[ WP ] A man is secretly in love with his barber . He begins to bald .

We've progressed in stages as my hairline began to recede, as the first pink glints of my scalp began to shine through. Javier's fluffed his fingers through my hair, blow-dried it, done his best to give it volume. He's trimmed down the back and sides to half an inch from the skin, to reduce the contrast to my thinning crown. He's used sprays, creams, anything to make the remaining follicles darker, give them more volume. And when even his best efforts began to fail, he's shaved my head down to the contours of my scalp, making it seem intentional. 
 
 Javier's cut my hair for the last eight years, and and in all that time we've never been closer. 
 
 It feels like a lie, sometimes, the anxiety around him that I mask as fear of going bald. There's his hand on my shoulder, his eyes dark and tender as he leans over me and we plot together, two men seeking to subvert cruel genetics. He's invested himself in me, in my situation, to a degree that I think he would fly from if he understood how I felt about him. I wonder sometimes what he sees when he looks at me. A challenge? A tragedy? The natural limitations of his chosen profession? Or a desperate balding fool, returning to his barber's chair again and again and again in an attempt to pretend that the world is n't falling out from under him. 
 
 I'm bald this time, picked clean and starkly naked as I walk through his door, busying myself, conspicuously, with a magazine, waiting for him to finish with his current client. He looks up and sees me, raises an eyebrow at my naked scalp, and grins at me in the mirror, signalling at me to wait. I am curiously calm. A stage of our relationship has ended. A new one will begin. 
 
 `` I was n't expecting you back,'' he teases afterwards, brushing the stray hairs from his chair. He gestures me forwards. `` I tried, Eddie, I tried the best I could.'' He hangs his head melodramatically. `` I figured I failed you.'' 
 
 `` Never,'' I tell him, easing into the familiar seat, rubbing a hand across my stubble. `` Just a shave. That's all.'' 
 
 `` You used to shave yourself,'' he remarks, flicking open his straight razor and running across his leather strap. The sound of it scraping across the leather is soothing. Brisk, steady sweeps of the shiny silver blade. It's mesmerizing. 
 
 `` Yes.'' I can feel my Adam's apple bob as I swallow. There's nothing else to say, nothing that would n't give the game away. There's a brief frown on his face as he tightens the white cloth around my neck, as he oils up his hands and massages it into my cheeks, my jaw, my upper lip, my neck. He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then decides otherwise. In all the times he has cut my hair, we have never been so silent. 
 
 He lays the hot towel across my mouth, folds it upwards across my face, leaving my nostrils exposed. In the warm, waiting darkness, I relive the touch of his fingers across my face, I imagine him standing over me, straight razor in hand. He is completely, utterly silent. What does he know? What does he suspect? I feel his fingers press down on me, hands outspread, gripping my face. 
 
 I blink at the sudden reintroduction of light, and flinch again as he lathers me up, briskly, all business. I try to catch his eye in the mirror, but he twists my head to the side as his razor scrapes across my temple. His thumb presses beneath my cheekbone. He is warm, and the blade is cold, and in these past eight years we have never before been so physically intimate. I relish the feel of the blade against my skin, scraping down coolly, cutting me apart by follicles, cells, atoms. 
 
 The silence builds, becomes heavy, becomes unbearable. I ease open my eyes and see us both in the mirror, my own pink, half-shaven face staring dazedly out at him; him standing over me with his eyebrows furrowed in concentration or anger, his fingers stern and unyielding. I have lied to him by omission these past eight years. I can lie to him no longer. 
 
 `` I love you,'' I tell him, and he tilts my head backwards and presses his razor to my throat.
