At night, between cities, we had the slow scenes I wanted as badly as the fast ones.Showers with his chin hooked over my shoulder because the water was too hot for him and exactly right for me.His laugh when I smuggled hotel lotions because I’m apparently seventy-five at heart.The moments where we made love like we were speaking a language we’d both spoken in other lifetimes but finally understood fluently together.The way he’d say things in my ear in that low, rough tone that made my spine liquefy and also made me want to build a life with him until our hands were wrinkled and worn with age.
“Marin wants to add dates,” I said one night, the lamp casting a gold pool over the white duvet, his hand tracing lazy circles on my back.“Two more in Ontario.Maybe one in New York.There’s a lot of momentum.”
He went still.“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.”I looked up at the ceiling, at the texture every hotel insists on, but no one likes.“Part of me wants to ride the wave.Part of me wants to go home and sit under our tree and not talk to anyone for a week.”
His face softened, but his mouth went tight at the edge, a line I was learning to read as protective worry.“More cities means more people.More chances for people to… get close.”He didn’t say Andrew.He didn’t have to.None of us had forgotten the empty chair or the calls.
“Marin’s upping security,” I said gently.“She’s on it.”
“I’m on it,” he said back, and kissed my temple like a promise.
I rolled into him, cupped his cheeks and kissed him with everything I had.
I was still holding his face when his phone buzzed on the nightstand.He groaned, reached, frowned, and then his whole body dropped an inch like a cable had been cut.
“What?”I asked, a knot forming without permission.
He adjusted his phone so I could read with him.Group text:Judy: “Don’t panic.We’re okay.But I’ve got some… plague situation.Fever.Adam too.He tried to go into the pub with a temperature.His staff sent him home; he says he feels like he is dying.But he is just being dramatic.Dad's hands are full, and I can't even get out of bed.”
A moment later,Adam:“I’m not dramatic.Mom is dramatic.Also, I might actually be dying.”
And thenDean:“No one is dying.The farm needs at least two strong backs for three days, or the frost will destroy what we have left in the fields.Also, the bar needs a bartender who isn't me.Who drinks something called a slippery nipple?”
I laughed picturing the look on Dean's face when he got that order.Brody scrubbed his hand over his jaw.“They need me,” he said, like an apology and like there was no other choice.And really, there wasn’t.Our families had rallied around us when it was needed.
“Then go,” I said.“Of course you go.”
A knock sounded on our door twice.Brody got up and answered it, letting Marin in our room, her eyes flicking from my face to Brody’s.
"Is everything ok?"she asked.
Broady groaned, looking at me like he was struggling with this.
I got up and moved beside him, wrapping my arm around his waist."Yes, Brody needs to head back home.He is needed to help out his family."
Marin locked eyes with Brody, seeming to understand he needed to be convinced I would be ok.“I’m already securing additional security for the last leg,” she said.“Eight venues added over three cities and five days.I’ll be glued to Cassidy’s side.You go help your family.We’ve got her.”
Brody didn’t like it.But he watched my face, and I watched his, and we met in the middle like we always do.
“I can meet you after I am done helping dad and see if I can get Chase or Mason to help with the pub,” he said, framing my cheeks in his warm, callused hands.
“I’ll be home in six days,” I said.“We’ll meet as soon as I get home, and you can tell me how many beans and squash you saved from an early grave.”
He laughed, the sound raw around the edges, and kissed me like he was tucking something into me to hold until he returned.He said, “Text me when you wake up, when you get in a car, when you get to a venue.When you want to show me your room-service pancakes.”
“I will,” I promised, because sometimes love is a safety net of dings and read receipts.
He left that night, his mouth brushing my forehead, the door closing softly behind him.The room felt off without his body in it, but the tour didn’t pause just because our little world shifted.It expanded.
The morning post about a woman who’d read my book on her lunch break and then walked to her mother’s house to tell the truth about what had happened when she was nineteen.The bookstore owner who told me her employee had watched a customer cry quietly in the women's fiction section and had given her tissues and directions to our signing.The big-box retailer that rearranged a table, so my cover faced out near the front door.
And the emails.And the security briefings.And the greenroom doors that clicked behind me, which for a split second made my heart gallop before my brain caught up: safe.Controlled.Mine.My voice.My Story.
I slept on my side of the bed and reached back for a chest that wasn’t there, my hand finding only cool sheets and the bookmark he’d carved.I pressed the walnut to my lips, read the line he’d chosen, and let it steady me.
When Marin slid a revised schedule across the table, three more cities, short hops, controlled spaces, I looked from the paper to the woman who had taken care of my book like a thing she believed in and said, “Okay.Yes.We’ll add them.”
