After Hours at the Barber

My name is Dakota Mooney, I'm thirty-four, and I tend bar at The Velvet Tap in a midwestern city that shall stay nameless because my landlord reads everything. You should know up front, since it is the whole point of this story, that I like wearing women's clothes. A lot. Dresses, heels, the works. I keep it separate from my dating life, mostly out of cowardice, partly out of habit.

Anyway. Tuesday night. Slow doesn't even cover it, we had six customers all evening and one of them was Pamela Gonzalez, my boss, who mostly sat there doing receipts and telling us about her husband's fantasy football league. Pamela's forty-two, married since she was thirty, no drama, just a woman who wants her bar to run smooth. She locked the till at eleven and said, "Go home, both of you, before I feel bad paying you for standing around."

Cooper Grantham was there with me, helping us close. He's thirty-seven, works customer success for the bar's booking software, whatever that means, and he's been coming in on my nights for about a year. Single. Had a girlfriend back when he was twenty-eight, two years, ended fine. He's got this calm way about him, like nothing rattles the guy. Six customers and a dead jukebox and he was still cracking jokes.

We were stacking chairs when I mentioned the supply run. Pamela wanted us to grab the special order of bar rags from the barbershop next door, Cuts & Co, because the owner there takes deliveries for half the block. It was already after eleven on a school night, which is exactly the kind of night that makes a dumb idea sound great.

"The back door's unlocked for deliveries," I told him, grabbing the cash envelope for the rag invoice. "Five minute job. Come with, I'll buy you a gas station snack."

"Sold," Cooper said, shrugging his jacket on. "What are bar rags, even?"

"Bar rags, Coop. The rags. For the bar."

"You're a bartender, not a poet."

The barbershop is literally next door, ten steps from our back exit. We went in through the delivery door into the back room, all fluorescent hum and stacked boxes of towels and shampoo. And there it was, the old jukebox against the wall, dark and silent, the barbershop's twin to our own dead one at The Velvet Tap. Pamela keeps saying she'll get ours fixed. She will not.

And okay, here is where I admit something. The second I stepped into that empty room, that itch started up. You know the one. The itch to be somebody else for a while. I had my bag with me, because I always have my bag, and inside the bag was a little black dress and a pair of heels I'd been hauling around for two weeks like a lunatic, waiting for a moment.

"Give me a sec," I said. "Bathroom."

"Since when does a barbershop have a bathroom you'd use?"

"It has one. It's gross. Don't come in."

He gave me a weird look but he pulled out his phone, so I slipped into the little back restroom with my bag. My hands were actually shaking a little, which is stupid, because nobody asked me to do this. Nobody knew. I just wanted it so bad my chest hurt. The dress went on easier than it does at home, I'll say that. Heels, the two and a half inch ones, not the crazy four. I did my face quick in the mirror, nothing dramatic, some lip color and lashes I'd brought in a zip bag. Ran my hands down the dress. Took one breath.

Then I walked out.

Cooper was leaning against a box of towels, and when he looked up he went completely still. His phone was just hanging in his hand. His mouth opened, closed, opened again.

"Dakota?" he said, and his voice had gone up a whole octave.

"Hi," I said. And I did a little turn, because apparently my body had taken over the negotiations. "The rags can wait a second, right?"

"That's... okay. Wow. Okay!" He set the phone down on the towel box very carefully, like it might go off. "You look, I mean. Huh."

"Good huh or bad huh?"

"Good! Obviously good. I just, I have literally never seen anything like this." He was staring, but not in a bad way, in that way where a person forgets to blink. "How long have you been doing this?"

"A while," I said. "Nobody at the bar knows. Nobody knows."

"And you're showing me? In a barbershop?"

"You were here. The moment felt right." I shrugged, and the shrug works different in a dress, I'll tell you that for free. "Do you like it?"

"Yes," he said, fast, no pause at all. "Yeah. I really do."

And that's when the rush hit me. I can't explain it any better than that. Standing there in heels in a dark back room with the broken jukebox and one person looking at me like that, it was better than posting pictures to strangers ever was. Better by a mile. I felt powerful and ridiculous at the same