help herself. I let her, obviously.
By evening we were back in the hotel room getting ready to go out, the famous strip waiting for us in the way places like that always wait — already noisy in your head before you even get there.
I was stood in front of the bathroom sink in a vest and shorts, rubbing a towel over my grade-two buzz after a shower, when Becky looked at me and said, “I’ve been thinking about your hair.”
I laughed. “God, that’s romantic.”
“Shut up.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
She stepped closer and rested a hand lightly on the back of my head. My hair had grown a little since the cut. Not much. Enough to soften. Enough that the shape of it caught differently under her hand.
“You know what would look good?” she asked.
“That is a dangerous sentence.”
“Let me bleach it.”
I turned to look at her properly. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going out.”
“I know.”
I ran my hand over my hair on instinct. “You want me to hit the strip tonight with a bleached buzzcut.”
“Yes.”
The answer came so cleanly that I started laughing.
Becky’s mouth twitched. “You say that like it isn’t obviously correct.”
I looked at her, then at the hotel bathroom, then at my own reflection. “You really think it’ll suit me?”
“Yes,” she said.
Then, more quietly, with that sincerity she only used when she knew a thing mattered, “I really do.”
That landed differently.
“Alright,” I said.
She kissed me once, quick and pleased, and then we were suddenly in salon mode in a hotel bathroom, which turned out to be a deeply specific kind of intimacy.
There are people who would probably find bleaching a buzzcut in a warm foreign bathroom unglamorous. Those people are not my people.
Becky moved with the same focused calm she always had when she was doing something with her hands. She mixed the bleach at the sink while I sat on the closed toilet lid with a towel round my shoulders, and when she turned back to me with the bowl and brush there was that familiar shift in her face — not distance, exactly, but precision.
“You sure?” she asked, fingers already resting lightly against my temple.
“You ask me that every time.”
“Because I mean it every time.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”
So she began.
The first touch of bleach against my short hair felt colder than I expected. Becky worked methodically, brushing it through the close growth with the same care she would have given much longer hair. It would have been funny if it had not also been so disarming.
“You’re being very gentle for someone trying to make me look deranged before a night out.”
Becky looked down at me. “You’re going to look incredible.”
That did something to me.
“Right,” I said, because it was the best I could do.
She smiled and went on.
By the time she had finished applying it, the smell of bleach had filled the room and my scalp had begun to warm. Becky wiped carefully around my hairline and then stepped back.
“There,” she said.
I tilted my head. “There what?”
“Now we wait.”
“Thrilling.”
Becky laughed softly. “You’re impatient when it’s your own head.”
“I don’t like not being able to see it.”
“You trust me, though.”
I looked up at her.
That was not flirtation. Not really. It was simply true.
“Yes,” I said.
Something gentled in her face. “Good.”
While it processed, we sat on the bed in our half-done going-out clothes, drinking tiny plastic cups of wine from downstairs and talking nonsense about the people we had seen by the pool that afternoon. Becky kept glancing at my hair every few seconds as if she could not help it. I kept catching her doing it.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve looked at me six times in the last minute.”
“Have not.”
“You absolutely have.”
Becky leaned in and kissed the side of my head through the bleach. “I’m excited.”
That shut me up.
When she finally rinsed it out, the colour that came through was brighter and stranger than I had pictured. Pale, almost white-blonde in the bathroom light. Not warm. Not soft. Something sharper than that.
Becky towel-dried it, then stood back.
For a second she did not say anything.
I looked at her instead of answering straight away. “What?”
She was still looking at me in that concentrated way she had when something had gone slightly beyond what she expected.
“Nothing,” she said, but the word came out wrong.
I smiled. “That’s never true.”
Becky stepped closer again, one hand lifting as if on instinct, and rested her palm lightly against the side of my head. Her thumb moved once across the bleached stubble near my temple.
“No,” she said, more honestly this time. “It’s just—”
She stopped.
“What?”
Her eyes moved over my face, then back to my hair. “You look incredible.”
The way she said it changed something in the room.
Not playful. Not casual. Lower than that. More helpless.
I ran my hand over my head again, feeling the changed texture under my palm, the short pale grain of it. “Yeah?”
Becky gave a tiny laugh under her breath. “Yeah.”
I looked at her properly then and saw what she was not quite disguising. The focus in her. The heat of it. The way her gaze kept catching on my mouth and then flicking back up again.
“That bad?” I asked.
“That good,” she said.
Her hand slid to the back of my head then, fingers spreading there as if she needed the full shape of it in her palm. I watched her face change when she touched it.
“Well,” I said, trying for steadier than I felt, “that seems promising.”
That made her smile, but only faintly. “You have no idea.”
I think I did, actually.
Or I was beginning to.
Because that was the thing about the bleached buzzcut — it did not feel like costume. It did not feel like I was trying on somebody else’s nerve. The lighter colour, the closeness of it, the way it pulled everything into my face instead of softening it, it felt less like a departure than a kind of arrival.
I turned my head slightly and caught sight of myself in the mirror. The pale cropped hair, nearly white under the hotel lights. The bare neck. The sharper outline of my features. The version of me looking back was not softer or prettier or more careful.
She just looked sure.
And I loved her immediately.
Becky must have seen the moment it happened, because when I looked back at her she was still watching me, and there was something in her expression that softened at the edges even while the heat in it stayed put.
“You like it,” she said.
I smiled, and this time there was nothing uncertain in it. “I really do.”
That seemed to affect her almost as much as the hair itself.
“Good,” she said quietly.
We fell back onto the bed together, and she began kissing me. Firstly on my bare forehead, and then tenderly on my lips.
Not the quick kiss from earlier. This one landed differently. One hand still at the back of my bleached buzzcut, the other finding my waist and pulling me closer with enough certainty to make my breath catch. I felt the change in her immediately and it went straight through me.
When she pulled back, it was only just enough to look at me.
“You cannot wear that tonight and expect me to behave normally,” she said.
I laughed, but it came out breathless. “I wasn’t planning on asking you to.”
That made something flash across her face — want, affection, disbelief, all tangled together.
“Right,” she said, and kissed me again.
This time I kissed her back harder. My hands went to her hips, then under the hem of her top before I had really decided to. Becky made a soft sound against my mouth that did absolutely nothing to improve my ability to act sensible. Her hand tightened at the back of my head, fingertips dragging lightly over the bleached stubble as if she already could not get enough of the feel of it.
“That,” she said quietly against my mouth, “is going to become a problem.”
“For who?”
“For me,” she said, and after the smallest pause, “and probably for you.”
I laughed again, but it broke when she kissed the side of my jaw, then the line just below my ear, one hand still firm at my waist. There was something about the buzzcut leaving all that skin exposed that made even a small touch feel louder.
“Becky,” I said, mostly because I needed to say something.
“Mm?”
“We are supposed to be going out.”
“I know.”
She did not sound especially committed to that plan.
Her mouth moved to my neck and I tipped my head back before I could stop myself, giving her more room instead of less. That seemed to encourage her. Her hand slid from my waist to the top of my thigh, bare below the hem of my shorts, and stayed there just long enough to make it impossible not to notice.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, with no apology at all.
That nearly undid me.
I caught her face in both hands and kissed her again before she could say anything else, and there was enough force in it that she took half a step back with me and hit the sink behind her. The sound of it made us both laugh into the kiss for a second, which only made everything worse in the best way.
Becky looked at me, flushed now, one hand braced on the edge of the sink.
“You look so good like this,” she said.
There was no irony in it. No cover.
I felt that low in my stomach.
“Yeah?”
“Yes,” she said, and her eyes dropped over me again. “It’s doing something to me.”
That honesty was almost more obscene than if she had dressed it up.
I stepped in between her knees where she stood against the sink and rested my hand at the back of her neck. “Good,” I said.
Becky smiled then — small, heated, unmistakable. “Dangerous answer.”
“Maybe.”
For a second neither of us moved.
Then she reached down, gave the waistband of my shorts a slow, deliberate tug, and said, “We need to stop, or we’re not leaving this room.”
That image landed hard enough that I had to look away and laugh into her shoulder.
She kissed the side of my head again, right over the fresh bleach, then pulled back and looked at me one more time as if she could not quite believe the effect I was having on her.
“Honestly,” she said, “you’ve no right.”
“None at all,” I said, because by then I was fully enjoying myself.
By the time we actually made it out that night, I was fully inside the look.
Not just wearing it.
Inside it.
I stopped reaching automatically for my old image of myself. Stopped thinking of the bleached buzzcut as something Becky had done to me for my birthday and started feeling the deeper truth of it: I had wanted this. Maybe not in exactly that shade, not until she suggested it, but in spirit. In nerve. In exposure. In the clean thrill of there being less and less left to hide in.
The first time I caught our reflection in a dark window on the way to the strip, I barely recognised the woman walking beside Becky.
Then I did.
And once I did, I could not stop smiling.
People looked, and I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy that. But what I enjoyed more was Becky. The way her hand kept returning to the back of my head as if she could not help herself. The way her eyes lingered every time I turned back toward her in a different light. The way she looked at me once while we were waiting for drinks — openly, hungrily, with no real attempt to hide it — and made my whole body go warm.
“What?” I said, though I knew perfectly well.
Becky’s gaze dropped briefly to my hair and then back to my face. “You know what.”
I smiled. “Maybe I do.”
She stepped in closer, not quite touching me except for her fingers at the nape of my neck. “You look so good like this.”
There was gratitude in it as much as desire, which somehow made it worse.
I leaned in and said, “You seem pleased about it.”
Becky gave a quiet laugh. “That is an understatement.”
And the thing was, I liked that too. Not just that she wanted me, though she very clearly did. I liked that the look gave me something new to inhabit. Something bolder. Cleaner. Something I could feel her responding to and feel myself answer back from inside.
By then I was not just letting her see me in it.
I was enjoying being seen.
—-
The rest of the holiday unfolded slowly after that. Beach days. Late lunches. Afternoons where the heat made movement feel optional. Nights where we went out and nights where we stayed in and ordered bad room-service chips instead. One day we spent hours at Nissi Beach, and I understood immediately why everyone talked about it the way they did. The sea there looked almost artificial in its colour, the kind of blue that makes you suspicious on first sight because surely it cannot be real.
We lay there longer than we meant to.
Becky was on her stomach beside me, half-dozing, her icy-blue buzzcut bright under the sun. I watched her for a while without meaning to. Or maybe fully meaning to.
She opened one eye. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s never true.”
I smiled. “You know what your problem is?”
“Go on.”
“You’re very nice to look at.”
Becky shut her eye again, but she was smiling now. “That is a terrible problem.”
“It’s become mine somehow.”
That made her laugh softly into the towel under her head.
By then, with my hair bleached and grown just enough to feel lush under my hand in a different way, I had started thinking more often about the thing I had not yet done. The final step. The one that had been waiting quietly underneath everything else.
Becky knew. Of course she knew.
She did not push it. That was part of why I loved her the way I did. She had a talent for hearing what was happening in me without trying to force it into speech before I was ready.
It was a few days later, late afternoon, the hotel room gone golden with the dropping sun, when she finally said, “I’ve got your birthday present.”
I looked up from where I was half-asleep on the bed. “I thought coming here, on this holiday. was the birthday present.”
“It was. This is separate.”
“That feels excessive.”
“Mm. Still got you one.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow. “What is it?”
Becky looked at me for a second, and there was something very calm in her face. “I think you know.”
I did.
My hand went, instinctively, to my head. The bleached stubble had grown just enough to catch differently under my palm. Still soft. Still close. But not the thing itself.
“You mean now?”
“If you want.”
There are moments when you feel yourself step towards something long before you physically move. This was one of them. I had known for months, really. Maybe longer. Ever since the grade two. Ever since the first time I had felt the clippers take me further than I had originally planned and realised it had felt less like panic than recognition.
I sat up properly. “You think I’m ready?”
Becky came and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think you’ve been ready.”
I looked at her.
“And I think,” she added, “that you wanted it to be me.”
That made my throat tighten a little.
“Yes,” I said.
Becky nodded once, not triumphant, just certain. “Alright.”
This time it was not a hotel bathroom improvisation. This time it was slower, more deliberate. Becky laid a towel over my shoulders and sat me on the chair by the little desk near the window, where the evening light was still strong enough to make everything feel clear. The clippers were there first, to bring it close enough. Then the hot water. Then the shaving cream. Then the razor.
It was strange, the shift from buzzing to shaving. Clippers always had a kind of charge in them for me — the hum, the passes, the speed at which identity seemed to change under them. This was quieter. More intimate. More exposed in a different way.
Becky worked with both the confidence of a stylist and the care of somebody handling something she knew mattered.
I watched less than I had when she gave me the grade two. Not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to feel it. The warmth of the water. The smooth drag of foam. The slow, precise pull of the razor across my scalp. The way her hand kept finding the shape of my head as if memorising it.
When she finished one side and I lifted my hand to touch it, the sensation was so startling I laughed.
Nothing.
Or almost nothing. Just warmth, skin, and that strange almost-slickness of a freshly shaved head.
Becky smiled when she heard me laugh. “What?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“What is?”
I turned my head slightly so I could look at her. “This. The fact that this feels this good.”
She held my gaze for a second. “I know.”
The second half was easier, not because it mattered less but because the first half had already answered the only question that counted.
When she was done, she wiped the last traces of cream from my scalp and stepped back.
For a moment neither of us spoke.
Then I stood and went to her instead of to a mirror.
Becky looked at me — really looked — and I could see in her face that she understood exactly what had happened, exactly how right it was.
“Well?” she asked softly.
I ran both hands over my head, from forehead to nape, feeling the smoothness, the heat, the complete absence of anything to hide in.
Then I smiled.
Not slowly this time. Immediately.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. That’s it.”
Becky let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost something else. Then she put both hands on my face and kissed me.
We stayed in that evening.
Neither of us said it out loud, but there was no chance either of us was going to waste that moment under hotel lights with strangers shouting over music. We ordered food we barely touched. We showered salt and cream and heat from each other’s skin. Becky kept touching my scalp like she was checking it was still real, and every time she did, something in me gave way again.
What mattered was not that we had sex that night. That was inevitable. What mattered was the particular intensity of it — the way desire and tenderness had stopped being opposites between us. The way Becky touched me with both reverence and hunger. The way I felt seen in the most literal and least defended sense of the word.
—-
On the last night of the holiday, we went back to the beach just before sunset.
We had spent the day lazily, almost sadly, with that strange end-of-holiday awareness that makes every ordinary thing feel slightly sharpened by the fact that it is almost over. The sea had been clear and warm. Becky had fallen asleep on the sand for half an hour with one arm over her eyes. I had watched her and thought, not for the first time, that there was no version of my life now that did not have her in it.
That thought had stopped being frightening somewhere along the way.
By evening the beach had softened. Fewer people. Lower light. The sky beginning to shift towards gold, then pink, then the sort of blue that only exists for a little while before night makes up its mind. We walked barefoot along the edge of the water with our shoes in our hands. My shaved head still felt impossible and right every time the breeze moved over it.
Becky was talking about something — the flight home, I think, or whether we had enough clean clothes left to avoid wearing beach things to the airport — when I stopped.
She turned back to look at me. “What?”
My heart was hammering so hard it made the whole thing feel faintly absurd.
I had not planned a speech. I knew better than to try.
“Becky.”
Something in my face must have changed, because hers did too.
“What?”
I set my shoes down in the sand. “I love you.”
Her expression gentled instantly. “I know.”
“I know you know.” I laughed once, nervous and helpless. “That’s not the point.”
Becky went very still.
I reached into the pocket of the linen shirt I’d thrown over my dress and found the ring I’d spent the whole evening being painfully aware of.
She looked down at my hand, then back at me.
“Oh,” she said, and it came out half-breath.
There are moments when the world narrows so completely that you can hear your own pulse inside them. This was one of those.
“I don’t want to do anything in my life without you in it,” I said. “I don’t want anyone else at the end of the day. I don’t want anyone else cutting my hair or stealing my hoodies or leaving mugs everywhere or knowing what I mean before I’ve worked it out myself. I just—”
I had to stop and breathe.
Becky’s eyes were bright already.
I looked at her and said the simplest version. “Will you marry me?”
She made a sound then — half laugh, half something breaking open — and covered her mouth with one hand for a second before dropping it again.
“Yes,” she said.
Then, because she knew me and knew what I was like when I was overwhelmed, she said it again, firmer this time.
“Yes, of course I’ll marry you.”
I laughed, and I think I cried a bit at the same time, which was not dignified but was apparently unavoidable. I slid the ring onto her finger with hands that shook more than I would have preferred. Becky looked down at it once, then back at me, and the expression on her face was so open it nearly undid me.
Then she kissed me.
The sea was still washing in and out a few feet away. The sky was dropping through its last light. Somebody farther down the beach shouted something cheerful in another language and I did not care enough to turn and look. Becky’s hands came up to my face and then over the smooth curve of my head and I kissed her back with all the force of everything that had brought us there.
Later, back in the room, the ring caught the light every time she moved her hand. We could not seem to stop looking at each other. Or touching each other. Or laughing suddenly in the middle of kissing because the fact of it was too large to contain neatly.
There are nights that feel like endings and beginnings at once.
That was one of them.
Afterwards, when the room had gone quiet and the air-conditioning was making its tired little effort against the heat, Becky was lying half on top of me with one leg tangled through mine, drawing absent circles against my stomach.
I was still awake. Or too happy to sleep. Or both.
I turned my face toward her and said, “Fiancée is a terrible word.”
Becky laughed softly into my shoulder. “It is quite bad.”
“We should come up with something else.”
“Future wife?”
“That’s much better.”
“Thought so.”
I lay there for a while longer, feeling the shape of the night settle around us.
Then Becky lifted her head a little and said, “I’ve been thinking about the wedding.”
I smiled into the dark. “Have you? It’s been, what, two hours?”
“Plenty of time.”
“That’s efficient, even for you.”
She kissed the centre of my chest, then rested there again. “I was thinking maybe we should grow it.”
I looked down at her. “Grow what?”
She tilted her head just enough for me to know exactly what she meant.
“Our hair,” she said. “For the wedding.”
That landed strangely.
Not badly. Just with more weight than I had expected.
I ran a hand over my still-bare head on instinct. The smoothness of it was already becoming familiar, already difficult to imagine giving up.
Becky must have felt the shift in me, because she lifted herself slightly and looked at me properly.
“Not because you have to,” she said. “I’m not saying that.”
“I know.”
“I just thought maybe it could be nice. To see what happens. To give ourselves the time.”
I was quiet for a second.
Because that was the thing, really. Growing it again would not just be growing hair. It would be finding out whether I would ever want it long again. Whether what had brought me here had changed me permanently, or whether I had only been moving through a phase of myself. Whether the woman I had become under Becky’s hands and under my own choices would feel any urge at all to go back.
I looked at her.
Becky’s expression had gone gentler now, as if she could see the exact shape of the thought moving through me.
“It’s only an idea,” she said. “We don’t have to decide now.”
I smiled a little. “You’ve managed to turn wedding hair into some sort of existential challenge.”
“That does sound like me.”
“It really does.”
She smiled then, but softly, and settled back down against me.
I kept my hand at the back of her neck for a while, thinking about home waiting for us. About a wedding that suddenly existed. About my hair. About hers. About the possibility of time doing something I had not yet imagined.
Then I kissed the top of her head and said, “Maybe.”
Becky looked up. “Maybe?”
“Maybe we try.”
Her face changed at that, not dramatically, just enough that I knew the answer pleased her.
“Alright,” she said.
Then she kissed me once, slow and certain, and tucked herself back against me like that settled everything for now.
Outside, somewhere beyond the hotel, the sea kept moving in the dark.
And inside, with the ring on her hand and the future suddenly larger than it had been that morning, I lay awake beside the woman I was going to marry and wondered, not unhappily, whether I would ever want long hair again.
