The road comes off the ridge and drops back toward Sunshine Valley, the lights of town visible in the valley below as we roundthe curve, and I think about Kessa’s face when she looked at me across the fire. I think about the word she didn’t use, which was the word for what Honey is, which StillWater has a name for and which I don’t know how to translate except sideways. The closest I can get is: someone who found the frequency on their own. Without the clan, without the tradition, without the years of being told what to listen for. Just… arrived at it like it was home.
She inhabits the thing I ran from.
The lights of town come up, and I slow for the turn onto her road. Twenty-three miles of two-lane, and neither of us has said a word, and I don’t feel the absence of words. The silence carries its own fullness.
“That was…” she starts.
She doesn’t finish. Which is its own kind of answer.
I turn onto her drive and the gravel crunches under the tires. The house is lit from inside, the amber of the lamps glows through the lace curtains. I stop the car.
She looks at me in the dark. Neither of us says anything. We don’t need to.
I think:I know what the song is for. I don’t know if I know yet how to give it.
I walk her to the door. She goes in. I stand on the porch for a moment after the door closes, in the dark, the creek runningsomewhere below the property, a nighthawk cruising for prey over a field. The guitar is in my car. The melody is in my head.
Tonight the question arrives and before I can finish it, I’m already thinking about the way she saidyesto Kessa without flinching, the way she sat with the drum like she’d been doing it her whole life, the way she didn’t finish her sentence just now because she didn’t need to.
The obligation and the wanting aren’t two different things. I’ve been treating that as a problem to solve. Tonight I’m not sure it is one.
I return to my car.
I drive home with the melody running and the Missouri dark around me and a kind of quiet I haven’t felt in eight years sitting in my chest where the performance used to be.
Chapter Nineteen
Honey
I don’t tell him I’m coming.
This is not a test. I want to be clear about that, at least to myself, even if I can’t fully explain it to anyone else. It’s not suspicion, and it’s not a trap. It’s something simpler and harder to say out loud: I’ve been putting him together in pieces for weeks now: the workshop version, the porch version, the male at the creek and the male at the StillWater fire, and there’s one version I’ve only heard about. The one who walks into a bar on a Friday night and fills it. I want to see that when he doesn’t know I’m watching. Not because I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Because I want the true thing. I’ve been taking in true things about him for weeks, and I’d like to finish the picture.
I’ve been going to Sunshine Valley for supplies long enough that the drive doesn’t require thinking. Twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane, the ridge going dark to the east, the town lights coming up in the valley shining bright on a clear summer night. I know where The Taproom is. I’ve passed it many times without ever going in.
The sound of his guitar reaches me before I’m through the door.
The room is full. Not packed with restless energy, just full of people drinking, listening, and lingering. Friday night, every stool taken, groups at the high tables near the windows, the low steady noise of people who are comfortable. The stage is in the far corner, small, with one lamp angled down. I find an empty table near the wall, sit, and look up.
Oh.
He’s on a bar stool with one boot on the floor and one on the rung, guitar across his chest, and he is, I don’t have a better word for it, perfect. Dark hair loose around his face, pushed back enough to stay out of his eyes. Flannel shirt, open at the collar, jeans. He didn’t dress for a stage. He just happens to be on one. The casualness. The absolute absence of performance in his posture. He’s big the way I’ve known he’s big for months, but here, with the room arranged around him and the lamp throwing its light down, what registers first is his face.
He’s handsome. I’ve known this. I haven’t let myself look at it straight on until right now, from here, with him not looking back.
His face is open in a way I’ve come to recognize, that quality he has of not monitoring himself, of simply being where he is without checking whether it’s working. The song has him. His eyes are half-closed and his jaw is slightly loose, and whatever the lyric is asking of him is right there on his face, visible to the whole room. I understand in this moment why women have always fallen for musicians. It’s not the instrument. It’s the permission they give themselves to feel openly. He doesn’t do that at my kitchen table. He doesn’t do it on the porch. He’s doing it right now in a flannel shirt on a Friday night and I cannot look away.
His tusks catch the stage light. I’ve been close to his face for weeks, in lamplight, in the Missouri dark, across a kitchen table, and I know the shape of him.
But from here, with distance and the angle of the lamp, I notice how well they fit him. The prominent cheekbones, the strong line of his jaw, the tusks as part of it all. Not separate from his face. Just his face. He is very, very good-looking, and I have been, apparently, not letting myself fully register that.
I register it now.
His hands move on the guitar with the ease of eight years. Big hands, thick fingers that shouldn’t be able to find every note on a small instrument. They shouldn’t, yet they do. I’ve thought about his hands since the first visit. Watching them from here is different from everything I’ve imagined.
The song goes where it goes. He reads the room with his eyes, adjusts the chorus to match the crowd, and reflects their energyback. He’s in genuine exchange with this space. Not performing at it. Just…withit. I’m looking for any contradiction and I’m not finding any.
He finishes. The room responds. He says a few words low into the mic and two people near the stage laugh. Then he moves into the next song without a gap.
