“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 sleepor 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.
The Other Shoe
Bennett
