Walker plays two more songs. The crowd between each one is enormous, the bar temperature rising, people pressing forward, phones aloft.
And then he leans into the mic.
“Got something new for you,” he says. “Haven't played this one out yet. First time ever. And first time working with my co-writer, who happens to be here tonight. Sadie, baby, give the people a wave.”
I slouch instinctively in my seat, turning bright red, but manage a tiny wave.
Cassidy shakes my shoulder excitedly, hissing, “You wrote a song with Walker Rhodes?”
Tanner hollers and whistles his approval.
Walker just smiles at me, warm and happy.
A wink at me. Then a nod at the band, and Walker starts to play our song.
The opening chord is different with a full band behind it. Bigger, fuller, the melody I know from the truck bed under the fireworks now expanded into a song that fills every corner of Sutton's. The bass line underneath it is propulsive and low. I feel it in my whole body. The fiddle player comes in on the second bar and I actually grip the edge of the table.
It's the same song. It's a completely different song. It's both at once.
And then he starts to sing.
His voice wraps around the words, velvet and raspy and full-throated. The first line lands and I actually stop breathing for a second.
Those are my words. My words in his mouth, in his voice, filling this bar.
Not a soft ballad sung to one woman but an anthem performed for a crowd. Sutton's holds two hundred people on a good night but the energy in here right now is stadium-sized.
He makes the words something I couldn't have imagined when I was sitting in that truck bed with a Sharpie on my skin.
The crowd feels it immediately.
By the time the chorus hits the first time, people are moving. By the second chorus, half the bar is singing words they've never heard before because the words are just that easy to know.
The song builds to its final few bars and the crowdat Sutton's is fully in it. Phones up, voices joining, the whole bar moving together.
Walker's voice lifts over all of it, ragged and confident and completely alive.
The last chord rings out and fades.
For one suspended second the bar is completely silent.
Then the thunder of applause comes down.
Walker stands in the noise of it, one hand on the mic, looking out at the room. He takes a drink from the whiskey glass next to him, utterly at ease. For someone who called himself rusty with songwriting, there’s no trace of that on stage.
Then he looks at me.
“Come on up here, darlin’,” he tells me. “You deserve your flowers.”
Heart hammering, I make my way up to the stage.
He pulls me to his side, his arm coming around my shoulders, and turns to face the crowd.
“Don't be fooled by the shy act.” His voice fills the bar. “She's feisty as they come. That red hair, well. Bruce Springsteen said it best about a redheaded woman, I’ll tell you that. But I got a few things of my own to say about it.”
He's talking to the crowd but he hasn't taken his eyes off me, and the look in them is intimate and entirely private despite the two hundred people watching.
“This woman right here is the only reason I'm back on this stage tonight. She's my muse. And she's one hell of a songwriter.”
