Sort It Out For Me: Part Three

I enjoyed writing the continuation of Tester’s “Sort It Out For Me” so much that I decided to keep going. I hope you enjoy it! -LimeNina

 

Sort It Out For Me: Part Three

***

Months pass, and I become simple.

Not simple-minded—I don’t mean that. I mean stripped of complication. Reduced. The way a good sauce is reduced: everything unnecessary boiled away until what remains is concentrated, essential, intense.

I wake before dawn. I shower. I shave my skull—the razor gliding over terrain I know by touch alone now, every contour memorised, every angle automatic. I check the result with my palm: smooth, flawless, not a whisper of stubble. I shave my groin, my chest, my underarms. I am hairless from crown to toe, and I maintain that condition the way a monk maintains a vow.

Some mornings, though, he takes the razor from my hand. No explanation, no warning—just his fingers closing over mine and lifting the blade away. On those mornings I sit still while he shaves me himself, and the act transforms from routine into ritual, from maintenance into possession. My own hand on the razor is discipline; his hand on the razor is love. I never know which morning will be which, and the not-knowing is part of it.

I make his breakfast. Eggs, toast, coffee—always the same, always the way he likes it. I kneel beside his chair while he eats, and he feeds me from his fingers. I take each morsel with my lips. My jaw, my tongue, my throat: calibrated instruments now, precise in their function.

He opens the shop. I sweep, I clean, I fetch. I lay out his tools in the correct order—clippers, scissors, combs, razor, strop. I keep the hot towels ready. I greet customers with a nod and take their coats. They see a quiet, bald man in a plain shirt, collar buttoned to the throat. They don’t see the leather beneath the cotton. They don’t see what I am.

If they notice that the barber is bald too—his own skull shaved clean every morning, a practice he maintained long before I arrived—they probably think it’s a fashion statement, or a professional eccentricity. They don’t understand that it’s a mark of authority, not submission. That when I shave his head for him each morning, after I’ve done my own, I am performing an act of worship on an altar that mirrors mine.

When the shop is closed, I am his completely. Every evening the same beautiful liturgy: I run his bath, I wash him, I dry him, I oil and massage his body. Then he uses me—my mouth, my arse, my hands, whatever he requires. Some nights are tender. Some are brutal. I have stopped distinguishing between the two. Tenderness and brutality are simply different instruments; he plays them both, and I am the thing that sounds.

He has calibrated me like a Swiss watch. No wasted movement, no extraneous thought. I am pure function, pure devotion. When he says *kneel*, I am already kneeling. When he says *present*, I am already turning, already lowering, already offering myself. My body anticipates his commands the way a musician’s fingers anticipate a familiar score.

There is nothing I can refuse him. I learned this slowly, and then all at once.

* * *

The pain came first—or rather, the acceptance of pain.

Early on, perhaps two months in, he introduced the cane. A thin rattan thing, whippy and precise. He bent me over the back room chair—the same chair where it all began—and laid six strokes across my arse. Each one was a line of white fire, and I cried out, gripping the leather, tears running down my face.

‘Count them,’ he said.

I counted. Six became twelve. Twelve became a weekly ritual, sometimes more. The welts faded; the lesson didn’t. Pain was not punishment—or rather, punishment was not the point. The point was surrender. Each stroke was a question: *will you stay?* And each time my answer was the same. I stayed. I counted. I wept and I stayed.

After a caning he would kneel behind me and kiss the welts, and then ease himself inside me, and fuck me slowly while the heat still throbbed in my skin. The pain and the pleasure would merge until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began, and I would come without being touched, shuddering and sobbing, his cock buried deep.

‘Good boy,’ he would murmur, his lips against my burning scalp. ‘My good boy.’

* * *

Then came the embarrassment.

He began to use me in the shop—not while customers were present, but in the gaps between them. A Wednesday afternoon, the street quiet, the door locked for lunch. He would have me strip and kneel in the barber’s chair, legs spread over the arms, while he shaved me—skull, groin, everything—in full view of the plate-glass window. Anyone walking past could have looked in. The frosted lower half of the glass preserved a kind of modesty, but my shaved head, my naked shoulders, the expression on my face—these were visible to anyone who cared to glance.

No one ever stopped. Or if they did, I didn’t notice. I was too far gone, too deep in the trance of the razor on my scalp, his fingers tilting my chin, the cool air on freshly bared skin.

‘You like being seen,’ he said once. Not a question.

‘I like you being seen,’ I said. ‘I like people knowing what you can do.’

He smiled at that—a rare thing, his smile, and all the more valuable for its rarity. Then he put the razor down and fed me his cock, right there in the chair, the afternoon light falling across us both.

* * *

And then the humiliation, which was the last frontier, and the sweetest.

He took me to a pub one evening. Not a gay bar—an ordinary pub, the kind with football on the television and old men nursing pints. He sat at a table and I stood beside him.

‘Kneel,’ he said, quietly but clearly.

I knelt. On the floor, beside his chair, in a public house. My shaved head gleaming under the overhead lights. My collar visible above the neck of my shirt.

A few people glanced. Most looked away. One man at the bar stared for a long moment, then turned back to his drink.

Sir ordered a pint for himself and nothing for me. He drank it slowly, one hand resting on my bare scalp, his thumb tracing idle circles. People came and went. I knelt, and felt a kind of bliss that I cannot adequately describe—the bliss of being exactly what I was, in front of strangers, without pretence.

When we left, he kissed the top of my head in the car park.

‘You didn’t hesitate,’ he said.

‘No, Sir.’

‘You weren’t ashamed.’

‘No, Sir. I was proud.’

He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded, and something shifted between us—a deepening, a settling, as if the last tumbler in a lock had fallen into place.

That night he fucked me with a ferocity that left me gasping and bruised. Afterwards, lying on my mat, I realised I was happy—not in the fleeting, contingent way I had sometimes been happy before, but in a structural way, a foundational way, as if happiness were no longer an experience but a condition.

I had been emptied out and filled with something better.

* * *

I am thinking about all of this—the fullness of it, the completeness—when the phone rings one Tuesday morning while Sir is downstairs cutting hair.

It’s my sister, Helen. We haven’t spoken in four months.

‘Mum’s dead,’ she says. ‘Last night. Stroke. Quick, at least.’

I stand in the flat, naked, my hand on my smooth skull, and try to feel something appropriate. What comes is distant and muffled, like church bells heard through fog.

‘When’s the funeral?’

‘Friday. St. Andrew’s, half past eleven. You’ll come?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

I hang up and sit on the edge of the bed—his bed, which I am not normally permitted to use as furniture, but this seems like an exception he would grant. I wait until lunchtime. When he comes upstairs, I tell him.

He listens, nods.

‘You’ll go on Thursday. Come back Saturday.’

‘Will you come with me?’

‘No. This is yours to do.’ He cups my face in his hands, tilts it up. ‘You go, you deal with it, you come back. Two days.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And you don’t take the collar off.’

‘No, Sir.’

He kisses my forehead. ‘I’m sorry about your mother.’

‘Thank you, Sir.’

It is the most tender exchange we have had in weeks, and it undoes me more than the news itself.

* * *

The train carries me back to a life that no longer feels like mine.

I’m wearing a dark suit—Sir bought it for me months ago, for occasions exactly like this. My skull gleams under the carriage lights. The collar sits hidden beneath my shirt. I have a small bag with a change of clothes and a razor.

The town is unchanged. The same grey streets, the same tired shops, the same church spire poking above the rooflines. I walk from the station to Helen’s house, where I’m to stay the night.

She opens the door and regards me.

‘Christ, you’re thin.’

‘Hello, Helen.’

‘And the head. You’re still doing that, then.’

‘Still doing it.’

She lets me in. Her husband, Richard, shakes my hand with the wary politeness of a man who suspects me of something but isn’t sure what. Their children are at school. We drink tea in the kitchen.

‘So,’ Helen says. ‘Tell me about this life of yours. You’re still living above the barber’s shop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘I work in the shop. I assist him.’

‘Assist him.’ She turns this over. ‘You had a good career. Fifteen years. And now you’re assisting a barber.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re happy?’

‘Very.’

She looks at me—really looks—and I can see her trying to square the brother she remembers, the one with the good suits and the corporate job, with this bald, quiet man sitting at her kitchen table. She can’t do it, and the failure makes her uncomfortable.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘As long as you’re happy.’

‘I am.’

Richard excuses himself to do something in the garden. Helen and I sit in silence for a moment.

‘Is he your—boyfriend? Partner? What do I call him?’

‘You can call him my partner.’

‘And does your partner have a name?’

It occurs to me that I have never used his name in conversation. To me he is Sir, and has been for so long that his given name—Daniel—feels like a word in a foreign language.

‘Daniel,’ I say. ‘His name is Daniel.’

‘Right. And Daniel couldn’t come?’

‘He has the shop to run.’

‘Of course.’ She pauses. ‘There’ll be people at the funeral. Aunts, cousins. People who’ll ask questions.’

‘I know.’

‘Just—be careful what you say. Some of them are quite traditional.’

‘Helen. Our mother has died. I think they’ll have other things on their minds.’

She concedes this with a nod, but I can see the worry in her eyes—not for me, but for herself, for the explanations she might have to give.

* * *

The funeral is as funerals are. The vicar speaks kindly about a woman he barely knew. My mother’s friends weep and clutch tissues. Helen reads a poem and does it well. I sit in the pew and feel the collar against my throat and think about Sir, and then feel guilty about thinking about Sir, and then stop feeling guilty because guilt is an indulgence he has trained out of me.

Afterwards, the reception. A church hall, sandwiches, tea. I move among the mourners with my bare scalp and my buttoned collar, accepting condolences, deflecting questions. Most people are too absorbed in their own grief or social anxiety to interrogate me closely.

Not all.

Aunt Margaret, my mother’s younger sister: ‘But what happened to all your lovely hair?’

‘I shave it, Aunt Margaret.’

‘On purpose? Good heavens. You look like a convict.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

My cousin David, emboldened by two glasses of sherry: ‘Helen says you’ve chucked in the job and gone to live with some bloke?’

‘That’s broadly accurate.’

‘What do you do all day?’

‘I work in his shop. He’s a barber.’

‘A barber.’ David blinks. ‘Bit of a comedown, isn’t it?’

‘It doesn’t feel like one.’

I say this with such plainness, such absence of defensiveness, that David has nowhere to go with it. He drifts away. I realise that Sir’s training has given me something I never had before: the ability to state what I am without apology. The professional man would have hedged, qualified, made self-deprecating jokes. The man I am now simply tells the truth and lets it sit.

* * *

And then, near the end of the afternoon, standing by the tea urn:

‘Well, look at you.’

I turn, and there is Claire.

She’s taller than I remember—heels, probably, though she was always tall. Dark hair pulled back, sharp jaw, red lipstick. A black dress that manages to be both funereal and commanding. She looks, as she always did, like someone who has just been told something amusing and is deciding whether to share it.

‘Claire.’

‘You look magnificent,’ she says, and reaches up to run her palm over my scalp. The gesture is so casually possessive that I almost flinch. Almost.

‘You look well,’ I say.

‘I look fabulous, darling, but that’s not what we’re discussing.’ She takes my arm and steers me towards a quiet corner. ‘I want to hear everything. Helen told me you’ve gone and given yourself to some man, and I want every sordid detail.’

Claire and I dated—if you can call it that—for six months, perhaps seven years ago. She was the first person who ever put me on my knees. I was the first man she’d been with since her transition who let her be fully herself in bed. We were good for each other, for a while, but she wanted more than I could give—or more than I was ready to give—and we parted gently. She stayed in touch with Helen, of all people. Women’s solidarity, perhaps.

‘His name is Daniel,’ I say. ‘He’s a barber.’

‘A barber.’ Her eyes glitter. ‘How delicious. And he did this?’ She touches my head again, fingertips this time, reading the smoothness.

‘He did it the first time. I maintain it now. Every day.’

‘Every day. God.’ She takes a breath. ‘And the rest? The kneeling and the collars and the being owned?’

‘Helen’s been thorough, I see.’

‘Helen’s been bewildered. I’m the one being thorough. Tell me.’

So I tell her. Not everything—not the raw physical specifics, not here in a church hall with my mother’s friends nibbling egg sandwiches—but enough. The collar. The positions. The daily rituals of service: the shaving, the bathing, the feeding. The stripping away of everything extraneous until I was nothing but function and devotion.

She listens intently. Her eyes never leave my face.

‘And the sex?’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘Better than us?’

I hesitate, because I owe her honesty. ‘Different. You showed me what I wanted. He gave it to me.’

She doesn’t flinch. She nods, slowly, as if confirming something she already suspected.

‘I always knew you had more in you than I could reach. More depth, more surrender. You held back with me—not on purpose, I don’t think—but there was always a reserve. A last inch you wouldn’t give.’

‘I wasn’t ready.’

‘No. You weren’t.’ She sips her tea. ‘And now?’

‘Now there’s nothing left to hold back. He’s taken it all. I gave it willingly.’

She is quiet for a moment. Around us, the funeral reception is winding down. People are gathering coats, making their goodbyes.

‘He’s made more of you than I ever could,’ she says, and there is no bitterness in it—only recognition, and something else. Something that looks, from where I’m standing, very much like hunger.

‘Claire—’

‘Don’t.’ She holds up a hand. ‘I’m processing. Give me a moment.’

She takes a long breath. Lets it out.

‘You were always mine a little bit, in my head. Even after we ended. I thought: he’ll come back when he’s ready. He’ll come back to me.’ She looks at me steadily. ‘But you didn’t. You found something better. Someone who could finish what I started.’

‘You started something important. I wouldn’t be where I am without you.’

‘Oh, I know that, darling.’ The faintest smile. ‘I taught you to kneel. He taught you to stay.’

We stand together in silence. Then she reaches into her bag and produces a card.

‘My number. My address. I’d like to hear more about this Daniel of yours. I’d like to—’ She stops. Starts again. ‘I’d like to see what he’s built.’

I take the card. ‘I’ll ask him.’

‘You’ll ask his permission, you mean.’

‘Yes.’

She laughs—a real laugh, low and warm—and shakes her head. ‘You really have gone all the way, haven’t you.’

‘All the way.’

She kisses my cheek. Her lipstick leaves a mark I don’t wipe off.

‘Go home to your man,’ she says. ‘And give him my regards.’

* * *

I tell Sir about Claire on my first evening back.

We are in the bathroom. He is in the tub; I am kneeling beside it, soaping his chest in slow circles. His eyes are closed.

‘So this Claire,’ he says. ‘She dominated you.’

‘She was the first person who did, yes, Sir.’

‘And she’s a trans woman. She still has her cock.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘What was she like? In bed.’

‘Commanding. Inventive. She liked to use my mouth.’ I pause, keep washing. ‘But she couldn’t take me as far as you have. I think she knew it at the time, and she knows it now.’

He opens his eyes. ‘She wants to come here.’

‘I think so, Sir.’

‘Why?’

I think carefully before I answer. ‘To see what you’ve made of me. To understand what she couldn’t do.’

‘And what else?’

He always sees further than I do. I search for the truth.

‘I think she’s hungry, Sir. I think she saw me and recognised something in herself. Something she’s been looking for.’

He is silent for a long time. I wash his arms, his hands, between his fingers.

‘Tell her she can visit. A weekend. She sleeps in the spare room. She observes. Nothing more, until I say otherwise.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And you—you’re mine. You don’t touch her, she doesn’t touch you, unless I give the word. Clear?’

‘Clear, Sir.’

‘Good.’ He stands, water streaming off him, and I wrap him in the towel. As I dry his back, he says, almost to himself: ‘Interesting.’

* * *

Claire arrives on a Friday afternoon.

She steps out of a taxi with a leather overnight bag and a look of studied nonchalance that doesn’t quite conceal her nerves. She’s wearing jeans, boots, a silk blouse. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders—thick, glossy, falling past her collarbone. She looks beautiful and self-possessed and slightly terrified.

I meet her at the door. Sir is with a customer—an old man getting his weekly trim—and I show her upstairs.

‘So this is where you live,’ she says, looking around the spare flat. The mat at the foot of the bed. The absence of personal effects. The razor and strop laid out by the bathroom sink.

‘This is where I live.’

‘It’s very—’

‘Bare. I know.’

She picks up the straight razor, turns it in her fingers.

‘You use this every day?’

‘Every morning. On my head, and everywhere else.’

She looks at me. Really looks, the way she did at the funeral, as if seeing through my clothes to the smooth, owned body beneath.

‘Show me,’ she says.

‘I can’t. Not without his permission.’

She sets the razor down. ‘Right. Of course.’ A pause. ‘I’m not used to this. The waiting. The asking.’

‘No one is. At first.’

The shop bell jingles below. Footsteps on the stairs. Sir comes in, wiping his hands on a towel.

He is shorter than Claire by several inches, and broader. Compact, muscular, plain-looking. Nothing about him would catch your eye on the street. But when he enters a room, the room contracts around him. Claire feels it—I can see it in the way her shoulders straighten, the way her chin lifts slightly, a defensive reflex.

‘Claire,’ he says.

‘Daniel.’

‘You’ll call me Sir, while you’re in this house.’

A beat of silence. Something electric passes between them—a contest, brief and intense, fought entirely with eye contact.

‘I don’t call anyone Sir,’ Claire says.

‘You will here. Or you’ll leave.’

Another silence. I can see Claire weighing it—the pride, the curiosity, the hunger. The hunger wins.

‘Sir,’ she says, and the word comes out rough, as if it’s scraped her throat on the way up.

‘Good. Sit down. He’ll make tea.’

I make tea. I bring it to them. I kneel on the floor beside Sir’s chair. Claire watches all of this with an expression I can’t quite read—fascination, desire, and something like grief.

‘He told me about you,’ Sir says. ‘You were important to him.’

‘I like to think so.’

‘You taught him to kneel. I taught him to mean it.’ He sips his tea. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘No. Try again.’

Claire’s eyes flash. She is not used to being challenged. In her world, she is the one who challenges.

‘I wanted to see what you’d done with him.’

‘And?’

She glances at me—kneeling, still, my bald head level with Sir’s knee.

‘And you’ve done more than I thought possible.’

‘That’s because you held back with him. You were afraid of breaking him.’

‘Maybe I was.’

‘I wasn’t.’ He puts down his cup. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen this weekend. You’ll watch. You’ll see how we live. You won’t interfere, and you won’t give him orders—he responds to one voice only, and it’s mine. If you want to understand what we have, you’ll understand it by watching, not by participating. Unless I decide otherwise. Clear?’

‘Clear,’ she says. Then, after a pause: ‘…Sir.’

* * *

That evening, she watches.

She sits in the corner of the bathroom while I bathe him. She watches me soap his body with the care and precision of long practice. She watches me dry him, oil him, kneel while he eats. She watches me clear the plates and wash up and return to kneel beside his chair.

She says almost nothing. But her eyes never leave us.

Later, when Sir takes me into the bedroom, she stands in the doorway. He hasn’t told her to leave.

‘Kneel,’ he says to me.

I kneel.

‘Present.’

I turn, lower my head, raise my arse.

He fucks me from behind, hard and fast, his hands gripping my hips. Claire watches from three feet away, her lips parted, her breathing audible. I can smell her perfume mingling with the scent of lubricant and sweat.

When he finishes inside me, he pulls out and turns to her.

‘What did you see?’

‘I saw—’ Her voice is unsteady. She clears her throat. ‘I saw him disappear. He stopped being a person and became—a function. An instrument.’

‘Yes. That’s what total submission looks like. You’ve been doing it in halves. Costumes and safewords and negotiated scenes. That’s theatre.’ He nods at me, still on all fours, his cum leaking from me. ‘This is the real thing.’

She stares at me. I can feel her gaze on my bare scalp, my bare arse, the wet gleam of my used hole.

‘You don’t have a safeword?’ she asks me.

‘No.’

‘Aren’t you afraid?’

I look up at her. ‘Of what?’

She has no answer for this. She goes to the spare room. Through the wall, I hear her—muffled, urgent sounds, the creak of the bed. She is touching herself. Sir hears it too. He says nothing, but his hand rests on my skull, possessive and warm.

* * *

Saturday morning.

Claire emerges looking tired, slightly dishevelled, newly uncertain. She watches me shave my head at the bathroom sink—the ritual she’d asked to see the day before. The lather, the blade, the scrape and rinse, the palm check. Sir stands behind me, monitoring, though he hasn’t needed to correct my technique in months.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says quietly. ‘The ritual of it. Like a sacrament.’

‘It is a sacrament,’ Sir says. ‘He gives me his hair every day. Every day he chooses to be bare for me.’

Claire touches her own hair—unconsciously, I think, a protective gesture, her fingers finding the thick dark mass of it.

Sir notices. Of course he notices.

‘Come down to the shop,’ he says.

She follows us downstairs. Sir opens the shop, and the Saturday customers begin to arrive. Claire sits in the waiting area, leafing through a magazine, watching him work. Watching the clippers, the scissors, the comb. Watching hair fall.

Between customers, Sir catches her eye.

‘You keep touching your hair,’ he says.

‘Do I?’

‘Every few minutes. Like you’re afraid it’s going to disappear.’

‘Maybe I am.’

‘Or maybe you’re afraid it won’t.’

She says nothing. Colour rises in her cheeks—Claire, who I have never seen blush, is blushing.

A customer arrives and the moment passes. But something has been planted.

* * *

That afternoon, the shop closed, Sir does something unprecedented: he invites Claire into the back room.

I am already in the chair, naked, collared, awaiting my afternoon shave. Sir is beside me, strop in hand. Claire stands in the doorway, arms folded.

‘Come in,’ Sir says. ‘Close the door.’

She does.

‘Sit in the other chair.’

She sits. The identical barber’s chair, the one where Sir first shaved me, first fucked me, first strapped me down. Claire settles into it with the wariness of someone who can feel the charge in a piece of furniture.

‘Watch,’ Sir says.

He shaves me. The full ritual—skull, face, neck. Then he reclines the chair and does my chest, my stomach, my groin. I am hard by the time he reaches my pubic bone, and he ignores my erection with the indifference of long practice, shaving around and beneath it, lifting my cock out of the way with casual fingers, scraping the razor over the tender skin of my inner thighs.

Claire watches every stroke. Her hands are gripping the armrests of her chair.

When he’s done, he towels me off and stands between the two chairs, looking from me to her.

‘You want this,’ he says to her.

‘I want—’ She stops. ‘I don’t know what I want.’

‘Yes you do. You’ve known since the funeral. Since you touched his head and felt what was underneath.’

‘I’m not like him. I don’t submit.’

‘You’ve never met anyone worth submitting to.’ He takes a step closer to her chair. ‘You dominate because no one’s ever been strong enough to stop you. But you’re tired of being in charge. I can see it in the way you hold your shoulders. You’re carrying everything yourself, and you’ve been doing it for years.’

I watch from my chair. Claire’s face is a war—pride and need contending for territory. Her jaw is set but her eyes are liquid.

‘I’m a dominant,’ she says. ‘That’s who I am.’

‘That’s who you’ve been. There’s a difference.’ He reaches out and takes a strand of her hair between his fingers. She doesn’t pull away. ‘You’re shaking,’ he says.

She is. Visibly.

‘I’m going to ask you a question,’ he says. ‘Think carefully before you answer, because I won’t ask again. Do you want to sit in that chair as my guest, or as my subject?’

‘I can’t—I don’t just—’ She is breathing hard. ‘You can’t just dismantle someone in an afternoon.’

‘I dismantled him in an afternoon.’ He nods towards me. ‘He walked in off the street asking me to sort him out, and I took him apart. I can do the same with you, if you’ll let me. But you have to let me. That’s the price.’

Silence. The clock on the wall ticks. I can hear my own heartbeat.

‘What would you do?’ she says, and her voice is barely above a whisper.

He takes the cape from the hook and shakes it out. The fabric snaps in the quiet air.

‘First this,’ he says. ‘Then we see what’s underneath.’

* * *

She stands. She is trembling. She unbuttons her blouse, folds it carefully, sets it on the counter. Her bra follows. Her breasts are small, neat, her nipples dark and hardened. She unbuckles her jeans and steps out of them. Her underwear is black lace, and the outline of her cock is visible beneath it.

She stands before him in her knickers and her fear, and he looks at her the way he once looked at me—appraisingly, proprietorially—and then nods.

‘In the chair.’

She sits. He fastens the cape around her neck. Her dark hair spills over it, rich and heavy, falling past her shoulders.

‘You’ve grown this for years,’ he says, running his fingers through it.

‘Since my transition. It took a long time.’

‘I know. That’s what makes it valuable.’ He picks up the comb and draws it slowly through her hair, from root to tip. She closes her eyes. ‘That’s what makes giving it up mean something.’

‘I haven’t said I’m giving it up.’

‘You’re in the chair. The cape is on. You haven’t moved.’

Her eyes open. They find mine in the mirror—me, naked and shaved and gleaming in the adjacent chair. I hold her gaze. I try to show her, with my eyes, what I cannot say with words: that the other side of this is not loss but arrival.

‘I’m afraid,’ she says.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Fear means you understand what’s about to happen.’

He reaches for the clippers. The large black pair. The ones he used on me, that first afternoon, a lifetime ago. He switches them on, and the room fills with their buzz—a sound I know as intimately as my own breathing.

He stands behind her. One hand rests on her shoulder.

‘Last chance,’ he says.

She looks at herself in the mirror. A beautiful woman with beautiful hair. Then she looks at me. A smooth, devoted, transfigured thing.

‘Do it,’ she says. ‘Sir.’

The word breaks something open in her. I can see it happen—a crumbling, a collapse, a release. Tears spill down her cheeks even before the clippers touch her.

He places the bare blade at her forehead, dead centre, and drives it back.

The first stroke opens a white path through her dark hair. A thick swathe of it slides down the cape and into her lap, and she makes a sound—not a word, not a moan, something more elemental, the sound of a self being unmade.

He makes another pass, widening the bare channel, and more hair tumbles. She is weeping openly now, tears and snot, her chest heaving under the cape. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t slow down. Pass after pass, the clippers mowing through years of careful growth, and the hair falls in dark curtains around her.

I watch, transfixed. My cock is painfully hard. I have never seen anything so beautiful as this demolition.

He works around to the sides, holding her head steady with one firm hand, tilting it this way and that. The clippers strip her bare, pass by pass, and the woman in the mirror transforms. The long feminine curtain of hair gives way to a rough stubble, then to the pale contour of her skull—and she is extraordinary. The bones of her face, freed from the softening frame of hair, are stark and magnificent. Her cheekbones, her jaw, the long column of her throat.

He sets the clippers down. She is shorn to the scalp, her lap full of hair, her face wet with tears. She looks at herself in the mirror and I can see her trying to recognise what she sees.

‘We’re not done,’ he says.

The lather. The brush, working foam over her raw scalp. She shudders at the touch. Then the razor, and the long slow scrape of steel on skin, and the stubble falling away in tiny dark crescents. He shaves her with the same unhurried precision he uses on me, and when he’s done her head is as smooth and bare as mine—as naked as an egg, gleaming under the light.

He wipes her clean with a warm towel. Then he stands behind her, both hands on her bare skull, and they regard each other in the mirror.

‘There you are,’ he says.

She can’t speak. She raises one shaking hand and touches her own head—the shocking smoothness of it, the absence where all that hair once was.

‘There you are,’ he says again. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

* * *

What happens next happens slowly, and then quickly.

He removes the cape. He tells her to stand. She stands, in her black lace knickers, shaved and shaking. He looks at her body—the small breasts, the flat stomach, the visible cock beneath the lace.

‘Take those off,’ he says.

She hesitates—the last hesitation, I think, she will ever make with him—and then slides her knickers down and steps out of them. Her cock hangs between her thighs, half-hard, and she stands before him as she is: a bald woman with a penis, stripped of every pretence.

‘Kneel,’ he says.

And Claire—Claire, who has never knelt for anyone in her life, who dominated me and every man before me, who wore her authority like armour—kneels.

He turns to me.

‘Come here.’

I rise from my chair and stand beside him. We look down at her—two men standing over a kneeling woman, all three of us shaved smooth, all three of us transformed.

‘She’s mine now,’ he says to me. ‘Like you’re mine. Do you accept that?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

He looks down at her. ‘And you. Do you accept it?’

‘Yes, Sir.’ Her voice is small, cracked, newborn.

‘Good.’ He runs his hand over her bare skull, then over mine. Two smooth heads under his palm. His property. His creations.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘Show her what I taught you. On your knees.’

I kneel in front of Claire. She looks at me—bald, just as I am bald, bare and shaking and new. I lean forward and take her cock in my mouth. She gasps, her hands coming to my head, fingers sliding over the smooth skin, and I can feel her trembling, feel the tears still wet on her thighs.

Sir moves behind her. I hear his zip.

‘You’re going to take me,’ he tells her, ‘while he takes you. And you’re going to understand what it feels like to be held between two kinds of devotion.’

She nods, unable to speak, and I work my mouth on her, tasting the salt of her, the heat, while behind her Sir positions himself and pushes inside.

She cries out—pleasure, pain, the annihilation of self—and grips my skull with both hands, pulling me onto her. I take her deep, my throat opening, while Sir fucks her with slow, measured strokes. She is caught between us, filled and filling, dominating nothing, surrendering everything.

When she comes it is with a sound I have never heard from her—not the controlled, performative moan of domination but something raw and broken and true, a howl of release, and she pulses in my mouth while Sir drives into her from behind, and for a long suspended moment we are three bodies, three bald skulls, three demolished selves, fused into a single act of obliteration.

* * *

Afterwards, the three of us on the floor of the back room.

Hair everywhere—all hers, great dark hanks of it scattered across the linoleum. She lies between us, her bald head on Sir’s chest, her hand on my thigh. We are all breathing hard.

She touches her head again. Again. Can’t stop touching it.

‘I can feel everything,’ she whispers. ‘The air. Your skin. I can feel everything.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s how it starts.’

Sir’s hand moves from her head to mine and back again. Two skulls under his palm. He says nothing for a long time.

Then: ‘There’s a mat. At the foot of the bed. It’s his, but he can share.’

I look at Claire. She looks at me. Her eyes are red, her face bare, her skull gleaming.

‘Yes, Sir,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Sir.’

* * *

Monday morning.

I wake before dawn. Beside me on the mat, Claire stirs, her bald head catching the faint light from the window. Above us, Sir breathes steadily in the bed.

I rise. I shower. I shave—my skull, my body, the whole ritual. Then I wake Claire and hand her the razor.

‘Your turn,’ I say. ‘I’ll show you how.’

She sits on the edge of the tub, naked, her overnight stubble a dark shadow on her pale scalp. I lather her head with slow, careful hands, and she closes her eyes.

‘Like a sacrament,’ she murmurs, remembering.

‘Yes. Every day. You choose it every day.’

I teach her the angles, the pressure, the direction—the same way he taught me, that first morning, a lifetime ago. The blade scrapes, and the stubble falls, and beneath it her scalp emerges, smooth and clean and new.

When I’m done, I rinse her with cool water and run my palm over her skull. Flawless. She opens her eyes and looks at me and we are mirrors of each other—two shaved, devoted creatures, kneeling on a bathroom floor.

‘Breakfast,’ says Sir from the doorway, and we rise, and follow him, and begin.

***

*END OF PART THREE*