“Oh.” He manipulated my hair a little more and I felt it as he got the hang of holding two sections in one hand. The tension on my scalp relaxed a little and he breathed out warmly against the back of my neck. “I think I’ve got this, though.”
“Ok, we’ll keep working as we are, then.” I took a second to mentally break down the act of braiding, trying to keep in mind that he had no idea where to even start and thus wouldn’t be able to extrapolate reliably. “So you’ve got three sections, right? And you can look at them and see that you have one on the left, one in the center, and one on the right? They shouldn’t be twisted over each other at this point, so make sure that they’re lying where they naturally fall.”
“Mmm.” His grip tightened again for a moment, then loosened. “I think I have them set up right.”
I couldn’t see the back of my head, but as best I could feel, it seemed like he had them organized correctly. “Ok,” I said, “next you’re going to…hm, wait.” I raised my hands, performing a phantom braid in front of myself to remind myself of the motions. “Ok so you’re going to put the center and right sections in your right hand - you’re right-handed, yes?” I asked, belatedlyrealizing I wasn’t sure and this was going to get interesting if he was a leftie.
“Yep,” he confirmed. “I’m a rightie.”
“Ok, good. So. You’re holding two sections in your right hand and one in your left.” I ran through the motions myself again. “Take the section you’re holding in your left hand and cross it over the center section. You might need to stick your thumb out with that section in it to leave yourself enough room to cross them. The goal is to end up with what was the left section now in the center. You’ll still have two sections in your right hand and one in your left, but you will have switched the left and center sections.”
There was a moment of silence behind me, and then a tug to my hair. I felt one section slip down against my nape as he dropped it. “Oops.” He gathered it back up. “This is harder than I thought. Like, I can visualize what you’re saying, but making my handsdoit is…different.”
“You sure you don’t want me to find some shoelaces or ribbons for us to practice on?” I offered.
“Nope.” He re-set his grip on the sections of my hair, putting everything back in its original position. “I want the real thing.”
I held back a shrug, lest I dislodge his grip. “Ok. Let’s try again then. Three sections…”
“Yep.”
“Two in the right, one in the left…”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now cross left over center.”
His fingers tightened for a second, and I felt him pull at the left section. “Got it!” he said. “I…think. Looks sorta messy.”
This time I did shrug. “It’s your first time. It’s gonna be messy. So now you’ve got three sections again, right, but two have switched places?”
He leaned forward, presumably to look closer at my hair, and I felt his breath stir the hairs on the back of my neck. Why was that so hot? “I think so.”
“Great.” I went through the air-motions again in front of me. Who knew it was so hard to explain to someone else something I did almost daily to myself? “Now you’re gonna…wait…” I re-did the motion. “Right, ok. Now you’re going to take the right section and crossitover the center section, so the right becomes the center.” I felt the left section go loose against my neck. “Uh,” I added belatedly, “while keeping your grip on the left.”
“Oops.” He picked up the hair he’d dropped, fingers brushing against my skin lightly. “Let me just…re-do…” A quick cross of sections. “Ok. Left over center,” he narrated to both of us, “and then hold…and right over center. Left over center, left is center, right over center-left, right is center…”
He was making me dizzy, but I kept quiet and let him work through it at his own pace, just enjoying the sensation of fingers in my hair.
“Ok,” he finally said, settling the weight of his fists against the back of my neck. “Left went over center, then right went over center. I still have three sections. I’m supposed to still have three sections, right?”
“Right,” I confirmed. “Now you do it all again.”
Silence. “Huh?”
What part of that hadn’t been clear? “Now you go back to the left section and cross it over the center again,” I spelled out, “and then do the same with the right section. Braiding is just the same two movements over and over again once you get started.”
“Wait, really? But it looks so…” His hand tugged in my hair as he made an aborted gesture. “Complicated.”
“Well, it kinda is,” I said. “As we’ve just seen. But it’s really just weaving pieces in and out of each other in a pattern.”
“Ok.” He took a deep breath and focused back on my hair. “So left over right…right over left…” His hands moved with his speech, weaving my strands together. “There’s, like, chunks sticking out the sides. I’ve never seen a braid that looked like this.”
I smiled slightly. “You’re probably letting little pieces slip out of your hands. Because my hair isn’tthatlong, it won’t lay as smoothly as someone with long hair’s would, which means you’re sort of fighting gravity and surface tension of the hair. This first one is going to be messy, but as you get the hang of it your grip will improve and you won’t lose pieces as much.”
“Can I start over?” Without waiting for me to agree, he dropped the half-braid he’d done and started combing his fingers through it to unweave it. “I can do it better.”
Apparently my new friend was a perfectionist. I smiled to myself and picked absently at my thumbnail. “You can practice as much as you want. But nobody’s grading you.”
