Page 33 of Pretty Savage: Defy

“Can I help you?” Carrson steps in front of me, arms crossed over his chest, glaring. I swear he flexes on purpose.

The man gulps. “Ah…I was just, um, asking your—”

I lean around Carrson and give him a reassuring smile. “It’s fine. Get your daughter. I can help.”

Mumbling thanks, the man rushes off.

Carrson turns to me. “Daughter?”

“He doesn’t know how to braid his daughter’s hair, so I’m going to do it.” I raise an eyebrow. “You can stand down now, Romeo. Not every interaction is a knife fight.”

Carrson glances after the man, then back at me. “Try telling that to my father.”

Before I can respond, the man returns with a little girl in pink leggings and a baseball jersey that hangs to her knees. Her hair reaches halfway down her back in a tangle of loose waves and one sad, unraveling braid.

“This is Macie,” the man says. “Macie, this nice lady said she’d help.”

Macie peers up at me from under a curtain of blonde hair. “Daddy made it lumpy.”

Her father winces. “Daddy did his best.”

Carrson steps aside, looking deeply suspicious of the entire exchange, but he doesn’t interfere when I slide out of the booth and gesture for Macie to sit in my chair. Her father hands me a brush, three elastics, and a purple ribbon like he emptied half a drugstore into his palm in a panic.

“I watched a video,” he says.

“That was your first mistake,” I tell him.

Macie giggles.

I start at the bottom, working through the tangles as gently as I can. “Tell me if I pull too hard, okay?”

“Okay.” She kicks her sneakers under the table. “Are you a princess?”

“No.”

“You have princess hair.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day.”

Carrson makes a low sound from behind me.

I glance over, expecting a joke, but he isn’t smiling. He’s leaning against the edge of the booth with his arms loose at his sides now, all the fight gone out of him. His attention is on my hands as I divide Macie’s hair into three sections, then on the girl tilting her head back, then on her father hovering close by. Each tangle dissolves under patient strokes of the brush.

The man crouches beside his daughter. “She pulling?”

“No,” Macie says. “She knows how.”

“I’m glad one of us does.”

I work the sections of hair, crossing one piece over the other, making sure to catch all the flyaway pieces and tuck them in. The entire time, I’m aware of Carrson’s eyes on me. The quiet, intense way he watches as I talk and joke with Macie.

I tie the purple ribbon around the end of the braid, noting how Macie is sitting taller, proud of herself for no reason except that someone made her feel pretty.

“There.” I give the braid a gentle tug. “Tournament ready.”

Macie twists around, trying to see over her shoulder. “Is it lumpy?”

“Not even a little.”