Gavin Part 5: Doc's Perspective by Whittaker

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Gavin Toys with a Longhair Enthusiast Part 5: Doc's Perspective.




Steam curled out of the mouth of the kettle and the device clicked itself off. Doc got up and poured the water into his mug of tea. He looked around his apartment. Softly lit with warm lights. Perfectly organized, everything in its place. He looked at himself in the full length mirror by his front door as he took the first sip from his mug. Was he really about to do this?

His hair was tied in a long, simple ponytail. The way it always was. He swept it over his shoulder.

It was thick, black, and shiny. Healthy to the very ends. It flowed around him like an oil slick. He never really had to deal with frizz, or flyaways. It always just seemed to behave the way he wanted it to. Straight, smooth, heavy. Really heavy, honestly. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had it cut. He remembered the feeling of having it cut though. Sitting in a brightly lit public space. Feeling confined under a cape. Having some random person he didn’t know touch him. Running their fingers over his scalp. He remembered the sound of metal on metal, close to his ears. And he remembered the sensation of his appearance changing. The tips of his hair hitting different places than they used to. Feeling disoriented and uncomfortable for weeks afterwards while he adjusted to the new ‘normal’.

He used to stretch the intervals between haircuts as long as possible, to avoid the touches of strangers. Then he just stopped getting them all together, to avoid the discomforting sensation of his body and appearance changing.

Of course, the side effect of this was that his hair had grown so long that if he leaned too much he was at risk of stepping on it. If he was walking up or down stairs he had to make sure it was positioned very precisely, so as not to drag it through whatever foulness was there. Sometimes he found himself just holding onto it, so that he could move it out of the way as needed. It was like an inanimate additional appendage that he constantly needed to be thinking about.

He smoothed his hand down the length of it, as far as he could reach. There were still a couple feet beyond his fist. He lifted it up and inspected it for split ends. It wasn’t perfect but it was damn near close. The only hair cutting that Doc engaged in was sitting in his comfy chair by the big living room window overlooking the ocean, and performing ‘search and destroy’, where he snipped individual split ends off the tips of his strands.

"Alex," he made eye contact with himself in the mirror. "Are you seriously doing this?" He asked himself.




***




He had been lifting weights with his friend Simon when this mess all started. Simon was always ribbing Doc about his hair, he was used to it. And in general he was used to the attention that it afforded him and had more or less become practiced at fielding all of the comments. It was a constant barrage of ‘Oh my god, you have the longest hair I’ve ever seen in my life’, ‘Wow your hair is incredible’, ‘Have you ever cut it?’, ‘Will you ever cut it?’, ‘I could never have hair like that’, so on and so forth.
He had been trying to PR his bench press. Simon had been spotting him. He was going to fail the lift, he warned Simon, who moved to help him support the weight. One of Simon’s feet was standing on the hair that was pooling behind him. When his hands became loaded with the weight of the bar, his footing slid on the hair and he stumbled, and that was how Doc ended up with 345lbs of barbell, plus Simon, on top of his chest.

He groaned uncomfortably. Simon righted himself quickly and thankfully another person in the gym saw the mishap and stepped in to help them re-rack the bar. "Ugh, f*cking hell," he wheezed.

"Dude, cut your hair." Simon said

Doc looked at him in confusion. "Yeah, cause that’ll make me stronger."

"Nah man, cause I slipped on it, and that’s why you just got crushed."

Doc rolled his eyes and shook his head, gently prodding at the place on his chest where the bar had slammed into him. He wondered if he would end up with a bruise.

Simon would usually let up his teasing after being brushed off by Doc, not this time though. "Seriously man, it’s been too long. Look I know you have some hang-ups about the whole process but I swear you can handle it, and then when you finally cut it the clock resets and you don’t have to think about your hair for another 2 decades." he tried to appeal. "Donate it or something, make some bald kids happy."

Doc squirmed uncomfortably. "There is a donation event taking place at the hospital in a couple of months…" he admitted reluctantly.

"Perfect! See, that is serendipity! You are meant to cut the hair, dude."

Doc shook his head.

"What’s the charity? I assume they take money as well? How about this, we put up a poster in the gym collecting donations for the charity, and if it reaches a milestone, say like 10k or something, then you go and donate your hair."

Doc grumbled. "30k" he said.

Simon was startled. He had honestly not expected Doc to counter the offer. He had expected another dismissal. "Okay, sure, 30k."

"And you’re not allowed to contribute, neither is Scott or Phoebe, that’s cheating. I’ll match whatever the final donation ends up being, at the end, to make up for it."

A smile was creeping onto Simon’s face, he couldn’t believe it right now, Doc was actually seriously considering cutting his hair. "Okay man, yeah, no problem, we won’t contribute. I will however be in charge of marketing."

Doc laughed nervously and they shook on the deal. The next week Doc turned beet red when he saw that Simon had put together a poster with a collage of pictures of his hair. One of the pictures was of him standing with his long ponytail fully visible in side-profile, it was blown up bigger than the rest of the photos and a large pair of cartoon scissors had been pasted so that it looked like they were about to cut it off. The poster read ‘If we raise 30k our local hair monster will donate his hair! Help us get there!’ and had a thermometer drawing with a big 30k goal at the top. Simon had somehow managed to convince the gym staff to display it at their front desk. The meter was already at 4600$. That was okay though. Interest would be high at first and then would peter out. That was just how humans were.

Weeks went by however, and the donation number kept climbing and climbing.

Doc was meeting Simon in the gym one day when he saw that the 30k donation goal had been surpassed. Simon could not keep the grin off his face. "Uh oh, looks like it’s happening, man. Not gonna chicken out are you?"

"What if I triple the donation instead?"

"F*** no, man! People want to see you lose the hair! Don’t deny them this."

Doc’s chest and throat tightened. "Fine." He conceded.

Simon hooted and hollered. He went to grab the man’s ponytail to swing it around like a jump rope. Doc wrenched it out of his grip. "Stop it," he said sternly.

Simon swooned sarcastically. "Docpunzel, Docpunzel, cut off your hair."

"That’s enough."

"I can’t wait to tell Scott, he’s gonna lose his mind."

Doc rolled his eyes.




***




So now here he was, in his apartment, 10:45am on a Saturday. The Wigs for Kids drive was underway. He was going to swallow his pride, take an Ativan, walk to the event, and let someone cut his hair off.

Well, not just ‘someone’. He was going to let Gavin cut his hair off.

He wasn’t sure if that was going to make things worse or better.

Gavin was an ER nurse at the hospital where Doc practiced. Doc was head of the ICU, and besides the normal overlap between ER and ICU, Gavin could always be found lending an extra hand, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to pick up ICU shifts here and there. Doc had worked with him a fair amount over the years.

He wasn’t sure if he could call them friends, but they were definitely friendly. Then again, Gavin was friendly with everyone.

Gavin was perfect.

Gavin was everything that Doc wished that he could have.

He was outgoing, charming, and he radiated warmth and kindness. He cared so much about doing a good job. He was intelligent, confident yet humble. He was relaxed and funny. In the few instances where Doc and Gavin had interacted at social events with one another, Gavin had somehow managed to make Doc feel like he too was an interesting, socially skilled, ‘normal’ member of the group. Instead of the awkward social clutz he often felt like, in situations outside of his comfort zone.

He was also absolutely beautiful. A bit smaller than average height, maybe 5’8"-5’10", slender and delicate with striking features. Doc loved their relative size difference. Doc was 6’3", fit and thick with well defined muscle. He loved to imagine how it would feel to run his large hands down Gavin’s slender arms, to grab him around the waist, maybe pick him up, toss him around a bit, press his body up against a wall, or loom over him on their bed.

He had gorgeous thick blond hair. Thicker than Doc’s, and with more texture, and he obviously had lots of fun styling it in different ways. Braids and buns and curls. Doc felt some silent camaraderie with Gavin, being the only other man in their hospital with notably long hair. Though Gavin was obviously not as ‘weird’ about it as Doc was. Doc knew that Gavin cut his hair, he had even cut it short a couple times. He knew that he had donated it. But what Doc appreciated was that Gavin had never once made any comments about Doc’s hair or what he thought should or shouldn’t be done with it. Everybody else seemed to think that it was their business. Not Gavin though.

A few years ago Gavin had had a major health scare. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and had needed to undergo surgery. The whole hospital staff had been shaken by the diagnosis, but Gavin had taken the whole incident in stride. He had taken a large chunk of time off for his recovery, when he came back to work, his hair had been shaved short from the surgery, but he just looked so sweet and innocent and vulnerable that Doc had been even more drawn to him. And then his hair gradually grew back over the years and Doc got to appreciate watching him look more and more ethereal the further it fell down his back.

Now whenever Doc saw Gavin, he would surreptitiously perform a double-take, to appreciate his thick, waist length braid, or his swishing high ponytail, or his long curls clipped back from his face.

It had been Gavin who had come up with the idea of running a fundraiser through the hospital with Wigs for Kids, and obviously he had offered up his time and hair to the cause.

After the outcome of the deal with Simon, when Doc had worked up the balls to add his name to the donor list, Gavin had come and found him in his office. Seeing him stand there at his open door brought an immediate smile to his face. "Gavin, please come in, to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Hey Doc, this isn’t a work-call. It’s about the fundraiser that I’m helping to put on." He came in and took a seat across from Doc’s desk.

Doc quirked an eyebrow at him.

"Umm, well, your name… it’s been added to the list? Of donors. I just wanted to make sure, you know, that that was actually you, and not somebody who thinks they’re being funny."

Doc’s heart gushed at the man’s obvious concern for him and his open awareness and acceptance of his eccentricities. "It was actually me." He confirmed.

Gavin’s eyes widened in surprise. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "Okay! Okay, that’s um, that’s cool."

Doc cleared his throat. "When do we find out who will be doing the cutting?"

"Oh, well it was probably just going to be random on the day-of."

Doc’s anxiety fluttered at that. "Could it be you?" He asked.

"Yeah, it might be. I’m gonna be up on stage the whole day."

"Can it be you? You are… the person whom I would trust the most…"

Gavin made an affirmative noise of realization. "Oh!, Yes of course, I can make it so that it’s me."

Doc smiled, "Thank you, Gavin, I appreciate it."

"You’re welcome." Gavin smiled and Doc wanted to pull that radiant expression towards him and press his lips to it.



***



Doc had put his shoes on but was still hovering by his unopened door. Gripping his ponytail firmly. He needed to leave soon. He was pacing back and forth.

"For f*ck’s sakes, Alex." He spoke to himself again. "You can do this. You are an adult. You have your sh*t together 95% of the time. You are a f*cking doctor. It’s going to be Gavin. It’s going to be one time, and then you never have to do this again."

He grabbed his keys and forced himself through the door before he could let the doubt creep back in again.



***



Doc made it to the event. The Ativan was helping but he was still internally screaming. He had forced his hands into the pockets of his slacks so that he wouldn’t be caught obsessively fidgeting with his hair. There was a textured medallion in his pocket that he was fiddling with instead.

Gavin was being sweet and charming as usual. He looked like such a natural in front of a crowd. Doc was envious of his almost careless social confidence.

"I called dibs on Doc Greene the second I saw his name pop up on the list of donors," he recounted to the crowd. "I don’t know about you guys, but I never thought I’d see the day."

That was Doc’s cue. He swallowed the lump in his throat and approached Gavin’s station. "Well, I’ve seen you do this 3 times now and come out unscathed, so I figure it must not be as scary as I’ve made it out to be in my head. Just go easy on me, please." He said, then internally applauded himself. ‘Good job Alex,’ he thought. ‘That was a normal thing to say. Make a light joke at your own expense. That’s something that people do.’

"Absolutely,’ Gavin replied. "How much do you want to donate?"

How much did he want to donate!? None ideally. He panicked. What was a normal answer to this question? What was a normal amount to donate? How long was his hair? He had no idea. Gavin would tell him if he said the wrong amount, right?

"Um, is 2ft okay?" He asked.

"Yeah, of course it is."

Doc exhaled a sigh of relief. "Alright then, let it be done."

He forced himself into the chair in front of Gavin, and managed to hold still and not flinch when Gavin put a cape around his neck. He felt the weight on his head fluctuate as Gavin fiddled with his ponytail and a measuring tape. Amazingly he found that when it was Gavin, he didn’t immediately want to move away. He actually wanted to lean into him. He wanted Gavin to card his fingers through his hair, and firmly touch his scalp.

"You ready Doc?" Gavin asked.

"Ready as I’ll ever be, I think," he replied.

"How long’s it been?"

Doc dreaded that question. The inherent embarrassment he felt whenever it was asked. "God, I don’t even know anymore, 15 years maybe?" He deflected.

"F*cking right, eh?" Gavin whistled in amazement. Doc laughed, he had never heard Gavin curse before, it was cute seeing him slip up and be ‘imperfect’. "Sorry!" He apologized and covered the microphone that he had hooked around his ear. "Alright, here we go!"

Doc took a long, slow, fortifying inhale, and braced himself as he felt Gavin apply firm even downward pressure on his ponytail. This was it, he was about to get his ponytail cut off. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. His leg started bobbing up and down involuntarily. He pressed a hand into it to try and make it stop but it didn’t work. He could hear the harsh crunching of Gavin’s scissors and feel the subtle way the cutting pulled on his scalp. Then he felt the release of weight, and his chin dipped forward a bit as it over-compensated, his neck used to holding up a heavier load.

Gavin held up the severed ponytail for everyone to see. It looked enormous. Doc needed to feel what was left of his hair. He needed to feel it now or he was going to panic. He stood up abruptly. Gavin mimed a half-bow with the tail in hand. People in the audience applauded.

‘Okay Alex, you’re fine, pull yourself together. People like what Gavin is doing, mimic the behaviour’. He made a small bow as well. The remainder of his ponytail slid over his shoulder towards the ground as a result. He looked at it. ‘It’s okay’, he told himself. ‘There’s still lots there.’ He straightened up.

"Feel lighter?" Gavin said playfully, reaching out to touch the remains of his ponytail and let it trickle through his fingers.

"Disconcertingly so", Doc admitted, then wondered if he should have said that differently. He reached for his hair and ran his hand down it, feeling it stop abruptly at around the length of his outstretched arms. He was feeling nauseous. It was going to take a long time to get used to this change. He untied his ponytail and shook it out, running his fingers through it, untangling it a bit, but just generally trying to speed run the process of familiarizing himself to the foreign sensation.

"I can’t believe you can just do that. Your hair is so slippery, mine could never."

Doc blushed, "Oh, yeah I guess it’s always felt pretty easy to manage." He tied his ponytail back into place.

"No wonder you’ve kept it long for so long. I don’t think I could ever get tired of my long hair if it behaved like that."

‘Yeah, cause that’s the reason’, Doc thought self-deprecatingly.

"Hey Doc, how do you feel about returning the favour and being my barber? Get a little bit of revenge if you want?"

"Oh, r-really? You’re sure?" Doc stammered.

Gavin waves him off, "Yeah sure, why not?"

"But doesn’t your husband want toâ€""

And there was the real damper on Doc’s fantasies about Gavin. The husband. Matt or Mark or something equally uninteresting. Doc knew that Gavin’s husband worked at the hospital as well, but he wasn’t sure if he had met him or not. Didn’t know if he was a nurse, or a doctor; maybe he worked in admin, or with the custodial office. Doc wondered if they had met through work, and how the husband had managed to seduce Gavin, who seemed so magical and carefree and unobtainable. He didn’t like the husband. On principle. He had decided that whomever this person was, that Gavin deserved someone better.

"Nah, he said he didn’t want to. I was gonna draw a name from a hat, but you can do it."

Case in point. If Doc was Gavin’s husband, he would never say no to him.

"Um, okay then," Doc pulled off his cape and set it aside, looking around the stage at the tools available to him.

Gavin started chatting to the crowd again, setting them up for his haircut. Doc swept his gaze through the crowd. It landed on a brunet sitting at a picnic table near the periphery. The man was conventionally attractive, if a little plain. He had a short back and sides haircut and a short beard. He was staring at Gavin. He looked uncomfortable. Doc wondered if this was the husband.

Gavin had picked up a cape and was trying to put it around himself. Doc helpfully reached out to hold his hair out of the way of the snaps. As soon as he got that braid in his hands he knew he was a goner. It was so thick and soft. He didn’t want to let go.

"Okay, so what do you want me to do now?" Doc asked.

"Just go ahead and throw a hair tie at the top of my braid and cut it off!"

"The whole thing!? Just like that?"

Gavin laughed, "Yeah the whole thing."

Doc blew out a surprised breath. "Oh boy, yikes, alrighty then." He ran a hand slowly down the full length of Gavin’s braid, thumb gently tracing the bumps. He grasped it at the base experimentally, even his large hands struggled to encircle its full thickness.

"Wow Gavin, it’s absolutely gorgeous," he ran his hand gently down the thick braid again. "The whole thing, you’re absolutely sure?"

Doc flicked his gaze subtly to the man in the corner, and saw his expression darken. Oh yeah. That had to be the husband.

Gavin shrugged, "I mean sure, why not?" he said.

"Okay," Doc answered hesitantly. Gavin made it sound so easy, though he supposed haircuts were easy, for most people… He reached for a hair tie and smoothed his hands down Gavin’s head a few times, trying to tame the man’s flyaways. He had managed to get quite rumpled after a couple hours of flouncing around on stage outside in the wind and humidity. "You know what," he said, "your braid has gotten a little messy, I should probably fix it properly before I cut it, so it’s neater for whomever has to make a wig out of it."

"Oh, yeah, sure," Gavin agreed.

Doc unbound the end of his braid and unraveled the strands. When the whole rope was undone, he ruffled the gorgeous mane a bit, and swept it so that it fell around Gavin’s shoulders and spilled into his lap.

Someone in the crowd wolf whistled. He picked up a brush and used it to gently sweep the thick mass of Gavin’s hair up into the grip of his palm, then he began gently working out the tangles from the bottom up. When he got to the scalp, he was pleased to note how Gavin leaned into his caresses, clearly enjoying the massage of the bristles. He let himself give into temptation and add his fingers to the mix, stroking them through the gorgeous hair.

"Do I have to pick up the scissors? We could just keep doing this instead?" Doc tried to joke, hand resting on the back of Gavin’s neck.

Doc caught the brunet at the picnic table standing up abruptly. ‘Whoops, took it too far, don’t want to cause a scene.’ He ran his hands through Gavin’s hair one last time to section it into three even chunks and braided it up tightly, then secured the top with a second hair tie like Gavin had requested. He grabbed the scissors and brought them to the base of the braid. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. If one of his friends found out about this they were not going to let him hear the end of it. He started snipping, and though it was hard not to project himself into the chair, he kept his hands steady as he cut through the thickness. When it separated from Gavin’s head, and the man stood up and ruffled the choppy leftovers, Doc’s heart fluttered at how easily he joked about the cut, and brushed off how silly he looked. If he and Doc were together, Gavin would be treated to the most luxurious spa day he could imagine this afternoon, assuming the man enjoyed things like that. Doc would come. He wouldn’t get anything done, but he would lounge around in a soft robe and watch Gavin get primped and pampered, sipping a nice drink. He needed to figure out what kind of things Gavin liked, so that he could spoil him. That was a good idea.

Picnic table man, aka probably the husband, had walked up the steps to the stage and was putting his hands on Gavin. Doc felt like his welcome here was probably over, so he slowly started to drift off the stage, but the guy wouldn’t stop glaring at him. Then Doc noticed his gaze flick down to his hand, and it occurred to him that he was still holding Gavin’s braid. Did the guy want it? That’s bizarre, it wasn’t even attached to Gavin anymore. He leaned cautiously towards the man and dangled the braid within his arms reach. The man quickly snatched it up.



***



Later than evening saw Doc sat at his kitchen island with a pad of paper and pen in hand. He had swirled his hair up into a bun on the top of his head, so that he could ignore to the best of his abilities, the fact that it was 2ft shorter than it had been this morning.

His pen slashed vertically through the centre of the page. 'Likes', he labelled one column, and 'dislikes', he labelled the other.

If he was going to be the one to make Gavin happy, he would need to be methodical about this.





End-Note: Stay tuned for Part 6: Miles's Revenge!

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