Chapter 6
Chapter Six
STEVIE
The hallway stretches longer than any hallway has the right to. Kafka-core shit.
Or maybe that’s just me, dragging my feet like a kid on the way to the principal’s office. Except the principal never threatened to bleach my entire identity until I look like a white-collar Barbie trying to enter witness protection from the PTA.
Saul walks beside me. Beside. Not ahead, not behind, not giving me time to spiral alone like a respectful federal agent. No, this sexy beast matches his pace to mine with those long, load-bearing thighs like it’s nothing. Like he’s not a six-foot-tall stress response wrapped in denim and body heat.
I add it to the file I’m building on him. Against my will. For national security reasons. For science.
The room at the end of the hall looks like a government-subsidized kill shelter for self-esteem. One sad chair in front of a mirror. Supplies lined up like scalp-firing squad. No music. No magazines. No sign that joy has ever been allowed to live here.
Just a mirror, a chair, and a woman who looks like she could cut hair, run a black-ops unit, and make the best green bean casserole at your aunt’s funeral.
“You must be Stevie,” she says, voice efficient. Like my name is the box she’s checking before she chemically removes my soul.
I nod because what the fuck else am I gonna do, fight her?
“I’m Patricia. Have a seat.”
The chair is cold and vinyl and vaguely threatening. It squeaks under me like it knows what’s coming. In the mirror, I look like I’ve already been erased in Photoshop. Washed out, colorless, with a face that still thinks maybe we’ll make it out of here with dignity.
Poor thing.
Patricia drapes a cape around my shoulders, black, the same as every salon, at least that’s normal, and snaps it at the back of my neck. Her fingers are quick. Professional. She doesn’t linger.
“We’re going blonde,” she says, more to herself than me, running her hands through my hair to assess it. “Good texture. Healthy. This won’t take as long as some.”
Healthy. Great. My scalp’s thriving while I disassociate.
Saul leans against the wall like a fucking Greek tragedy. Arms folded. Eyes on me. Not ogling, not detached, just... here. Like a promise he made and doesn’t mind keeping. Like he’s built to witness difficult things and not flinch.
I catch his eye in the mirror and forget what my own name is. Which, great. Convenient. Since I’m about to lose it anyway.
Patricia sections my hair like she’s mapping an escape route from my identity. Clips clicking. Fingers deft.
My brain catalogs it all because if I stop thinking about gray hairs on her blouse or her thumb calluses, I’ll start thinking about Saul’s hands on the back of my neck telling me “You’re doing so good” while a woman with bleach in her gloves takes my soul.
She picks up the scissors.
“Wait,” I say, and my voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else. “Can I just…”
Patricia pauses. Looks at me in the mirror.
“One second,” I manage. “I just need one second.”
I need to say goodbye to the woman who still knew how to bake cookies for a mobster and come in court.
She sets the scissors down. Steps back. Gives me space.
In the mirror, Stevie Reeves looks back at me for what might be the last time.
Dark brown hair. My mother’s color. The one thing about me that never changed, even when everything else did.
Mermaid hair, she once called it. Said I could probably breathe underwater with hair like that.
Spoiler alert: I can’t.
I try not to think about Dario. But my brain is an asshole and it’s already there. Him watching me from across the restaurant. That slow-burn smile. The way he looked at me like he saw too much and liked it anyway.
Did he notice my hair?
Probably not. Men don’t unless it’s wrapped around their dick or stuck in their food.
But still, I want some part of me to exist in his memory exactly as I am right now, before Patricia turns me into someone else.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay. I’m ready.”
I’m not ready.
Patricia picks up the scissors again.
The first cut sounds like something dying.
I know that’s dramatic. I know it’s just hair. I know it grows back. Except it won’t grow back, not like this, not as Stevie. Whatever grows back will belong to someone else.
Patricia works quickly. Efficiently. She’s not doing this to hurt me. She’s doing this because it’s her job and she’s good at it and there are probably a hundred other witnesses who’ve sat in this chair before me.
Dark strands fall onto the cape. Onto the floor. Each one a piece of me I’ll never get back.
I should be focused on my existential crisis but instead I’m watching Saul’s reflection and wondering if he’s as good with restraints as he is with reassurance.
He hasn’t said a word, but something about the tension in his jaw makes me wonder if this part still hurts him too.
That jaw.
My identity is dying on this floor and I’m thinking about whether Saul’s stubble would leave beard burn on my inner thighs.
Patricia finishes the cut.
My hair’s shorter now, falling just above my shoulders in layers I don’t recognize. It’s still brown. Still technically me.
Not for long.
“Color next,” she says, mixing something that smells like it could dissolve a body in a bathtub. “This might sting a little. The developer is strong because we’re going several shades lighter.”
Sting. Right.
She starts applying it with a brush, painting it through sections, working from the back forward. The smell is sharp. Medicinal. Nothing like the salon I went to in high school when Katie Martin convinced me to get highlights for prom.
Those highlights were three shades too orange and I cried in the bathroom for an hour. My mom said they looked beautiful anyway, even though they didn’t.
I wonder what she’d say about this.
Probably nothing. She’s been dead for six years. She doesn’t get a vote.
The processing time stretches. Twenty minutes, Patricia says. Maybe thirty. Depends on how my hair takes the color.
Twenty to thirty minutes sitting here with chemicals eating my identity and Saul Bennett standing six feet away looking like emotional support wrapped in denim. My brain has nowhere to go except directly to his belt buckle.
She sets a timer and steps back. Adjusts something on the counter. Gives me space again, like she knows I need it even though I haven’t said so.
Maybe she does know. Maybe that’s part of her training too. How to give people room to grieve while their hair processes.
I count ceiling tiles. Then floor tiles. Then the ways I could probably convince Saul to bend me over this chair if I wasn’t currently dissolving into someone else.
He hasn’t moved. Hasn’t checked his phone, hasn’t wandered off to do something more important. Just... stays.
“You don’t have to be here,” I say quietly. “I’m fine.”
The lie tastes like the chemicals seeping into my scalp.
“I know I don’t have to,” he says. His voice is low. Private, even though Patricia can definitely hear us. “I want to.”
I don’t know what to do with a man who wants to witness something hard just so I don’t have to go through it alone. My pussy knows exactly what to do with him. She’s got a whole presentation. Slides. Diagrams. A thesis on load-bearing capacity.
I stare straight ahead. Try not to cry. Try not to slide off the chair and crawl into his lap. Try not to imagine him pressing those big capable hands into my hips while whispering you’re doing so good, sweetheart, while I fall apart in a way that has nothing to do with hair dye.
Timer dings.
Patricia moves me to a sink. I close my eyes and pretend it’s a spa. Pretend I paid for this voluntarily. Pretend I’m not one heartbeat away from sobbing into the drain.
Her fingers in my hair feel professional. Competent. I’m imagining Saul’s hands doing this. Less professional. More possessive. Gripping while he…
God, Stevie, get a grip.
She wraps me in a towel. Leads me back to the mirror.
“Ready?” Patricia asks.
No. Absolutely not. Not even a little bit.
I open my eyes.
The woman in the mirror’s a stranger.
Every ex-boyfriend’s rebound. Blonde. Not like fun blonde. Not like slutty blonde. Like... safe blonde. Wealthy-divorcee-who-volunteers-at-shelters blonde. She has good credit and seasonal allergies and doesn’t fuck criminals.
She looks like she gives good head because she read a book about it, not because she’s feral and has something to prove. She doesn’t eat gas station sushi at 2 AM. She eats grapefruit and says ‘refreshing.’
I hate her.
The cut’s different too, now that it’s dry. Layered around my face in a way that makes me look younger. Softer. Like someone who doesn’t notice things she shouldn’t, who doesn’t memorize the jaw movements of strangers in restaurants, who doesn’t send cookies to men she testified against.
I don’t recognize myself.
That’s the point, I guess. That’s the whole fucking point.
“It looks good,” Patricia says. Professional. Assessing. “The color suits you.”
It doesn’t suit me. It suits whoever I’m supposed to become.
I can’t speak. Can’t move. Can’t do anything but stare at this woman who has my eyes but nothing else.
Movement in the mirror. Saul, pushing off the wall.
Walking toward me with those thighs and that quiet certainty.
He stops just behind the chair, close enough that I can see his face reflected next to mine.
Close enough that if I leaned back I’d hit solid muscle.
Close enough that I can smell him, soap and something warmer, like he generates his own heat.
“Hey,” he says quietly. Just that. Just hey.
But the way he says it, like he’s not going to pretend it’s fine, cracks something open in my chest.
“I don’t look like me,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“I don’t.” My voice breaks. “She’s gone. She’s just... gone.”
Saul doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay. Doesn’t offer platitudes about it being temporary or how I’ll get used to it. He just meets my eyes in the mirror and stays there.
Steady. Present. A witness to my undoing.
I take a breath. Then another. Force myself to look at the blonde stranger until my heart rate slows.
“What now?” I ask.
“Photos,” Saul says. “Then documents. And then we go.”
Right. Paperwork. Portraits of my new fake face. Hooray.
I stand on legs that don’t feel entirely solid. The cape falls away and Patricia sweeps the hair from my shoulders. My old hair, my mother’s color, scattered on the floor like something discarded.
I don’t look at it.
I can’t look at it.
The photo room is just as soulless as everything else in this building. White backdrop. Camera on a tripod. A man in a polo shirt who looks like he does this twelve times a day and has never once wondered about the people standing on his little X.
“Look at the camera,” he says flatly. “No smiling.”
I stand on the marked spot with my new blonde hair and my old face and try to look like someone who exists.
The flash goes off.
Twice more.
“Done,” Polo Shirt says, already turning away.
Three flashes and the new me is documented.
Back in another room, this one slightly less beige, more of a taupe, God I’m losing my mind, there are documents waiting.
Saul sits across from me while I look at them.
Driver’s license. Social security card. Birth certificate.
All with the same name.
I read it three times because my brain refuses to process it.
Elizabeth Taylor.
Elizabeth. Fucking. Taylor.
I look up at Saul. “Is this a joke?”
His brow furrows slightly. “What do you mean?”
“Elizabeth Taylor.” I hold up the license. “You’re making me Elizabeth Taylor?”
He blinks. “It’s a common name. Good for blending in.”
“Elizabeth Taylor was the most famous woman of the twentieth century.” My voice is climbing toward hysterical and I can’t stop it. “She was married eight times. She had violet eyes. She was impossible to ignore.”
Saul’s expression changes as understanding hits.
“I’m supposed to be invisible,” I snap. “And you’ve named me after Cleopatra’s horny ghost.”
I laugh, and it sounds unhinged even to me. “I spent my whole life feeling like nobody saw me. Like I was wallpaper. And the universe decides my fake name should be the one woman everyone looked at?”
I drop the license on the table. Press my hands against my eyes.
“Beth,” I say. “I’m supposed to go by Beth. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s sad cousin who sells insurance and once got fingered behind a Chili’s.”
Saul blinks. Possibly rethinking his career.
“That’s actually perfect,” I whisper. “That’s exactly right. Not the real thing. Just close enough to remind you what you’ll never be.”
The room is quiet.
Then Saul’s hand is on the table near mine. Not touching. Just there.
“For what it’s worth,” he says slowly, “I don’t think you’re forgettable.”
I look at him. At those soft-worn eyes and scarred hands. He’s probably got a dick that could split a woman in half emotionally and physically. I want to climb into his lap and see if kindness breaks me faster than his cock would.
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you’ve been sitting in this building for hours watching your whole life get erased, and you haven’t fallen apart once.” His voice is steady. Certain. “That’s not nothing.”
I want to tell him I’m falling apart right now. That I’ve been falling apart since Dario smiled at me in that restaurant and I smiled back and everything after that was just a slow-motion catastrophe.
But I don’t.
I just look at the documents on the table. The driver’s license with my new face and my impossible name.
Elizabeth Taylor.
Beth.
I pick it up. Study the blonde stranger in the photo.
“Hi Beth,” I say quietly. “Nice to meet you.”
She doesn’t respond.
Just stares back at me with those empty bitch eyes like she’s waiting for someone else to show up and do the life part.
She looks like she eats salad by choice.
I fucking hate her.