“It’s absurd,” Holly concedes. “Trust me, I know.”
“Fine,” Mami says, reaching for her feathering scissors. “Lazy chic it is.”
Mami finishes Eli’s haircut, but we won’t see the full effect until later. She’s caked on a hair mask and wrapped his head with a thermal foil cap.
Meanwhile, I take the shears to his sideburns, but when I try to press the buzzing contraption to his face, he twitches back.
“You’re gonna have to sit still,” I tell him, cupping his jaw with one hand in an effort to angle his face. He reaches for my hand on his jaw, covering it with his warm palm, his gray eyes searching for mine. My breath inadvertently catches in my lungs the moment our gazes meet, filling my chest with an ache I haven’t felt in a really long time. There’s a vulnerability behind those eyes that I recognize.
“I… I just…” He stutters in a low voice. “Ineedmy beard.”The unguarded tone in his voice stabs at my heart. I stare into his eyes for way longer than I should.
Against all good judgment, I run my thumb over the edge of his beard, appraising. “It’ll grow back,” I quietly assure him, then push down any inkling of emotion and break away from all eye contact. Eli clears his throat, averting his gaze to the reflection in the mirror.
I steady his face with one hand, working the shears over his beard with the other. Inside my head, the left and right parts of my brain go at it. My operating system defaults to analyzing, assessing, and searching for answers—no feelings required, regardless of how strong those feelings may be.
My life and career have taught me that emotions only serve to impair judgment. Under the influence of emotion, humans become irrational beings, incapable of thinking objectively and making decisions based on facts. Just look at my own mother. Either my dad was extraordinarily adept at lying or my mother ignored a trail of evidence fifteen years long, given that my half sister and I were the same age when the truth finally came out.
When I’m done with the beard trim, I push Eli back in the chair, then lather his face in shaving cream for a wet shave. I stretch the skin, slowly angling the blade around his cheeks, jawline, and neck. Behind me, Mami holds up a pair of tweezers over his forehead, preparing for the next stage—the plucking of the brow. At the sight of the tweezers poised over his head, Eli recoils under me.
“You realize you have a Japanese steel blade to your throat, right?” I say, holding up the straight razor in my hand in warning.
“Christ Almighty,” he exclaims, as the blade makes contact with his chin, and I swipe upward, finishing the shave.
I’m barely done wrapping his face in a hot towel, when Mami savagely attacks his left brow. I know her well enough to see the sadistic pleasure she’s getting from inflicting pain on this poor man.
“Why would anyone actually choose to do this?” Eli mutters.
“Who’s the tough guy now?” Holly teases.
“You want to look the part, don’t you?” Mami asks, pulling yet another hair.
“Right.” Eli grimaces. “For my audition.”
By the time Mami’s done plucking his brows, Eli’s clean-shaven face is caked in a charcoal mask. He moves to the mani-pedi station, where Mami scrubs and cuts his nails.
“Buffed finish,” Holly tells her. “Not too shiny. He can’t look like he got a manicure.”
“Well, how ’bout we just don’t buff the nails, then?” Eli deadpans.
“They have to be clean and well-maintained,” Holly says as if all of this should be evident. “But if they’re too shiny, you’ll look like you’re trying. And—”
Eli cuts her off. “Lemme guess—I can’t look like I’m trying.”
It takes another two hours, and as many rounds of coffee, for Mami to finish his nails, then blow-dry and style Eli into the perfect “Lazy Frat Bro” look.
Holly and I sit back, awaiting the big reveal like the audience of a runway show. Mami pulls back a curtain to introduce a completely transformed Eli, proudly twirling him in a slow circle. His clean-shaven cheeks blush crimson at the echo of Holly’s loud claps and whistles.
I swallow hard at the vision of the man standing before me—clean face, soft skin, rumpled hair that begs you to sink your hands into it and pull—hard. My stomach flutters against my own better judgment. Blotches of red crawl from my chest to my neck as the siren equivalent of a five-alarm fire goes off in the back of my mind.
“Dolores, you are an absolute miracle worker.” Holly pats my mother on the shoulder.
“I look like a frat boy,” Eli sighs, checking himself out in the mirror.
“Precisely,” Holly says. “A very handsome, guileless Phi Delt. Nice, clean-cut, laid-back, but still knows how to have a good time.” Then she turns to me and grins from ear to ear. “See?” she exclaims. “I told you he’d be perfect.”
I meet Eli’s eyes, not saying a word, just wondering why in God’s name he’s been hiding all this. Every feature of his face is magnified—the long muscles of his neck, the high cheekbones,the hard lines of his jaw, the vivid gray of his eyes. But he also looks strangely vulnerable. Like all that facial hair was guarding him from the world. A protective, territorial instinct—the one I usually only reserve for my own family—settles in my gut. It’s absurd, really. I don’t know this man, or so I keep telling myself.
“He looks good.” I clear my throat, then turn to my phone. “Great job, Mami.”
