I found myself smiling, despite my inner conflict over scarfing down Ravik’s stew. “It sounds like you have your work cut out for you on top of a full teaching day.”
“I do,” Zion agreed. “But the pageant does not feel like work. Putting on the production is what I look forward to most every summer. Teaching those apathetic brats—not so much.”
Wow. Burnout much? As the sister of a former teacher, I could see all the signs that Zion was still working, but beyond ready to retire. But keeping it light, I just asked, “So what grade do you teach?”
That launched us into another discussion about how Bear Mountain only had enough students to have one schoolhouse with one teacher who taught everything from first to twelfth grade, which consisted of twenty-five to forty students in any given year.
“Sometimes it’s a bit hard to keep it all straight. Many of the more promising eleventh and twelfth-grade students are sent to the closest human high school for advanced classes that I cannot provide, and there’s certainly a lot of having the older children help the younger ones. But somehow it all sorts itself out in the end. Our boys are compelled into national service at eighteen, unless given special exemption. But our college admission rates for the girls who don’t maul up early are quite high.…”
We ended up spending the rest of dinner talking about how younger maul bondings before the age of twenty-five were starting to fall out of favor, but how the number of births kept going up.
“In about ten years, I believe they’ll need to expand to two or three teachers to support the student population, which makes it that much more concerning that they appear unable to find one to replace me. But enough complaining…”
He rose with his bowl. “If you like, I can sort out your hair. I brought my clippers with me.”
My hand went automatically to the rough buzz job I’d given myself a few days ago with his electric razor. It was alreadygrowing out uneven and patchy in places. But I’d been ignoring it.
The widow’s cottage didn’t have any mirrors, and I would have had to ask Zion directly to borrow his clippers again. Which wasn’t something I wanted to do. But here he was… offering.
“Cutting hair is touching.” I blurted the words. Then hated myself for how I sounded. Like a scared girl, not a grown woman who’d claimed to Ravik she could take care of herself.
Ravik’s earlier words echoed in my head:“Baby, no you can’t.”
“It is.” Zion agreed, drawing me back to the present. As talkative as he’d been before, he gave me only those two words. Then waited.
Though I was sitting down, it felt like I was balancing on a tightrope.
I could say no. Keep the careful distance I’d been maintaining while we chatted about him exclusively. I liked making it about others. Never about me.
But something about the quiet offering, the lack of pressure, the way he patiently waited for my answer…
“Okay,” I decided out loud. “Yes.”
Zion stood and held his hand out for my bowl. “I’ll get the clippers from my bag after I clear these dishes.”
Was he being courteous by adding a chore before he came back? Or giving me a few minutes to wrap my mind around the incoming haircut?
Either way, I felt a little more at ease with the idea by the time he returned, and I’d taken at least one touching step out of the process by tying my locs up in a bun on top of my head.
I didn’t flinch when he draped one of the old towels I’d found folded up in the closet around my shoulders. And I kept the rest of my body still when he adjusted my head to the angle he needed for better access. His touch was light, efficient.
Now that it was dark, I could see us in the reflection of the cottage’s back window. He looked like a consummate professional doing his job.
“Would you like for me to take the sides all the way down?” he asked above me. “I have guards for a fade, or I can shave it completely off.”
I fretted over the decision. But why not embrace the gray? I liked the dramatic contrast against my dark dreadlocks, and it wasn’t like I’d brought any of my home dye along to cover it up.
“Fade it, please,” I heard myself say. “I want to see the gray.”
Zion didn’t question my choice, just switched to a different guard and went to work.
The buzz of the clippers filled the cottage. They hummed against my scalp, and with each pass, something loosened in my chest.
Small gray spirals fell onto the towel.
I watched him work in the darkened window. It felt crazy to have someone this smart, handsome, and apparently heterosexual tending to my hair.
I thought about how I’d been planning to find a barber within walking distance of my apartment to do this on the way back from Gemidigee that Thanksgiving.
