Chapter Two #2
My blood was still running hot from the last hour.
Sixty minutes across from her — her voice in my chest, her body moving against that guitar, and my hands wanting to be everywhere her voice was.
Every time she'd leaned forward, I'd lost my place.
When the flush on her throat had started climbing, I'd wanted to follow it with my mouth.
When she'd closed her eyes and tipped her head back and sung, a pull behind my ribs had gone sideways in a way I hadn't felt in years.
She didn't seem to have the first clue what she did to me. I was going to need a cold shower before dinner. Possibly two.
I grabbed my guitar and tore through something fast and loud until the situation in my jeans settled enough to stand up without embarrassing myself.
Milo found me outside the Saloon twenty minutes later, right on cue.
"So," he said, falling into step beside me on the path toward the cabins. "The photographer."
"What about the photographer."
"Nothing. Just that you were in there for an hour and a half with the door shut and you came out looking like you'd been rear-ended by a truck you'd like to see again."
"We ran the setlist. She picks up harmony fast."
"Uh-huh." Milo shoved his dark curls off his forehead and hit me with the grin he'd been perfecting since we were playing for tips at a Fort Worth bar with a broken AC unit and a crowd of nine people who were mostly there for the dollar wings. "How's her voice?"
"Good. Really good. She'll hold the bridge sets."
"How's the rest of her?"
"Milo."
"I'm asking as your lead guitarist. Ensemble chemistry. Very professional concern."
Russ appeared from the direction of the cabins with his ball cap pulled low and fell into step on my other side. He'd been restringing his bass on the porch and had probably heard every note through the open Saloon windows. "Sounded good in there," he said. "She's going to work."
"That's what I said."
Milo leaned forward to look around me at Russ. "He watched the door for a solid minute after she left."
"I was thinking about the setlist."
"For a minute. At a closed door."
"Setlist is complicated."
Russ adjusted his ball cap and said nothing, which was how Russ said most of the things that mattered.
I ate dinner at the Lodge with the band.
Grilled chicken, cornbread, and sweet tea that tasted the way sweet tea was supposed to taste, which was how it tasted in Texas and nowhere else.
Then I headed back to the Saloon alone because the acoustics were good and I had two empty hours and a melody I'd been chasing since San Antonio.
The room was better at night. String lights on, the old wood glowing amber in the low light, the bar polished and hushed.
I sat on the edge of the stage with my guitar and played the new song from the top, humming through the places where the lyrics hadn't arrived yet, letting the melody find its own shape in a room that did not have opinions about streaming numbers or radio formatting.
I was deep in the second verse when I heard the latch.
Layla stopped just inside the entrance. "I'm sorry, I left my camera bag after rehearsal, I didn't think anyone would be—"
"You're fine." I kept playing, quiet, just under the conversation. "It's by the stool."
She crossed the room and picked up the bag, and I expected her to leave. She didn't leave. She stood there with the strap in her hands, turned toward the stage, listening.
"New song?" she asked.
"Trying to be." I played the chorus through once and shook my head. "The bridge keeps wanting to go somewhere I haven't found yet."
She settled onto the stool facing mine, the same one from rehearsal, and set the bag at her feet.
The string lights caught the gold in her hazel eyes and the floral scarf was gone from her hair, which fell loose and heavy past her shoulders.
Without the camera up in front of her face, she looked different — more present, more herself.
"Play it again?" she said.
I played it again. She listened with everything she had, still and focused, her head tilted, her gaze on my hands.
I could not remember the last time someone had heard a half-finished song of mine with that quality of attention.
My label listened for the single. My producer listened for the hook.
Milo listened to find his guitar part. Layla just listened, and the room went very small and very quiet around the two of us and the unfinished melody.
"The bridge wants to go up," she said when I stopped. "You keep bringing it back to the verse key, but it wants to climb."
I looked at her. Then I played the bridge again and let it rise, and she was right.
The melody opened up. The whole song rearranged itself in the air, and the sound that came out of my guitar was the sound I'd been hunting for three weeks in hotel rooms and green rooms and sound checks from Tulsa to Austin.
"How long have you been playing?" I asked.
"Since I was fourteen. My brother Bobby bought me a secondhand Yamaha for my birthday and I taught myself from YouTube videos in the barn." She gave me a full, real smile, and it changed the entire shape of her face. "I used to play for the horses. They're a very forgiving audience."
I laughed before I could smooth it into anything polished or professional. She looked startled by it, as if she hadn't realized she was funny. The surprise made her prettier, which was already becoming a problem.
I set my guitar down and rested my elbows on my knees. My hat was back at the cabin. I'd left it after dinner and hadn't missed it. "Can I ask you something? Why'd you quit performing?"
The smile dimmed but held. "Froze on stage in college.
Open mic night at a coffeehouse in San Marcos.
Sixty people watching and every lyric I'd ever learned went blank.
I walked off and never went back." She said it evenly, no drama, no plea for sympathy, just a fact she was handing me because I'd asked.
Her voice was steady in a way that took effort.
"For what it's worth," I said, "what I heard today isn't someone who needs coaching or patience or hand-holding. What you have is already there. You just have to stop thinking it isn't."
She held my eyes for a beat longer than she had all day. The Saloon air pressed close, and my pulse was running faster than the conversation justified.
"Thank you," she said. "For today. For making it easy."
"Anytime."
She grabbed her camera bag, stood, and gave me a small wave at the door. The Saloon settled into itself after she left: the overhead lights buzzing, the old building ticking in its joints, the ghost of an unfinished song hanging in the still air.
I ran the new bridge one more time. She was right.
I leaned back on my stool and thought about every woman I'd been with since the fame hit.
Every one of them had been right there while I played, and not one of them had heard the music.
They'd been waiting for the cue, the single, the angle — whatever piece of Wade Bishop the brand they could take with them.
I'd gotten so used to it I'd stopped expecting anything different.
Milo would have told me I was being dramatic. Milo would have been right.
Layla Rigsbee walked into a room and heard a bridge that wanted to climb when I kept pulling it down.
She'd given me her full attention — no agenda, no angle, no mask.
When she'd looked at me tonight, something landed behind my ribs that I'd buried so deep I'd lost track of it, the weight of being seen by someone who wanted nothing but the real thing.
I stood up, set my guitar in the stand, and hit the lights.
The Saloon went dark. I stepped out onto the porch and the Hill Country night spread wide above me, stars scattered dense above the ridge, crickets and tree frogs pulsing in the grass.
The air carried the dry cedar smell of a June evening that wasn't done with the day's heat.
The night air should have cooled me down by now, but the heat had nothing to do with Texas and everything to do with a woman who played for horses and smiled like she'd forgotten anyone was watching.
I put my hands in my pockets and made for the cabin, and somewhere in the live oaks the mockingbird from this morning was at it again, singing to an audience of nobody with the tireless conviction of a performer who had never needed one.