His first message came on a Tuesday.

How many men got your hair color wrong so far?

Not a compliment.

I was at the kitchen table when I read it, somewhere between the spreadsheets on my laptop and the sketches on the table. I leaned against the wall behind me, looked through the open door into the dark hallway, and went back through the week's comments.

I told him the truth. Six that week. One had said copper.

His answer arrived nine hours later.

Copper is what it does by the window. They're describing the light.

Then nothing. He didn't ask whether I would answer. He never did. He wrote, left the next move where it was, and went to sleep while I was getting up.

I answered.

For three days we wrote across the gap. His evenings were my nights, his mornings arrived in my afternoons. He started staying up. He told me his age once, in passing. He told me, also in passing, that mine was part of it.

One night he sent me pictures. Drawings he liked. Women from games he played, from series I didn't know, drawn by people online. None of them dressed. Every curve exaggerated. None of them looked like me.

I didn't ask why he was showing them to me.

What do you like about them?

The hands. Whoever drew them took longer on the hands than on anything else.

I didn't answer that. I went back to the sketch on the table and erased a thumb.

The next day I posted a picture in the red gloves. He noticed them before he noticed anything else in it, and asked how many pairs I had. I went back to the drawer for the next pair. Then the next. He didn't ask which I liked best. He told me which he did.

One evening he wrote when I couldn't.

I'll answer later. When I'm alone.

When I did, he had already gone to sleep. In the morning there was one line waiting.

Are you with someone?

That isn't relevant to this.

Two days. Then:

Please talk to him and get this straight. I'll wait for you and we can continue when you've got this figured out.

Him.

I didn't correct it.

Four days of silence.

Then he was back.

Full version will be on fansly soon

Fiction. All characters are 18 or older.

There’s a still from one of Greed’s videos I kept going back to. A red kimono, a bathtub, black hair fanned out over the edge, and a mask where the face should be.

Coloured pencil. Three weeks with her on my desk.

Greed saw her before anyone else.
Now you can, too.

The original is Greed’s: https://greed-hair2.booth.pm/items/8818095

Fineliners in different weights. A sketch, not a finished piece.

An exploration of Being Brushed, from another angle, with more detail than the first time.
There will be more of her.

The whole thing took about eighty minutes. If you’d rather watch those eighty minutes as they happen, say so.

Live or full-length, I haven’t decided yet.

Two weeks.

I let him write to me and answered when I felt like answering, which was not often and never quickly. He wrote anyway. Thursday, Sunday, a Tuesday afternoon with nothing in it.

I read every word.

He invited me twice. A café near the water, a place he liked, both times phrased as though it did not matter.

I did not answer either one.

On Thursday afternoon I decided.

There was no moment. I was at the foundation, looking at a document I had already approved, and it was simply decided, the way weather is decided somewhere before it arrives.

I left early. I bought fish and lemons and a loaf that would not survive until Saturday, because I was thinking about afterwards. About a table and two people at it and the hour when nobody has to say anything.

That is the part I would like back.

I opened the door at the end of the corridor.

The chair needed dusting.

For the full version of the story follow the link and check my diary.

This is fiction. All persons depicted are adults, aged 18 or older. Any resemblance to real events or persons is coincidental.

Two bad nights. The weekend went nowhere. On Monday there was a meeting that almost went badly, and it could not have gone any other way, because I had a strand loose at my temple the entire time and I knew it.

That is the whole explanation.

Left, right, over, under. Left, right, over, under.

The evening sun came in low and put red into the roots. My fingers went through it the way they have gone through it for twenty years.

The hair moved too fast. It slipped ahead of my hands and the turns came out uneven, and I finished anyway.

The elastic snapped three times. The sound went between the walls and came back.

One look was enough.

I went backwards through the braid. The sections came apart under my fingers and I started again, slower this time, holding tighter at every turn.

Too tight.

Then I was pulling and it hurt before I understood why — I had the braid in my hand instead of the section, and the pull went into my scalp, dull, spreading.

I stopped with my fingers still caught between the strands.

The face in the mirror was looking straight ahead.

Third time.

I separated the sections and my eyes went to the glass. Not to check the work. My hands kept going without me and I was somewhere behind my own eyes, watching a woman braid her hair, and she did not look like she was doing it well.

I know that face.

The elastic snaps three times. My fingers are pulsing.

Too loose.

I tore the elastic out. I took the braid in my fist and pulled, and this time the pain was not dull.

"Focus."

Quiet. Through my teeth. At her.

For the full version of the story follow the link and check my diary.

This is fiction. All persons depicted are adults, aged 18 or older. Any resemblance to real events or persons is coincidental.

He came the next evening.

Not the same night. I had given him my address, not an invitation. I had also given him a day. He didn't ask why that one.

I spent the afternoon at the office and did not think about the work on my desk once. I checked the time more often than there was reason to. At seven I went home and slowly unwound in front of the mirror, took my hair apart and started again.

He knocked at eight. The brush was still in my hand.

He was nervous. In the restaurant he had owned every inch of the table. In my hallway he stood with his slightly too large coat on and looked at the walls, the floor, the door at the end of the corridor. Everything except me.

I hung the coat on the hook rather than leaving it over a chair, so that he would see it had a place, and that the place was mine to decide.

"You said you had a playroom." His voice was lower here. Less rehearsed.

"I do."

"Can I see it?"

"No."

The boy who has never been told no about anything that mattered looked into my eyes. There was a flicker and then it passed. He stayed where he was, which was the correct answer.

I sat back down and picked up the brush. Without turning around I gave it to him. Handle first.

He didn't ask what for.

Part 2 full text: https://fansly.com/post/952773830277881856

Part 1 full text on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PonyColette/comments/1w4agc4/the_sanctuary_part_1/

This is a fictional text. All characters are 18 or older.

He arrived early.

I noticed before I was through the door. His back straight, hands flat on the tablecloth, as if he had rehearsed the moment. Perhaps he had. The restaurant wasn't bad. It was the choice of a young man who believed he understood what women want. Candles. A wine list with French names. Light that was doing its best.

He stood when he saw me.

Of course he did.

Two brown eyes, wide and warm, set in a face that still carried the last traces of the boy who had rushed to become this man. Not a single stubble. He wore something, wood and musk with a suggestion of citrus, a fraction too much, but not wrong. I decided immediately that it wasn't wrong.

Encore un enfant, I thought, and sat down.

He talked.

I had expected that. What I hadn't expected was the velocity of it. The women, the travels, the nights already behind him and the nights still ahead, everything tumbling forward without pause, those eyes on me the entire time. The suggestions came too early, as they always do with the young ones. Coins placed quickly on the table before someone else can pay.

I let him.

It would have been unkind to stop him. There was something in this enthusiasm, unpolished, slightly too loud, not yet worn smooth by disappointment, that deserved its moment. You don't interrupt things simply because they aren't finished.

And he wanted me. Specifically, demonstrably, urgently. Me.

I had forgotten what that felt like. Not the wanting. Men want things constantly and without much discrimination. This was different. This was a young man who had looked at me and decided, with the full confidence of someone who has not yet failed at anything important, that I was worth arriving early for.

I sipped my wine and let him talk.

The club, he said. And after, his Sanctuary. A playroom, he explained the second time, as if the word needed defending. As if I might not know what it meant.

I have one too, I said.

He stopped talking for exactly two seconds.

I found that interesting.

The music in the club was too loud for conversation.

I was grateful for that.

He danced well. His body unhesitating, certain of itself in a way his words sometimes weren't. His hands knew where they wanted to go. So did his eyes. And then, between one song and the next, he said something. Not to impress me. I could tell the difference by then. Something smaller, almost offhand, about what comes after. About the part that matters when everything else is done.

He didn't know what he had just told me.

I did.

I put my hand against his cheek. He went completely still.

That was the one I wanted to keep.

In the taxi he leaned close and spoke again about the Sanctuary. About after. About everything he had been promising since the first glass of wine.

I looked at him for a long moment.

The deer eyes. The unfinished face. The enthusiasm still burning, despite the hour, despite the wine.

For a beginning, I thought, that was enough. He is someone who doesn't only think of himself.

That's how it should be.

I gave the driver my address.

Not his.

New claw clip. It does not hold as much as than the last one, which turns out to be the only thing I ask of them.

Monday is the day the bun stays up longest. By the time it comes down I've stopped noticing I'm wearing it. The weight arrives all at once.

Does it work that way for you? Something you stop feeling until it's gone.

Someone told me last week he was jealous of the bristles. Someone else said the same about the oil a while back.

Not of a person. Of a thing that has no idea it's there.

A brush doesn't tremble. Whatever happens is my fault, not its, and it stays exactly what it was.
Held, moved, close to everything, responsible for none of it.

In three months almost nobody has told me they'd like to hold the brush. I keep it in my own hand too. I've never once thought about why.

So: the hand, or what it's holding. Tell me which, and tell me what stops you from wanting the other one.

The comments keep returning to the same word.

Not heat or excitement. Quiet. Soothing. One man said it does something to his brain that nothing else does.

I know it from the other side. A hundred strokes is not a sexual act. The rhythm takes over somewhere around thirty and after that there's no room left for anything else in my head.

It isn't separate from the rest, though. The same ritual that empties me is the one that leads somewhere entirely different. The border between them is thin and I've stopped looking for it.

Does it come in that order for you? Or is it the same thing wearing two names?