October 1
Tressa Fay Robeson fluffed her dark French bob and slapped two Post-its over her nipples, then bent one arm over her head and grasped her wrist with the opposite hand. She widened her stance and lifted her chin at her phone on the stand, popping off a series of pictures with her remote.
Right now, everything was perfect.
There was butternut-squash-and-cheese-tortellini soup on the stove. All her plants-and she had dozens-were perky and vibing cheerfulness. Epinephrine, her best boy orange tabby, had obliged her photo sesh by hanging on the back of the sofa, just in view of the camera.
Her pictures would have looked even hotter if she hadn't had to use the Post-its to escape Instagram's censors, but they were still definitely solid.
Someone knocked on her apartment door.
Damn.
"Tressa Fay!" Mary shouted through the door. "We know you're hygge-bating in there, but we're your best friends, so you have to let us in."
"I'm naked!" Tressa Fay called out.
"So? You cut hair at the salon today with visible underboob."
That was unfair. Tressa Fay had worn a full-coverage bra under her tiny crop top. Her eponymous salon was always a little warm.
Also, her clients took a lot of pictures. Many of them waited for months for their booking with her, and some drove long distances or even flew into Green Bay to have their hair cut because they followed her platforms or had read about her in a magazine. To reward their efforts, she liked to put on a little bit of a show.
She opened the door.
"Good night." Guy put their hands over their eyes. "Some advance warning would be appreciated."
Mary, Guy, and Linds came in, Guy keeping their eyes resolutely on the floor. Linds trailed a finger over Tressa Fay's shoulder blades as she walked past. Linds was like a crab-she explored her environment by feel and liked to sun in a pile of other bodies.
Tressa Fay grabbed a cardigan off a chair and put it on. "I told you I was naked."
"Naked, I could handle." Guy sat in Tressa Fay's rocking chair, their hair out of its characteristic bun and tumbling in pale waves to their waist. "Naked is natural. Whatever it is that you have on suggests something outside of nature."
Guy liked to play the part of the prim miss. Tressa Fay shrugged, reached into the cardigan, and plucked the Post-it pasties off the black mesh bra top of her brown velvet bodysuit. She'd received it gratis, along with the matching thigh harnesses, from an indie lingerie designer who wanted to be on her feed.
"Being outside of nature is what makes it so good." Linds collapsed her long legs and spread out along the floor, smiling at Tressa Fay.
"It's a bodysuit," Tressa Fay told Guy. "Which is perfectly regular."
Linds wrinkled her nose. "Bodysuit is the worst word ever. Like, you're getting out of bed, and you're a skeleton, and then you tug your legs into a bodysuit."
"That's how I felt before I got top surgery," Guy said. "But now I just feel myself." Linds laughed, and they leaned over and high-fived her.
"I have an agenda." Mary directed this stern remark to Tressa Fay. "Which is you, out with us at the taproom." Guy and Linds and Tressa Fay went all the way back to elementary school, but Mary had only joined their group four years ago, after Tressa Fay hired her to work in the salon. Mary's agendas kept the rest of them from snuggling into a rut.
"No." Tressa Fay lay down on the rug next to Linds, who reached out to hold her hand. "Your agenda will mess up my plan."
"This is your plan?" Mary circled her finger around the apartment, which Tressa Fay had mood-lit with a million candles as soon as she got home before putting on her mom's old Bikini Kill record, misting the plants, and making the soup.
All of which was better by an enormous factor than numbing herself with her phone or streaming shows while wondering why she couldn't find a girl to make soup and listen to records from the nineties with. Tressa Fay loved this cozy world she'd made for herself. She also loved how the mythical girl in her imagination wasn't cheating on her, complaining about cat hair, or wishing Tressa Fay were something she wasn't.
"It's hopeless, Mary." Linds put her head on Tressa Fay's shoulder. "Once our girl here starts taking sexy pictures with soup on the stove, she's only getting freaky with herself."
"True," Tressa Fay said. "True, true." She deliberately did not look at Mary. Despite how emotionally close Tressa Fay was to Linds and Guy, they didn't know every part of the sad story of her last relationship, whereas Mary had greater knowledge and also had caught Tressa Fay opening dating apps a couple of times. Mary knew Tressa Fay's wound was now a healed-over scar and that she was a romantic, couldn't help it.
Also, Mary had brokered more love matches for her friends and family than it was safe to ignore. She had powers.
"I told this extremely fine girl about you last night, and she said she'd probably be at the taproom around nine," Mary complained.
There it was. "I don't do bars. As you know." Tressa Fay ignored the small flare of interest, low in her belly, that had fired in response to the words extremely fine girl. It had been a long time since she looked at an attractive person across a table and tried to figure out if they liked what they saw while her nerves fluttered. A long time since she held someone, their body fitted against hers. She did, in fact, need that. But she did not want anything to do with the usual ways to get there. Bars. Apps. Loud restaurants with heavy menus.
"But it's not a bar. It's the taproom!" Mary said. "Very low-key. Like, the key of low. Only dogs and very chill, hot people can hear in this key. And you haven't been out in forever, so it would be good for you even if you're not interested in this painfully gorgeous person I found for you and didn't even keep for myself."
Mary fluffed the dark honey-blond shag Tressa Fay had touched up before they closed the salon today. She should have known that if Mary was begging for a cut at the tail end of the day, she was dreaming up one of her agendas.
"She's not going," Linds said, fixing her false eyelashes in her selfie camera.
"I'm not going." Tressa Fay smiled. "But I love you very much."
"What am I supposed to do about this dishy woman who was going to meet us there?"
Tressa Fay narrowed her eyes. "You said she was probably going to be there. As in, incidentally."
"Same thing."
"You can give her my number."
Mary sighed, then stood up. "I love you, so I will try to understand."
"I could loan you some books about introversion." Guy stretched their arms over their head. "There are different types."
Tressa Fay had a dusty stack of books Guy had given her when they were worried about her after her breakup. Guy was a lawyer. They genuinely believed any problem could be studied its way out of.
After a quick round of hugs, Tressa Fay briefly finger-styled Mary's new cut and kissed Linds's glossy brown pixie, and her friends left.
She put her back to the door, smiling to herself. The evening was hers.
She strode across her tiny living room, dropping her cardigan, then ladled herself an enormous bowl of soup with lots of parmesan, flipped over the album on her turntable, and curled up on the sofa, nearly purring over each tortellini.
It had taken her such a long time to figure out that the best way to give other people what they wanted was to make sure she had everything she needed.
When she started working toward her cosmetology license her senior year, it was mostly because she'd taken every art class that her Green Bay, Wisconsin, high school had to offer, and she knew she wanted to keep doing something creative, but she didn't want to go to college. Plus, she had to earn money, because her dad had made it clear she'd be on her own once she walked across the school's stage with a diploma in her hand.
To her great luck, she was a natural, at least at cutting hair. Maybe it was because of her name, which her mother had given her to honor a particularly transcendent house party frontwoman's band named Tressa and the Over It Alreadies, with the addition of Fay to appease her dad, whose mother's name was Fay and who also, as an observant Catholic, fervently believed in the power of two-name names.
Tressa Fay didn't love talking to people, at least beyond the first conversation when they told her about their hair, and she especially didn't love anyone telling her what to do. None of that was a deterrent, though. Lots of people preferred a stylist who wasn't chatty. What almost ruined her career before it even started was that it turned out almost everything in the salon that she touched, smelled, rubbed, brushed, sprayed, or scrunched into someone's hair made her sick.
So while it wasn't long before she surpassed her classmates with a pair of scissors, a clipper, or a blade, she did the bare minimum she needed to do when it came to everything else, wearing gloves to protect her peeling hands and a mask against the onslaught of airborne chemicals. Her teachers acted like she was exaggerating. Most of her classmates simply didn't get it. After four years working at three different salons-each one promising a "natural" and "organic" environment-two different allergy specialists she couldn't afford, and prescriptions for steroids, inhalers, and immunomodulating topical creams, she ended up in the emergency room hooked up to a nebulizer after a coworker tripped and dumped a texturizing solution on the floor.
Tressa Fay was fired via text while she was talking to the hospital's billing department. She then failed to make rent, and her next bed was her dad's sofa, with a very firm thirty-day deadline.
She did the only thing she could do. She cut hair. Illicitly.
From her dad's kitchen and deck while he was at work, she cut and barbered for cash. Ten bucks for short, twenty for long, no other services. Just her, her client, blades, and the birds that fluttered onto the deck, stealing bits of hair for their nests.
Tressa Fay loved it.
She loved figuring out what the natural texture of a person's hair could do, sometimes showing the client the possibilities for the first time in their lives. She loved the different colors hair came in and the color clients had done somewhere else, or at home themselves. She loved making shapes, making statements, figuring out what was sharp, what was throwback, what was French, what was rock, what was queer.
She made enough money to nab a sketchy one-bedroom on the west side of Green Bay's downtown, and she kept cutting. Other than the moment she had to convince her landlord that the steady stream of foot traffic to her place didn't mean she was selling drugs, she was happy. Even better, she was healthy. Her skin cleared and stopped hurting. She could breathe. She didn't wake up worried she was coming down with the flu because she was congested, fatigued, and foggy.
When a commercial space across the street from her apartment became available, she had a stack of cash, but she was twenty-six years old with no credit, no references, and very creative tax returns. She met with the real estate agent anyway, and while they were in no way willing to give her the space, they did connect her to a business incubator that changed her life.
Now she owned her own salon.
All it had was white walls, plants, a shampoo station with the blandest hypoallergenic product ever made, her chair, and her blades. Mary washed hair, booked appointments, and worked viral marketing. Tressa Fay made shapes and helped people feel how they wanted to feel.
It was everything she needed, and she had to believe that giving herself what she needed in her private life-quality time with her cat, good food, an occasional gloriously dirty bit of lingerie to remind her sex existed-would lead to her someday getting what she wanted. Someone who loved her for exactly who she was. Someone who chose to stick by her through good times and bad. Someone she picked for herself and who picked her back, over and over again, forever.
Just that.
She'd finished her dishes and was considering making a half batch of cookies when her phone buzzed with an incoming text.
Hey! So I'm the worst, but I don't see you, and I have done a complete turn upstairs and down. Help!
Tressa Fay didn't recognize the number. sorry! she replied. I don't think I can. wrong number?
Three dots floated up, then slammed back down.
Look, it's okay if you changed your mind, it's even okay if you ghost, but the wrong number bit is just, no.
Uh-oh. Tressa Fay smiled sympathetically. Dating was extremely and very awful.
hey, so . . . this is the wrong number, for sure. my name's Tressa Fay, and I'm at home communing with my cat and
soup, and I didn't have a date tonight
or anytime in the foreseeable future, actually, but good luck out there, it's
the level worst
!!! I have the wrong number.
yes
I just realized. I used the wrong first three digits.
oh, no. numbers are so tricky
I'm an ENGINEER.
Tressa Fay laughed out loud. remind me not to drive over any of your bridges.
One collapsed bridge and a girl's got a reputation.
She laughed again. This stranger was funny. did you find your date?
Yes. Well, no. She just texted. She "remembered she was supposed to do something for her sister" and she, in fact, has a lot of family stuff going on right now so . . . maybe she can circle back some other time?
oof, sorry. like I said, rough out there
at least I think it is?
Cat. Soup.
yep
You have the right idea. Sucks, too, because it's such a gorgeous evening. I was looking forward to the Canyon Tacos patio to enjoy the last bit of light.
This engineer was very optimistic about her night, because it was cold and dark outside. Or she was being sarcastic.
Also.
Tressa Fay tapped her lip. Funny. Into girls. Hmm.
Copyright © 2025 by Annie Mare. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
