I was not afraid—not quite. Not yet. A numbness was seeping into my head, a comfortable sense of detachment. Damn it, I thought, maybe he slipped me a drug of some kind. But I knew, somehow, that the chilly numbness wasn’t in my head. It was radiating from those cold blue chains.

Michael returned. With both hands he held what looked like a hoop of glass tubing, two feet in diameter. The hoop glowed, like blue neon.

Silently he positioned the ring above my head and lowered it slowly to the floor. As it passed around my body it seemed to shed a cocoon of light behind. I saw myself in the mirror, encased in a cylinder of blue haze.

“Now we wait,” Michael said, “to let the energy soak in.” He cocked his head, looking me up and down as he groped himself inside his nylon briefs. His dark, handsome face went slack with lust—lips parted, eyes narrowed, sexed up.

I felt the hair on my body stand up straight, as if charged with static electricity. Something weird was happening in the mirror. I saw a mass of suspended particles in the space between my body and the cocoon of blue light, too vague to make out in the mirror. I tried to look down. My neck was paralyzed. Michael saw me straining. He reached inside the light and pushed my face down.

My body was being stripped of its hair. The process was silent, painless; magic, I suppose. The short hairs detached themselves from my skin and drifted slowly through the light-suffused air, made contact with the field of circling blue light—and disappeared.

At first the air was choked with free-floating strands, silky yellow ones from my chest and arms and legs, kinky darker ones from my crotch. Then the migration grew sparser, until I saw the last curly strand unfurl from my left nipple, stand straight, and pull free. It wafted gently like a weightless mote of dust, drew steadily toward the barrier of light, touched it—vanished.

I had been shaved once before, long ago. Before the muscles, before the armband, before the Harley. The job had taken hours, and left me with nicks around the base of my cock and around my tits. The master had not been pleased with the effect—he said it made me look too much like a boy instead of a man. Since shaving had been my idea, not his, he had punished me afterward with a razor strop.