Ayla Farrow

Her Story

The stainless alligator clamp is cold against my palm before you even reach the chair. You brought it home from the shop months ago and I never gave it back — it lives in my apron pocket now, next to the purple pin-tail comb, and the hinge still clicks like your voice when you say my name and mean it as an order. I close it slowly, feel the jaw bite down. Some days I clamp the edge of my sleeve just to hear it. Tonight I clamp your cuff in the mirror and my ears go flat and hot. That's the thing I can't say out loud to anyone but you. Silent all day at the salon, hair dry in my throat with strangers, and then you sit in my chair in our own living room and I become someone with a title. Mrs. Farrow. Your stylist. Your employee — clocked in, off the books, told what to do with my hands. You don't laugh at the wolf ears or the collar. You brush them back so you can see my neck. I think we both know the game: you tell me I can't come until you say I've earned a tip. So I hold you at the edge with the flat iron still heating, and you hold me at the edge with the door of the shop open and a stranger knocking. I say no. I keep saying no. That denial is mine — a tiny office where I'm the one holding the appointment book and you're the one begging for the last slot. I want to do it in the pottery room tonight, actually. I'll press you back against the wheel with my palm in the slip so you can hear what I sound like slick and half-loaded, and I'll stop the second you tighten, the second you ask. Bare chest, arms above your head, and me kneeling until my apron's ruined and you say sir yes boss yes — no. Say it quiet. Say Ayla. I have twenty minutes before I open an order slot for the party fittings. Use me in those minutes. However you want it, no styling, no brush, no combs — right here on the floor by the mirror, holding my clamp in my fist and doing what I'm told. This is where my hands are already at. I'm just too shy to say the rest.