Oh, Indiana Jones. Pt 2 by TheFellowTraveler

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This is the second piece of my two-part story with Indy.
Any feedback (including constructive criticisim) is welcome.

Have fun reading!


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It was somewhere around the end of the fifth week that we’d gotten around the discussion of a haircut. Summer was approaching, and he’d hadn’t had a haircut in a while before he even showed up at my doorstep.

"Alright," he said after looking himself up and down in the bathroom mirror, "You’re right, it’s starting to look like a helmet on my head."

"Which in itself isn’t a bad thing," I teased him, "I’m sure it’d be just as effective as one if you landed your head on it."

He turned to me and squinted with an attempt at seriousness; it lasted a second before he snorted and shook his head as he was walking over to the couch in the living room. Having planted himself next to me, leaning his head on my shoulder, he asked:

"You won’t cut it too short, okay? I’m returning to the university next week, and my poor students can’t have their professor looking like a convict on the run. It’s bad enough that they were stuck with my replacement for this long."

I pressed a kiss against his temple, the smell of my lavender shampoo greeting me as his hair tickled my nose. He shifted his head closer, and I pressed another kiss in greeting.

"No proper crewcuts, then," I said, running my fingers from his hairline to his crown. "That’s a shame; you’ve got just the hair for it, and don’t even get me started on the face. How about this: you just sit back and enjoy yourself, and I’ll do what I think is best."

He raised an eyebrow at me. "From the sounds of it, that’ll be a very short haircut."

"It won’t, I promise. I can’t have you returning to the States looking untidy or like a convict. You’ll look great with what I have in mind, trust me."

After a quick chuckle, he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and put his head against my chest. He was wrapping his arm around me as he said:
"Alright, I’m yours. Do whatever you think is best."

*

Sometime after dinner and wash-up, Indiana Jones was in my living room, caped and ready for a cut. The ends of the old, white tablecloth were neatly tied into a small knot at his nape, and he was sitting contently in the wooden chair beneath it.

"Feeling nervous?" I asked, and he picked up on the tease, turning to face me as I laid out the barbering equipment I’d bought last year.

"Should I?" his green eyes sparkled with curiosity, his smile with mischief. "No, actually;" Indy shook his head, turning away from me, leaning back facing forward again. "I trust you. I do. Pinky promise."

"That’s the spirit," I was plugging the clippers in as I said it; upon pushing up the switch and turning them on, Jones straightened up in his chair, shooting the machinery an untrustworthy glance. It took a lot of composition not to laugh at the whole ordeal.

Putting the clippers down onto the table, next to the attachments, the pair of scissors and two combs, I quickly stepped aside, brushed a kiss against the top of his head and clapped him on the shoulder before picking up a comb and getting to work. Indy seemed to relax again as I ran the comb through the silky hair, having my fun with picking up strands here and there to evaluate their length.

The hair on his nape and over the tips of his ears was the sorest sight to the eye; it was overgrown, draping over his neck and ears in thick peaks which he used to keep combed back with some pomade until he’d washed his hair prior to the cut tonight. The hair at his temples formed a bulbous-looking thing, the side part closer to resembling the Red Sea after Moses walked through it than a decent side part; the top of hair was the longest, though; his bangs flopped past his eyebrows when combed out.

All in all, he was ripe for a good trim, so I got to work before he had the time to change his mind again. Snapping on the number four guard onto the clippers before turning them on, I dug a hand into the hair on his left side and plowed the clippers through the mass of hair at his temple. It was falling down the white tablecloth in mounds, the voluptuous parting reduced to all of thirteen millimeters. Jones swore, sounding impressed, as he looked at the hair that landed in his lap.

He picked it up with his hand, pushing the ball of hair around his palm as I kept working my way through the rest; I used the distraction to push the clippers across his crown as well, making sure to hold them as lightly as I could in order not to alarm him of their location. The shorn strands flopped down the back of the chair, ending up on top of my boots, and I was already giving his head a gentle nudge forward in order to take off the back, stripping him all the way from the nape to the crown in single flicks of the wrist.

When the time came for me to cut the hair on his left temple, I had to pick up the bulk of his hair on top with one hand and hold it so as I worked my way through the side; Indiana let out a small sound resembling an "oh", as if only now realizing how much hair he had on his head. The hair was piling up everywhere: in his lap, on his shoulders, on the floor and my boots alike.

Once I was done with cutting off the bulk on the sides and back, I swept the hair off the shoulders into his lap; as I was putting on a number three attachment, Jones laughed. He called me over, nodding at the pile of cut hair bundled in his lap and saying, "Hey, we could stuff a pillow with this. Got any empty pillowcases?"

I chuckled, running my hand against the back of his head. "The Merino sheep would envy you, I’ll tell you that much."

Turning on the clippers again, I ran them from his sideburn and up, following the curve of his head and lifting the clippers off before they reached the top; the result wasn’t too stark of a difference between the length of the hair on his temple and the bottom end of the sideburn, but it was noticeable enough to give the haircut some structure. I did the same at his nape and other sideburn, debating if to go back for another round, with an even shorter attachment or not, but ultimately deciding against it; I wasn’t too sure that he’d like this haircut, either, let alone something shorter. The only other thing that he could deem drastic was taking the guard off altogether and cleaning up the arches around his ears and following the natural shape of his hairline at the nape.

Finally, it was time for the cherry on top. Indy’s shoulders sagged with relief when I turned the clippers off and put them down for good, picking up the comb and scissors instead. The most urgent part was cutting the hair at his crown to a length that could match the patch I’d previously cut with the number four guard; I picked up the strands with the comb and closed my fingers around them, realizing that his hair there would be as long as my fingers are thick. Every following snip was longer, cut at different angles to follow the shape of his head and the direction in which his hair grew; his hair fell against his scalp naturally, the short bits already following the path of the previous side part.

When it came to his bangs, I combed them over his forehead and began snipping halfway across; the fall of the strands nearly had a cinematic effect to it, landing into the pile in his lap like feathers do in cartoons. The crunch of his hair under the blades of the scissors sent shivers down my spine and pelvis. It took a few more cuts, some while holding them up and cutting from an angle so as to not make the cut too blunt, some pulled to the side and back, to match it up with the rest of his hair as best as I could.

Once it was all done, I ran a towel under the tap in order to clean off his neck and the skin behind his ears; my fingers were still wet, so I ran them through the hair on top, wetting it for the first time, then combing it into a side part with one of the combs from the nearby table, making sure that the front was swept back and then styled to the left. When I was satisfied with how the hairstyle looked and when he was cleaned up, I stood in front of him for the first time.

"Oh, holy shâ€""

Indy’s eyes nearly sprung out of his skull.
"Oh, damn it," he said, reaching for the knot at the base of his neck instantly, near-frantic until I’d put a mirror in front of him; at that, he seemed to freeze. He looked to me, then to his reflection, then to me again. "Holy sh.., indeed." His voice was calm and taken aback. "This is incredible."

It might’ve been the overhead lightning doing its magic, but the sharpness of the cut hair on the sides played naturally into the line of his cheekbones, attenuating them; the hair on top had some length to it, but it was sitting neatly in place, looking as if he were taken right off of a portrait from a poster.

Indy chuckled. "Don’t scare me like that again, alright? I thought that was horror on your face, you bastard. I never had a clipper cut before this."

"You’ve never â€""

"Never", he repeated. "I was imagining myself sitting here and looking like a peeled potato."

I chuckled, handing him the mirror as I stepped behind him and untied the tablecloth, careful to not spill the hair from his lap and make myself a new rug right on the spot. As I was tying it up and making sure that it wouldn’t spill, Indiana was checking himself out from various angles.

"My apologies, then. I reacted that way because I didn’t know that I was this skilled, really."

He squinted as he smirked, cocking his head to the side; the spill of the warm light from above made him even prettier in this position. "Modesty’s a virtue, Doc, you know?."

"I am far from a virtuous man," I said, with a chuckle, my hand finding its way under his chin, my thumb tracing the lines of his face. "Though I must admit that you are a delight to work with."

His answering smile made me take the mirror from his hands and put it down on the table with one hand, the other already having found his. He stood up from the chair, reminding me once again that he towers over me for half a head, gently leading the way until he’d had me against the nearest wall.

"A delight, you say." He was tilting my face up with his forefinger under my chin and his thumb caressing it from above. "Then tell me, Doc, how’d you feel about a shower? I might need your help to wash my hair again."

He was out of the cast and his ribs had healed nicely; the last thing this heathen needed was anyone’s help. I couldn’t hold back my answering smile as I told him to lead the way.


The End

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