A Sacrifice for Me Instead by Faded Dusk

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Logan and I met by happenstance in a local bar, both of us just grabbing drinks on a Friday night. Ordinarily, I doubt an architect like me and a high school teacher like him would have much of an overlap, but I was immensely grateful the happy coincidence came to pass, for his sake and my own. Logan immediately caught my eye from the moment he sat down next to me. A handsome, athletic build, a jawline amplified by the rugged, neat beard he sported, captivating blue eyes, and best of all, his hair. Admittedly I had no idea what majesty I was looking at initially, as he always kept it tied up in a short ponytail, but after we’d chatted for a while I asked him about it and he let it flow free for my eyes to behold. Light brown, sun-kissed waves, reaching down to his shoulders, a healthy sheen to every strand. I was so captivated that I blurted out how his hair was a one in ten thousand type of beauty, immediately cursing my loose tongue. Luckily for me, far from being put off by the remark, he blushed, thanked me for the compliment, and even offered to swap numbers. I attempted to curb my excitement as much as possible when I saw the golden band on his ring finger, and he confirmed he was indeed a married man, for nine years in fact. Still, I was happy just getting to be friends with a man as charming as him, especially when before we went our separate ways for the night, he allowed, practically asked, me to run my hands through his mane. Not a knot or tangle to be found. Romantic or not, I had struck gold.

I’d never become faster friends with anyone. We were texting each other every other day at the least, hanging out at least twice a week, two weeks in and we were greeting each other with hugs. Despite being three years older than me, Logan and I clicked on a level I’d never experienced. It was marvelous. A couple months passed like this, with Logan’s hair getting ever longer and more enticing, before the night Logan didn’t show up for our regular Friday drinks. I waited there at the bar for a few hours, but he never came, and worse still, he wasn’t answering texts or phone calls either. Had I done something wrong? Was he hurt? My mind was wracked with worry and potential guilt as I trudged my way up the steps and flopped onto my apartment sofa despondently, giving his phone one last ring to no avail. Around 1:00 AM, just as I was about to give up on it all and head to bed, to hopefully sleep off my sorrows, there was a rapid knock at the door. My heart rolled as I opened it. It was Logan, but he looked miserable, his hair disheveled and unkempt, his clothing rumpled, and his eyes were red as though he’d been crying for hours. My heart ached for him, but he wasn’t really coherent at that point, so I just helped him to my couch and got him some pillows and blankets to hopefully sleep off some of the worst of it.

The next morning, I woke up to the scent of coffee, and found Logan preparing cups for himself and I, hair pulled back into a half-ponytail, putting on a smile as best he could. I noticed, attempting to keep my expression neutral, that his fingers were barren. Once we were both seated, he explained, albeit with some hesitation and trembling hands, that his wife had left him abruptly. Worse still, he hadn’t even realized that she’d set him up to be cut off completely when she did so. The only things in his name were his car and his personal possessions. Everything else, including the house, technically belonged to his now ex-wife. And so she’d kicked him out, packed a couple bags full of his clothing and tossed him onto the streets, all because she felt she was finally ready to reveal the other man she’d been sleeping with for literal years. Logan had spent most of last night laboring over where he could go, and drinking gas-station alcohol to try and soothe his frayed nerves (much to his later regret). His phone died early into the night, and coming to me hadn’t occurred to him for hours. He hadn’t wanted to trouble me…but…

By this point, Logan was crying again. I pulled him into a silent hug and just let him get it all out, a process that lasted over half an hour before he could even formulate a full sentence again. Over the next few days, we finished moving Logan into my apartment. A few days after that, I offered him the bed so he could get some good sleep and he instead suggested we just share, to which I agreed. A couple nights later I awoke to find his arms wrapped around me and his face buried in my neck. Later that morning we shared our first kiss. With summer now in full swing, we had plenty of off time to explore the new side to our relationship.

Still, I could sense a residual pain in Logan. Every time my fingers brushed through his mane, he’d lean into it, but wince at the same time. The more time we spent together, the more I realized his hair was reminding him of his marriage. At last I decided to ask him directly about it, during one of our morning (shirtless) coffee chats, and I broached the topic as gently as I could, even tucking a shank of hair behind his ear and rubbing his cheek to make sure he understood I just wanted to help him. This elicited a fresh wave of tears. He admitted that he’d only grown out his hair at first because his wife hated it, but it had eventually gotten to the point that she changed her tune and demanded he grow it out long enough to donate. He would’ve been happy to cut it off once it got past his nape, but it was one of the things she’d started to nag him about most. Now he was torn. On the one hand, the long hair was a reminder of his wife’s control, of the voice still itching at the back of his mind, criticizing every mistake, every shortcoming. But on the other, he had grown almost attached to the hair, to the sheen, the attention it had brought, to the compliments. He even admitted that at one point during the past few days, he’d thought about cutting it himself, but then wondered and worried I’d find him hideous if he did so and toss him out onto the street. I would be lying if I said the words didn’t sting a bit, even if I was certain they came more from his crippling self-doubt than a belief that I was genuinely so shallow as to stop liking him if he cut his hair.

Still, to cut it now, he felt, would logically mean donating it, and then he would feel as though he was following his wife’s orders all over again. But to cut it without donating…well the guilt over denying the charity would follow instead. There seemed to simply be no winning. We went about our day as normal, the conversation weighing on my mind, until a plan started to form in my mind, a way to soothe his guilt and free him of his hair all without giving his ex-wife a thought. I stepped out to collect some supplies, and that evening, I asked him to strip down to his underwear and put on a silk blindfold. To my delight, he obliged. I led him, ever so gently, into the dining room, where I’d moved the table aside and laid out some towels to serve as padding and a weighted anchor point I’d purchased that afternoon. Kneeling him in front of it, I rapidly bound his hands together and to the anchor, before tying his feet together as well, leaving him kneeling on the floor in front of me, helpless, hair at my mercy. I removed his blindfold, and of course he questioned what I was doing, and so I explained.

"You’re still going to donate your hair, in a way, Logan. You’ll simply be donating it to the altar of my pleasure. Perhaps, I hope, the altar of our pleasure. I did my research. A large part of the hair donated to organizations like those charities you mentioned never even gets used. Some of it is thrown out, some just sits and collects dust, overall, it’s rarely worth it. So instead the paycheck from my next contract is going to go entirely to a charity of your choosing. I promise my…no, our finances are in more than a stable enough place to afford that. You’ll still be giving, you’ll be free of your hair, and you’ll be making me very happy." I massaged his cheek, "will that work for you?" He opened his mouth, but no words came out. At last, he managed a nod. "Excellent. Then all that’s left is to rid you of this terrible burden." I removed the hair clips with a flourish, and the sun-kissed locks spilled onto his shoulders. "Now stay nice and quiet for me, alright?" I purred, brandishing a shiny, sharp, new pair of shears.

Walking around behind him, out of his view, I lifted a huge, foot-long shank away from the scalp and sliced it off, dropping it to rest next to his bare feet. So I continued, grip, lift, cut, drop, repeat. Lock after lock tumbled past his shoulders and collected in a pile. At one point, I dipped my hand in, rummaging the silky clippings and relishing their divestiture from his scalp. Logan sat silently all the while. Occasionally his eyes would widen as a particularly thick shank would slide past his eyes, but true to his affirmation his mouth remained sealed. The cauldron of hair on the floor was massive already, and there was still more to come.

I exchanged my shears for freshly oiled clippers with a #2 guard attached. I figured there was no need to rush this process. Gently, I pushed Logan’s head forward towards the ground and drove the clippers into his nape. Up, up, up, they climbed, peeling away another layer of sandy hair that toppled away to join the shorn pile on the ground. Another pass, and another. I’d thought there wouldn’t be much to cut with the clippers after all that scissor work, but still the process just kept going. Not that I was complaining, being in ecstasy from the mixture of power and that divine feeling of silky hair giving way to fuzzy scalp. He leaned into my touch as I moved his head this way and that, bending his ear, tilting his chin, attacking from every direction to ensure not a single hair escaped the clippers’ hungry teeth. At last I set the clippers down and rubbed both hands over his freshly mown buzzcut. A sigh of happiness escaped his mouth, and the purest smile I’d seen since I’d known him spread across his face. But still he uttered one word, the first since we’d started the process, "...shorter."

His wish was my command. I unbound his hands so I could tilt his head all the way back. The guard was tossed aside, he closed his eyes, and I drove the clippers downward through the hairline and past the crown. Tufts of fur drifted away with each pass, and in far too little time, the short pelt I’d left him with was reduced to a five-o-clock shadow, a pale imprint of the mane now carpeting my floor. I removed the rest of Logan’s bindings, and swept the myriad piles into a single mound, a small island of beautiful hair between us. Logan stared at it for a brief moment, and then his eyes drifted up to meet mine. The piercing skies within shone brighter than ever before. He took me in his muscular arms, and carried me off to the bedroom, where we spent the rest of the night in bliss and freedom.

So it became our yearly ritual. Every year, Logan’s mane would grow, and grow, and grow, and on the anniversary of that magical night, I would bind him once more, the scissors and clippers would emerge, and we would make another sacrifice. After a couple years, any relation the ritual may have once had to Logan’s ex-wife had evaporated, and it was simply for us. A renewal, a freedom, only found in the comfort of each other's arms.

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