Chapter 30 Making Music
Making Music
SADIE
“Close your eyes,” Walker says from behind me.
We’ve been back home for all of thirty seconds and I have no idea what he’s been planning, because he won’t say a peep.
“Why?”
“No more questions.” His hands come up to cover my eyes from behind. “Don't peek.”
“I'm going to trip,” I laugh.
“I've got you.” His chest presses against my back as he walks me forward, one slow step at a time, still covering my eyes. “Trust me.”
“I do trust you. That doesn't mean I can walk blind across a field.”
“You’re not flying blind. I’m right here with you. Almost there.”
With my eyesight obscured, my other senses are heightened.
I can smell the night. Sweetgrass and woodsmoke and the perfume of the wild roses along the fence.
Somewhere across the valley the first of the illegal bottle rockets goes up, a distant crack, and I feel Walker's arms tighten around me slightly, like an instinct.
“Okay,” he says, close to my ear. “Open.”
He drops his hands.
I open my eyes.
His vintage truck is parked out back. The tailgate is down. The truck bed is full of blankets, an actual nest of them, quilts and pillows piled deep. There's a small cooler wedged in the corner, glass beer bottles poking out through the ice, and his Martin guitar propped carefully against the cab.
I stand there in the grass and just look at it for a moment.
Screw a white tablecloth and crystal champagne glasses.
This is the most romantic thing a country girl like me could ever dreamed of.
He promised me we’d sleep underneath the stars this summer.
Here it is.
“Walker,” I whisper.
He leans against the tailgate with his arms crossed, watching me take it in. “Couldn't let my princess lay down on a hard truck bed.” His gaze travels over me slowly, dropping from my face down and back up. “Not for the things I have planned tonight.”
The warm night air suddenly feels warmer. He looks pretty pleased with himself, and I have to say, he’s earned it. And there’s more to come?
“Such as?” I say.
“You’ll see.” He holds out his hand. “Get in the truck, darlin'.”
I take his hand and let him help me up.
He climbs in after me and suddenly the truck bed is its own small world.
Walker settles back against the cab and pulls me in front of him.
My back against his chest, his legs on either side of mine.
His arms come around me and he props his chin on my shoulder and we sit there for a moment just taking it in.
The quilt nest, the cooler, the guitar, the Montana sky enormous overhead, the valley spread out below us.
I tip my head back against his shoulder. Above us the stars are coming out one by one, the way they do out in the country where there's nothing to compete with them. Whole constellations arriving at once, like they’ve been waiting for their time to shine.
“What are your plans for that guitar?” I prompt. “Another lesson?”
“Was gonna write you a song.”
“Really? Right here? Right now?”
I crawl to the guitar on my hands and knees and take it like it’s a precious thing before handing it to him.
“Go on, then,” I urge.
“I meant at some point tonight,” he grumbles. “I’d rather hold you in my arms than this guitar.”
I poke his thigh. “No more excuses. Get to work, cowboy.”
He sighs. Sits with his back against the cab, guitar across his knee, and I tuck myself under a quilt beside him.
“This is the part where I impress you by coming up with some masterpiece,” he admits sheepishly. “Except I’m rusty as hell.”
I smile at him. “Just gotta warm up to it, that’s all.”
He picks out a melody. Stops. Plays it again, slightly different. His brow furrows.
He adjusts the chord voicing and plays it a third time. This time it settles into something. I can feel it, the way a thing clicks into place.
A melody that catches.
He exhales. “There it is,” he murmurs. He plays through the melody again, slower. “All right. Getting the music. The words are being difficult.”
“They'll come.”
He glances at me sideways, then pulls a Sharpie from his pocket. “I had a notepad. I swear I had a notepad.” He pats his shirt pocket, his jeans pockets. Looks around the truck bed. “Damn it.”
I can’t help but grin at him. When did I start thinking this grumpy cowboy was so adorable?
“Forgot something?” I say.
He runs a hand through his hair. “Like I said. Rusty as fuck. I need to get the words down before they go. Once the thread's there I can follow it but if I lose it…”
He looks at me, calculating now.
“I don’t have paper,” he says. “But I’ve got you. Hold out your arm, baby.”
“You want to write on me?”
“You're my muse.” He says it simply, like it's just a fact he's stating. “Seems right you'd be the page too.”
His muse. I feel the smile spread across my face, luminous and shy and more pleased than I can ever remember.
“Okay,” I say. I push the quilt aside and hold out my arm, wrist up, like an offering. “Come on. Before you lose the thread.”
His eyes meet mine as he uncaps the marker.
These are the first words Walker’s written in two years. It’s a big moment.
And it’s my skin he’s writing them on.
He takes my hand in his and turns my forearm up and holds it for a moment, looking at it the way he looks at the guitar when he's deciding where to start. His thumb traces the inside of my wrist once. Tingles go all the way up my arm.
Then he puts the marker to my skin.
The tip of it is cool, a little scratchy. I watch his face as he writes, the concentration there, lips moving slightly, the line between his eyebrows.
Walker’s introduced me to all kinds of forms of intimacy, but this is a new one. The intimacy of being written into his creative flow.
Like I’m part of his art too.
“What does it say?” I ask.
He shows me.
I read it. Read it again.
It’s about me. About us. A moment in our story, made into poetry. I can already tell this isn’t going to be like the one-note love songs of his sixth album. This one is going to be passionate and complicated and real.
Thank God.
“That's good,” I say softly. “That's really good, Walker.”
“Yeah?” He picks up the guitar and fits the words to the melody and plays it through. Hearing it out loud, the words on my skin, now part of a song, gives me a shiver despite the warm night.
“What’s next?” I ask.
“We’ve got our intro. Now we need the verse. Chorus. Bridge.”
He traces the line of my collarbone with one finger first, like he's deciding, and then the marker follows the same path and I close my eyes.
“Stay with me,” he murmurs. “Tell me if the words are right.”
“Read them to me as you write them.”
He does. His voice low in the dark, just above the sound of the crickets, reading the lines as they come. They’re raw and unfinished, not quite strung together yet, but there’s so much beauty in the fragments already.
He’s writing love and loss like two notes in the same chord. The tension between them is the whole song.
I listen with my eyes closed and feel the marker moving across my skin.
“Here’s the chorus,” he says, and pairs the lyric with melody.
It’s beautiful, but…
“Change ‘devil’ to ‘outlaw’,” I say, when he pauses.
A longer silence.
I can feel him turning it over. Testing it against the melody in his head.
“Say it again,” he says.
“It’ll go like, ‘Face of an angel, heart of an outlaw.’”
He doesn't answer. Just picks up the guitar and plays the line both ways, back to back.
Then the marker moves and he writes the new word over the old one.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Yeah, that's it.”
He plays it again with the change and I watch his face. The slow smile. The new spark in his deep green eyes.
He grins back at me.
“I think you might have a hidden talent for songwriting, darlin'. Where have you been hiding that?”
Maneuvering the guitar out the way, he reaches out and slides my dress strap off my shoulder. Slowly. His eyes on mine the whole time.
“Maybe here?” He kisses my shoulder.
“Lower,” I tease.
His eyes glimmer.
He tugs the neckline of my dress down, his knuckles grazing my skin as he goes. Presses his mouth to the swell of my breast, his lips warm and unhurried.
“Here?” he murmurs.
“Getting warmer.”
A smile against my skin. Taking his time as his mouth moves lower, tongue tracing the curve of my breast, and I feel my breath go shallow. He pushes my dress down all the way, leaving my breasts exposed, and takes my nipple into his mouth.
My head falls back as he sucks, swirling his tongue across me until I’m gasping. I'm arching into him, fingers curling into his hair, when he withdraws his lips from me.
I make a sound of protest.
He just reaches for the marker. Uncaps it with his teeth. His eyes find mine.
“Hold still,” he murmurs. “I've got another line.”
One hand spreads flat and warm against my back, steadying me, and then the marker finds my breast and traces slowly along it. The tip of it cool against the skin his mouth just warmed up.
He leans back and plays another few bars of the song. I’m still half naked, splayed across the nest of quilts and pillows, feeling like one of those women in classical paintings. I’ve never felt more beautiful. More free and bohemian and me.
“Okay,” I say, when he pauses. “What about… ‘but I could still see the blush on your cheeks in the pink neon light?’’
His fingers still on the strings.
“For the chorus,” I say. “After the line about the girl not seeing his red flags because she’s wearing rose-colored glasses. But he sees her pink cheeks even in the pink light, because he understands her innocence no matter what.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Damn,” he says softly. “I'm never writing without you again.”
I wish that could be true.
Maybe it can be. For the next six weeks, at least.
He sets the guitar down.
Slowly, he lifts the hem of my skirt. His eyes stay on my face the whole time. The marker uncaps. He presses it to my inner thigh and writes the whole chorus there, his hand warm and steady against my skin.
When he pick up the guitar again, he plays the whole thing through from the top, the words from my arm and collarbone and thighs all threaded together now.
His unmistakable, raspy twang adds so much depth to the words.
Gives them life. The song that's coming out of him in the dark of this truck in this Montana pasture is…
It's beautiful.
It's raw and specific and real in the way his best work has always been real, the way all his songs used to, back when he was still making the music of his soul.
“I think we got a song, baby,” he says at last.
“Yeah we do.” I come up to my knees and take his face in my hands. “You did it, Walker. You’re making music again. You got a title for this one?”
He doesn’t even hesitate. “Red Flag.”
Of course. He's talking about me in that dress, his words, waving a red flag in front of a bull. He's talking about himself, a red flag of a man. And he’s talking about him being worried I’m wearing rose-colored glasses, so those red flags just look like flags.
Pure Walker Rhodes. Double meanings, deep personal lore, passion and anguish all intertwined.
“It’s perfect,” I tell him. “Perfectly imperfect. Yes.”