Page 13 of The Song We Lost

Because I am not ready for our love story to be over.

We spend a day and a half wrapped up in each other, cooking, laughing, making love, pretending the silence hasn’t been growing between us for years. When it’s time for him to leave, we make a plan. He’ll join me for part of the tour. He’ll show up more and meet me halfway in everything.

We’ll really be together again, with that thought hope returns and I let myself believe it.

Believe in us.

One more time.

chapter 5

bailey

. . .

This is the biggest tour of my career. The kind of tour that doesn’t just happen, it’s built, piece by piece, over years of a career and months of planning and pressure and second-guessing. It has bigger venues, with longer runs, in new cities I’ve never headlined before. This is a full-blown production, not borrowed lights and rushed sound checks. I have played festivals, opened shows, and even shared a tour. I did a small tour for my last album... but this... this is different. This is the kind of tour you don't typically get this early in your career. It feels surreal.

I should feel triumphant. Instead, I feel like I’m holding my breath. Like everything depends on this tour being successful.

Every day starts early and ends late. My meetings blur together. Set lists get rewritten. Outfits are adjusted, lighting cues tweaked.

I’m excited, genuinely, but I’m also terrified. Because this tour is proof. On this tour, I get to show them that I’ve outgrown the girl they signed years ago. Proof that I don’t need to be packaged and polished into something easy to sell. Proof that I can carry this on my own. I get to have a guitar in my hand, a piano on stage. I get to sing a few songs stripped down by myself. If I can make this work, really work, I could finally stop running. I could go home.

That should excite me, I should feel so fulfilled...

Luke is here with me, just like he promised. I think part of my unease is that I had half-expected him to cancel, to come up with an excuse, a reason he needed to be somewhere else, working on his career instead of working on our marriage. The first night, when I spotted him near the side of the stage, something in me finally unclenched. Like I was holding a breath and could finally let it go. He was leaning against a speaker case, arms crossed, eyes fixed on me, not on his phone, not scanning the room, but onme. For the rest of the show, my body relaxed, almost like I needed him to be here for all this to make sense. After the show, he was waiting backstage, sweat still clinging to my skin, adrenaline buzzing through me.

“You were incredible,” he said, pulling me into his arms. “Jesus, Bailey. You owned that stage. The way the crowd went quiet when you did the acoustic set and then their voices joined yours...”

I laugh into his chest, breathless. “It’s just the first night.”

“It’s the first of a lot,” he says. “They’re going to add dates. I can feel it. No one can say you didn't earn all you got after this.”

Hope flares, but so does panic. More dates mean more time away from him. But he is here now, I have him with me for a whole month.

We eat late, still buzzing, sharing fries from the hotel room bed like we used to. He talks about the shows, about moments he liked, about how good it feels to watch me up there again. For the first time in a long while, I let myself imagine this sticking.

Sitting by the mirror of the second city on our tour, I struggled to get all my pins out of my hair. I didn't even hear him come in, but then I felt his presence behind me. His strong, calloused hands wrapped around mine, and I stopped. My eyes met his in the mirror, and I almost cried because he looked likemyLuke.Exactly the same, but his eyes, they were all my old Luke, and the way he was looking at me was a mix of love, awe and heat. We didn't speak. Luke moved on instinct and carefully removed the pins and then ran his fingers over my scalp, eliciting a half groan, half whimper from me.

It hasn't just been carrying everything on my own that has been hard... It is everything else I have missed from being so distant, so far away from the love of my life. It's the loneliness, the memories that haunt me, the intimacy, and yes, the sex. Luke and I had always had such a healthy sex life... and I know because we were each other's first, each other's everything, some people assumed we'd outgrow each other. But it was different, we experimented and grew together instead of apart... until recently... There was never anything I felt like I couldn't go to Luke with, do with Luke.

I am pulled back into the moment when Luke kisses the top of my head and then pulls me up from the chair and into his arms.

"You are so incredible, Sunshine. Do you know that? I am the luckiest man..."

My back is to his front, and he pushes my hair over my left shoulder, while we are still facing the mirror. I watch him as he rubs his hand over my silk-robe-covered body that I changed into as soon as I got into my hotel room. The heat from his hands sears through the silk, and a shiver runs through me.

Our eyes are locked through the mirror, and I wonder what he sees when I am just me. When I am stripped down of everything this career has made me, and I am just Bailey.

Luke breaks eye contact to drop kisses down my hairline and then my neck and collar bone, his scruff tickles my skin as he moves, and I can feel my nipples pebble under the silk. With one hand he tugs the robe back, revealing my shoulder to him, hecontinues his kisses until he bites down on my shoulder earning a yelp turned moan from me.

He growls in response and then drops down to his knees behind me, pulling my robe with him. He spins me, and the rest of the robe drops to the ground. Luke's eyes are pure fire as he takes me in bare before him, he gently pushes me back so I am leaning back on the counter behind me.

"God Bailey, I need to taste you, it's been too long," he groans.

Luke is still fully dressed, on his knees before me, but I don't feel exposed or shy. I feel powerful. Luke is all man, and seeing the look on his face, knowing I put that there. Makes me feel...

He tosses his hat on a chair and then wraps both hands around the back of my thighs, resting just under my ass cheeks. And then he is on me, he doesn't start slow, he doesn't tease, he dives in. His scruff adds to the friction of his mouth, teeth and tongue. He pushes me back, my back now pressed against the cold mirror, and he uses the angle to push apart my legs so he can get better access. He growls into my pussy and doesn't slow or take it easy, he feasts and I can feel my orgasm building, and I know it won't take me long to get there. He pushes one leg over his shoulder to free his hand, and he bites my inner thigh as he slides a finger inside of me. I buck and moan, as he keeps working me, adding a second finger while he sucks and flicks my nub with the tip of his tongue.