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Author's Chapter Notes:
So I get a lot of emails and comments asking about this story. The love is great and painful since I have been so stuck on this one. I'm giving it another go. I'm not really sure what people are hoping to see. Hopefully, you like this. Please let me know. (But maybe be gentle if you hate it.)
I’m afraid of heights. Once, when I was really small, my father dragged me on a double Ferris Wheel at the state fair. I was nervous before we even got on, but the technical difficulties that left us stopped for several minutes while our little basket swayed in a terrifying manner at the very top have given me nightmares for decades.
I’m just saying I understand that everyone has quirks and phobias. But seriously…shopping? Who has nightmares about shopping? One word answer: William. William has nightmares about shopping. I’m not saying that he doesn’t like shopping. I’m saying that he woke me up in the middle of the night because he was mumbling in his sleep about shoes, drowning in footwear. In the morning I told him that having a vast over-abundance of footwear was kind of a dream of mine and he stared at me with this horrified expression before explaining that the dream shoes had teeth and they bit him whenever he tried wearing them with the wrong pair of pants.
That was before we even started our trip.
I suppose I should stop here and tell you that I’m well aware that my spontaneous promise to travel to England and tell off the bitch that William had dated when he was in college was crazy. It’s not the kind of thing I do. Ever. I might have changed my mind if William hadn’t carried me into his bedroom ten seconds after I said it and then proceeded to drug me with pleasure. When I came out of the haze he had already started putting the plan in action. He’d made a couple of calls and gotten tickets to a benefit ball taking place only a few days later that he was certain Cecily and the rest of his old crowd would be attending. He’d also booked tickets for a flight out of Boston that would get us to London about nine hours before the ball. I couldn’t back out then. The tickets were first class. You can’t back out from first class tickets to London. You can’t.
We’d packed and caught the first ferry off the island the next morning and were checked into a hotel in Boston by lunch time. The plan only gave us two days to get to Boston and then get William a new look. It was apparently my asking him if he had any ideas about that new look that led to the nightmare about shoes.
The actual shopping was worse. I couldn’t even talk him into coming out of the dressing room at the first store. At the third store I held up a very nice turtleneck sweater and he just shook his head. “Don’t think so, pet.”
That was when I realized I was going about things the wrong way and took him to the hair salon. I glanced around the place when we walked in and chose the edgiest looking stylist in the place. Her name tag, which hung from a series of safety pins attached to an unused belt loop on her very low, very tight jeans, said Faith and she had blue streaks in her hair, a tattoo and a pair of handcuffs hanging from the styling chair. I hoped they wouldn’t be needed. William shook his head again. But I held firm.
“That girl doesn’t take shit from anyone. Look at her. You can just tell that she doesn’t let anyone put her down. She will know exactly how to make you look the same.”
“How?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. The point is—it’s just hair. If you don’t like it we can have it changed again later or you can shave it off and it will grow back. Come on.” I tugged him over to her chair and pushed him into it. I gave her a big smile. “Hi. This is William. He needs to look more…” I struggled to find the word.
“Badass?” She suggested.
I grinned. “Exactly.”
She looked surprised for a moment before nodding and giving William a slow perusal. “Cool. So when you say badass…”
“Hot. Maybe dangerous even.”
William shook his head. “That’s not going to happen, ladies.”
Faith ignored him completely. “I got ya. I can do it, but you’re gonna have to trust me.” She grinned at me.
I nodded. “Do it.”
“Buffy, don’t you think I should—”
I stepped in front of him, leaned in for a quick kiss and pulled off his glasses. “Trust me. She is totally the right girl for the job.”
“I thought the goal was to make me look better.”
I shook my head. “Nope. The goal is to make you look different and feel different.”
“I—”
Faith laughed. “No worries, handsome. I’m great at this.” She quickly wrapped a black cape around his neck. She turned back to me and gestured towards another chair. “Tommy’s out today. You can hang in his chair and watch if you want.”
“Thanks.” I sat down.
“So what’s the story here?” She asked William as she started playing with his hair. “You trying to toughen up your image ‘cause you’re a musician or something?”
William laughed. “Not even close.”
She started combing his hair away from his face. She narrowed her eyes for a moment and grinned. “Oh yeah. This is gonna be…” She nodded. “So it’s just a basic make a girl see what’s she’s missing thing, then? Or a guy?”
He frowned. “Girl. Or not exactly…there’s an event…”
I laughed and filled her in a little. “We are going to a big party with a bunch of people that haven’t seen William in a long time. He needs to make an entrance.”
She pulled out her scissors and began clipping off his pretty curls. “The kind of entrance where everyone stops talking and all the girls need new panties?”
“Yeah.” I nodded and tried not to look too sad about those disappearing curls.
Faith chopped away for a few minutes and then stepped back. “Okay. Yeah.”
A petite Asian girl rocking the ever popular rebel schoolgirl look walked up and wrapped her arm around Faith’s waist. “Can I help?”
Faith nodded but didn’t turn to look at her. “Yeah, you wanna go mix some bleach for me.”
The other girl nodded. “Fun. How light are we going?”
William’s eyes widened. “Wait. What?”
Faith turned to the other girl. “Light. Platinum.”
William shook his head. “No.”
I was nearly as surprised. “Really?”
Faith sent the other girl to get busy in the back and smirked. “And here is the trust part we were talking about.”
I was tempted to argue or make her reassure me, but I didn’t. Instead, I just nodded. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m always sure.”
William was not. He continued to shake his head and send me shocked, pleading glances. “No. I agreed to a haircut, not…not chemical processing. I’ll look like a freak.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. There is a double standard, isn’t there? I mean, I’ve been bleaching my hair since my early teens and before that I used lemon juice and no one has ever given me a hard time about it. For the record my hair was blonde when I was really small and then darkened to a lightish medium sort of brown so my bleaching only brings it back to its original color. It’s basically natural. The thing is, the only men I knew who colored their hair were gay. Still, Faith wasn’t pushing to the give him highlights, she was planning to turn my shy book guy into a sexy punk guy. That’s different, right? I mean there is nothing girly about that. I couldn’t picture it, but I had a good feeling about it. It was so much more extreme than anything I would have done on my own and that was a great thing. William needed something extreme.
Faith had pulled a pair of handcuffs out of a drawer while I wasn’t paying attention. She dangled them in front of William.
His eyes widened like a cartoon character showing surprise.
“Here’s the deal, handsome. We can use these now or you can be a good boy and let me finish your hair…and then I’ll let you take ‘em home. I’ll bet you two can come with lots of fun uses.”
I watched William swallow a few times and laughed. I wondered how many pairs of handcuffs the girl had at work and was truly glad that I’d had my own hair retouched before the trip. I’m more used to the kind of salon where they give you a glass of wine and a gay man catches you up on the celebrity gossip of the month while making you look as much like a holiday edition Barbie as possible. “I think it is going to look great.” I could barely look at him while saying it. I suck at lying. I was just as worried as he was.
Faith took my fidgeting to mean something else entirely. She grinned. “Look at you getting’ all ansty.” She turned back to William. “Bet she won’t even wait ‘till you get back to your place, Willy. She’s got fuck me in the cab written all over her face.”
I should have been insulted. I probably would have said something, but William beat me to the punch.
His eyes glared coldly. “Don’t call me Willy.”
“There it is.” Faith practically bounced. “I knew he was in there somewhere. Fuck! I’m getting goosebumps! Now, let me get to work wipin’ away the Willy.”

Two hours later I was staring at William’s reflection in the mirror and trying to remember how to stand up. My knees had gone all Jello. “Black.” I took one look at his new hairstyle and realized that we only needed one color in his new wardrobe.
He turned his head and looked at me with a furrowed brow. “You know that was not a sentence, right love?” He looked stunned. I already assured him it looked great, but I knew he was unconvinced.
“We need to dress you in black. All black.”
He frowned, but Faith agreed. “It’s classic for a reason, handsome.” She was still fussing with his hair and I was starting to get irritated. I mean, his hair was done—at that point she was just touching my William.
Oh, have we not discussed the fact that I was suddenly thinking of William as mine? Yeah. I know.
“If we’re all done.” I said quickly and while looking directly at Faith’s fingers on William’s neck.
She grinned far too broadly. “Yeah…we’re five by five.” She gave William one last look in the mirror before turning to me. “Get him some leather: a jacket or some pants…a leash.”
I rolled my eyes but couldn’t stop myself from laughing.
Faith freed William from the cape and chair and he followed her over to the cash register to pay. He tipped well despite having hated every moment of his time in the salon and I thanked Faith quite sincerely. I’d hated her touching him, but I couldn’t deny the results. My shy and rumpled William looked like a rock star. We were just about out the door when Faith yelled and ran over to us. She grinned and then clipped the handcuffs she’d used to threaten William on to his belt loop. She dangled a small chain with the key near his face and said, “Go easy on her the first couple of times.” She put the key in the pocket of his button down and gave it a pat. “Have fun, kiddos.”
I could feel my face growing hot as we walked outside. William turned to me. “We are done for today.”
I wanted to argue that we still had too much to do and that leaving it all for one day was a bad idea, but…William had finally put his foot down.
He barely spoke a word on the trip back to the hotel and when he got our room he walked directly to the first mirror and stared at his reflection. “I could shave it off. That’s the only sensible—”
I shook my head emphatically. “No. It looks really good.”
He turned and glared at me. “I’m not this person. You want me to be somebody that I can’t be.”
I lifted my hands and cupped his face. “No. I want you, just you, as you are.” I ran my hand over his gelled in place white spikes. “It’s just hair, sweetie. It doesn’t make you a different person.”
“I can’t pull this off.”
I pulled his glasses off. “You are pulling it off. Look again.” I pushed him to turn back to the mirror. “You look like Billy Idol. You want to know how many girls can resist Billy Idol? None. No girls can resist Billy Idol.”
“I’m nothing like him.”
I laughed. “No. He’s a maniac and you’re a sweetheart.” I handed him back his glasses. “If you can’t live with it, we can go find another salon—a gentler salon—and have them put some color on it. But it works…it really works for you.”
He looked at the mirror again quizzically. “You like it? Honestly?”
I nodded. “I do.” And I did, despite already missing the curls.
He sighed and bit his lip before turning to me and holding up the handcuffs. “Enough to let me try these out?”
I laughed and ignored the sudden throbbing between my legs. “I’m not really a playing with handcuffs kind of girl.”
“I’m not the type to wear this hair. But I’ll trust you…if you’ll trust me.” He gave the cuffs a little shake and pierced with me his eyes. “Do you trust me?”


Chapter End Notes:
Thoughts? Hopes? Dreams?



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