How to Get Ainsley Bishop to Fall in Love With You by T. M. Franklin Page A

through my damp hair. I tensed, but she didn’t seem to notice. “I would have shampooed your hair, Oliver.”
    I shrugged. “I was trying to be considerate. Didn’t want you to get a handful of—” Okay, how could I finish that sentence without sounding completely disgusting? Nope. Couldn’t think of a single thing.
    Ainsley looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Handful of what?” she asked, lips twitching. “What do you keep in there?” She poked at my hair with the tail of her comb.
    “Shut up.” I tried to hold my frown but failed. “It’s only polite, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t go to the dentist without brushing.”
    “Could you imagine?” Ainsley wrinkled her nose at me in the mirror. “Gross.”
    She grabbed a water bottle and sprayed my head a few times, then combed through it, wrestling with a couple of snarls. “Do you have an idea what you want?” she asked.
    What do I want? What do I want?
    I was pretty sure “for you to never ever EVER stop touching my hair” was the wrong answer.
    “Oliver?” Ainsley paused in her hair-fiddling to glance at me in the mirror again.
    “What?”
    She tilted her head and arched a brow, waving with the comb toward my head. “How do you want your hair cut?”
    “Oh. Uh.” My face burned with the force of a thousand suns. “I don’t know. Just . . . shorter?”
    Ainsley laughed. “Yeah, well, that’s the general idea.” She rounded the chair and stood in front of me, a look of concentration on her face as she examined my unruly mop. Her gaze drifted down to meet mine. “Do you trust me?”
    I felt paralyzed under her scrutiny. Frozen, yet still . . . hot. I couldn’t even fidget, which was a first for me. “Uh. Yeah. Sure I do,” I muttered. I did. But I began to wonder if she knew what she was doing.
    Her eyes narrowed. “That wasn’t very convincing.”
    I sat up a little. “Well, what are you going to do?”
    She smirked. “A little protective of our hair, are we, Oliver?”
    “No, I just—”
    She started to hum “You’re So Vain”under her breath as she moved behind me again.
    “Again. Shut up.”
    Ainsley laughed. “I’m kidding!” She combed up a piece of hair and held it between her fingers. “I’m thinking a little off the top, maybe half an inch?” She dropped the piece and combed out a bit above my ear. “Shorter here and in the back. Clean it up with a razor—”
    “Razor?” My voice cracked.
    “Relax. I do it all the time,” she said, patting my shoulder as she looked me in the eye through the mirror. “It’s going to look great. I promise.” Ainsley smiled hopefully at me until I nodded.
    “Okay. Whatever you think.”
    She bounced a little on her toes before getting to work. I watched in the mirror as she combed and snipped, every now and then looking up to catch my eye before quickly focusing on my head again.
    “Is something wrong?” I asked after the third or fourth time.
    “Wrong? No. Nothing’s wrong .” She cut another piece of hair and tossed it to the floor. “I just . . . I might have asked you here under false pretenses.”
    What?
    That couldn’t possibly have meant what I thought it meant. What I hoped it meant. My heart started to beat quicker, and I wiped my damp palms on my jeans underneath the pink cape.
    I took a slow, deep breath. “What kind of motives?” My voice didn’t even crack. I almost fist-pumped, but the cape stopped me long enough to remember not to.
    “I kind of wanted to ask you for a favor,” she said with a sheepish shrug. “You’re the only one I could go to—”
    A favor. Of course. A favor. Not because she wanted to jump my bones. I glared at myself in the mirror. Who would want to jump those bones? They were all sharp and pointy.
    I hated my bones.
    “. . . and you seemed to think it might be a good idea, and let’s face it, I have no clue what I’m doing.”
    She was still talking to me. I realized I should talk back. “What did I think