Chapter 32
Best Seat in the House
SADIE
Summer passes like a dream I don't want to wake up from.
Jonah and I catch crawdads in the creek behind the property and line them up on a flat rock to name them before releasing them back.
We make strawberry shortcake at Rosemont with Daryl.
Marianne’s recipe, he tells me. Jonah’s been campaigning for it since the Fourth of July when somebody beat him to the last slice.
When it's done and plated, Jonah sits across from me and his grandpa at the kitchen table and eats his entire portion in about forty-five seconds.
He looks up, whipped cream on his nose and says with dignity, “Now you get why I was so upset about missing that last slice.”
I do. It’s a top-tier strawberry shortcake. A recipe that deserves to be passed down through generations of Rhodes.
Walker confirms it too, when he and I make a midnight snack of it. And then he “accidentally” drops a dollop of whipped cream on my boobs and licks it off, and I end up on the kitchen counter with my legs wrapped around him while he fucks me on the countertop.
We're having a lot of sex. Sneaking it anywhere and everywhere we can. His bed at night, the sheets tangled around us as his hands finding me in the dark. Again in the morning before he leaves for work, with time to make it back to my room before Jonah wakes. The tack room one afternoon, the scent of leather wrapping around us, Walker’s belt buckle cold on my hip while he fucks me against the wall.
He goes down on me all the time, and though I don’t have much basis for comparison, I get the feeling I’m pretty damn spoiled in that regard.
He’s taught me how to go down on him too, and I’ve come to love that too.
He’s been endlessly patient as I learn, been so happy and grateful every time I put my mouth on him, and that makes it even more fun for me, makes me enjoy it, makes me want to do it again and again until I don’t need any more instruction to make him lose his mind.
And I succeed.
I’ve always been an excellent student.
I went from virgin to “lost count of how many times I’ve ever had sex” in no time flat, thanks to Walker. Not that I’m complaining.
We don’t have a lot of time together.
Neither of us says it out loud. It would only be wasting precious moments to dwell on it.
We fall into the best routine I could ever ask for.
Long evenings on the porch after Jonah's in bed, his guitar across his knee, playing me fragments of new songs and watching my face while I listen.
Some nights we talk until three in the morning, about music and stories and our pasts.
He tells me how his mom is the one that introduced him to country music, George Jones and Patsy Cline and all the shoulders of giants he stands on now.
I tell him about how books got me through my daddy leaving and Momma falling into a state of almost catatonic depression.
We exchange a million words except three little ones.
But what does it matter anyway?
I’m not staying.
Except that every day, a bigger part of me wants to.
The album is taking shape. Four songs finished, two more in progress.
The notebook has started to look like a conversation.
His handwriting and mine running alongside each other in the margins.
His lines, my edits, a phrase that started as his and ended as mine or the other way around until neither of us could tell you where one ended and the other began.
Walker writes late at night. Sometimes I hear him get up from bed in the middle of the night and I know he’s writing, because when I wake up in the morning he’s left me coffee and new song lyrics. While Jonah eats breakfast, I scribble my additions.
It’s the second thing Walker does when he comes home now: go to the notebook. The first thing he does is give me or Jonah, whoever happens to be closer to the front door, a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
Sometimes he nearly goes for a kiss on my lips and has to stop himself halfway there.
One Friday, Walker takes a two hour errand to town that he's vague about, returning empty-handed.
It’s not sneaking around the way Daddy used to, off to the casinos and coming back having lost all the money that was supposed to go to our bills. Walker’s coming back smiling, like he’s got a secret he’s dying to tell me but can’t yet.
I trust Walker completely. But I’m also nosy as hell and need to know what’s going on.
“What are you up to?” I ask him directly, because I don’t do subtle.
“Nothing.” The picture of innocence, which on Walker's face is deeply unconvincing.
He looks way too excited for nothing.
“You’re plotting something,” I say.
He looks at me over the rim of his coffee mug with those green eyes and that almost-smile. Absolutely no intention of telling me a single thing.
“You'll see,” he says.
I run through the possibilities. Something to do with the music. It has to be. Maybe studio booking. Someone he's played the songs for coming to town. His record company president, Carter Caldwell, coming to check in.
“Stop trying to figure it out,” he says, without looking up.
“I'm not.”
“You are. You get a line right here when you're thinking.” He strokes a finger between my eyebrows.
“What tricks have you got up your sleeve?”
“You like all the tricks I have up my sleeve.” The eyes glimmer. “And you ain’t even seen them all yet.”
On Saturday I start to get an inkling.
It’s when he tells me to bring a friend to Sutton’s. To wear that dress. When he promises he's driving and I climb into the truck and see our passenger in the back seat: his Martin guitar, in its case.
“Walker,” I start.
“Hush now, baby.” He puts the truck in reverse. “You're too fucking smart and I know the gears are turning. But I promise you, you don't know everything.”
I look at the guitar case. Look at him. Look at the guitar case again.
He reaches over and takes my hand and holds it the whole way there.
Sutton's is packed the way it only gets on Saturday nights in the summertime. Every table full, people three deep at the bar, tourists and locals alike.
Walker walks through the door and Sutton's does what every room does when Walker Rhodes, Grammy winner, stadium headliner, country music superstar, walks into it. Reorients itself around the gravity of his star.
The last time he was here, crashing what he thought was my date, he was almost incognito in a backwards baseball cap. Now, in head to toe black, from his boots to his cowboy hat, he looks even taller than his towering 6'5 height. Iconic, instantly recognizable.
And I know what he looks like with all of it off.
I watch it happen: the double takes, the nudges, the phones rising. Walker Rhodes, here, on a random Saturday night in Marble Falls.
He doesn't notice. Or if he does, he doesn't care. His hand finds the small of my back and stays there as he navigates us through the crowd. Not to the bar. Not to any of the tables near the back where a man trying to avoid attention might sit.
To the best table in the house. Front and center, direct sightline to the stage.
He pulls out my chair. Every woman in this bar is looking at him and he's looking at me.
He leans down, lips brushing my cheek. “Don't move,” he murmurs. “I'll be right back.”
Then he's gone toward the stage and I'm sitting alone at the best table in the bar with the sense that my feet aren’t quite touching the ground.
Tanner appears beside me and pulls me into a quick hug. “Hey, favorite sister-in-law.”
I pull back, blushing a little. “I'm not your sister-in-law.”
He shrugs. “Not yet.” Then he's already turning to flag down a server, completely unrepentant.
I turn to find Cassidy staring at me with her drink halfway to her mouth.
“Did I miss something?” she says.
I give Cassidy a hug. She's beautiful the way she always is, fresh-faced, simple tank and jeans, brown hair loose.
“You made it,” I say.
“Wouldn't miss it.”
I add, “Tanner's just teasing.”
“As always.” Her lips purse as she glances at him. His eyes are on her already. Like they’re magnetized there.
“God, he's exhausting,” she mutters.
“Give me one night, Freckles.” He grins at her. “I’ll show you exhausting.”
Her cheeks go red, and she looks away.
Tanner’s green eyes drop to the ring on her finger. “Doctor Dickface couldn't make it?” The grin doesn't quite reach his eyes this time.
“His name is Derek,” Cassidy says. “Not that you've ever bothered to learn it.”
“Yep, good old Devon. Wouldn’t be caught dead in a dive bar, now, would he?”
“He's in a twelve hour surgery to remove a brain tumor from a father of three young kids,” Cassidy says. “But sure, Tanner. Real shame he couldn't be slamming back whiskey shots in a dive bar.”
His jaw tightens. He looks away.
Interesting.
Cassidy never told me there was a whole thing going on there. I need to get the full story out of her. Soon.
Around us, the room is changing. I can feel it before I can name it, a subtle shift in energy, like a weather change. Heads turning. Phones coming out. Voices dropping to that frequency that means something important is happening.
At the next table, two girls in their early twenties have abandoned all pretense of their own conversation.
“Oh my God,” the brunette breathes. “Is that actually Walker Rhodes?”
“It is,” the blonde answer. “How is he even hotter in person? It’s not fair.”
I can feel their eyes on me and I pretend not to notice.
The blonde drops her voice again, but I can still hear when she asks her friend, “Who’s the girl he came in with?”
“No clue. Lucky bitch.”
I want to be mad, but hey, they’re not wrong. I am feeling like one lucky bitch.
“Do you think he'd take a selfie with us?” the brunette asks.
“He's talking to the band. Don't. Just look.”
They’re looking. Half the bar is looking.
I look too, because even after a whole summer I'm not immune to him.
My eyes roam over him, seeing him the way they do.
Black shirt stretched over his biceps. The cowboy hat casting a shadow across that jaw.
Guitar strap over one shoulder, the Martin hanging easy against his hip.
He's talking to the drummer, one big hand wrapped around the neck of the guitar.
His head bends over the strings as he checks the tuning, corded forearms flexing, dark eyebrows coming together in concentration.
He looks iconic. He looks like an album cover. He looks like the reason people drive four hours to stand in a field just to hear him sing.
He is, objectively, extremely hot. Those girls aren’t wrong.
But there’s a lot they don’t know. They don't know he keeps his mother's recipe cards in the kitchen drawer and can’t bring himself to move them.
That he reads to his son in a different voice for every character.
That he writes his best lines at two in the morning and leaves the notebook open on the counter for me every morning, along with fresh-brewed coffee.
They see Walker Rhodes, the legend.
I get to know the man.
I reach for my drink. Look around Sutton’s. The packed Saturday night crowd, the band's equipment waiting on the empty stage, the low ceiling holding in the heat and the noise and the smell of weed smoke and beer.
I think about the guitar case in the back of Walker's truck and feel the anticipation simmer inside me.
Something is about to happen.
I know it before the bar does. I’ve known it from the moment he walked us to his truck. Beside me, Cassidy puts her hand over mine on the table. Tanner meets my eyes and grins.
They know too.
And then the band stops its warm-up chatter. One by one the instruments go quiet, and that quiet spreads outward from the stage, table by table, conversations trailing off mid-sentence, all the way to the back wall.
Walker steps out of the shadows at the back of the stage.
And then his eyes find me at the table.
He gives me that smile. The private one. The one that’s never once appeared in any concert footage or interview or photograph. The one that’s only ever for me.
And I forget everything else but the man in the black cowboy hat on stage, looking at me like I'm the only girl in the room.
The only girl in the world.