She'd offered to cut his hair the way she offered most things now — lightly, like it cost her nothing, like eleven years hadn't taught her exactly what it cost.
He sat on the kitchen stool with a towel knotted at his throat and his shirt already off, because she'd said take it off, you'll get hair down your collar otherwise, and he had, without arguing, which should have told them both something.
"Hold still," she said, and combed a section flat against his nape, the comb's teeth cold, her fingers warmer than the metal by a degree that shouldn't have registered and did.
The scissors opened with a small metal sound. She held them the way her mother had taught her, blade angled away from skin, and still she felt the particular attention of standing over someone with something sharp in her hand and his throat bared under a towel.
"You're breathing different," he said, to the cabinets, not to her.
"You're imagining things." She wasn't. She cut a slow line above his collar and watched the dark hair fall in commas onto white terrycloth.
When the cutting was done she didn't put the scissors down. She set them on the counter within reach and let her hand stay where it was, flat now, not combing, just resting at the base of his skull where the hair was shortest.
Neither of them named it. Naming it would have made it a decision, and decisions were the one thing they'd spent eleven years agreeing not to make.
"Am I done?" he asked, and it wasn't about the hair.
"Almost," she said, and didn't move her hand, and he didn't turn around to make her answer for it — held still, the way she'd told him to, the one instruction he'd finally decided to follow all the way to the end.