A Hand in Her Hair

I woke up on Kira's leather couch with my hands hurting. That was the first thing I noticed. Not the sunlight coming through the blinds over her salon, not the fact that I was shirtless under a throw blanket. My hands. Both of them, right across the knuckles, like I'd spent the night at the gym doing curls. Which, in a way, I had.

I'm sixty-three years old. I've been roasting coffee for most of my life, I've never been married, and until about fourteen hours ago I had never once touched Kira Young in a way that would make my hands ache the next morning. Twenty years of friendship, gone in one very loud night. Or maybe not gone. That was the part I couldn't figure out yet.

Here's how we met, since it matters. Twenty years ago she was twenty-six and I was forty-three, both of us stuck in the same barista training course at some hotel conference room with bad lighting. She could pull a perfect espresso shot on day two and she made sure everybody knew it. I liked her immediately. We've been friends ever since, the kind where you call each other at ten at night about nothing. Never once did anything like this happen. Until it did.

And now my hands hurt and her shampoo was still in my nose. That smell. Coconut and something sharper underneath, some expensive salon thing, I guess, and every time I breathed it in I got a whole replay of the night before. Her hair. God, her hair. It was everywhere and I had my fingers in it and I pulled, actually pulled, hard, and she made a sound I can still hear. Sorry, let me back up.

The apartment above her salon is cluttered the way you'd expect. Boxes of product samples, a flat iron on the kitchen counter, a big worn leather couch that I apparently slept on while she got the bed. Or maybe she put me out here after and I don't remember. I remember falling asleep mid-sentence, and that's about where the tape runs out. I remember the middle. The middle was very good.

I sat up and the blanket fell off and I realized I had no idea where my shirt was. Pants, thankfully, still on. Small mercies.

Then the bathroom door opened and Kira came out in a silk robe, charcoal gray, with her hair a complete disaster. And I mean a disaster. Her hair is her whole thing, she's a stylist, she probably spends more on conditioner than I spend on rent, and there it was, knotted up on one side like a squirrel's nest. She grinned when she saw me.

"Look who's alive," she said, leaning on the door frame. "You're still shirtless. That's cute. Very morning-after of you."

"Good morning to you too," I said, and my voice came out scratchy. "Your hair looks like a crime scene."

"Your fault!" She came over and sat on the arm of the couch, and I tried very hard to look at her face. "I've been in the bathroom for twenty minutes trying to brush it out. Do you know how hard it is to detangle your own hair when somebody yanked half of it out by the roots?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You're not sorry. Look at your face. You're delighted."

I was a little delighted. I'm not going to lie about that. "Okay, some of that was, um. Enthusiastic."

"Enthusiastic." She laughed and crossed her arms. "Cody, you had two fists full of my hair and you were pulling like you were trying to start a lawnmower."

That's so exactly her. She's forty-six, she runs her own salon, she doesn't soften anything. It's one of the maybe six things I love about her and I was not ready to count that list this early in the morning.

"Coffee?" I said, standing up, because I needed a task immediately.

"God, yes. You're the professional, you make it."

So I made coffee in her tiny kitchen while she leaned against the counter watching me, and let me tell you, awkward silence is a real thing and it has a weight. I found her beans, and they were supermarket beans, pre-ground, and I nearly said something about it and then thought, Cody, do not roast her beans the morning after you roasted her, that's too much. I made the coffee. I gave her a mug. We stood there sipping like two people waiting for a bus.

The memory of the night was hanging over everything. Every time I looked at her I remembered the sound she made. Every time she looked at me I think she was remembering it too, because she kept doing this little smile and then killing it.

"You slept on the couch," she finally said.

"You took the bed."

"I took the bed because you fell asleep mid-sentence and I couldn't move you off the couch. You're heavy. You're like moving a sack of coffee."

"Flattering."

"I'm just saying, I left the bedroom door open. A man with any initiative would've taken the hint."

I choked on my coffee. She just watched me cough, drinking her own, all smug.

"I didn't want to assume," I managed.

"Assume! We'd already done everything else and you didn't want to assume!"

"Okay, fair." I set my mug down. My hands were aching again and I flexed them without thinking, and she caught it. Of course she caught it. She notices everything, it's her whole job.

"Your hands hurt," she said. Not a question.

"A little. Why?"

"Because of me." She said it so plainly, and something in her voice wasn't teasing at all. "You grabbed my hair so hard your knuckles are sore the next morning. That's a lot of grabbing, Cody."

"Kira."

"No, I want to talk about this. I've been in the bathroom for twenty minutes and this is what I was thinking about. Not my hair. Well, my hair too. But mostly this." She put her mug down next to mine. "You liked it."

"Liked what?"

"You know what. Don't do the thing where you get quiet and professional. You liked pulling my hair. Last night. You were, and I'm quoting your own text to me from two years ago about a different topic, unhinged about it."

I looked at her. She looked back. Her robe had slipped a little off one shoulder and her ruined hair was everywhere and she was waiting, actually waiting, and I could see under all the teasing that she needed me to say it. She needed me to say it out loud. Twenty years of friendship and one insane night and she was standing in her own kitchen needing me to say a true thing.

"Kira."

"Cody."

"You're going to make me say it."

"I absolutely am."

"Fine," I threw my hands up, which hurt, which felt right somehow. "Yes. I liked it. I liked it more than I have liked anything in years, maybe ever, and I have been sitting on this couch since seven in the morning trying to figure out if that makes me a monster or just a guy with a thing."

"There," she said softly.

"Was that so hard? For me, I mean. It was hard for me."

"It was like pulling teeth. Which, speaking of pulling." She grinned again and tugged at a knot in her hair, wincing. "You owe me a deep conditioning treatment, by the way. I do them for clients at two hundred bucks, you're getting the friend rate, which is you sitting in my chair and being quiet."

"Deal."

"But first." She stepped closer, and the shampoo smell got stronger, and I stopped breathing for a second. "Say the rest of it."

"Which rest?"

"The part where you say you want to do it again. Because I know you do, you've got your fight-or-flight face on, and also I could tell last night that you weren't nearly done. You stopped yourself. Twice. You did that thing where you let go all of a sudden like you'd touched a stove." She tilted her head. "Why'd you stop, Cody?"

"Because I thought I was going too hard."

"I was there, genius. I said yes about forty times. I would've told you."

"You were a little busy."

"I was exactly busy enough to notice a man holding back on me." Her eyes were doing something now, bright and competitive, the same look she had in that training course twenty years ago when she pulled a perfect shot on day two. "So here's my question. Was it a fluke? One weird night? Or is it a thing?"

"It's a thing," I said, before my brain could vote on it.

Her whole face changed. Not a grin, something quieter. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Good." She picked her coffee back up like nothing had happened. "Because I've been thinking about it all morning, and I have a counterproposal, but it involves my salon chair and about an hour of your time and you admitting at least two more things out loud."

She walked me down the stairs from the apartment to the closed salon, flipped the sign on the door even though nobody was open yet on a Sunday, and pointed at her chair like a game show hostess. "Sit."

"That's the entire proposal? Sit?"

"Part one of the proposal. Part two is you sit there while I do your scalp and your gray hairs and whatever that is happening on your left ear, and you talk. Out loud. About the thing."

"The hair thing."

"The hair thing."

I sat. The chair was one of those big black leather ones that recline, and I sank back and immediately understood why she charges two hundred bucks, because my spine made a noise of gratitude. Kira snapped a cape around my neck like she was doing it in her sleep, which, honestly, she probably could.

"Okay," she said, spinning me to face the mirror. "Look at this sad man."

"That sad man made you coffee this morning."

"He made me coffee out of pre-ground supermarket beans that were in my cabinet since roughly the invention of the cabinet. I've been to your shop, Cody. I've smelled what you can do. The disrespect."

I laughed and she got to work, and this is what you need to know about watching Kira work. I'd seen it maybe a hundred times over twenty years, her