Tale Of Two Cities
Gisele
There’s a moment no one prepares you for—the one where handling everything by yourself stops feeling like strength and starts feeling…
incomplete. Not because you can’t do it.
You can. You always have. But because somewhere along the way, you found someone who makes you want to share the win before you even leave the room.
Someone who turns a solved problem into a story worth telling.
And once that shift happens, once independence makes space for connection instead of replacing it?
Well. That’s when everything gets a little more complicated… and a lot more worth it.
Playlist: “The Night Will Always Win” by Manchester Orchestra
The hotel room in Minneapolis is nicer than the last one.
Derek arranged it, which means it has a rainfall shower and a view of the city and a minibar that I’ve been ignoring because I’m here to work, not to sit by a window drinking ten-dollar wine and thinking about a man who is currently somewhere in Illinois losing his mind over a power play sequence.
I know he’s somewhere in Illinois because he texted me from the airport at six this morning: Springfield first. Then Milwaukee. Back Thursday.
I texted back: Kill it. Which is not the most romantic send-off in the history of long-distance communication but it was six in the morning and I was already reading Derek’s revised shot list for the day.
That was seventy-two hours ago.
We’ve texted. Not as much as either of us would like, I think, though neither of us has said that out loud because we’re both apparently committed to performing competence at all times.
His texts come in clusters—before practice, after games, the occasional late-night message that arrives while I’m already asleep and reads like something he thought about for a while before sending.
Mine go out between calls and fittings and the seventeen daily conversations with Derek about creative vision, which is a phrase Derek uses approximately forty times a day.
I am, by every measurable standard, girl-bossing to the extreme .
The shoot has been good. Better than good—the content we’ve captured is exactly what the campaign needs, and the Luxe team is happy in the specific way that means they’re already thinking about the next collaboration before this one is finished.
Derek has been manageable. The models have been professional.
My technique has been flawless, which I’m noting for the record because the last time I was in Minneapolis with a camera pointed at my work, a woman left with significantly less hair than she arrived with.
No pixie incidents this trip.
What I did not account for, when I agreed to the extended shoot schedule, was how loud a hotel room gets when you’re used to someone being in your space.
Not loud with noise. Loud with absence. The specific silence of a room that has exactly one toothbrush and one set of products on the bathroom shelf and no evidence that anyone else exists in the world except the person standing in it.
I’ve been alone in hotel rooms my whole career. I’ve always been fine.
I’m fine now. I’m just more aware of the fine than I used to be.
The problem happens on day three.
It starts with the sweater.
The campaign has a hero look—a specific styling moment that anchors the whole visual narrative, the one Derek has been building toward since the first planning call.
We’ve been shooting around it for three days, building context, and today is the day we shoot the centerpiece.
The model is in the chair. The lighting is perfect. Derek is practically vibrating.
And the sweater—the specific, carefully selected, flown-in-from-the-brand’s-New-York-studio sweater that the entire hero shot is built around—is the wrong color.
Not slightly wrong. Not a shade off in a way that only bothers people who think about color for a living.
Wrong in the way that makes the model’s skin look gray and the whole composition fall apart, wrong in a way that’s immediately visible to everyone in the room including Derek, who goes the specific shade of pale that means he already knew something was wrong before I said anything.
“It’s the lighting,” he says.
“It’s not the lighting.” I look at the monitor. Look at the sweater. “The lighting is fine. The sweater is pulling green. It’s going to read completely differently from what we approved.”
“The brand sent what they sent.”
“Then the brand made a mistake.” I straighten up. Think. The whole day is built around this shot, and we have the space until four o’clock and the model until five and a campaign launch that does not move because a sweater is the wrong color. “What do we have on the rack?”
“Nothing in this palette. Everything else is—”
“Show me.”
He shows me. He’s right that nothing is an exact match.
He’s wrong that nothing will work, because there’s a rust-colored silk blouse on the end of the rack that shouldn’t work with the campaign aesthetic and is going to work beautifully if I adjust the rest of the look around it and trust my instincts instead of the approved shot list.
I pull it off the rack. Hold it up against the backdrop. Look at the monitor.
“Restyle the look around this,” I say. “Different accessories. Lose the structured jacket, go softer. Give me twenty minutes.”
Derek stares at the blouse. “That’s not what we—”
“I know what we approved.” I’m already moving. “The sweater doesn’t work. This does. Do you want the shot or do you want to argue about it?”
He does not argue about it.
Twenty minutes later, the model is restyled and the look is different from what we planned and better than what we planned, and when Derek sees the first image on the monitor he goes very quiet in the way that means he’s doing the mental work of deciding whether to admit I was right.
“It’s good,” he says finally.
“It’s better than good,” I say pleasantly, and go back to work.
By the time we wrap at four-thirty, I’m running on the specific adrenaline of a problem solved under pressure, which is its own kind of high, and I want to tell someone about it.
I want to tell one specific someone about it, the someone who would listen with actual attention and make the dry observation that I was right and Derek was wrong and then ask a technical question about the color issue because he’s been paying enough attention to know what questions to ask.
I pick up my phone.
His name is right there.
I call.
It goes to voicemail after two rings, which means he’s on the ice or in a meeting or somewhere that requires his phone to be off, and I get the standard Bennett Foster voicemail which is just his name and the instruction to leave a message, delivered in the tone of a man who considers voicemail a mild inconvenience at best.
“Hey,” I say. “It’s me. I know you’re probably at practice or something. I just—there was a thing today with the shoot, and I wanted to tell you about it. It’s fine. I handled it. I just wanted to—” I pause. Hear myself. “I’ll tell you later. Good luck tonight.”
I hang up.
Stand in the hotel hallway for a moment.
I handled it. I always handle it. I have been handling things alone since I was seven years old and my father left and my mother stopped being someone who could handle things, and I had to figure out what that meant for me.
I built a whole life around handling things.
A salon, a reputation, a brand partnership, a carefully maintained independence that meant no one could ever leave me with something I couldn’t manage on my own.
And I did handle it. The sweater situation is resolved. The shot is better than what we planned. Derek is satisfied, and the campaign is on track, and I did that, by myself, in a hotel room four hours from Sorrowville.
The fact that I wanted to tell someone about it before I was even out of the studio is new.
The fact that someone has a specific face and a specific voice and a specific way of listening that I was already mentally composing the story for on the drive back to the hotel—that’s new too.
I order room service because it’s easier than going out alone, and I watch the Slammers game on my laptop because their road schedule means it’s streaming tonight, and I eat pad Thai on a hotel bed and watch Bennett play hockey from five hundred miles away.
They win. He plays well—really well, the kind of present, instinctive hockey that’s been showing up in flashes since the timeout game, the version of him that trusts his reads instead of controlling every variable.
I watch him set up a goal in the second period with a pass that requires him to trust Holden to be in the right place, and Holden is in the right place, and the bench erupts, and Bennett is already moving to the next play before the celebration finishes.
I’m smiling at my laptop alone in a Minneapolis hotel room.
This is my life now. I find this unreasonably okay.
My phone buzzes at eleven-fifteen, when I’m already in bed with the lights off and the city doing its city things outside the window.
Bennett.
I answer before the second ring. “Hey.”
“Hey.” His voice is low and a little rough the way it gets after a game, when the adrenaline has burned off and what’s left is just him. “Sorry I missed your call. We had a film session after.”
“I watched the game.”
A beat. “Yeah?”
“You played well. The Holden pass in the second.”
“He was there.” A pause. “I trusted he’d be there.”
“I know.” I roll onto my side. “That’s what I mean. You guys are really starting to gel at the right time.”
He’s quiet for a moment, the comfortable kind. The kind that used to feel like absence and now just feels like him thinking. “You said something happened with the shoot.”
“The hero sweater was the wrong color. I restyled the whole look in twenty minutes, and it turned out better than what we planned.”
“Of course it did.”
“Derek took seven minutes to admit I was right.”
“He should.” I can hear the smile in it. “You okay?”
The question is simple, and he asks it the way he asks everything now—directly, without deflection, like he actually wants to know the answer and has time to hear it.
“I’m okay.” I think about whether that’s the whole truth. “I just wanted to tell someone about the sweater thing before I’d even left the studio. I was composing the story in my head on the way back.”
“Composing it for who?”
“For you.” I say it without hesitation, which six weeks ago would have required considerably more courage. “I wanted to tell you.”
The silence that follows is a different kind.
“Two more days,” he says.
“Two more days,” I agree.
“Then I’m taking you somewhere with no Derek and no film sessions and no itineraries.”
“I don’t do well without itineraries.”
“I know.” He sounds completely unbothered by this. “I’ll make you one.”
I close my eyes. Outside the window, Minneapolis is doing what cities do, indifferent and lit up and completely unconcerned with two people in two different hotel rooms talking about sweaters and hockey passes and the specific shape of missing someone.
“Get some sleep,” I tell him. “You have Milwaukee tomorrow.”
“You have Derek tomorrow.”
“Pray for me.”
“Every day,” he says, and the simplicity of it lands somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
We hang up.
I lie in the dark for a while, looking at the ceiling that has done nothing wrong, thinking about what he said.
Not the sleep or the itinerary or even the two more days.
The other thing. The thing he said like it was obvious because to him it is obvious, the way things are obvious when you’ve stopped fighting them.
Every day.
I fall asleep still smiling, alone in a hotel room in Minneapolis, feeling less alone than I have in years.
Which is either the best thing that has ever happened to me or the most terrifying, and at eleven-thirty on a Wednesday I’m too tired to figure out which.
Probably both.
Definitely both.