Chapter 16

They lay in silence for a while, both of them lost in their own thoughts. After a while, Sally turned her head to look at Oyin beside her.

Tonight, she couldn’t tell if he was posing or not. He lay on his back with his hands twined behind his head. His body was relaxed, but his position highlighted the muscles development in his arms and abs.

She let her eyes linger on his fine chest, his tight belly, and then his long legs and bare feet. When her eyes returned to his bald head, she felt a familiar question prod her unmercifully.

As if he’d somehow been able to tell the difference between her leisurely leer and her intense curiosity, he glanced over at her. “What is it?”

“I’m sure you get asked this all the time, but I’m dying to know.”

His mouth quirked up slightly. “The no hair thing?”

She nodded sheepishly. “I can’t even tell if you shave it. I’ve never felt any bristles.”

“I don’t shave it. I started going bald when I was seventeen. I was completely bald by the time I was twenty-three. It’s a hereditary thing. Ran in my mother’s family.”

Sally was uncharacteristically silent, watching his face, trying to figure out if it was a sensitive subject for him.

Finally, she asked, “Weren’t there any treatments or whatever you could have tried?” He looked calm and natural, and so she hoped she wasn’t being unforgivably rude.

Not that it necessarily would have stopped her.

“Yes. There were. Medical treatments or cosmetic remedies. I was…encouraged to try them.” The brief falter in his reply surprised her, as she’d never heard him stumble over his words before.

“You didn’t want to try them?”

He hesitated and met her eyes. And something in her expression must have encouraged him to continue, “No. My father wanted me to do something about it, and I wasn’t inclined to do what he said.”

“A teenage rebellion thing?”

Oyin gave a half-shrug. “Maybe. There’s a long history, and it’s not a pretty one. Maybe it was just a way to rebel, but my mother died when I was very young and the hair loss came from her family, so it seemed important that I…”

When he didn’t finish, Sally said softly, “That you affirm her memory that way?”

“Yeah. My father wasn’t always kind to her.” He cut a quick glance over to her, as if he didn’t intend to say as much as he had.

She didn’t speak for a minute, not wanting to come off as too nosy and have him close up. Then, “Was he mad about it? About your not treating the hair loss like he wanted?”

 “Yes,” Oyin admitted softly, his eyes shifting to stare up at the ceiling. “He was mad. That was the turning point.”

There was something here. Something Sally desperately wanted to know. A story. A history. The shadows of Oyin’s background. She was dying to ask him, to give him a whole inquisition—despite the guarded look in his eyes and the slight tension on his face.

But she had grown up a lot since she was a child and blurted out any question on her mind. Now, occasionally, she could manage to keep her mouth shut.

So she didn’t push him, realizing it might bother him or hurt his feelings. Instead, she just said, “I’m sure you know you’re absolutely gorgeous and the baldness just makes you look more fascinating, so I think you made the right decision.”