Chapter 34
Love Song
WALKER
I've been making calculated decisions my whole career. Measured moves, managed risks, everything run through a team of people whose job is to tell me when I'm about to do something stupid.
Last night I didn't consult a single one of them. I just looked at Sadie across the bar and pulled her up on that stage with me because she’s the one who got me back up there.
I kissed her in front of two hundred people and put my hat on her and showed everyone who was watching that she’s mine.
“Everyone who was watching” turns out to be a lot more than two hundred people when you bring phones into the picture.
Damn if I didn't just set off a firestorm.
It's all over the internet. Every platform, every gossip site, every country music fan account with a following. Our kiss. Sadie’s name.
Who she is. Where she came from. Videos of last night being dissected from every angle.
Self-proclaimed professional lip-readers confidently assessing what I murmured in her ear. Getting it wrong, of course.
My phone has been ringing since seven this morning. Publicist, agent, manager, the label, two journalists who somehow got my personal number, and my sister Josie three times in a row which means she's either thrilled or furious. I'm not ready to find out which.
I ignore all of it. The only text I answer is from my dad, who sends me a video of Jonah riding his pony and executing a flawless mid-canter gait change, to which I text back:
Tell him daddy says, Fuck yeah!!
Sadie is sitting at the kitchen table in my t-shirt with her coffee and our shared notebook, writing something in the margin of the third song. Copper hair loose, feet tucked up under her on the chair. She looks like she slept well. She looks dewy and unbothered. Utterly serene.
Her phone has been going off too. Or it was, until she changed a setting and went back to her coffee like nothing happened.
“You're handling all this crazy like you're bombproof,” I tell her.
She looks up. “I decided this summer I'm not gonna live my life caring what people have to say about me. Most liberating thing I’ve ever done for myself.” A smile. “Let them talk. Doesn't change anything about our lives. Doesn't change what we have.”
I come around to where she's sitting and take her face in both hands and kiss her slow and thorough, the way I've been kissing her all morning and plan to keep kissing her until someone makes me stop.
Nobody's made me stop yet.
No one trying to reach me on the phone.
Not Sadie.
I’m sure as hell not stopping myself.
“Backbone of steel,” I murmur against her mouth. “I think it's the first thing that made me…”
Made me fall in love with you.
I swallow it back down.
“Made me crazy about you,” I finish.
My hands slide under the hem of the t-shirt. Cup her full breasts. I’m just getting somewhere interesting when my phone buzzes with a call on the counter.
I ignore it. Close my thumb and forefinger around her nipple and pinch a little, enjoying her gasp of surprise.
The phone stops. Starts again.
I pull back and look at the screen. Carter Caldwell. Record company president, sort-of friend. Fifth call in the last hour.
Why didn’t I block him already?
Sadie raises an eyebrow.
“He might quit bugging you if you actually answer,” she says.
“Or he'll just get worse.”
“Only one way to find out.”
I grab the phone and hit speaker.
“What do you want?” I growl.
I have my gorgeous woman in my arms and I’d much rather be tending to her than dealing with whatever he has to say, and my tone shows it.
“Hello to you too, Walker,” he says. “And since we’re skipping pleasantries, are you having an affair with your nanny?”
“You're on speaker,” I tell him. “And Sadie is right here. So watch your fucking mouth.”
A pause. Then, smoothly: “Hi Sadie. Carter Caldwell. Nice to meet you. I'm Walker's friend, allegedly, and most definitely the president of his record label, which you might not know given that he's been avoiding my calls like I'm the repo man and he’s sixty days past due.”
“Hi Carter.” Sadie’s eyes find mine, laughing. “I don’t think Walker’s ever dealt with a repo man in his life. But yes, I'm the nanny, and yes, Walker and I are having a torrid, scandalous affair. Just wait until people find out we're living together before marriage. Pearls will be clutched.”
Living together before marriage.
She says it lightly, offhand, just looking at the notebook. Apparently unaware of what she just let slip.
Is that something she's thinking about? The “before marriage?” The implication of what comes after?
Do I let myself start to hope?
A heavy sigh from the speaker. “I can already see exactly how you two ended up together.” Carter's voice shifts, warmer now, less president of a record label, more the man I've known for fifteen years. “Walker. I'm not calling to give you grief about your girl.”
“Then what are you calling about?”
“I'm calling because I've been trying to get you back in a studio for two years and last night you got on a stage at a dive bar in Montana and played a song that has seventeen million views this morning.”
Sadie's pen stops moving.
“Seventeen million,” I repeat.
“And climbing. My phone has been ringing since midnight. Three labels that aren't mine wanting to know if you're still under contract. Every major promoter in the country wants you. CMT. The Today Show.” A pause. “Walker. That song. Where did it come from?”
I look at Sadie. I can tell she's back in that pasture on the Fourth of July. The truck bed. The Sharpie. The fireworks going up one after another over the valley while I wrote our song on her skin.
“Collaborative effort,” I say, still looking at her.
“I need that album,” Carter says. “Whatever you've been doing up there in Montana, I need all of it. When can you come to Nashville?”
Nashville. The label. The machine. Everything I came up here to get away from, now pulling in the other direction.
I look at Sadie.
She looks at me.
She picks up her pen and writes in the margin of the notebook before turning it to face me.
You should go
I shake my head. Pull the notebook and pen back towards me and write back.
Not without you
While Carter drones on, she takes the notebook. Doodles a little Empire State building and passes it back, shaking her head.
Still committed to New York.
I knew she would be. I've known it all summer. Knowing it and watching her draw that building are two entirely different things, though.
My fingers curl into the countertop.
“Carter,” I tell him. “I got a home studio. Fly the engineers out and we’ll do it from here. I can’t make this album without the view I’m looking at right now.”
In the background, the mountains stand proud against the blazing blue sky.
But it's Sadie who's in the foreground of that view. The most important part. Sadie with her coffee and her pen, writing in the margins of our notebook.
It’s Sadie who I can't make this record without. Sadie who I couldn't have made it without even if I'd tried.
Carter is saying something about distribution. I have no idea what.
I've written a lot of music in my life. First album I was twenty-three, hungry and trying to prove something. Second was rawer, more honest, the one the critics called a breakthrough. The ones after that the label wanted more than I did.
This one is mine.
Mine, and hers.
The mood shifts song to song. There's a propulsive one that'll open the album. A slow one crafted for maximum emotional damage. Two or three that'll play at every wedding in the country for the next decade. The usual mix, on the surface.
But underneath that, the subject doesn't change.
Top to bottom, every song on this record is a love song.
Every one of them is about Sadie.
Three-quarters of them were written with her, her words woven into mine until I lost track where hers end and mine begin.
The rest have been written about her, for her, in the hours after she fell asleep when I'd get up and go write at the kitchen table because something she said or did or looked like was still moving through me and the only place it had to go was into a song.
It's my love letter to her. Twelve tracks. Forty-three minutes. Everything I haven't been able to say out loud since the second week of June.
I look at her across the kitchen.
She's uncapped her pen again, head bent over the notebook, copper hair falling forward, completely absorbed. She has no idea. Or maybe she does and is choosing not to say anything, the same way I've been choosing not to say anything, both of us circling the same truth from opposite directions.
August is half gone.
We’re running out of time.