Before - Bethan-Kris Page 0,4

but that certainly didn’t stop her roommate—who was a year younger than her—from somehow managing to keep their fridge and freezer stocked with all the liquor they might want or need. A lot like the benzo bars in the bathroom, or the coke her roommate liked to indulge in on the weekends.

Those weren’t really her things.

Kind of came with the territory, though.

Models were expected to be a lot of things. Most importantly at this stage in Gigi’s fledgling career, available. Pleasant. Ready at a moment’s fucking notice. Her weight couldn’t—or rather, shouldn’t—fluctuate more than a pound or two as though it really made a difference on her tall, slender frame. She couldn’t cut her hair or change the style from the shoulder-length, loose dark blonde waves her mother agency settled on as the best look to showcase what they considered to be her ... strangely beautiful features.

Sure, strangely beautiful was one way to put it. Growing up, the only thing she wished she could do was hide the freckles that always showed through her makeup no matter how much she tried to put on. She begged her mother to have the gap between her two front teeth fixed because no matter what, the full, round bow of her upper lip always showed it off regardless of what she did to hide it. Kids teased that her vivid green eyes, always wide, made her an alien because no one else had that color but her. Add in the flat, wide slope of her nose and eyebrows that were darker than the hair on her head, and well ... there was never a lack of jokes where her looks were concerned.

Funny how the same features that she was once teased about were now the things that everyone promised would someday put her under the brightest of lights all across the globe. The right person needs to see that face of yours, her mother, Kimie, used to tell her, and still did, and they’ll find their muse, Gigi Rey Parker. Don’t you ever stop showing it off.

Part of her felt like she was living her mother’s dream for her just as much as her own. Especially because her mother left her own budding modeling career to keep and raise the baby she became pregnant with at just twenty-one, and alone seeing as how her father had never been in the picture, well ... she didn’t want to let her mom down, either. Even if at first, her mom hadn’t wanted her to model at all.

That was how, barely six months past her seventeenth birthday, Gigi found herself leaving her small New Jersey town for New York City. Where she then signed the rights to her future over to MGNT Modeling without truly understanding what it meant. Everyone else said she was beautiful—that she was going to be a star.

So much so, that she wanted it, too.

Three years later with an entire portfolio in hand, a few small runway shows under her belt, and a handful of magazine shoots, and she wasn’t any closer to seeing those bright lights than she had been when she first showed up in New York.

The whispers from other models in the agency—it was hard to make friends outside of the modeling circle when every day revolved around making it—were starting to creep into Gigi’s own thoughts. Especially when she made it back to her Brooklyn apartment that she shared with her roommate because the day was over, and the only thing she had were the thoughts in her head screaming at her. You’re too old. If you haven’t made it yet, you won’t. Maybe you’re just ... not what people are looking for, Gi. I mean, look at you. Not that she ever voiced it out loud or said a word to anyone about those self-doubts and fears.

If she did, they won.

Instead, she kept on keeping on.

Go-sees.

Castings.

Whatever she was told to do, she did it.

Maybe that was why, as her roommate and for all purposes, best friend, squealed in Gigi’s bedroom doorway at the news she had just shared, all she felt was a sense of surrealism. She somehow managed to float back down to earth, her body becoming hers again as she nodded to the unspoken question coming from Cassie as the girl opened her arms high and wide like she was saying this is it, Gigi.

Her mother echoed the silent sentiment. “You did it, baby girl! This is your break, Gi. I’m so proud of you.”

Should