Veneer

Veneer by LimeNina

—

I cut hair for a living and I have too much of my own. Dark auburn, thick as rope, halfway down my back in waves I haven’t had to work for since puberty. Men comment on it. They always have. I smile and say thank you and feel nothing at all.

My name is Rae. I am thirty-four. I run a chair in a decent salon in a university town and I am good at what I do. I can read a face in three seconds and know what it needs. I know what hair gives people, what it hides, what it allows them to pretend.

I didn’t know what taking it all away could do. I know now.

* * *

She came in on a Wednesday. Late afternoon, the salon half-empty, the light going gold. The door chimed and I looked up and something in my chest seized.

Tall. Five-ten in flat shoes, scuffed at the toes. Dark jeans, grey linen shirt with the sleeves rolled. No jewellery. No makeup. Olive skin, freckles across the nose. Jaw like a blade. Eyes so dark they were almost black, and in them a quality I didn’t have a name for yet. I’d learn to call it certainty.

Her hair was short—a grown-out crop, three inches on top, rough at the sides. Dark, almost black, pushed back from her forehead. It looked like she’d been running her hands through it for weeks instead of getting it cut.

‘Walk-in slot?’ Low voice. Direct.

‘I can fit you in now.’

She sat. I caped her. She ducked her head without being asked.

‘What are we doing?’

She met my eyes in the mirror. ‘Something shorter. More than you’re thinking.’

I gave her a sharp fade—skin tight at the temples, two inches on top, textured and pushed back. It was the best haircut I’d done in months. It showed off the bones of her skull, the hard line of her jaw, the way her ears sat flat and clean.

She looked at herself and nothing moved in her face.

‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘You’re skilled. It’s not enough.’

‘No,’ I said. I could have gone shorter—could have picked up the clippers again right then. But something told me not to. The same instinct I use when a client wants a dramatic change and I know they need to live with each stage before the next. You don’t take someone from long to bald in one sitting. You let the idea grow as the hair shrinks. You let them see themselves changing, and want more, and come back.

‘Can I come back?’

‘Wednesday. Same time.’

She paid. She tipped well. At the door: ‘I’m Nell.’

‘Rae.’

‘I know. It’s on the wall.’

Half a smile, and she was gone, and I stood at my station with my hand on the warm chair and felt her absence like a hole in the air.

* * *

She came back. Every Wednesday. Each time shorter. The second visit I took the top to an inch, the sides to a half guard. The third, a number one all over. Her skull was emerging week by week—the dome of it, the elegant nape, the bone curving behind her ears. She was becoming the thing that was under the hair, and the thing was magnificent, and each time I put my hands on her head I felt a heat in the pit of my stomach that I could not account for professionally.

On the third visit she said, ‘Have coffee with me.’

I said yes before the sentence was finished.

She ordered for both of us. No consultation. The assumption that she knew what I wanted, delivered without apology, and the quietly proprietary feel of it went through me like warm water.

She told me about herself in pieces. Thirty-six. Moved from Edinburgh after a relationship ended. Furniture restorer—workshop on the industrial estate. The relationship was nine years, a woman called Fiona.

‘Fiona wanted safe,’ Nell said. ‘Settled. I don’t do settled.’ Her eyes, dark and still, over the rim of her cup. ‘I’ve always been with women, Rae. Since I was sixteen. There’s never been anyone else.’

I nodded. My face was hot. I picked up my coffee and put it down again without drinking.

‘That makes you nervous,’ she said.

‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

‘It doesn’t need to.’

‘I’ve never—I’ve only been with men.’

‘I know.’ How did she know? What was visible in me that I couldn’t see myself?

I stared at her. She looked back with that steady certainty.

‘Same time next Wednesday?’ she said.

‘For the cut or the coffee?’

‘Both.’

* * *

This became the pattern. Wednesdays: the cut, then coffee. The coffees got longer. She asked questions I wasn’t ready for, and I answered them anyway, because she had a way of looking at me that made evasion feel like a waste of both our time.

I told her about the men. Tom, David, the others. A succession of nice, adequate, unmemorable. She listened with her chin on her hand and her dark eyes on my face.

‘What was the sex like?’

The bluntness of it made me redden. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine.’

‘Adequate. It was all—adequate. They did the right things. It just never felt like anything was at stake.’

‘When does it feel like something’s at stake?’

‘When I shave someone’s nape with the open razor. The blade on their skin. They can’t see what I’m doing. They’re trusting me with a weapon against their throat.’

‘And that turns you on.’

Not a question. A diagnosis. My face was burning.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Has anything else ever turned you on that much?’

‘No.’

She reached across the table and took my jaw in her hand. Not my cheek—my jaw, her fingers firm, tilting my face towards her the way I tilted clients towards the mirror. A barber’s grip. A possessive grip. In a café. In public.

‘It will,’ she said. Then she let go and picked up her coffee and talked about oak veneer as if nothing had happened, and I sat there with my jaw tingling and my cunt throbbing and thought: *I am in so much trouble.*

* * *

The first kiss was at my car, after dinner. A Friday. A small Italian place she’d chosen, food she’d ordered for both of us without asking. The tagliatelle was perfect. She’d been right about what I wanted, which was becoming a pattern that thrilled me and frightened me in equal measure.

At the car she backed me against the door and kissed me. Not a question. A statement. Her mouth firm and hot and tasting of wine, her hand on the back of my neck, her fingers finding the bare skin under my hair, and the sensation of her fingertips on my nape—the place I frequently shaved on other people—sent a bolt of heat through me so violent my knees buckled.

I kissed her back. I kissed her back and the desire was nothing I recognised. Not the gentle warmth of Tom’s bed, the comfortable escalation, the predictable ending. This was a razor on a nape—sharp, dangerous, real. I was shaking. I was wet. I was terrified.

She pulled back. Her hand stayed on my neck.

‘Come to my workshop on Friday,’ she said. ‘After you close.’

‘What for?’

‘Because I said so.’

I drove home and sat in my car in the dark and pressed my thighs together and didn’t touch myself because touching myself felt like it would break something open that I wasn’t ready to open. My hands were trembling on the steering wheel. My scalp was prickling. Between my legs was a heat I had no category for—not the manageable warmth of ordinary arousal but something hotter, deeper, structural, as if something fundamental had been switched on and there was no switch to turn it off.

I went inside. I locked the door. I lasted eight minutes before I had my hand between my legs, and when I came I was thinking about Nell’s fingers on my nape and the sound she’d made—a low hum, almost subvocal—against my mouth, and the orgasm was sharper and more violent than anything Tom or David or any of the adequate men had ever produced in me, and it left me gasping and staring at the ceiling and knowing, with absolute clarity, that I was lost.

* * *

The workshop. Friday.

Brick walls, linseed oil, sawdust. A half-stripped oak dresser in the centre of the room, its veneer peeled back to show the raw wood.

‘Feel it,’ she said.

I put my hand on the stripped side. Warm, smooth, alive with grain. Then the veneered side. Cold. Dead. A surface pretending.

‘You see the difference,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She was standing very close. I could feel her body heat.

‘I want you to stop wearing dresses,’ she said.

The sentence landed on me with a weight that was out of proportion to its content. Stop wearing dresses. A small thing. Except it wasn’t, because the dresses were the hair’s supporting act—chosen to complement it, always, for twenty years—and without them the hair was just hair, unframed, unexplained, and I would have to decide what I was without the costume.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Because I want to see what’s under the performance. Jeans. Plain colours. Simple things. Things that let your face be the point instead of the hair.’

‘And if I say no?’

She looked at me. Patient, certain, unyielding. ‘You won’t say no.’

She was right. I knew she was right, and the knowing was the frightening part—not that she was telling me what to wear but that I wanted to be told. That some part of me, some deep and previously inaccessible part, had been waiting for someone to take the decisions off me. To strip them away the way she stripped veneer. To tell me: *this is what’s under all that. This is what you are.*

‘All right,’ I said. ‘No more dresses.’

She kissed me. Slower this time. Her hand in my hair, her fist closing around it, pulling my head back, and the tug on the roots went straight to my clit and I gasped into her mouth.

‘Good girl,’ she said.

I nearly came standing up.

* * *

The next two weeks. An escalation that I can only describe as controlled collapse.

She told me to stop wearing makeup. Not a suggestion—a flat, quiet directive, delivered in the workshop while her hand rested on the back of my neck. ‘You don’t need it. It’s a layer between your face and the world. Take it off.’

I went to work barefaced the next morning and felt naked. Exposed. My skin was paler than I’d realised, the freckles more visible, the shadows under my eyes unmasked. Clients glanced at me and I could see them registering the change—some small recalibration happening behind their eyes—and the vulnerability of it made me want to crawl out of my own skin.

By Thursday I didn’t want the makeup back. My face without it was plainer and realer and mine.

She told me to stop painting my nails. She told me to get rid of the perfume. ‘I want to smell *you*,’ she said, her mouth against my ear, her fingers interlaced with mine. ‘Not a bottle.’

She told me what to eat. This was unsettling. We were at the Italian place, the second time, and I reached for the menu and she put her hand over mine and moved it away.

‘I’ll order,’ she said.

‘You always order.’

‘Because I’m good at it. And because you like it when I choose for you. Don’t you.’

Not a question. I put the menu down.

I drink Pinot Grigio. I have always drunk Pinot Grigio. It is the one taste I have never questioned—I like it, it’s mine, it’s the flavour of Friday nights and restaurant dinners and the comfortable routines of my adult life.

Nell ordered me a Malbec. Red. Heavy. A wine I’d tried once and actively disliked.

‘I don’t like red wine,’ I said.

‘I know. You’ll drink it because I want you to drink it.’

I stared at her. ‘Why?’

‘Because changing what you drink is a way of changing you.’ She said it simply. Factually. As if she were describing a process in the workshop—sandpaper grade, solvent type. ‘And I am changing you. And you’re letting me. And you want me to. You like the feeling.’

My mouth was dry. My heart was hammering. The Malbec sat in front of me, dark as blood.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I like the feeling.’

‘Then drink it.’

I drank it. It was heavy and bitter and not what I would have chosen, and the not-choosing was the point, and the point went through me like a blade. I drank it and I felt myself yield—not just to the wine but to the principle behind the wine: *your preferences are not fixed. Your boundaries are not walls. I can move them. You will let me move them.*

She ordered me the lamb. I eat fish. I have always eaten fish at Italian restaurants—safe, predictable, the choice that required no thought. The lamb arrived pink and bloody and I ate it and it was good—actually good, better than the fish would have been—and this was the worst part, because it meant she was *right*. She knew me better than my own habits knew me. She could override me and find something underneath that I hadn’t known was there.

Halfway through the meal, she said: ‘You say “I suppose” a lot.’

‘Do I?’

‘Constantly. It’s your hedge. Your way of never fully committing to a statement. “I suppose we are.” “I suppose it does.” As if everything you think comes with an escape route.’

She was right. I said it all the time. I’d said it to her, in this restaurant, probably three times already.

‘Stop saying it,’ she said. ‘From now on. No more “I suppose.” You commit or you don’t. You say yes or you say no. No hedging.’

‘Why?’

She leaned forward. Her dark eyes held mine.

‘Because I know you’ll obey me.’

The sentence was so naked—so bluntly about power, not improvement, not my benefit, just the raw fact of her authority and my submission to it—that my vision actually blurred. My cunt clenched. I sat in a restaurant and felt my body respond to a sentence about obedience with a wave of arousal so intense I had to grip the table.

‘Yes,’ I said. Not *I suppose so*. Not *maybe*. Not *all right*. ‘Yes.’

‘Good girl.’

She took my earrings out herself that same evening. We were in the workshop, and she reached up and unclipped the small gold hoops I’d worn every day for six years and set them on the bench and said, ‘You don’t need these anymore.’ The gesture was so casually possessive—her hands on my body, removing things she’d decided I didn’t need—that I stood there with my naked earlobes tingling and my breath short and thought: *she is taking me apart. Piece by piece. And I am letting her. And the letting is the most erotic thing I have ever done.*

* * *

I told Keeley. Not all of it—not the soaking underwear, not the orgasm against the bathroom tiles—but enough.

‘She’s telling you what to wear?’ Keeley was sweeping up, her pink ponytail bouncing. ‘What to eat? She took your *earrings* off you?’

‘I know what it sounds like.’

‘It sounds like—Rae, if a bloke was doing this, I’d tell you to run.’

‘I know.’

‘So why aren’t you running?’

I opened my mouth and closed it again. The honest answer was that running was the opposite of what my body wanted to do. My body wanted to move toward Nell the way iron filings move toward a magnet—helplessly, totally, at the cellular level. I had spent thirty-four years making sensible choices about moderate men with moderate desires, and the result was a moderate life that I couldn’t feel through the insulation of my own hair, and now a woman was peeling the insulation off, strip by strip, and what was underneath was raw and terrified and *alive*, and I could not bring myself to stop her.

‘Because when she touches me,’ I said, ‘I feel more in my body than I’ve felt in my entire life. Because when she tells me to do something and I do it, I feel—released. Like someone opened a cage I didn’t know I was in. And because I’m thirty-four years old and I have never once been wet because a man looked at me, and she looks at me and I can barely stand up.’

Keeley stared at me. Then: ‘Jesus Christ, Rae.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve got it catastrophically bad.’

‘I know.’

‘Have you slept with her?’

‘No. We’ve kissed. She puts her hand on my neck and I—dissolve. That’s the only word. I dissolve.’

‘So dissolve. Go to bed with her. Find out.’

‘I’m scared that if I go to bed with her I won’t come back.’

‘Back to what? Tom? Nice boring adequate Tom?’ Keeley leaned on her broom. ‘You’ve spent your whole life being the girl with the amazing hair who dates nice boring blokes and never makes a fuss. And now some woman with a buzzcut is making you come apart from a *text message*. That’s not something to run from. That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you.’

‘It doesn’t feel safe.’

‘Good. Safe is Tom. Safe is adequate. You don’t want safe. You want whatever the fuck this is.’

* * *

She told me to walk next to her down the high street, in daylight, holding her hand. Saturday morning, people everywhere. I did it, and the looking was a blade against my skin—not cutting but pressing, testing.

‘You’re embarrassed,’ she said.

‘I’m not used to it. People are staring.’

‘Let them stare. They’re staring because they can see something they don’t see every day. Two women who aren’t pretending.’

‘I’ve been pretending my whole life.’

‘I know. That’s what I’m fixing.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘Listen to me. I’ve always been a dyke. Since I was sixteen. I never pretended, I never hid, I never tried to make it palatable. It cost me, but I paid the price because the alternative—the hiding, the performing—was worse. And if we’re going to be together—’ She stopped walking. She turned to face me, right there on the high street, people everywhere. ‘And we are going to be together, Rae. You know that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re going to be a dyke too. Not a woman who’s experimenting. Not a woman who’s going through a phase. Not a straight girl with an exception. A dyke. With a dyke. In public. Every day. Can you do that?’

The word sat in my mouth like a stone. *Dyke.* Hard, blunt, undecorated. Not *queer*, not *fluid*, not any of the soft terms I might have chosen for myself. *Dyke.* A word that left no room for retreat.

‘Yes,’ I said. My voice was shaking. ‘Yes, I can do that.’

She kissed me. In the middle of the high street, on a Saturday, in full view of three dog walkers, a woman with a pushchair, and Mrs Geddes from the salon, who stopped dead and stared with her mouth open.

‘Good girl,’ Nell said against my mouth. And then, louder, not caring who heard: ‘My good girl.’

I was vibrating. My whole body. Shame and desire and terror and exhilaration, all of it at once, and the combination was so overpowering I couldn’t speak. I just stood there, her hands on my face, my face on fire, the eyes of the street on us, and felt the last wall crack.

* * *

That night, the workshop. She sat me on a stool in the middle of the room and said: ‘I’m going to cut your hair.’

Not at the salon. Not by me. Here. Now. Her.

‘To the jaw,’ she said. ‘I want to see the neck.’

She’d bought scissors—good ones, German, not far off professional. She sat me on a stool in the middle of the workshop and stood behind me and I felt the cold steel touch the nape of my neck and the rush of it—the vulnerability, someone else holding the blade, *not being the one in control*—was so acute I gripped the stool and my breathing went ragged.

‘Breathe,’ she said, and cut.

The sound was dense—the crunch of good steel through thick hair—and a long auburn rope slid down my back and hit the floor with a sound like something landing. She cut again, and again, working around my head with more confidence than skill, and the hair fell in heavy pieces and each one that fell was a piece of costume hitting the stage, and underneath the costume was—me. Just me. Jaw exposed, neck bare, ears naked.

‘Christ,’ I said, reaching up to touch the rough ends.

‘Don’t touch it. I’m not finished.’

She picked up the clippers. I hadn’t seen them on the bench.

‘Nell—’

‘The back and sides. Faded. You taught me what that looks like; I’ve been watching you for weeks. I know how to hold these.’ She switched them on and the buzz filled the workshop. ‘Do you trust me?’

I was breathing hard. She was about to take clippers to my head in a furniture workshop and she was not a hairdresser and the rational part of me was screaming and the rest of me—the rest of me was so aroused I could feel my pulse in my clit.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She pressed my head forward, chin to chest, and ran the clippers up my nape.

The vibration entered my skull and went *everywhere*. My teeth, my nipples, the soles of my feet. Hair fell against my neck in soft clumps and the air hit the bare skin and I moaned—a real moan, the sound I’d been unable to make with any man—and Nell’s free hand pressed down on my shoulder, holding me steady, and she made another pass.

She wasn’t elegant. She wasn’t trained. But she was deliberate and firm and she moved with the same confidence she brought to everything—the clippers running up the back and sides of my head, peeling away the length, and the hair falling to the workshop floor in dark auburn drifts. When she was done, the top was still jaw-length and the back and sides were buzzed short—a rough undercut, unskilled but devastating.

She ran her palm up the back of my bare neck and I made a sound I didn’t know I could make. Her hand on the freshly clipped stubble was a detonation. Every nerve ending that had been muffled under hair was suddenly awake, screaming, and her hand was the only thing in the world.

‘More,’ I said. ‘Please. More.’

‘Not tonight.’ She turned me around on the stool. She stood between my knees and took my face in her hands. ‘Saturday. You come here Saturday morning. I take the rest. All of it. Bare.’

‘I can’t wait until Saturday. Nell, I can’t—’

‘You can. You will.’ She kissed my forehead. ‘Because I told you to.’

I drove home. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror—this wild, butchered, half-shorn creature—and I looked nothing like the girl with the hair and I looked exactly like someone who was drowning in desire and I pressed my back against the tile wall and slid my hand into my jeans and came in ninety seconds, gasping Nell’s name, the cool tile against the stubble on the back of my skull.

* * *

The longest week of my life.

Keeley took one look at me on Monday morning and said: ‘She did that?’

‘She did that.’

‘With furniture clippers?’

‘They were perfectly good clippers.’

‘Babe, it’s completely uneven at the back. Sit down, let me—’

‘Don’t touch it.’ The vehemence surprised us both. ‘She did it. I want it the way she did it.’

Keeley raised her hands. ‘Okay. Jesus. Okay.’

I worked the week with my lopsided undercut and my jaw-length top and no makeup and no earrings and no nail polish and the air on the back of my neck was a hand, Nell’s hand, and it was on me all day long. I caught myself reaching back to touch the stubble between clients—a quick, furtive brush of my fingers—and the sensation each time was a small electric shock, a reminder that something was happening to me that could not be reversed.

Mrs Geddes came in on Wednesday. She sat in my chair and looked at me in the mirror with an expression of carefully assembled neutrality.

‘You’ve had a change,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it to do with the young woman I saw you kissing on the high street?’

‘Yes, Mrs Geddes.’

‘Well.’ She adjusted her handbag on her lap. ‘She seemed very… decisive.’

‘She is.’

‘Hmm.’ A pause. ‘I think I’d like the usual, please.’

On Thursday night, I lay in bed and ran my hand over the stubble at the back of my head, back and forth, back and forth, and thought about the razor, and about Saturday, and about what I would look like without any hair at all, and the thinking made me so aroused that I pressed my face into the pillow and touched myself and came twice, the second time with my hand on my own shorn nape, imagining Nell’s.

She texted at midnight: *Saturday 8am. Don’t wash your hair. Don’t eat beforehand. Wear something you don’t mind losing.*

I read the text four times. I didn’t sleep.

* * *

Saturday. Eight in the morning. The workshop.

Nell opens the door. She’s bald—I haven’t shaved her in ten days and she’s done it herself, or had it done; her skull is smooth, gleaming, bare. She’s wearing a white singlet and canvas trousers and bare feet and she looks like a weapon. She looks like an answer.

In the centre of the workshop: one of her oak chairs—stripped, polished, beautiful. On the bench beside it: a bowl of lather, a brush, a straight razor, a towel, a jug of water, steam rising.

‘Sit down,’ she says.

I sit. The oak is warm against my palms. My heart is slamming.

She stands behind me. She runs her hands over my skull—the uneven stubble at the back, the longer hair on top—and I feel her mapping me, the way I map a client’s head before a cut, reading the terrain.

‘I’m going to take all of it,’ she says. ‘Clippers first. Then the razor. When I’m done, you’re going to be bald. You’re going to walk out of here with nothing on your head, and you’re going to go to work on Monday and your clients are going to see you, and your mother is going to see you, and the world is going to see you, and what they’re going to see is not the girl with the hair. Not the girl at all. They’re going to see a woman who chose this. My woman.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I am shaking.

She picks up the clippers. No guard. She switches them on and the sound fills the workshop the way it filled it the first time—a low, thick hum, intimate as a voice—and she places her hand on the top of my head.

Her palm presses down. Firm. The barber’s grip—the grip I’ve used ten thousand times, now used on me—and the shift is vertiginous. I am not the one holding the blade. I am the one in the chair. I am the client, the subject, the thing being worked on, and the loss of control is the most erotic experience of my life.

The clippers touch my forehead.

The first stroke runs from hairline to crown and the remaining hair falls in a thick auburn curtain down the cape and into my lap and the *sound* of it—that dense, shearing crunch—goes through me like a hand between my legs. I grip the chair. The clippers reach my crown and Nell lifts them away and I can feel the stripe of bare scalp, cool and exposed, and every nerve in it is screaming.

Another pass. Another fall of hair. She’s working fast now—not rough but not delicate either, the same confidence she brings to stripping a dresser—and the hair is coming off in thick swathes, piling on my shoulders, sliding down the cape, gathering on the floor. I can see it in the periphery of my vision—auburn everywhere, a lifetime’s worth—and I don’t care. I don’t care. The only thing I care about is the vibration of the clippers against my skull, and Nell’s hand on my head, and the air—the air, touching my scalp for the first time in my life, cool and intimate and everywhere.

She works around the back—the already-short stubble from last week, now being taken to nothing—and the clippers on my nape make me moan. She doesn’t pause. She takes the sides, behind my ears, and the sensation of the bare blade in that tender hollow is so acute I press my thighs together and rock in the chair.

‘Still,’ she says. One word. A command.

I hold still. She finishes. She switches off the clippers and the silence is enormous.

She runs her palm over my head. The stubble is uniform now—a dark ginger shadow, barely there—and her hand on it is a revelation. I can feel every line of her palm, every whorl of her fingerprint. I can feel her pulse through the contact. I can feel *everything.*

‘The razor,’ I say.

She lathers me. The brush works in slow circles and each circle is a planet of sensation, warm foam and soft bristles and the pressure of her hand behind the brush, and I close my eyes and feel my body go liquid in the chair.

She picks up the razor. I hear the strop—steel on leather, a sound I know so well, a sound I’ve made a thousand times, and hearing it now, as the subject rather than the practitioner, is like hearing a familiar word in a language you didn’t know you spoke.

The blade touches my nape.

The first stroke runs upward, slow and precise, and the razor clears the stubble and beneath it my scalp appears—bare, white, smooth, alive. The sensation of the steel against my skin is the most intimate thing I have ever felt. More intimate than any kiss, any touch, any cock inside me. The blade moves and I feel every millimetre of its edge, and the scraping sound is a whisper, a secret, a sentence in a language that means: *I am taking everything off you and what’s underneath is enough.*

She shaves me. Stroke by stroke. The nape—slow, careful, and I grip the chair and breathe through my teeth. Behind the ears—I cry out, a short sharp sound, and she pauses with her hand on my head until I’m still, then continues. The sides, the temples—the blade tracing the contours of my skull, introducing me to a geography I’ve never known. The crown—she re-lathers, and the brush on already-bare skin is almost more than I can take, and then the razor again, long strokes from front to back, and each one is a sentence and the paragraph they’re building is: *you are free of it. You are free.*

The top. The last of the stubble. Three long passes and it’s gone and there is nothing left—nothing between her hand and my skull, nothing between the air and my skin, nothing between me and the world.

She wipes me clean. Warm towel, then cool, and the cool cloth on my bare scalp makes me gasp and arch in the chair. Then her hands—both hands, flat, pressing—moving slowly from my forehead to my nape, and the sensation of her palms on my bare skull is so complete, so total, that I lose the ability to form words.

‘Stand up,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’

She leads me to the back room. The narrow bed. A mirror on the shelf.

I look.

A bald woman looks back. Pale, freckled, enormous-eyed, the skull smooth and shining, the face stripped of every frame and context and excuse. Not pretty—not the way I was pretty, not the way men told me I was pretty. Something else. Something harder and cleaner and truer. The bone structure of my face, which the hair had always softened, is stark and visible—jaw, cheekbones, brow—and the effect is not masculine and not feminine. The effect is *me*. Pure. Undiluted. The bare wood.

I put my hands on my head and the sound I make is not a word. It’s the sound of a woman meeting herself.

‘Kiss me,’ I say. ‘Now. Right now.’

She kisses me and her bare head meets my bare head—forehead to forehead—and the sensation of smooth skin against smooth skin on the skull is a detonation. No hair to cushion it, no buffer at all—just nerve-dense scalp against nerve-dense scalp, two bare skulls touching, and the intimacy of it obliterates me. I can feel her pulse through our foreheads. I can feel the heat of her brain. I can feel everything she is through this single point of contact, bone to bone, and I open my mouth and moan into her and she grips the back of my bare skull and pulls me closer and our heads slide against each other, skin on skin, and the friction is so charged I could come from this alone.

She pulls me to the bed. She undresses me—fast now, not the slow ceremonial undressing of a patient teacher but the urgent hands of a woman who has been waiting for weeks, and I am helping her, pulling at my own clothes, kicking off jeans, and then I am naked on the narrow bed, bald, stripped of every surface I have ever maintained, and she is looking at me.

‘You’re shaking,’ she says.

‘I need you. Please. I need—’

She pushes me down. She climbs over me and her mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, my breast. She takes my nipple between her teeth and the sensation arcs from my chest to my cunt and I shout and grab her skull—that smooth, warm, bare skull—and pull her harder against me.

She goes lower. Her mouth on my stomach. Her hands spreading my thighs. Her bare head between my legs, lowering—I can see the dome of her skull descending, pale and gleaming—and then her mouth is on me and the first stroke of her tongue is the first stroke of the razor. Slow. Precise. Devastating.

I come almost instantly—embarrassingly fast, violently, gripping her bare head with both hands and arching off the bed, and the orgasm rips through me from my scalp to my toes. She doesn’t stop. She holds me down and keeps going—her tongue, her fingers, a second orgasm building before the first has finished, and I am sobbing and gasping and pulling her skull against me and the feeling of her smooth head under my palms while she takes me apart is the circuit, the completed circuit, the hand on the skull and the blade between the legs and the bare wood resonating under both.

The second orgasm breaks me open. It starts at the crown of my bare head—my shaved, naked, newly born head—and it rolls downward like a wave, like the razor, scraping everything away, and I scream. I actually scream, in a furniture workshop at half past eight on a Saturday morning, and the sound of it bounces off the brick walls and comes back to me and I don’t recognise my own voice because my own voice has never made that sound before, and the sound is the sound of a veneer being ripped off and the wood underneath it being *struck*, and the wood is ringing, and the ringing doesn’t stop.

She crawls up my body. She lies on top of me. Her skull against my skull. I can feel her heartbeat through our foreheads.

‘Touch me,’ she says. ‘Rae. Touch me.’

I slide my hand between her legs. She’s soaked—slick and swollen and hot against my fingers—and I touch her the way I’ve touched myself all those nights, thinking about her, except now she is real and warm and her bare head is against mine and I can feel every sound she makes transmitted through the bone.

I push inside her and she gasps and her skull presses harder against mine and the pressure is exquisite, and I curl my fingers and find the place and she cries out and I work against it, pressing and circling, and her hips are grinding against my hand and her moans are vibrating through my skull, and I can feel her getting close—the tightening, the rhythm breaking, the held breath—and I press my bald head against hers and whisper, ‘Come for me, come for me—’

She comes. Clenching around my fingers, crushing her skull against mine, a sound from her throat that I feel before I hear—a deep, shuddering groan that travels through the bone from her head to mine and detonates somewhere behind my eyes. I hold her. I keep my hand on her while the aftershocks roll through and she gasps and grips my skull and I grip hers and we are two bald women on a narrow bed in a workshop full of stripped furniture, and there is nothing left on either of us that is not essential.

* * *

Later. Morning light through the high windows, falling on sawdust and auburn hair.

I am lying on my back. Her head is on my chest. I am running my palm over her skull—slow, circular, the way she ran the brush over mine—and the sensation of bare skin under my hand is the most peaceful thing I have ever felt. I feel emptied. Clean. Stripped back to the wood and finding that the wood is beautiful.

‘Monday,’ I say.

‘Monday.’

‘I walk into the salon. Bald. Keeley screams.’

‘Keeley will be thrilled and you know it.’

‘Mrs Geddes has a coronary.’

‘Mrs Geddes already saw me kiss you on the high street. She’ll survive.’

‘My mother calls. My mother—’ I stop. The thought of my mother, who brushed my hair every night for twelve years, who loved the hair more than she knew how to love me—the thought of her seeing me bald is a blade at a nape. Dangerous. Real.

‘Your mother will see you,’ Nell says. ‘Not the hair. Maybe for the first time.’

‘And if she doesn’t like what she sees?’

‘Then she’s looking at the veneer and not the wood. And that’s her problem.’

She lifts her head. She looks at me. Her dark eyes, her bare skull, her jaw like a blade.

‘Saturday morning,’ she says. ‘Every Saturday. You come here. I shave you.’

‘And during the week?’

‘During the week you shave me. At yours, at mine, wherever we are. Every morning. You’re going to get good at this—you’re already good at this, but you’re going to get good at it on *me*. And I’m going to get good at it on you. Every morning. Clean. Bare. Nothing left over from the day before.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘And you’re mine.’

‘Yes.’

‘Say it.’

‘I’m yours.’

She puts her mouth against my bare scalp. The kiss on that skin—on the place where my hair began, once, in another life—is the most intimate thing another person has ever done to me. I feel it in my skull and in my chest and between my legs and in the place behind my sternum where, for thirty-four years, something has been waiting to be uncovered.

The hair is on the workshop floor. The girl is gone. The woman is here, bald and bare and shaking and claimed, and the air is touching every part of her.