There comes a point when avoiding help becomes significantly more exhausting than accepting it—usually right around the time an entire town decides you’re not doing this alone anymore. You can call it meddling. You can call it an ambush. You can even pretend it’s highly organized emotional warfare disguised as a grouptext. But when people start showing up with snacks, opinions, and an alarming amount of enthusiasm for your personal growth? That’s not chaos. That’s community. And community, for better or worse, has a way of getting exactly what it wants.
Playlist: "Help" by The Beatles
I stand in the doorway of Glamboozled for a full thirty seconds before anyone notices I'm there.
There’s a particular kind of chaos that only Gisele LaRue can generate while simultaneously looking completely in control of it. Sample boxes stacked four deep against the back wall. Her phone going off every forty-five seconds. Carrie running between stations like she’s air traffic control at O’hare, using hairbrushes instead of lighted marshalling wands. Color swatches fanned across every available surface. a man named Derek on speakerphone explaining, with great passion, the difference between two shades of nude that look identical to me and apparently represent entirely different brand philosophies.
“Bennett.” Gisele spots me, holds up one finger without breaking her conversation with Derek, and points me toward the waiting area with the efficiency of a woman who has mentally triaged me as non-urgent.
I’m not sure how I feel about that.
But I sit.
I watch the chaos.
Derek is still talking. Gisele is now simultaneously responding to him, marking tasks in a binder, and mouthing an apology at me that I wave off because I don’t actually mind. Watching her work is one of my favorite things, a fact I’m still getting used to admitting to myself.
She’s wearing her hair up today, a few pieces falling loose around her face, and she’s got product on her hands from something she was mixing when I walked in, and she looks completely, thoroughly beautiful in the way she always does when she doesn’t know she’s being watched.
I’ve been in love with this woman for twelve years.
Probably longer if I admit it to myself.
I’m still getting used to that, too.
Derek finally winds down. Gisele thanks him with the professional warmth she deploys like a precision instrument, hangs up, and turns to face me with an exhale that says she’s been holding that breath for approximately three hours.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s a lot.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s more than I expected.” She looks around the salon with an expression that’s somewhere between exhilarated and mildly horrified. “I thought the Luxe deal would be exciting and it is. It’s incredibly exciting, but it’s just also—”
“A lot.”
“So much.” She laughs, short and real. “Come to the back. I have fifteen minutes before my next client, and we need to talk.”
The back room is the one island of relative calm. Post-it board still on the wall. Bingo card on the table. The worn couch that has absorbed more of my emotional revelations than any piece of furniture should reasonably have to.
She hands me a yellow Post-it before she even sits down.
“Check in,” she says. “Fast.”
I look at it. Look at her. “We’re doing this in fifteen minutes?”
“We’re doing the beginning of this in fifteen minutes.” She tucks her legs underneath her, which is her settling-in position, and gives me the look—the one that means don’t argue, just talk. “Pick one.”
“Overwhelmed,” I say, because it’s true and it’s faster than arguing.
“At what?”
“Everything.” I set the Post-it down. “Practice is rough. Franklin’s been in the observation deck twice this week. Boone’s trying to have feelings conversations with me, and I keep shutting him down and then feeling guilty about it. And I show up here and you’re—” I gesture at the wall of luxe chaos visible through the doorway. “In the middle of something enormous.”
“I am,” she agrees. “And that’s actually what I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay.”
She takes a breath. “I can’t do the daily sessions anymore. Not right now. Not until the launch event is over and things settle.” She holds my gaze when she says it, watching for the reaction.
