“So you fixed it,” he says when I finish.
“I fixed it.”
“In thirty-eight minutes.”
“Thirty-eight and a half, technically.”
“While Derek watched. Franklin does that same thing.”
“Derek hovers. It’s his primary personality trait.” I lean against the counter. “The hair looked great. The campaign isgoing to be beautiful. And I need to never see the color copper again for the rest of my natural life.”
Bennett hands me a plate of pasta that smells incredible and gestures at my own table like he’s inviting me to sit down in my own apartment. I would find this presumptuous from anyone else. From him, it just feels like care.
We eat. The pasta is good—better than good, actually, from a place I’ve driven past a hundred times without going in—and the conversation moves the way it does between two people who have stopped performing for each other. He tells me about practice, about a play sequence he’s been trying to get the guys to run cleanly for two weeks, about Shep doing something with the emotional check-in game that I gather was both mortifying and effective. I tell him about the caption copy battle and the scheduling conflict and the specific joy of watching Derek be humbled by competence.
At some point, I stop talking mid-sentence.
I don’t mean to. I’m in the middle of describing the post-shoot cleanup and something just—stops. The sentence doesn’t finish. My fork is still in my hand. The words are simply gone, like a signal that dropped without warning.
“Gisele.” Bennett’s voice is careful.
“Mm.” I try to locate the rest of the sentence. It’s not there.
“When did you eat today?”
I think about the protein bar. Half the protein bar. “I had—I was going to have lunch but the shoot ran long.”
“So you had breakfast.”
“I had part of a protein bar.”
He looks at me with an expression that is not judgment and is not pity but is something in the middle that I don’t have a name for. Concern, maybe. The specific concern of someone who has been on the receiving end of being taken care of and has learned what it actually looks like.
“Eat,” he says quietly. “We don’t have to talk.”
So I eat. And somewhere between the last of the pasta and the moment Bennett gets up to clear the plates without asking, something in me just—releases. Like a knot that’s been pulled tight for fourteen hours finally deciding it’s done. I follow him to the couch because that was the plan, the evening that was planned, and I am a person who is going to have a lovely evening with her boyfriend and not fall asleep at eight-thirty like a golden retriever after a long walk.
I last approximately eleven minutes.
I know this because I’m aware of the moment it happens—the moment my body simply overrides every intention I had and pulls me under. I’m listening to Bennett talk about the power play sequence and then I’m not listening to anything at all.
The next thing I’m aware of is his hand on my shoulder, gentle, not waking me so much as checking.
“Hey.” His voice is very quiet.
“Mm.” I surface just enough to register that I’m horizontal on my own couch and that at some point my shoes came off, which I definitely didn’t do. “I wasn’t asleep.”
“You were completely asleep.” There’s something in his voice I can’t quite read. Soft, maybe. “Come on. Bed.”
“I’m fine here.” The couch is extremely comfortable, and my body has apparently decided to stay on it permanently.
“Gisele.” He says my name the way he’s learned to say it, like it means something specific. “Come to bed.”
He helps me up with the matter-of-fact steadiness of someone who has made a decision and is executing it. I’m upright. This is progress. He walks me to my bedroom with one hand at the small of my back, and I’m aware enough to appreciate this even if I’m not entirely functional.
“Sit,” he says, and I sit on the edge of the bed, and he kneels in front of me and finds the clasp of my bracelet—theone I always forget to take off—and undoes it, sets it on the nightstand. His hands are careful. Not tentative. Just certain, like everything he does.
“You don’t have to—” I start.
