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You love your boyfriend. For all of his sharp edges, he has a nice heart. But, unlike some people with their partners, you don’t believe that he can “do nothing wrong”. He does a lot wrong. You know he does a lot wrong, and you love him in spite of that. There is one thing that he’s been doing wrong that you’ve picked up on since you started living with him that you refuse to let him do any longer, though.
You want to be able to take showers in peace, but whenever you try, you have to confront that thing, and you can never find tranquility around it. Sitting on one of the higher shelves built into your shower—Guy’s shelf—is the offending bottle. It’s one of those stupid, horrible 3-in-1 shampoos. Its very presence, the constant reminder that your beloved boyfriend is using subpar hygiene products, haunts every moment of your shower.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it just stayed in your shower, but it doesn’t. Its ghost haunts you, following you around in other aspects of your life with your boyfriend. You want to be able to cuddle with him without a care in the world. You are not allowed this luxury, because whenever you reach up a hand to play with his hair, you are reminded that his hair would feel so much softer and nicer if he used actual shampoo and conditioner. Guy loves his hair, and he loves to boast about it. Whenever he does, you have to shove down a kneejerk reaction about how much better his hair would be if he treated it right.
You love your boyfriend, but you cannot take this any longer. Maybe the fact that you love him and want the best for him is part of why you’ve reached your breaking point on the matter.
You have to time your plan just right, or else it won’t work the way you want it to. You stay things too late, and you risk missing your chance because he would get to the shower before you, or worse, him catching you in the act. You start too early, and then you’ll just be standing in the shower for years while you wait for him to get in, and you don’t particularly want to do that.
You strike when Guy decides to go to the gym. Usually you would go with him, either to work out yourself or to just watch him, but you tell him that you’ll pass this time. You give him the excuse that you had something you needed to do around the house and that you’ll just go next time. Technically, it wasn’t a lie, but it did avoid the whole truth. He takes your answer though, and he kisses you before leaving to go workout.
You wait around five to ten minutes after he’s left, just to ensure he wasn’t coming back because he forgot something, to jump into action. You rush into the bathroom, ready to start your righteous work. You grab his horrible abomination in a bottle and slam it onto the sink counter. Then you run and grab the small, travel bottles you bought just for this reason. You unscrew the top of his shampoo bottle and start pouring it out into the little travel bottles. A worse partner would just pour it all down the sink or into the trash, but you weren’t going to do that to the man, just in case he really didn’t like your shampoo.
Once the bottle was empty, you screw the top back on and put it back on his shelf in the shower. You open all of the cabinets in the bathroom and try to find a good place to put all of the tiny bottles of soap. You don’t need to find a place to hide them inside the cabinet. Them being in the cabinet is hiding enough. Guy isn’t going to check in there for them, you knew that. You just had to make sure that they stayed out of sight.
You check the time once you’re done with that and match it up to what you know about Guy’s workout schedule. He should be home soon, assuming he isn’t doing a longer workout than usual. Perfect. Your plan took exactly as much time as you needed it to. You can move from phase one to phase two now without much concern.
You run back into your room to grab something clean to wear. You don’t put much thought into what you grab. It’s just a t-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and some clean underwear. You rush back into the bathroom and put your clean clothes down on the sink top. You peel your current clothes off and drop them on the floor. The two of you don’t have a hopper in the bathroom yet. You make a mental note to buy one and get it set up, but you don’t give it too much thought. You have bigger concerns at the moment. You kick your clothes into the corner, keeping them mostly out of the way.
You spin around to face the shower again. You turn the knobs of the shower faucet and wait for the water to heat up. After a few moments, you stick your hand into the spray of water to test the temperature. It’s a little off, not quite perfect, so you fiddle with the knobs again and then check a second time. Satisfied that the water temperature is exactly how you want it, you pull your hand back and then get into the shower. You lean your hair back into the spray, getting it soaked. You don’t do anything more than that. You simply wait.
It’s very boring waiting in a shower doing nothing, but at the very least, you don’t have to wait long. You can faintly hear the front door open over the splash of water against the tile of the shower. Guy’s footsteps are a little easier to hear, since he’s always been a heavy walker. It doesn’t take long for Guy to move from the door, to your room, to the bathroom door. If you had to guess, he was putting his gym down in your shared room, grabbing clean clothes, and then coming back to the bathroom door.
“You in the shower?” He asks through the door.
“The water’s running, isn’t it?” You sarcastically shout back.
“Ha ha, smartass.” He pushes the door open and waltzes in. “Do you care if I get in?”
“I’ve never cared before.” You quickly grab your bottle of shampoo and pour some into your hands, scrubbing it into your hair so you look busy. “Go ahead and hop in.”
“Hell yeah.”
You can hear him pull his gym clothes off over the water. He doesn’t bother to push his clothes into a contained area. He just leaves them on the floor where they lay after being dropped. He pulls the shower curtain open at the other end of the shower from the shower head, not wanting to get water on the floor for the millionth time. He steps in just before you start rinsing the shampoo suds out of your hair.
You stare a little. You have no shame in admitting this. He’s your boyfriend, you can stare at him however much you want. He stares at you all the time, you’re allowed to stare back at him. It’s justified. Your boyfriend is hot, why wouldn’t you look at him like this?
He’s sculpted like a god. Not like how some people think gods should look, not all “perfect” and generically muscular. He’s built like a brick house, all bulk and thick corded muscle. The fat he has on his body adds to it, padding bits of his body out here and there in just the right ways. He may not have the “dream six-pack” look, but he does have a thick, sturdy torso. His biceps are massive, the strength in them obvious. You could sink your teeth into those biceps. His thighs are similar, and so is your reaction to seeing them.
“You like what you see?” Guy asks with a shit-eating grin once he notices that you’re admiring him.
“…shut up.” You grumble, your cheeks heating up. You lean your head back into the shower stream, breaking eye contact with the convenient excuse of needing to wash the shampoo out of your hair.
Guy chuckled. He twists his body to look at the soap bottles on his shelf. He reaches out to his bottle of 3-in-1 and pumps the top of it. He pauses for a moment, his brow scrunching up in confusion. He tries to pump out soap again, and then he tries a third time. Then he gives up, accepting that his shampoo bottle was empty.
“Damn. I swear I just bought this.” He grumbles.
“You’re out of 3-in-1?” You ask as innocently as possible.
“Yeah. Fuck, that sucks.” Guy groans. “I don’t wanna run to the store to get another bottle, I just got back.”
Hook, line, and sinker. You have to choke down the smile that threatens to rise on your face. He’s had exactly the reaction you wanted from your plan. He’s mentioned that it’s such a tragedy that he’s out of soap, and that’s just the open door you need. You’re ready to move on to phase three, the last phase, of your plan.
“Just use mine.” You try to offer up casually.
“Just use yours?” Guy parrots back.
“Yeah. I’m fine with you using some.”
“Babe, the shampoo and conditioner thing you have going on has like… seventeen steps to it. My way is supposed to be simple and easy.”
“I’ll do it for you.” You decide, hoping he takes the bait on this.
“…You will?”
“If you let me, yeah.”
“There’s no way in hell I’d turn down free pampering from you, sweetheart.” He grins. “How are we gonna go about doing this?”
“I’m gonna wash your hair first.” You start, holding up a finger and twirling it around. “Turn around.”
“Aye aye, Captain.” Guy says as he spins around.
You stare at the sculpted musculature of his back for a few moments, before you snap back into focus. You grab your shampoo off of your shower shelf and squirt a good amount into your hands. You reach up and start running your hands through his hair, working the shampoo into it. Suds start to fill his orange strands, covering them nicely. You scratch his scalp lightly as you go, and he sighs and leans his head back into your hands.
“God, that feels good.” He lets out a relaxed groan as you work.
“Thanks.” You smile. “That’s the goal.”
You scrub the shampoo into his hair just a little more before stopping. You pull your hands back and start shuffling around him to swap places so he’s closer to the spray. It’s not the easiest thing to do in such a cramped space, but the two of you make it work. You brush against him once or twice as you move, but you don’t slip or fall over, so you’re counting this as a win.
“Alright, lean your head back.” You mutter, guiding his head back under the shower spray.
Once the water starts running through his hair, you start running your fingers through it again. You ease the suds out of his hair, helping the water wash them out. You keep pushing your fingers through his hair until the water runs clear and without soap again, and then you keep doing it for a bit after, just before you want to mess with his hair. You pull your hands back once you’ve deemed it time to move on.
“Okay. Conditioner time.” You say, both to yourself and to him, grabbing another bottle off of your shower shelf.
You repeat the process of squirting conditioner into your hands and running them through his hair. You don’t do it quite the same way that you worked the shampoo into his orange strand. You need less conditioner than you did shampoo, just because of how short his hair is. You also don’t start at the roots of his hair. You start at the ends and work your way in, making sure the ends are nice and saturated and the roots aren’t too oily and greasy. His ends are a little dry and split. They definitely needed some TLC, and you are happy to oblige.
“So now we wash it out, right?” Guy asks, already moving his head back into the shower water once your hands start to leave his head.
“Nope.” You reply, reaching back out to tilt his head back forward.
“Nope?”
“Nope. It’s gotta sit in there for a bit.”
“How long is a bit?” Guy asks, scrunching up his eyebrows.
“Like, uh…” You think, trying to give him a better estimate than ‘when I feel like it’s been a bit’. “A couple minutes? Not too long.”
“Okay… and why’s it gotta sit?”
“Because it makes it work better.”
“What? How’s it sitting in my hair going to make it magically work better? Whenever I use my conditioner, I just wash it right out, and it works fine.”
You bite back what you want to say. You want to tell him that that’s because he uses 3-in-1 shampoo. The conditioner in that isn't a good conditioner. It doesn’t really work as a conditioner, or at the very least, it doesn’t work nearly as well as a conditioner by itself. You can’t work it into your hair in the same way you can do regular conditioner, and you couldn’t leave it in your hair the way it needed to be for your hair to soak up all of the good stuff in it. But you can’t say that to him. You’re just trying to prove the efficiency of your method right now.
“Just trust the process.” You provide as an answer instead.
“Trust the process?” He asks. “What process?”
“The one you have to trust.” You won’t give him an explanation more than that. “Okay, that should be long enough. Now we can rinse this stuff out of your hair.”
You tilt his head back again. Like how getting the conditioner into his hair was similar to getting the shampoo into his hair, getting the conditioner out of his hair was similar to getting the shampoo out. You have to work your hands through his hair a bit more to get the conditioner out, though. The conditioner is thicker, and it’s stuck more in his hair, and you want to make sure that you got it all out. If you didn’t, his hair would be weird oily in a patch here or there, and you didn’t want that.
“There. That should be done. Body wash time.”
“You gonna scrub me down, hot stuff?” Guy smirks, his hands finding your hips and pulling you just a little closer.
“Maybe if you behave yourself.” You shoot back at him.
“Ah, babe, you know me.” He leans down to give you a kiss on the lips, just a quick one before pulling back. “I never behave myself. But you like that.”
“No, Guy. I don’t like it. I love it.”
“I think I’ve got something you’ll love even more…” Guy chuckles before pulling you back in for another, deeper kiss.
You’re drying yourself off after your shower, running a towel over your arms. Guy finished drying himself a bit ago, and is now busy pulling clothes on. That doesn’t take him that long either. He runs a hand through his already mostly dry hair once he’s done, originally just to push it out of his face. He seems shocked by what he’s feeling, and he pushes his fingers back through his hair a few more times.
“Huh.”
“Huh?” You echo back, moving your towel to your other arm.
“My hair feels different.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“Good different. Like… wow, my hair feels great.” Guy whistles, looking at himself in the mirror.
“Let me feel.”
You throw your towel back over the towel rack as Guy turns away from the mirror and towards you. You reach your hands up and mess with his hair, getting a good feel of it. You smile at what you’re feeling. He’s right. His hair feels fantastic. It’s the softest that you’ve ever felt it. You feel proud of your work. You did this. You made his hair feel this good.
“Damn, you’re right.” You mumble, playing with a couple stands of his hair. “Your hair feels really nice…”
“Do you care if I use your shampoo and stuff more often?” He hesitantly asks.
You could scream. You could cry. You could cheer. It’s over. It’s finally over. The curse of his awful, horrid 3-in-1 shampoo has been broken. You’re free. You don’t have to quietly suffer through your beautiful, handsome, lovely boyfriend using subpar products on his hair. You think the only thing that would make you happier in this moment is if he got down on one knee and proposed to you right here, right now. You feel like you’re about to explode from joy and excitement.
“Yeah, sure, go ahead. I don’t mind.” You calmly say instead.