I slugged another mouthful of the hot whiskey, the fire burnin’ down my throat and leavin’ a trail of raw fucking pain, just like Augusta Belle had done.
Where in the fuck had she been?
My brain tried to wrap itself around the pain of her leavin’, her comin’ back, fucking with my life in ways I didn’t understand.
I kicked at a rock, watching it tumble over the gray asphalt before I veered left, deciding I wanted to be off this road if Augusta Belle took a mind to hop into my truck and chase me down. I didn’t really care if she drove it, though I’d never let anyone else, but the idea of her sittin’ behind that big wheel made a half smile turn my lips.
Augusta Belle Branson was back, after all these years. I’ll be damned.
And here I was running away from her because I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to do that moment justice. I’d turned her pretty smile over in my head so many times, remembered the way she used to lock her fingers with mine whenever we watched a movie. She wasn’t just most of my good memories—she wasallof them. Every other part of my past was tainted with pain. But not her. She didn’t know it then, but she kept me breathing all those nights when it felt like the end of the world was just around the corner.
Blades of stubborn wheatgrass whipped against the rough denim of my jeans as I lifted the bottle over my head, swallowing deep as the lovely liquid burned away the pain of seeing her face again. The sweet contours even prettier than I remembered, full lips that’d taunted me so many nights begging for a taste. Whiskey-laced irises haunting my dreams.
I cussed when my boots hit mud, the soft sound of the sucking like a playlist for how this entire night had gone. Water lapping a shoreline lifted my gaze to a small lake, dark shadows playing off moonlight. The thud of my back hitting the old wooden bench was deaf on my ears as Augusta Belle danced around my thoughts, twisting with a whiskey bottle, fogging my head until the only thing I could do was take another drink.
The first night I ever tasted what would soon become my constant companion, she was lifting a half-empty bottle to my lips, urging me to taste.
“It won’t hurt,” she promised, “too much.” Her eyes glinted in the darkness of her upstairs bedroom, her breath already heavy with the scent of rebellion.
“Your mom would never let me in this house again if she found us both drunk,” I warned, always the cautious one between us.
“She’d never let you see me again if she found you up here in my room.” That defiant twinkle again. If I was sure of anything else, it was that this girl was born to be a rebel. “Scared?”
Hell yes, I’d been scared then, but not of the liquid in that bottle. Scared of the hellfire and brimstone that was her.
I groaned, the memory fading as fast as it’d come.
What in the fuck was Augusta Belle doing back in my life, walking up one day like a ghost? The very ghost that’d sheared my heart wide open and then found its way on to the radio for everyone to feel.
I groaned, throwing back the last of the amber whiskey and dropping the bottle at my feet.
Some fucking foresight that I hadn’t brought a backup bottle.
I’d also had the bitter taste of regret in my mouth about that single I’d signed off on with the music execs in Nashville.
I remembered the meeting only in chunks.
The bitter smell of the chain coffee shop. The green tie loosened at head-douchebag’s collar.
I’d hated both of them from the minute I’d sat down.
But I was a stupid kid with a broken heart and an aimless shuffle in my feet.
“Over a million views on YouTube, you’ve really accomplished something.”His eyes’d sliced up and down my haggard body. I hadn’t had a shower in a few days, singing dive bars all night for tips and then drinking my earnings away till dawn.
It’d only been luck that Augusta Belle had created the YouTube channel, after I’d dragged my feet for months, and uploaded a few of my songs. There were some with her singing backup off-screen, the warmth of her encouragement surrounding me as I strummed and sang my heart out in my bedroom.
And then she’d vanished.
Left me in the dust. For what, I still wasn’t sure. Coulda been dead in another river for all I knew.
Augusta Belle had been gone a week when I uploaded the last song.
The song that flayed my heart open.
The song I still couldn’t sing onstage without something heavy clawing at my throat.
Never would have guessed her coming back could be any more painful than her leavin’, but so it was.
