Sort It Out For Me: Part Four

Sort It Out For Me: Part Four

by LimeNina (with continued thanks to Tester for the inspiration)

—

The first week is a disaster.

Not a dramatic disaster—no screaming, no walkouts, no doors slammed in the night. A quiet disaster, the kind that unfolds in small misfires and stiffened silences, in the gap between what Claire thinks she is and what she has agreed to become.

It begins with breakfast.

I have made eggs, toast, coffee—the same breakfast I have made every morning for months, prepared exactly as Sir likes it. I kneel beside his chair. Claire stands in the kitchen doorway, freshly shaved—I did her scalp again this morning, and she managed her own legs and groin with only minor guidance—wearing one of Sir’s old shirts and nothing else. Her bare head makes her eyes enormous.

‘Kneel,’ says Sir.

She kneels. Stiffly, reluctantly, as if the floor is an insult. Her knees are too close together. Her hands rest in her lap instead of behind her back.

Sir looks at her. Then at me.

‘Show her,’ he says.

I adjust her. Widen her thighs. Move her hands behind her back. Tilt her chin down. She submits to being arranged, but I can feel the resistance in her muscles, the tension humming through her like a plucked wire.

Sir eats. He feeds me from his fingers as usual. Then he holds a piece of egg toward Claire.

She hesitates. I can see the war on her face—hunger, pride, the deep-rooted conviction that she is the one who feeds, not the one who is fed.

She takes it. Barely. Her lips brush his fingertips and she flinches.

‘Again,’ he says, holding out toast.

She takes it. This time without flinching, but with a rigidity that makes the act mechanical rather than devotional.

Sir says nothing. He finishes his breakfast, stands, and goes downstairs to open the shop.

Claire and I are alone. She sits back on her heels and exhales.

‘I can’t do that,’ she says.

‘You just did.’

‘I did it badly.’

‘Yes. You did it badly. You’ll do it less badly tomorrow.’

She looks at me—this man she once commanded, now gently correcting her form—and I see something complicated move across her face. Not resentment, exactly. Something closer to vertigo.

‘How long did it take you?’ she asks. ‘Before it felt natural?’

‘A few days for the body. Longer for the mind.’

‘How much longer?’

‘I’m still working on it.’

She almost smiles at that. Almost.

* * *

The positions are harder for her than they were for me.

Not physically—Claire is fit, flexible, disciplined in her body. The difficulty is psychological. When Sir says *present* and she goes to all fours, head down, arse raised, I can see her jaw clench. The exposure offends something fundamental in her. She has spent years constructing herself—her femininity, her authority, her control over how she is seen—and this position dismantles all of it.

*Display* is worse. On her back, knees up and spread, hands behind her head—everything visible, her breasts, her cock, the smooth expanse of her shaved groin. She does it, but her eyes are furious.

Sir notices the fury. Of course he does.

‘You’re angry,’ he says, standing over her.

‘I’m exposed.’

‘That’s the same thing, for you.’ He crouches beside her. ‘You’ve spent your whole life controlling how people see you. Every outfit, every gesture, every word—curated, deliberate. And now I’m asking you to lie on your back with your cock out and let me look at you. That makes you angry because it makes you afraid.’

‘I’m not afraid.’

‘You’re terrified. You’re terrified that if someone really sees you—all of you, without the curation—they won’t like what they find.’

She says nothing. Her jaw works.

‘I like what I find,’ he says. ‘Now hold the position.’

She holds it. Tears leak from the corners of her eyes, tracking sideways into her ears. Sir wipes them with his thumb and stands.

‘Again. Kneel.’

She kneels.

‘Present.’

She presents.

‘Display.’

She displays. And this time the fury is a fraction less, the surrender a fraction deeper.

* * *

The sexual terrain is new for everyone, and this is where the comedy creeps in—not slapstick, nothing broad, but the quiet absurdity of three adults navigating arrangements that have no manual.

Sir is a gay man. He has been a gay man his entire life. He has never touched a woman’s breast, never kissed a woman’s mouth, never had cause to consider the particular geography of a woman’s body—even a woman whose body includes a penis he finds, in principle, familiar.

‘In principle’ being the operative phrase.

The first time he attempts to use Claire the way he uses me, it goes wrong almost immediately. He has her on all fours—*present*—and he enters her from behind, and the mechanics of this are fine, identical to what he does with me. But his hands, moving by habit to grip her hips, encounter a waist that curves differently, skin that feels different, a body that responds differently. Claire moans, and the moan is not my moan—it’s higher, breathier, inflected with a femininity that visibly throws him.

He stops. Still inside her, but motionless.

‘What’s wrong?’ she says.

‘Nothing. Give me a moment.’

I’m kneeling nearby—my usual position when he doesn’t need me, attentive and still. I can see his face in the mirror. He looks, for the first time since I’ve known him, uncertain. Not repulsed, not reluctant—uncertain. A craftsman encountering an unfamiliar material.

He pulls out. Steps back.

‘Turn over,’ he says. ‘On your back.’

She rolls over. Her cock is hard, curving up against her belly. This, at least, is territory he knows. He wraps his hand around it—and I see the relief on his face, the return to something he understands. He strokes her slowly, and she arches into his hand, and now they’re speaking a language they both know.

But he’s careful with the rest of her. Her breasts, her nipples—he touches them the way one might touch an unfamiliar instrument, experimentally, reading her responses. When she gasps at a particular touch, he files it away and repeats it. When something doesn’t land, he moves on. He’s learning her the way he learns anything: methodically, attentively, with the calm patience of a man who has all the time in the world.

Afterwards, lying on the back room floor, Claire says: ‘You’ve never been with a woman before.’

‘No.’

‘Not even—’

‘Not even.’

A pause.

‘Is it a problem?’ she asks, and there is a vulnerability in the question that I have never heard from her before.

‘It’s not a problem. It’s an education.’ He runs his hand over her scalp—the gesture that means, in his language, *you belong to me*. ‘I know what to do with a man. I know what to do with a cock. The rest of you—I’ll learn.’

‘And if you can’t?’

‘I always learn.’

He says this with such flat certainty that Claire laughs—a real laugh, startled out of her—and for a moment the tension breaks, and they are just two people figuring each other out.

I watch from my corner and feel something I don’t expect: not jealousy, but tenderness. Tenderness for both of them. For his willingness to be a beginner. For her willingness to be his lesson.

* * *

He does learn. Quickly, because he is who he is.

Within a week, he has mapped her. He knows that her nipples are more sensitive than mine—acutely so, a side effect of the hormones—and he uses this mercilessly, pinching and teasing until she’s writhing. He knows that she likes her cock handled firmly but slowly, that she comes harder when he talks to her, that her arse is less experienced than mine and needs more patience.

He discovers, too, that her shaved head is an erogenous zone of extraordinary sensitivity. More so than mine, perhaps because it is newer, perhaps because the loss of her hair carries a charge that my loss never quite did. When he runs his razor over her skull—he takes over her morning shave within the first week, claiming it as his prerogative, another possession—she closes her eyes and her breathing changes and her cock stiffens visibly.

‘You like that,’ he says, scraping the blade behind her ear.

‘God, yes.’

‘Why?’

She thinks. The razor pauses. ‘Because it’s the most honest thing anyone has ever done to me. Every stroke takes something away. What’s left is—just me.’

He nods and continues shaving, and when he’s done he fucks her in the barber’s chair, her bare head tipped back, her legs wrapped around him, and she comes with his name—*Sir*—on her lips, as if the word itself is an orgasm.

* * *

But it is not all discovery and tenderness. Claire is not me. She does not fold.

Three weeks in, Sir gives her an instruction and she refuses.

It is a small thing—he tells her to clean the bathroom floor—and she says, simply, ‘No.’

The silence that follows is total.

I freeze. In all my time here, I have never refused Sir anything. The concept is as foreign to me as breathing underwater. I kneel in the doorway and watch.

‘No?’ he says.

‘I’m not a cleaner. I’m not here to scrub floors.’

‘You’re here to do what I tell you.’

‘Within reason.’

‘I decide what’s reasonable.’

They stare at each other. Claire’s chin is raised—that defensive tilt I recognise from her first evening, the dominant reasserting herself. Sir is perfectly still.

‘Clean the floor,’ he says.

‘No.’

He moves so fast that neither of us sees it coming. One moment he’s standing two feet away; the next he has her by the back of the neck, forcing her to her knees, pressing her face toward the tiles.

‘You are mine,’ he says, his voice low and even. ‘You knelt for me. You let me shave you. You let me fuck you. You called me Sir and you meant it. You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of submission suit you. It’s all or nothing. Clean the floor.’

She is trembling. Her bare scalp is flushed red. For a long moment I think she will fight—actually physically fight him—and I don’t know what will happen if she does.

Then something breaks. The same something that broke when the clippers first touched her hair. A wall, a pretence, a last defended border.

She cleans the floor. On her hands and knees, naked, weeping, while Sir stands over her and I kneel in the doorway, my heart hammering.

When it’s done, he pulls her up and holds her. She sobs against his chest, great racking sobs, and he strokes her bare head and says nothing until the sobbing stops.

‘That’s the last time you refuse me,’ he says.

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘I don’t give you tasks to humiliate you. I give you tasks to teach you that no task is beneath you. That you are not your pride.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Good girl.’

It is the first time he has used the phrase. The effect on Claire is electric—a shudder, a fresh spill of tears, a pressing of her face deeper into his chest. Good girl. She has waited her whole life, I think, to hear those words from someone strong enough to mean them.

* * *

The outside world takes longer to arrive than I expected, but when it does, it arrives with force.

Claire’s friend Devlin is the first.

Devlin is a large, bearded man who runs an LGBTQ support centre in the city where Claire used to live. He and Claire have been close for years—political allies, drinking companions, fellow travellers. He is, by all accounts, a good man. He is also a man with firm opinions about power dynamics, consent, and the particular vulnerabilities of trans women.

He turns up on a Thursday afternoon, unannounced, having obtained the shop’s address from Claire’s old flatmate. The bell jingles, and there he is: six foot two, arms folded, radiating concern.

Sir is cutting a customer’s hair. I’m sweeping. Claire is upstairs.

‘I’m looking for Claire,’ Devlin says.

‘She’s not available right now,’ I say. ‘Can I take a message?’

He looks at me—bald, collared beneath my buttoned shirt, broom in hand—and I can see him cataloguing details, drawing conclusions.

‘I’d like to see her, please. I’ve come a long way.’

Sir glances up from his work. ‘She’ll be down when I’m finished here. Take a seat.’

Devlin sits, but he does not relax. He watches Sir work. He watches me sweep. When the customer pays and leaves, Sir calls up the stairs.

‘Claire. You have a visitor.’

She comes down. Bald, scrubbed, wearing a simple dress—one of the few items of her own clothing she’s kept. When Devlin sees her, his face goes through a rapid sequence: shock, recognition, horror.

‘Christ, Claire. Your hair.’

‘Hello, Devlin.’

‘What happened to your hair?’

‘I shaved it. Well—he shaved it.’ She nods toward Sir. ‘I maintain it now.’

Devlin stands. He is a head taller than Sir, and he uses every inch of it.

‘Can we talk privately?’

‘We can talk here. These two will hear anything you have to say eventually.’

‘Claire—’

‘Sit down, Devlin. Please.’

He sits. She sits across from him. Sir leans against the counter, arms folded. I stand by the door with my broom, doing my best to be furniture.

‘People are worried,’ Devlin says. ‘You disappeared. You stopped answering your phone. You gave up your flat. Then I hear from Jenny that you’ve gone to live with some—’ he glances at Sir, ‘—some man you barely know, and you’ve shaved your head, and—Claire, this has all the hallmarks of a coercive situation.’

‘I appreciate your concern,’ Claire says, and her voice is calm—genuinely calm, not the forced calm of someone performing wellness. ‘But I’m here voluntarily. I came here of my own free will, and I stay of my own free will.’

‘You shaved your head.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your hair was—Claire, you spent years growing that hair. It was part of your identity. Part of your transition.’

‘It was. And then it wasn’t. Things change.’

‘Things change, or someone changes them for you?’

Sir speaks for the first time. ‘She asked me to do it. She said the words. No one forced her.’

Devlin turns to him. ‘And who are you, exactly? What is this arrangement?’

‘I’m a barber. She lives with me, and with him.’ He nods at me. ‘The arrangement is none of your business, but since you’ve come a long way, I’ll tell you this: she serves me. Voluntarily. The same way he does. She’s fed, clothed, housed, cared for. She is not abused, imprisoned, or coerced.’

‘She serves you.’ Devlin’s voice is flat. ‘A trans woman. Serving a man. Shaving her head for a man. You don’t see how that looks?’

‘I see how it looks. I don’t much care.’

‘Claire.’ Devlin turns back to her. ‘This is textbook. Isolation, dependency, identity destruction—the shaved head, the giving up of your flat, your job—’

‘I didn’t have a job. I had a series of temp contracts and a maxed-out credit card.’

‘That’s not the point—’

‘It is partly the point, Devlin. You’re imagining I had this wonderful life that I’ve been lured away from. I didn’t. I had a lonely flat and an empty diary and a lot of nights spent wondering what the point of it all was.’ She pauses. ‘And I wasn’t lured. I came looking.’

‘For what?’

‘For what he has.’ She looks at me. ‘I saw what Sir had done with him—the peace, the purpose, the total absence of bullshit—and I wanted it. I wanted someone to strip away all the noise and show me what was underneath.’

‘And what was underneath?’

‘Someone who kneels,’ she says simply. ‘Someone who serves. Someone who doesn’t need to be in charge of everything all the time. I spent years being strong, Devlin. Years of being the dominant one, the capable one, the one who holds everything together. And I was exhausted by it. I was performing strength because I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘There are therapists for that.’

‘I’ve had therapists. Four of them. They helped me transition. They didn’t help me with this—because this isn’t a pathology. It’s a preference. A deep one.’

Devlin is quiet for a moment. He looks from Claire to Sir to me and back again.

‘I want to talk to her alone,’ he says to Sir.

‘No,’ says Claire, before Sir can answer. ‘Whatever you want to say, you say in front of them. They’re my family.’

The word lands in the room with unexpected weight. Family. I feel it in my chest. Sir’s expression doesn’t change, but his hand moves, almost imperceptibly, and rests on my shoulder.

Devlin tries for another twenty minutes. He is earnest, thorough, and kind. He asks Claire if she’s been hurt. (No.) If she’s free to leave. (Yes.) If she has access to money, a phone, the outside world. (Yes to all three—Sir returned her phone after the first week, once it was clear she wasn’t leaving.) He asks if she’s happy.

‘Happier than I’ve ever been,’ she says, and I believe her, because I recognise the quality of it—that structural happiness, that foundational peace.

Devlin leaves unconvinced but out of ammunition. At the door, he turns back.

‘If you ever need help—’

‘I know where to find you.’

‘I mean it, Claire.’

‘I know you do. And I love you for it. But I don’t need rescuing. I need exactly what I’ve got.’

He leaves. The bell jingles behind him. Claire stands in the middle of the shop, her bare head catching the late afternoon light, and lets out a long, shaking breath.

‘Well done,’ says Sir.

‘Thank you, Sir.’

‘You called us your family.’

‘You are.’

He crosses the shop and takes her face in his hands. Kisses her forehead—the smooth, shaved dome of it—and holds her for a moment.

‘Go upstairs. Both of you. I’ve got a customer at four.’

We go upstairs. Claire sits on the edge of the bed—she has permission now, a privilege earned through weeks of service—and I sit beside her.

‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

‘I’m fine. He needed to see me. Now he’s seen me.’

‘Will there be others?’

‘Probably. Jenny, maybe. A couple of people from the support group.’ She runs her hand over her scalp—the gesture that has become, for all three of us, a kind of self-soothing, a rosary of skin. ‘Let them come. I’ll tell them the same thing.’

‘What thing?’

‘That I chose this. That I keep choosing it. Every morning when I shave my head, every time I kneel, every time I say *Sir*—I’m choosing it again. That’s not coercion. That’s the freest I’ve ever been.’

I take her hand. Her fingers close around mine. We sit together in the quiet flat, two bald, devoted creatures, and wait for Sir to finish with his four o’clock.

* * *

Jenny comes the following week. She is smaller than Devlin, quieter, more surgical in her concern. She sits in the shop and watches Claire sweep the floor—bald, graceful, unhurried—and something in her face softens.

‘You look different,’ she says.

‘I am different.’

‘Not just the hair. You look—settled. You never looked settled before.’

‘I wasn’t.’

Jenny stays for an hour. She asks fewer questions than Devlin and listens more carefully to the answers. She watches the way Claire moves around Sir—attentive, alert, orbiting him like a planet around its sun—and she watches the way Sir speaks to Claire, firm and direct but never cruel.

When she leaves, she hugs Claire at the door.

‘I don’t understand it,’ she says. ‘But I can see you’re not in danger. And you look—honestly, you look radiant.’

‘It’s the scalp,’ Claire says, deadpan. ‘Very reflective.’

Jenny laughs, and Claire laughs, and Sir—who has been pretending to reorganise his combs—makes a sound that might, under laboratory conditions, be classified as amusement.

* * *

There is one more incursion, and this one is harder.

A woman named Sandra, from the trans support group Claire used to attend. Sandra is newly transitioned, early in her journey, and she had looked up to Claire—Claire’s confidence, Claire’s beauty, Claire’s magnificent hair. When she hears what has happened, she is not concerned. She is angry.

She doesn’t come to the shop. She writes an email—to Claire, but also to three other members of the group—calling Claire’s situation abusive and her submission a betrayal. She writes that a trans woman shaving her head for a man is an act of self-destruction, a capitulation to male control, an undoing of everything transition is supposed to achieve.

Claire reads the email at the kitchen table, her face very still.

‘She’s wrong,’ I say.

‘She’s not entirely wrong,’ Claire says. ‘My hair was part of my transition. It meant something. Giving it up meant something too—but she’s right that it’s not nothing.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Reply. Honestly.’

She writes back—to Sandra only, not the group. I don’t read the email, but Claire tells me the gist of it later that evening, while we kneel side by side waiting for Sir to come upstairs.

She told Sandra that transition gave her the body she needed, but not the peace she needed. That her hair was beautiful, and she grieved it, and she would do it again tomorrow. That submission was not a betrayal of her womanhood but an expression of it—that she could only kneel this deeply because she had first stood up fully as herself. That the shaving was not an erasure of her femininity but a distillation of it: everything inessential stripped away until what remained was the woman herself, bare and true.

‘What did she say?’ I ask.

‘Nothing yet. She may never reply. That’s all right.’

Sir comes upstairs. We rise to our knees, side by side, two smooth skulls, two straight backs. He looks at us and something crosses his face—not a smile, exactly, but a recognition. A quiet pride.

‘Bath,’ he says, and we rise and follow him, and the evening liturgy begins.

* * *

Months pass.

Claire’s rebellions grow fewer and smaller, then cease entirely. Not because she has been broken—or not only because of that—but because the thing she was rebelling against turns out not to exist. She was fighting the idea of submission; the reality of it, she finds, is not a cage but a clearing.

She learns the positions until they are automatic. She learns to be fed from Sir’s fingers without flinching. She learns the bath ritual, the massage, the precise order of his tools. She learns, as I learned, that service is not degradation but devotion—that there is a profound dignity in doing a thing well for someone you love.

Because she does love him. As I love him. Differently—her love has a ferocity to it, a heat that mine doesn’t share—but unmistakably.

And Sir, who has never been with a woman, who navigated Claire’s body with the careful curiosity of an explorer in new terrain, has arrived somewhere surprising. He does not love her as a man loves a woman—he is not capable of that, and she does not need it. He loves her as a craftsman loves a rare material: for what she is, for what she can become, for the challenge and the satisfaction of shaping her.

He fucks her differently than he fucks me. With me, it is direct—the hard, familiar grammar of two male bodies, efficient and deep. With Claire, there is more preamble, more exploration. He has learned to read her nipples the way a musician reads a score. He has learned that her cock, stroked just so while he takes her from behind, produces an orgasm that leaves her shaking for minutes. He has learned that shaving her head immediately before sex—the warm lather, the scrape of the blade, the cool rinse—is the most reliable aphrodisiac he possesses.

‘It’s the vulnerability,’ Claire explains to me one evening. We are lying on our mat, whispering in the dark while Sir sleeps above us. ‘The razor on my head—it puts me in a state. Completely open. Completely his.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘It was the same for me, in the beginning.’

‘Is it still?’

I think about it. ‘Not the same. Deeper. Quieter. Like a hum instead of a shout.’

She reaches out and runs her palm over my skull. I do the same to her. Two smooth heads in the dark, finding each other.

‘I’m glad you brought me here,’ she whispers.

‘You brought yourself.’

‘You showed me the way.’

We lie in the dark, and I listen to Sir breathing above us, and I think about the meeting—that interminable meeting, a lifetime ago, in a town I can barely remember—and the walk to the barbershop, and the door opening, and the words that changed everything.

*I’m afraid it’s got a bit long. Can you please sort it out for me?*

He sorted it out. He sorted me out, and then he sorted Claire out, and now the three of us are here, in this small flat above a barbershop, bare and bound and happy.

Outside, the world turns. People have opinions. Devlin worries. Sandra judges. Helen sends bewildered Christmas cards. None of it touches us, here in the quiet centre of what we are.

In the morning, I will wake. I will shower. I will shave my skull, and then Claire’s, and then Sir’s. Three bald heads under my razor, three acts of devotion. Then breakfast, then the shop, then the long sweet afternoon behind closed doors.

This is my life now. This is our life.

And no one needs to sort it out but us.

—

*END OF PART FOUR*