Milo dropped onto the bench on her other side. “Quick strategy session. If you forget the words tonight, just harmonize with full confidence and nobody will know. I’ve been doing it for eight years.”
“That is the opposite of reassuring,” she said, but her mouth was fighting a smile.
“Ask Boyd. He forgot an entire song in Amarillo and just played louder. The audience went crazy.”
Boyd passed behind us with a pair of drumsticks. “Different arrangement,” he said, without stopping.
Layla laughed, short at first, then full, and she stopped tuning and laid her hands flat on the strings and breathed.
Russ set his bass case down and gave her a nod. That was the speech.
The sky was going dark, the crowd noise building, and the band had that loose, still focus they got right before a show. Layla sat in the middle of it, one of us.
I settled my hat and hit the first chord. The whole band came in behind me, the speakers pushing the sound across the meadow toward the far ridge. The crowd was in from the opening number — I could feel the lean, the rising noise between songs, hands clapping before I’d finished the last chord. Four songs in I was drenched in sweat. The stars were thick overhead and phone screens flickered through the crowd. Milo nailed asolo in the third song that pulled a roar. Russ held the bottom end steady. Boyd drove the rhythm. I sang with everything I had, because a Hill Country sky and a few hundred people who came to hear music was the whole reason I picked up an instrument in the first place.
Then it was Layla’s turn.
The band cleared. I set my guitar in the stand and stepped into the wings. Layla walked out alone, took the stool under the single spot, and laid her Martin across her lap. The crowd went quiet.
She strummed her opening chord and the note came out thin. It wavered. I could see the tension in her shoulders from twenty feet away. My chest tightened.
She stopped. Took a breath. Started again.
This time the sound was clear and strong, carrying into the dark. I let out the breath I’d been holding.
She sang three songs. By the second one a woman in the front row put her phone down and just listened. The teenagers near the speakers stopped filming. The meadow held still — not polite stillness but the real thing, the quiet that only happens when an audience forgets they’re an audience and just hears. Her voice filled the open night, and she gave those people every single thing she had.
She finished. The silence held for one long second. Then the applause broke — loud, real, with whistles and stomping. The turquoise women were on their feet. Layla stood up from the stool, her grin so wide I could see it from the wings. She gave a small wave that was half thank-you and half shock, tucked her Martin under her arm, and walked off toward me.
“I did it,” she said. Her hands were trembling.
“Yeah, you did.”
I took the guitar from her, leaned it on the amp, and pulled her in. She pressed her face into my chest and laughed,breathless and shaking, and I held her while the applause carried and the night stayed warm and the best part of my week was in my arms.
We finished the main set, came back for two encores, and by the time the lights came down the meadow was thick with people talking the way people talk after a show that caught them by surprise.
The band broke down. Milo coiled cables, whistling one of our songs, which he’d deny if confronted. Russ cased his bass. Boyd had his kit packed in four minutes flat. People thinned out, voices fading down the path toward the Lodge, and the grounds went still.
I found Layla at the edge of the stage, boots dangling in the grass, face tipped toward the sky. The stars were out, thick and scattered, and the night smelled of dry grass and cooling speakers.
I sat beside her and took my hat off.
“I have a proposition for you,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”
“Come with me.” I said it before I could smooth the edges or make it clever. “Tomorrow, when the bus leaves.”
“Wade.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“It sounds like you’re asking me to leave my whole life and drive off with a man I’ve known for five days.”
“I am.” I held her hand and I didn’t dress it up. “Because I drove onto this ranch to play some music and go home. And then you showed up with a voice you didn’t trust and a camera that sees everything. And you looked at me like nobody has since before the fame hit.” I ran my thumb across her knuckles. “You heard the song before I finished writing it. You saw through every version of me I’ve ever performed, and you wanted the one underneath. And I am falling in love with you. I know it’s fast. Iknow five days is nothing. But I’ve never played music the way I play it next to you, and I’ve never been this honest with another person. I want a real chance at this. You and me.”
Her fingers tightened on mine. She didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“You know I spent six years hiding,” she said. Her voice was steady but her hand was shaking. “Behind the camera, behind the lens, behind every excuse I could find not to stand in front of anyone and be seen. My whole life I’ve been safer on that side.” She turned to face me. “And then you put a microphone in my hand and told me I was enough. And I believed you. And it terrifies me how much I believed you.”
“Does that scare you enough to stay?”
“No.” She was looking right at me, and she was smiling, and her eyes were wet. “It terrifies me enough to go. Because I am falling for you too, Wade Bishop, and I’d rather be scared on a tour bus than safe here without you.”
I kissed her with both hands in her hair. Her mouth was warm against mine, and she kissed me back and laughed against my lips. I pulled her closer.
Behind us Milo said “Finally” without looking up from a cable.
Tomorrow there was a bus and a highway and a hundred things to figure out. But she was grinning at me in the dark and I was grinning back, and the figuring out was going to be the best part.
