Do-It-For-Yourself Haircut

"Hey, baby?" my girlfriend Hannah asked me one Saturday afternoon, when we were hanging out in her apartment.

"Yeah?" I said.

"I've been thinking," she said, "and I've decided I want to change my hair."

"Oh?" I said. "What do you want to do with it?" I was a little worried, since I liked Hannah's chest-length brown waves the way they were. Considering she worked as a hairstylist, though, I figured she'd probably have the taste to pick out something flattering - or maybe just something weird, for the sake of her art.

"I definitely want to go shorter," Hannah said, "but I don't have all the details nailed down. If this were a client who told me 'use your own judgment', I could experiment as I was cutting, no sweat - but this is me, and I don't have nearly as much experience cutting my own hair as cutting other people's. On the other hand, though, I'd feel silly paying another stylist to be a pair of hands for me..."

"What if we swapped bodies for a few hours?" I said. "You sit me down, and cut your own hair using my body."

"That's a good idea!" Hannah said. "We can do it right in the kitchen. I'll go gather what we need."

Hannah took a mirror from her bedroom and propped it up on the kitchen table, putting her set of haircutting supplies down next to it. She then pulled up a chair in front of the mirror and sat in it.

"You ready, baby?" she asked.

"I should be asking you that," I said, positioning myself behind her, "but I'll take that as a 'yes'." I closed my eyes and concentrated on Hannah, then visualized pulling her skin into the space that my body occupied, and stretching my skin into her body's place. In my mental image, our two elastic bodies sank into their switched places like square pegs into square holes, connected by threads of energy to their former locations. As usual, this coincided with a shift in my senses. I found myself sitting instead of standing, eyes open instead of closed - and most importantly, Hannah instead of Ryan.

"Alright," Hannah said from my body, cracking my knuckles. "Let's get to work." She grabbed a towel and draped it over my shoulders, tucking it under my hair, to prevent cut hairs from falling down my shirt. "Thank you so much for doing this," she said, choosing a pair of scissors. "This is going to be way easier and less expensive than it could have been."

"My pleasure," I said, seeing Hannah's face in the mirror forming my words. "I'm also glad I found a use for my power - besides party tricks and kinky sex, I mean. It'd be so much easier if my switches didn't undo themselves whenever people walk too far away from me."

"Finally, a job for Aquaman," Hannah said, smiling. She was examining a few locks of my hair, deciding how much to chop off to start.

I giggled. "You know, I always wanted a superhero name, but I could never decide on a good one."

"Well," Hannah said, "if you want to take another shot at it, you'll have plenty of time to think. Because - and I'm sorry I didn't warn you earlier - this haircut's probably going to take multiple hours. Just let me know if you need a pee break."

---

Hannah began by shearing my hair down to shoulder length, then cut it further into a chin-length bob, before deciding to take it even shorter. "You're not going to make yourself bald, are you?" I asked, mostly jokingly, at one point.

"Oh, don't be a drama queen," Hannah said. "I want to spice up my look, not burn it."

"I've seen a few of your coworkers," I said. "Did you get tired of being the only one in the salon with vanilla straight-girl hair?"

"How dare you?" Hannah said in mock outrage. "I'll have you know that my nose ring is more than enough to show how much I'm not like other girls." She paused. "And okay, maybe I was a little self-conscious. But I'm still mostly doing this for me."

As the afternoon went on and Hannah snipped away at my hair with increasing precision, she tried to keep me entertained with generic hair-salon chatter - asking me for updates on my job, my friends, and so on, and giving me some in return. It felt like she was having a hard time finding discussion topics - must've been since we already knew each other so well - but I didn't mind, since I found the situation itself pleasant enough on its own. I mean, there are much worse ways to pass the time than staring at your girlfriend's beautiful face for hours.

---

"I think that looks good," Hannah said, after a couple of final strokes with her smallest pair of scissors. "What about you?"

"I like it!" I said. It was true: I'd miss Hannah's old look, but the pixie cut with bangs was cute on her. "I'm not the one who'll be wearing it all the time, though."

"Right," Hannah said. "Force of habit." She carefully removed the towel, now strewn with loose hairs, from my shoulders. "I might also want to bleach and dye it later - maybe blue or purple - but I can do that part in my own body."

I looked at my reflection and imagined my hair turning a bright blue. Maybe a bit too weird for my tastes, but this was what I got for having a hair geek for a girlfriend.

"Ready to swap back now?" I asked.

"Actually, I've been thinking..." Hannah said. "It doesn't seem fair to me that you had to sit there for hours getting that haircut, and then I just swoop in and take it from you. What if I take you out for dinner tonight, and give you a chance to show it off?"

"You want to take me out on a date... in your body?" I said, smiling at the unexpectedness of it all. "Was this all just a plan to... put me in this situation?"

"Oh, I did actually want a new hairstyle," Hannah said. "But..." She looked a little embarrassed. "...I was also hoping you'd offer to swap with me. It's kind of fun, isn't it?"

"What's fun about it?" I asked. "Do... do you just like it better being a man?"

"No, no," Hannah said. "But it's refreshing to play a different role once in a while, isn't it? And, I mean... I'm attracted to you, and being in your body is..."

I laughed. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not making fun of you. I'm laughing because I... kind of feel the same way. I mean, look at you!" I said, facing the mirror. "You're adorable! Who wouldn't want to be you, at least for a night of fun every once in a while? And that time we tried bodyswap sex, I..." I couldn't help blushing with embarrassment myself. "I pretended not to enjoy it as much as I did, because I didn't want to come off as some kind of pervert."

I watched in the mirror as Hannah, grinning, planted a kiss on my cheek. "I enjoyed it too, baby," she said. "Maybe more than I let on. So... is that a 'yes' to the date?"

"You bet," I said.

"Wonderful," Hannah said. "Now, could you do me a favor, and wash and blow-dry my hair? Helps get rid of all the little shreds of hair that get stuck in there after the cut. In the meantime, I'll clean up in here."

"No problem," I said, standing up. "Oh, and... is that permission to shower in your body?"

Hannah just winked at me.

"Gotcha," I said, smiling. "See you soon, Ryan."

"See you soon, Hannah," said my girl/boyfriend.

THE END