I listened for a quiet moment, eyes drawn to the bathroom door when a soft humming came from that area. I walked across the room, grin pulling up my lips when I caught sight of her, hair piled into a messy bun on the top of her head, a notebook propped on one damp knee as she scratched notes with a pencil.
“Mornin’.” I breathed, stepping a little farther into the room.
Her gaze lit up when our eyes connected, and she held the notebook to her chest, the papers blotted with soapy wet spots from the bathwater, but she didn’t seem to care. “I’ve been writing.”
“Oh?” I sat on the edge of the tub. “Can I?”
She held out the notebook, sinking a little deeper under the soapy bubbles as her cheeks pinked up with the heat in the room.
My eyes scanned the scribbled notes, stanzas and lines strewn across the page.
I nodded my head, humming along a melody to a few of the lines before peeking up at her over the spiral pages and grinning. “This is good.”
“Really?” She smiled with some small sense of disbelief.
“Really.” I flipped a page, and then another, then three more in a row after that. “How many of these notebooks do you have?”
“A lot. I kept all of them. I have an entire box at home too. Writing made me feel—” her eyes flicked up to the ceiling as she shrugged “—closer to you.”
She stole the breath from my lungs with her admission.
Was it really possible that I’d been on her mind all of the last decade just like she’d been on mine?
Losing you was the final nail, the last piece of us, buryin’ my coffin…
I could definitely appreciate her Southern sound, but I didn’t know if she was ready to sing these lyrics every night. And hell if I was ready to hear them.
“We should put some of them to music.” I found myself saying the exact opposite of what I was thinking, but only because not doing it would be an injustice. I knew better than anyone that makin’ music was a matter of layin’ your soul on the page for all to see. There was somethin’ therapeutic about writin’ things down. No way would I take that away from her.
“There’s this certain arrangement that I think would sound so good paired with these words.” She leaned farther out of the tub, swiping the notebook and flipping through the pages.
And that was how I found myself fallin’ for Augusta Belle again.
Slow and steady, one beat at a time, mostly to the sound of music.
I don’t know what I was thinking when she proposed later that morning that I needed a haircut.
She looked so cute sittin’ across from me, notebook on one knee, my guitar perched over the other, I didn’t have the heart to deny her.
I grunted, shoving a hand through my hair and thinking it was getting on my nerves anyway. “S’pose it’s about time.”
A wicked grin turned up her cheeks before she set my guitar on the bed and rummaged through her makeup bag, pulling out a pair of scissors and heading back for me.
“Wait, you’re gonna do it?” I widened my eyes.
“Bet your sweet ass I am.”
I was about to steal those scissors right out of her determined little fist, but I burst into a laugh instead.
She grinned, sidling up close before straddling my lap and plopping down on my thighs.
I stifled another strangled moan of frustration, the tiny little shorts she wore doing nothing to help me contain my growing need.
“Just a few inches.” That bewitching smile did something to me, something I didn’t even like to think about.
“Fine, but don’t forget we’ve got a show tonight. Got to impress the people at Slick Willy’s.”
She stuck out her tongue, wiggling and shifting around for a second before her fingers stroked through the too-long licks of my dark hair.
