Chapter Six
Wade
SATURDAY MORNING THEband was at the Pavilion by seven, setting up for tonight. Boyd had his kit half-assembled. Russ was running cables. Milo was tuning his Les Paul on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling off and his coffee balanced on an amp, which was going to end badly for the amp or the coffee or both. I plugged in, played a chord, and let the sound go wide across the open grass.
The stage was open-air, easily twice the size of the bar inside. Tonight there’d be a few hundred people in those folding chair rows and the Hill Country sky over all of it — the biggest show of the week.
Five days ago I’d driven onto this property for a three-show booking. Good gig, good ranch, ninety minutes from home. I was supposed to play the Saloon, close it out here Saturday, get some content, and move on.
I had not planned on any of what had actually taken place, and I was done pretending the setlist was the reason I’d been awake since five.
Milo’s coffee tipped. He caught the mug on the way down but not before half of it hit the monitor speaker, and Boyd rolled his eyes with the weary patience of a man keeping a tally.
“It’s fine,” Milo said. “It’ll dry.”
We ran through the opening four songs while the sun climbed and the heat built. The outdoor sound was wider than the Saloon, the vocals carrying clean but the drums thinning past twenty rows. We’d tighten it at the afternoon run-through.
I headed out after setup. Layla was coming up the path from the Lodge in a pale blue top that turned her eyes gold in the morning light. She spotted me and lit up.
I met her on the path and kissed her. Her palm found my jaw and she smiled against my mouth and tasted like coffee.
“Brought you supplies,” she said, tossing me a water bottle. “You look like you’ve been awake since before the sun.”
“Five a.m.”
“That’s concerning.”
“I was productive.”
“At five a.m., everything feels productive. That’s the lie of early mornings.”
We took the path past the bonfire circle and down toward the river, her shoulder warm on my arm. I had my acoustic slung over my shoulder. She had her camera. Somewhere in the last few days those had stopped being things we hid behind and started being the way we talked to each other.
We found shade under the biggest live oak and sat in the grass, my back to the trunk and Layla tucked into my side. The morning was already blazing beyond the shade, the air dry and still. I could smell dust and juniper and the sun on her hair. My arm settled around her shoulders and her hand rested on my knee, and the ease of it still caught me off guard. Monday she’d been a name on a crew list.
She turned her camera on me and I let her.
She checked the frame and turned the screen toward me. No stage, no lights. Just a man under a tree with a guitar, looking like someone who belonged here.
“That’s the one,” I said.
She set it down in the grass, leaned up, and kissed the hinge of my jaw. “You’re welcome.”
I picked up the guitar. I’d been working on something new since Tuesday night — not the song she’d helped me fix in the Saloon, the one where she’d told me the bridge wanted to climb. This was different. It had shown up at two in the morning and demanded to be written, and she was in every line of it.
I played it through. She went still at my side, her grip tightening on my knee.
“That’s new,” she said.
“That’s you.”
She looked up at me. For a second Layla Rigsbee, the woman who always had a comeback, had nothing. Then she said, “Play it again,” and her voice came out rougher than she probably meant it to.
I played it again. When I finished, she turned her face into my neck and stayed there, and I pressed my mouth to her hair and closed my eyes, and the river ran below the bank and neither of us needed to say anything.
“It’s the best thing you’ve written,” she murmured at my throat.
“I know.”
