Page 2

Chapter one

Anna

I breeze into Shine Salon, my pride and joy, ten minutes before opening and lock the heavy glass door behind me. Warm vanilla scents drift through the well-lit space and chill acoustic music plays softly over the speakers.

“Good morning, all!” I say to my team, taking a moment to admire the tall bouquet of creamy white roses on our reception desk.

“Did Ashlyn deliver these today?” I ask.

Jenny, my cheery receptionist and beginner nail tech, pops up from behind the desk, glass cleaner and a cloth in hand. “Yep. You just missed her. She couldn’t hang around, but she said hi.”

I straighten the pile of my cousin’s business cards for Cedar and Stem Flower Farm. Ashlyn nailed her first season selling cut flowers from her beautiful garden. She’s been delivering fresh arrangements to display each week. Amrita, an experienced senior stylist who worked here long before I purchased the salon, holds the back door open for our delivery man. Stacked haphazardly, the brown boxes sway on the dolly and she grimaces at the tower.

“That’s excellent right there, Danny!” I call from my hairdressing station as I tuck my coat and purse away in a cupboard.

Amrita shoots me a relieved look when Delivery Man Dan halts, the boxes now safe, and holds out the machine for her signature. The boxes are filled with hair colour, shampoo, and toner. That’s my bread and butter right there. I’ve been a hair stylist for six years already. When I tagged along with my cousin, following her from Ontario to British Columbia at the age of eighteen, she had everything planned out. I, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue what I was going to do four thousand kilometres from home. After working the phones and front counter of this very salon, sweeping and washing towels, it didn’t take long for me to want to learn the trade. I convinced the owner to let me reduce my hours to part-time so I could earn my hairdressing ticket. Almost five years later, I took over the salon. I employ two full-time stylists and a couple of estheticians who do manicures, pedicures, and some waxing in the treatment rooms. Amrita’s thick blue-black hair is losing a battle against static electricity from handling the cardboard and paper and is standing up like a halo around her head.

“Look!” She holds up a box of nail polish, “The holiday collection!”

“Holiday?” Jenny looks aghast. “It’s September.”

It’s Jenny’s first fall and winter season working in a salon, and she has no idea how early in the fall season people start calling for services to get them ready for Christmas parties.

When my apron, a little black number with our rose gold scissor logo, is secured around my waist and I’ve tied my hair up in a high pony, I glance at the clock and then to Jenny.

“Shall we?” I jerk my head towards the front door.

She tucks away the cleaning supplies, walks to the door, and flips the closed sign to open. Before I can join in on unboxing the inventory, a mother and daughter enter as soon as Jenny turns the lock.

“Oh my god, Moooom. It’s fine. ”

A teenage girl, about fourteen or fifteen, hangs back by the entrance, looking like she wants to be anywhere but here. Half her hair is a weak orangey-yellow colour.

“Shhh. How is this fine? You can’t go around looking like that. It’s utterly ridiculous . What were you even trying to do?”

The scorn in the middle-aged mother’s voice, that look of disdain, takes me right back to middle school. My mom married Thad when I was twelve, a man whose entire personality was his megachurch. Within a matter of months, my relationship with her was wavering. When she quit the job she’d always loved at Thad’s request I knew that the mom I grew up with was all but gone.

Hair dye and makeup?

No.

Boys?

Hard no.

Anything that allowed me to grow into a liberated young woman?

Absolutely not.

I hip bump Jenny out of the way and greet the bickering mother and daughter.

“Morning, can I help you ladies?”

The mom wraps her arm around her daughter's shoulders and walks her to the front desk. Classic case of a kid who got their hands on a box of bleach and became inspired at 11 p.m. by something they saw on the internet. Hell, I did that when I was twenty.

The mother purses her lips. “Taylor, as you can see, made a very silly mistake.”

“It’s not that bad, Mom.” She adds that extra syllable that kids her age do.

It’s pretty bad.

“We’ve all been there,” I tell the girl.

Looking up from her sneakers, she gives me a shy braces-filled smile. “I watched a tutorial first, but something must have gone wrong.”

“I can squeeze you in, Taylor,” I say.

Jenny sends me a look that says, ‘no you can’t’. I know my schedule is almost full. I ignore her.

“Thank, God .” The mom clasps my hands over the counter like I just told her I got her daughter into a rare drug trial.

“This will take a while, Mom. Why don’t you go run some errands and come back later,” I suggest.

Taylor catches my eye and grins.

I love my job.

** *

At closing time, after my station is spotless and I’ve checked tomorrow’s schedule, I walk out onto West Isle’s main street. I breathe in the toasty notes of The Roastery, the coffee shop across the street where I buy my coffee beans. People come and go from the stores on both sides of the road, a mix of locals and tourists this time of year. You can tell which ones are the tourists because they’re wearing insulated jackets and scarves, like they didn’t get the memo that Vancouver Island does indeed have beautifully hot summers. I soak up the sun for thirty seconds, and then I’m at my front door. My commute home is a mere stone’s throw because when the studio condo in the newly renovated building above the salon listed last year I jumped at the chance. The unit is all of four hundred square feet and my bed folds up against the wall, but it’s mine. The tiny mortgage means that I can afford to own the salon, too. Being a business owner at twenty-nine years old feels damn good. Being this independent is a freedom I craved as a sheltered teen. When I want space beyond my narrow slice of balcony, I head to the beach or to Ashlyn and Isaac’s spacious yard. Over the past year, my cousin and her boyfriend have transformed their previously overgrown yard into a veritable oasis. Even with Ashlyn’s meticulous flower garden, the glittering glass greenhouse, and Isaac’s carpentry workshop, there’s plenty of room for me to throw down a towel, pop in some earbuds, and destress. I bound up the stairs to the third floor two at a time. Getting stuck small talking in a slow-moving elevator isn’t worth it. This building is rampant with bachelors who rent for a year or so and, unfortunately for me, they are generally of the undesirable variety.

“Hey there, Anna!”

I hear a door open down the hall and what’s-his-name from apartment three-zero-something grins. He moved in at the beginning of the month and I’ve lost track of how many times he’s invited me in to ‘hang out’. He catches up to me surprisingly fast, his footsteps silent on the thick hallway carpet, gaze slinking down the neckline of my sweater which makes me consider wearing winter scarves full time.

“Hi.” I half wave with the arm that holds my purse.

He wipes his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand.

“Glad I caught you.”

That makes one of us.

“Yeah, impeccable timing.”

I note that he isn’t wearing any shoes which means he literally came out here just to talk to me. I imagine him camped out next to his apartment peephole waiting for me and barely hold back a grimace .

“I got my surround sound all set up. It’s pretty sweet. You wanna watch something tonight, have a few drinks?”

“Uh, no, thanks.”

“Anna. C’mon. One of these days you have to say yes.”

I level him with a glare. “Says who?”

“Ah, don’t be like that.” He settles himself against my door frame, effectively blocking my access to the lock. I stare at the place behind his lower back where I know my door handle waits.

If this guy can’t take a hint, I’ll have to spell it out for him.

“Sorry, remind me of your name again?”

I’m not sorry. And I also haven’t forgotten his name. But the incensed look on his face makes it worth the extra seconds of interaction.

“It’s Tanner.”

“Right, of course. Tanner , I don’t do hook-ups with neighbours. Or anyone, actually. So,” I flutter my hand to indicate he should move his scrawny body out of the way.

He scoffs and rolls his eyes as he moves aside. “Prude.”

The hall is quiet enough that I hear the insult loud and clear. His choice of words is a punch to the gut. Only one other person has called me that.

“Knock on my door later if you’re bored— ”

Oh my god.

With record speed I unlock it and squeeze inside, only opening my door as wide as my hips.

Swinging closed with a bang, the door cuts him off for me.

“I will not be bored later, thank you very much,” I mutter.

It’s later. I’m bored. I can’t choose a show to save my life, my condo is finally clean, none of my friends are free, and even Ashlyn has left me on read. She’s preoccupied these days. If she isn’t busting her butt with Cedar and Stem or taking the odd nursing shift, she’s doing whatever people who are deeply in love with their live-in boyfriends do. Staring into each other’s eyes? Laughing until their sides hurt? Having steamy sex? I wouldn’t know. My v-card is very much my own. It’s not only tucked into my wallet, it’s in the depths of my purse where breath mints and receipts go to die. I had absolutely zero intention of still being a virgin mere months away from my thirtieth birthday, but here we are. I don’t know what, or who, I’m waiting for, but it isn’t the barely twenty-one-year-old Tanner and his surround sound set up down the hall. Every time I recall his dumb voice calling me a prude my heart rate ticks up and I’m mad all over again. A guy I dated a year or so ago used the same insult when I asked him to slow down.

While I’m not a religious person, the man who married my mom when I was still in middle school was . Not long after their wedding, everything changed. My mom sold our house and we moved into his place with his twin sons who refused to share a bedroom with each other. That left me in the partially finished basement. It’s hard to breathe when I remember the windowless excuse for a room with the cold linoleum flooring and house spiders the size of my fist. My eyes scan the nightlights I keep plugged into every other outlet for reassurance.

“Don’t rock the boat, Anna. We just moved in here. We’ll sort something out.” Mom had said. We never did sort it out. That room was all mine until I moved out and everything that happened in that house had to be Thad approved. Family church and youth groups were mandatory. It took a long time to get that patriarchal purity culture bullshit out of my head. Metaphors that compare a woman’s body to a lock that should only be opened by one ‘key.’ The constant reminder that your future husband is out there and he’s counting on you to be pure for him. It wasn’t lost on me that his boys were never the recipients of a similar message. Over time, with the help of therapy, I’ve unravelled the binds of those toxic lines of thought. I’m no longer ashamed of the desires that make me human. My therapist helped me realize that it’s okay for sex to still be an important milestone in my life. Sometimes it feels like the more ready I become to let go, the harder it is to find someone to be with that will be willing to take their time. Is that so much to ask for?

It’s seeming less and less likely that that person exists.