My New Obsession (Part 1) by AllisonWonderland

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Partially Based on a true story

I met Sean Collins in my junior year history class where he always sat in front of me. This was back in the 1980s when heavy metal was a big deal, and Sean was a metalhead. He usually wore black clothes and a leather motorcycle jacket. But his most striking feature was his curly, dark brown hair. He had been growing it for several years and it was nearly down to his waist. Unlike some of the other guys who would cut their hair into mullets or use a bunch of styling products to make their hair stand out, Sean never cut or styled his. It was all one length and very shiny and healthy. It was the envy of all the girls, but it attracted them as well and they always wanted to touch it. Not me, however. Sean was out of my league and I knew it. He dated metalhead girls who wore tight leather mini skirts and ran with his wild crowd. I, on the other hand was a nerd. I mostly kept to myself in high school in order to focus on my goal of one day becoming a lawyer. I was not into fashion whatsoever and my parents would never forgive me if I fell into that crowd of ruffians who drank and smoked and partied constantly. However, Sean was a bit different than the rest. Sure he got into his fair share of trouble, but he was also very intelligent and was the first one with all the answers whenever our teacher, Mr. Zimmerman, asked the class a question. He always ragged on Sean and tried to get him to clean up his act a bit and to apply for college, but it was Sean's dream to join the navy and to travel the world.

Sean and I were assigned to be partners once for a class presentation, and while working on that we became sort of friends. Even though it initially seemed like we had nothing in common, we both enjoyed reading about history. He eventually opened up to me and told me about his hopes and dreams for the future, about his volatile relationship with his abusive father, and about the fact that he thought he might be bisexual. He was a very animated and easygoing person and I enjoyed our conversations a lot, but only as a friend. Since I didn't want to ruin our friendship, I never told him about the odd feelings that I sometimes got when he leaned back in his chair in front of me and his long mane would spill onto my desk in class. I knew how important his beautiful hair was to him, but sometimes I got these random urges to just shear some of it off and to see what his reaction might be. I also sometimes imagined what it would be like when we finally graduated and he went off to boot camp and would have to shave it all off. Would he cry? What would he even look like without his hair? I don't know why these thoughts would sometimes come to me, but I brushed them off.

Then one spring day, Sean took his seat in front of me, but something was different. The wild, distracting mass of hair that would spill down his back onto my desk was gone, replaced by a neat little stub of a ponytail that didn't even reach his shoulders. I couldn't believe my eyes. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked what had happened to his hair. He told me that a strict new boss and taken over at his after school job and had implemented a uniform policy and told him that he had to get a haircut before returning to work. His aunt was a hairdresser so he visited her the night before and she had given him this haircut. Before he could continue, Mr. Zimmerman entered the room and told everyone to be quiet.

For the rest of the class, I stared mesmerized at the tantalizing way the little ponytail bobbed and bounced whenever Sean turned his head. Also, for the first time I could see his ears and the sides of his neck and this excited me for some unknown reason.

That night, lying in bed, I could not get Sean and his stubby ponytail out of my mind. My thoughts raced. I had never met or heard much about his aunt, but I imagined her as a very stern older woman. I imagined him sitting shirtless in her kitchen, completely at her mercy, getting his first haircut in years. I so wished that I could have been there to witness the show. Did she gather all of his incredibly long thick hair into a ponytail and hack most of it off in one fell swoop? It was so thick, that would have taken some effort. I could hear the almost crunchy sound the shears would have made as they severed the impressive ponytail. I could imagine the aunt, or even myself in the role of the aunt now holding the nearly foot long ponytail aloft like a trophy, possibly taunting Sean a little with it, as he slowly moved his head from side to side, marveling at how much lighter it suddenly felt. Or perhaps better still, did she cut it little by little, inch by intoxicating inch, letting the little curly tendrils flutter onto his lap, gathering into an increasingly large pile on the floor, sticking to the lithe muscles of his back and arms. (Sean was on both the gymnastics and fencing teams at school and had a very slim but athletic build.) By now I was absolutely beside myself with arousal and excitement in a way that I had never previously felt before. I couldn't wait for history class tomorrow. Perhaps I could find a way to discreetly question Sean about the details of his haircut so I could have even more fodder for my fantasies.

Well you could imagine my shock when I arrived in class the next day to find Sean angry and disheveled looking. It seemed as if he had not slept at all the night before. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap and there was no sign of the little ponytail to be seen. "Is everything okay?", I tentatively asked him. "Not really", he replied. "My boss at work said my new haircut still didn't meet the standards of the new dress code, as it was still past my collar. She wouldn't allow me to start my shift until I complied with the code, so I grabbed a pair of office scissors off her desk and hacked the ponytail off right in front of her. And to make matters worse, Beth broke up with me last night because she said she couldn't be seen with me anymore! " Beth had been Sean's girlfriend for a few months. She was like a metalhead Barbie, tall and tan and blonde and perfect... And very shallow. "I'm really sorry to hear that Sean", I told him. "Surely your haircut can't be THAT bad." Then without thinking, I reached forward and yanked the baseball cap away. I couldn't control my laughter. Little frizzy curls stood out from his head unevenly in every possible direction. He looked insane. "It looks..." I trailed off looking for the most polite way to put it but he finished my sentence for me by saying "ridiculous" and hastily replaced the baseball cap before anyone else noticed. I asked him what he planned to do and he said he was going to continue wearing the hat until it grew out long enough to put back into a ponytail and that he was going to find a new job as soon as possible. However, right then and there, I knew that just wasn't going to happen. I had other plans for dear Sean...

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