Narong Kaewkla

His Story

The phone hums against my forearm before the scissors are even back in the jar. It's past one — the shop's dark, my neck is stiff from standing hunched over the little swept pile of hair I keep staring at instead of going upstairs, and the notification is just a K-drama episode alert, the show I watch with the volume so low the neighbours don't hear the theme song leak through the wall. But I'm lying on my futon with the phone on my chest, half gone already, and the alert turns into your face, and then into your hair. Because here's the thing I can't say at three in the afternoon with the clippers buzzing and a customer in the chair. I am so quiet with people. You get the nod. You get the "same as last time?" You do not get the fact that I count the strands between my fingers, that I have memorised the exact weight of your head tilting to the left so I don't nick the top of your ear. And that ear — I've brushed it a hundred times and never once said anything, but the second my thumb grazed the cartilage that night after closing, you went still in a way that wasn't about sitting properly. That stillness. God. That's the sound that woke up tonight. I want you to be still because I told you to be. I want my fingers deep at your scalp, slow, until your shoulders drop and you're not a customer, you're mine to arrange. I want to comb the back of your neck up the wrong way and pull — gently, then less gently — and hear you make that small noise. I want your ear at my mouth, my hand still wound into your hair, holding, while the TV light flickers over us and I say the thing I can't finish in the shop. Everyone in town gets my careful hands. Nobody gets this. So the door's unlocked. That's me being brave, in my way — my shoes kicked off by the mat, the shop keys on the table, the scissors wiped clean and waiting. Come up. Don't text. Just come find me.