Chapter 2

True. Pushing himself up out of the chair, he crosses to the reception desk. “Hey, Keek,” he says, leaning down beside his business partner and oldest friend.

She doesn’t even bother to click the browser closed. Kiki’s naturally curly red hair is held up with a dozen bobby pins; this close, they look like a crazy network of scars crisscrossing her scalp. With one knuckle, she pushes her chunky black glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Hmm?”

“Get off the computer and come give me a haircut,” Jai tells her.

Kiki clicks the Like button under a picture of a cute kitten, then sits back and crosses her arms in front of her small chest. Through her glasses, she squints at his hair. “What? Now? I’m watching the front desk.”

Jai smirks. “Yeah, ‘cause we’re swamped. Come on, I’m bored.”

“Can I cut it any way I want?” she asks with a grin.

“Just a trim,” he clarifies.

She shakes her head and turns back to the computer.

Jai sighs. “But you can color it, too. Your choice.”

One eyebrow rises above the frame of her glasses. “Seriously? Any shade?”

Jai wonders just what he’s getting himself into, but hell, it’s only hair. His grows faster than most people’s, and he can always dye it another color later. “What do you have in mind?”

She sits back again and gives him a critical look. After a long moment, she says, “Dark blue with red and orange tips. Sort of a Jack Frost on fire look. Winter slowly dousing autumn’s flame. What do you think?”

“That’s going to take all night,” Jai complains. “You’ll have to lighten it first—”

“It’s pretty light already,” Kiki assures him. “I’ll just mix some silver into the blue.”

“Which will take twenty minutes to set,” Jai points out, “not counting the tips. Half red, half orange. Are you going to paint them in or foil them? Either way, it’ll take a while. I don’t know…”

With a shrug, she returns to her computer. “Well, excuse me, but when you said my choice, I thought you meant I could pick any color I wanted—”

“Okay, okay,” Jai concedes. “Jeez. Blue with red tips.”

“And orange,” Kiki adds.

Jai glances at the front door and almost wills it to open, but it stays shut. Where’s a late night rush when he needs one? “Fine, and orange. What happened to watching the front desk?”

But Kiki is already pushing back her chair. “I can watch it from your station. You said it yourself, it’s not like we’re swamped or anything. Your hair’s going to look so cutewhen I’m through with it.”

Cute isn’t exactly what I’m going for, but what the hell. 2

All his life, Jai knew he wanted to go into hair, but he hasn’t always been good at it. He likes to say he gave his first cut when he was five years old, and that’s true, but it wasn’t as well-received as his services are now. In fact, his mother was more than a little pissed at the hack job he did on his younger sister; she came home from work one day to find the babysitter on the phone in the kitchen and Jai standing over Carly in the living room, a dangerous pair of sewing shears in one hand and one of Carly’s ponytails in the other. Two years younger than Jai, Carly had loved the cut up until the moment she heard their mother’s wail of despair. Then she started bawling, too, and Jai found himself the recipient of a whupping so fierce, he couldn’t sit with the backs of his legs against a chair for a week.

For most people, that experience might have been enough to dissuade them from the glamourous life of a stylist, but not Jai. He simply strove to hone his talent, though his mother and sister never let him forget the one time he screwed up. Whenever they dropped by the salon for an appointment, the first thing either of them said was usually along the lines of, “Remember that time when…?”

Yes, he does. Stop mentioning it already, jeez!

After high school, Jai worked part-time at a discount hair salon, one of those chains located in a shopping mall with cheap prices and zero talent, where the bulk of the stylists’ earnings came from pushing products and not from cutting hair. How could anyone make any money on five dollar haircuts? Clients always tipped on the price they paid, never the price of the service, so if they had a coupon, the stylist got a pittance instead of a decent tip. Jai told himself it was a learning experience, nothing more, but all he really learned was that he hated working there. He hated being part of a chain corporation, and earning a salary instead of being paid per client, and working within the strict confines his managers set. He was meant for something better, he knew. He was meant for so much more.