The Queen's Curls

-1892- Waiting

The hinges on the door squeak as someone enters the parlour. She's going to have to oil those hinges again.

The person in the doorway at first doesn't even seem to be there, at least not mentally. Their eyes were unfocused and seemed to have some kind of film over them.

"How can I help you dear?" the parlour woman asks with a smile. That smile vanishes as soon as she locks eyes with her newest client.

The parlour woman walks around the counter and stands directly in front of the new person in her shop and says, "Leave this child alone."

A voice from somewhere deep inside the person sighs. "Fine, but I'll need a new host."

"Not in here you won't." And with a flick of her hand, the parlour woman had the demon sucked out of the person in front of her and stuffed in a bottle. Turns out, the entity possessing the poor person was only a tiny little minor demon, looking for some trouble.

"Now you must stay there and think about what you've done," the parlour woman says, and places the bottle with the tiny demon in it on a very high shelf where it will soon be forgotten.

The parlour woman turns back to the person that had just entered her shop just in time to catch them before they would have fallen, unconscious, to the ground. The woman then summoned all six of her familiars to help her carry this poor soul to one of the lush sofas in her waiting room.

She assessed the damage: the person — a man! — had three barely healed scars over his right eye, a plethora of bruises and bumps on his body, and what seemed to be a stab wound the size of a kitchen knife on his left thigh. How he managed to get to her shop, she didn't know.

One thing she did know was that this man was very handsome, and had some very nice abdominal muscles.

x x x

The man awoke slowly, like crawling out of a dark tunnel. First he felt the soft couch under his back, then his lack of upper body clothing, and then he finally felt the almost excruciating pain coming from his left thigh and his right eye.

His eyes flew open — well, only one of them, since the other was bandaged shut — and he sat up. As he assesses his surroundings, he comes to the conclusion that he, in fact, is in a woman's hair salon, and is lying, shirtless, on a sofa in what seems to be a waiting room.

Just as he had come to that conclusion, the parlour woman walks into the room carrying what seems to be more bandages and a bottle of something that the man could only identify and unidentifiable.

"Good afternoon," she says, meeting his gaze. "You were out for quite a while. How long was that demon causing you trouble for?"

Oh right, he thought. That. "Uh," he starts, but his voice didn't seem to be working all that well, so he cleared his throat and tried again. "I really don't remember. The last thing I do remember is coming into this shop, but then everything gets blurry after that."

"Well," the parlour woman says, taking a seat on the sofa at the man's feet. It seems like the little pest didn't do much of anything to you, besides maybe stab you, but that's not too big of a deal. Besides, he only stabbed your leg. If he had stabbed you anywhere in the gut area, then we might have had a problem."

The man sighs. How was he supposed to focus on anything when this gorgeous woman was sitting so very close to him?

"Here, let me change your bandages for you." The woman stands and retrieves the bandages she had brought with her and gets to work.

She starts with the man's leg. She had previously cut his pant leg to make room for her hands and new bandages, so that part of the job didn't take too long. It was just tedious; the parlour woman had to try her hardest not to touch him, because the wound was rather high up on his thigh, and having to put her hands so close to his you-know-what was quite nerve racking.