“As always.” Her lips purse as she glances at him. His eyes are on her already. Like they’re magnetized there.
“God, he's exhausting,” she mutters.
“Give me one night, Freckles.” He grins at her. “I’ll show you exhausting.”
Her cheeks go red, and she looks away.
Tanner’s green eyes drop to the ring on her finger. “Doctor Dickface couldn't make it?” The grin doesn't quite reach his eyes this time.
“His name is Derek,” Cassidy says. “Not that you've ever bothered to learn it.”
“Yep, good old Devon. Wouldn’t be caught dead in a dive bar, now, would he?”
“He's in a twelve hour surgery to remove a brain tumor from a father of three young kids,” Cassidy says. “But sure, Tanner. Real shame he couldn't be slamming back whiskey shots in a dive bar.”
His jaw tightens. He looks away.
Interesting.
Cassidy never told me there was a whole thing going on there. I need to get the full story out of her. Soon.
Around us, the room is changing. I can feel it before I can name it, a subtle shift in energy, like a weather change. Heads turning. Phones coming out. Voices dropping to that frequency that means something important is happening.
At the next table, two girls in their early twenties have abandoned all pretense of their own conversation.
“Oh my God,” the brunette breathes. “Is that actually Walker Rhodes?”
“It is,” the blonde answer. “How is he even hotter in person? It’s not fair.”
I can feel their eyes on me and I pretend not to notice.
The blonde drops her voice again, but I can still hear when she asks her friend, “Who’s the girl he came in with?”
“No clue. Lucky bitch.”
I want to be mad, but hey, they’re not wrong. I am feeling like one lucky bitch.
“Do you think he'd take a selfie with us?” the brunette asks.
“He's talking to the band. Don't. Just look.”
They’re looking. Half the bar is looking.
I look too, because even after a whole summer I'm not immune to him. My eyes roam over him, seeing him the way they do. Black shirt stretched over his biceps. The cowboy hat casting a shadow across that jaw. Guitar strap over one shoulder, the Martin hanging easy against his hip. He's talking to the drummer, one big hand wrapped around the neck of the guitar. His head bends over the strings as he checks the tuning, corded forearms flexing, dark eyebrows coming together in concentration.
He looks iconic. He looks like an album cover. He looks like the reason people drive four hours to stand in a field just to hear himsing.
He is, objectively, extremely hot. Those girls aren’t wrong.
But there’s a lot they don’t know. They don't know he keeps his mother's recipe cards in the kitchen drawer and can’t bring himself to move them. That he reads to his son in a different voice for every character. That he writes his best lines at two in the morning and leaves the notebook open on the counter for me every morning, along with fresh-brewed coffee.
They see Walker Rhodes, the legend.
I get to know the man.
I reach for my drink. Look around Sutton’s. The packed Saturday night crowd, the band's equipment waiting on the empty stage, the low ceiling holding in the heat and the noise and the smell of weed smoke and beer.
I think about the guitar case in the back of Walker's truck and feel the anticipation simmer inside me.
