Tears pooling in my eyes, I finally risk a glance. It’s so strange. My eyes are so blue. My pupils are much bigger than Xavier’s or even Ignacio’s, even though they both have dark brown eyes that merge into black pupils. I have a thin ring of blue that the black almost entirely consumes. I look demonic.
“My pupils—” I say. I can’t look at the rest of me, not yet. I’d rather have the cattle prod burned into my skin than study my flaws. And I can hardly bear to look at my hair, knowing it will be destroyed momentarily.
“Your eyes are like that because of the dark,” Xavier says quickly. “They’ve never had to adjust. I bet you can see everything when it’s dark, can’t you? While the rest of us are stumbling around blind.”
I nod. I can see perfectly in the dark. It’s the light that blots everything out.
“I dreamed about you,” I blurt out, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Isn’t that absolutely impossible? He’s standing behind me, his breath warm on my ear, but I can look into his eyes as he looks back into mine in the mirror. And isn’t it impossible that I dreamed of him before I ever knew him? Xavier responds by reaching around and pulling my hair back off my face, running a warm finger down the scar near my temple, the spot that impacted the ground when I fell from the tower. It was the first time Ignacio had turned from loving father figure to something terrible, a horrific monster who wanted to hold me down and split me in half while I screamed. I was just a girl, and in my panic had thought it better to leap out of the window than stay for any more of the pain. Blood running down my thighs, tears blurring my vision, and he laughed at me, told me I was a foolish girl, that I’d never jump.
I woke up in the tower days later, my head bandaged heavily, my eye swollen shut, and new boards nailed over the windows. That was the last time I ever saw the sun, or the moon, or the stars. That was the day I went from a girl in a tower to something much worse.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Xavier asks.
“Remember what?”
“When you fell. When you were a girl. That was the first time Ignacio had me work for him.”
My eyebrows shoot up in disbelief. “You’re the one who fixed me when I fell.”
He nods. There’s so much sadness in his eyes. I can’t bear it. I look away, finding my own eyes, and there’s just as much pain there. Everything hurts in this cruel world, whether you’re in a tower or with the prince who rescued you, as he tries to convince you to remove a part of yourself.
I don’t want to cut off my hair.
I’ve spent the better part of my life tending to this hair. Brushing. Braiding. Wrapping like a plaited crown piled on top of my head. When I was a little girl, I used to play with my hair for comfort, and pretend it was my mother. I still do that now. It’s so long, that it’s easy for me to run my fingers through it and imagine it’s somebody else’s touch.
“I didn’t know,” Xavier says, his eyes suddenly watery, his voice thick. “Seraphina, I am so sorry. That first time I was there… he wouldn’t tell me your name. He held a gun to my head while I stitched you up and checked you over. And then, when I’d gotten away and was putting together a plan to come back for you—”
His fingers come to rest on my shoulder, squeezing me almost to the point of pain. “He told me you had died,” Xavier finishes. “And me, fucking idiot that I was, I believed him.”
I’m crying, too. The grief in his words pierces my very soul, right down to the core; somebody cared about me, once. Somebody wanted to rescue me from Ignacio.
“I have carried you with me for ten years,” Xavier says, poking his chest with a rigid finger, “in here. I thought about you every day. I still think about you every day.”
I run my finger down my thick braid, remembering exactly how much Ignacio used to love using my hair for his pleasure, for my discipline. My hair is like this because Ignacio decided it. Because, until four days ago, I was his little fuck doll, his stolen prize, his dirty secret hidden away in the dark.
Suddenly, it’s as if I can feel every hair follicle on my head, the weight of this impossibly long braid, the way he used to pull it so hard pieces would come out in his fingers as he forced me back onto him.
“Cut it all off,” I say, my voice sounding like it belongs to somebody else, the meek edge gone. It’s as if I have been possessed. The hair that was my security blanket is now the weighted chain that will drag me to the bottom of the ocean if I don’t get it off.
Xavier opens his mouth to say something, but he must have heard the edge in my voice, because he takes the scissors from the counter, and with three agonizing cuts, he’s placing my braid on the counter in front of me.
I look at myself. I’ve never seen myself to know if I always had that hard glint of determination in my eyes, but I know inside of me that it wasn’t there a moment ago. I reach up to run my fingernails through my scalp. I feel light. So impossibly light, as if I could just hold my breath and float away on the breeze.
He colors my hair next, first wetting it as I lean into the sink, and then massaging dark goo into my scalp that smells horrific. My skin burns and my eyes water from the smell, but I bear the time patiently. I am a girl who is used to waiting, used to pain and discomfort. This is my default mode. I am most comfortable when I am held in the predictability of unpleasant things. We don’t talk. We’ve both taken our shirts off for this part, to avoid getting any of the dye on them, and so Xavier is bare chested, his dark skin in start contrast to the ivory sports bra I’m wearing, not to mention my pallid skin. The room heats up considerably when Xavier starts to apply the dye to my roots. I would say it’s the chemicals, but it is definitely because we are now both half-naked in a small enclosed space where we are constantly brushing up against each other by necessity. My cheeks burn, two red circles in a pale white face, as I remember all the times Ignacio would be behind me, all the times when I would close my eyes and pretend it was the mysterious angel from my dreams pushing into me instead.
Xavier. It’s been him all along. And now that I know, I can barely look him in the eye without a deep warmth spreading across my womb, almost painful in its intensity. My nipples stiffen to hard peaks under the thin bra Xavier bought for me and helped me put on earlier, a purely platonic gesture, but one that I’m now imagining in all different sorts of ways. There is no padding in this bra, and my nipples are clear as day, jutting out like tiny bullets on my chest.
I notice Xavier glance at me a couple of times, almost furtively. Can he read my mind? He doesn’t need to, I guess. He can feel it, like ripples of heat between us. I want to be this close to him for the foreseeable future.
Finally, the black goo is washed out of my hair and dried off with a towel. Xavier motions for me to stand, pointing in the mirror at the new Seraphina, the one with the dark hair and the new voice. I look into my reflection and see a stranger.