Chapter 1 #2
There are people who genuinely believe Aire Rhodes doesn’t smile.
The internet has compilations to prove it: Aire looking bored on red carpets, Aire answering stupid interview questions with one syllable, Aire walking straight past paparazzi, Aire sitting through award shows with the expression of a man who would rather be almost anywhere else.
One particularly dedicated fan account once uploaded a fourteen-minute video called Aire Rhodes Being Completely Done With Everyone.
He watched the whole thing in bed with me, munching on Cinnamon Toast Crunch straight from the box and complaining that it was unfair because, according to him, he’d been “pleasant in at least four of those clips.”
The funny thing is, none of it is really an act.
Aire hates red carpets. He hates talking about himself, and getting him to flirt on command is a lost cause.
Those interview games where grown adults hold up pictures of other celebrities and ask who they’d date?
Absolute nightmare fuel. He once told a radio host that asking how many people he’d slept with was “a weird fucking thing to ask a stranger before nine in the morning.” The clip pulled over ninety million views, Malcolm nearly had an aneurysm, and Aire’s fans loved him even more for it.
At some point, people stopped reading his silence as disinterest and started calling it mysterious. Then mysterious became unattainable. And, as Malcolm has reminded us more times than I care to count, unattainable sells.
Nobody sat us down back then and said, Congratulations on falling in love. We’ll now need you to behave like strangers until further notice.
It happened in increments. We’d been together close to a year when Aire’s first record finally started getting somewhere.
A photographer caught us leaving a restaurant in Midtown, and his manager asked us to keep a little distance around the album launch because they wanted the attention on the music.
Fine. Except the album did better than anybody expected.
Radio picked it up, an opening slot turned into his own tour, and not long after came his first award nomination.
By the time a blurry picture of us holding hands resurfaced, a label executive was explaining that Aire’s audience skewed young and heavily female, and there was no point “complicating the narrative” when neither of us had ever publicly confirmed anything.
Complicating the narrative.
I remember that phrase because I went home afterward and gave it to a fictional husband whose wife discovered he’d emptied the account they’d spent years building for their dream house and used the money to buy his ex-wife a house instead.
Not just any house, either. The exact one his wife had been sending him listings for.
According to him, there was nothing romantic about it, and she was “complicating the narrative” by acting like there was.
She poisoned him three chapters later.
Aire hated the whole thing as much as I did.
We fought about it more in those early months than we have about almost anything since, although most of those fights ended the same way: him saying fuck it, he’d tell everybody tomorrow, and me asking what good that would actually do when he was twenty-four, one album into his deal, helping support his mother and younger brother, and surrounded by people in expensive shoes warning him that one badly timed headline could fuck with everything he’d been working toward since he was fifteen.
And it wasn’t as if I needed him to claim me so I could feel important.
My own career was taking off right alongside his.
My third book had sold in twelve countries, my next deal came with a seven-figure advance, and for a good stretch there, I was making more money than Aire was; his first tour ate nearly everything it brought in.
I didn’t need his surname attached to mine, his followers, or a spot beside him on a red carpet.
So we waited.
And waited.
And got very good at it.
A chair shifts to my left as my agent, Nina, returns to the table and reaches for her wine.
She clocks the smile I haven’t quite managed to get rid of. “Please tell me you finally figured out chapter twenty-seven.”
“Would you believe me if I said yes?”
“Not for a second.”
Fair. Nina’s been reading my disasters since book one. At this point, lying to her about a bad chapter is mostly a waste of both our time.
Chapter twenty-seven is still a mess. My heroine’s motivation falls apart somewhere in the middle, my editor has very politely pointed this out with I think we need to interrogate Maren’s choices here, and I’ve spent most of the week avoiding the rewrite by tinkering with a sex scene that was perfectly fine three versions ago.
And that’s only one thing on my list. There are copyeditor queries waiting on another book, an author letter my UK publisher wants by Friday, and the people adapting my fourth novel into a movie would really like to know if I’m okay with them changing an architect into a veterinarian for reasons nobody has managed to make sense of yet.
I’m busy, but I also make ridiculous money doing the job I used to dream about. I know better than to complain too hard about that.
My life is good.
More than good.
Maybe that’s what makes the idea of me as some poor hidden woman pacing around Aire’s mansion, grateful for whatever time he gives me, irritates me as much as it does.
For one thing, the mansion is ours; I paid for half. For another, Aire is the one who calls me six times when I travel without him.
Servers are clearing the last of the dinner plates when a burst of applause ripples across the ballroom.
The foundation chair steps onto the stage, and the lights dim enough that conversation begins to quiet.
Tonight is technically the Riverlight Foundation’s annual arts benefit, although practically everyone in the room knows this year has become the Aire Rhodes show.
Memphis loves claiming its musicians, especially the ones who become globally inconvenient levels of famous and keep pouring money into the city without making a spectacle of it.
Aire funded three fully equipped recording rooms in public schools last year through a trust nobody knew was connected to him until his name surfaced in Riverlight’s paperwork.
Riverlight decided to honor him, Malcolm figured it was good for his image, and Aire would rather chew glass.
My manuscript could’ve done its job without me, but I wanted to see him receive the honor. Hence the separate cars, separate arrivals, and table number nineteen.
The woman onstage is thanking the sponsors when Aire’s name lights both screens flanking her. The whole room starts clapping, and Aire drops his eyes to the table like he might genuinely be considering an escape route.
I text him again.
Kyra: Try not to chew glass.
His reply appears midway into the introduction.
Aire: No promises. Give me a better use for my mouth and we got a deal.
I smile as he gets to his feet. Sienna loops her arms around his neck before he can leave the table, and irritation bites at me, wiping the smile off my face.
Six weeks of promo clips have given me plenty of opportunities to watch her find reasons to touch him.
I’ve told myself not to make a thing out of it.
I’m getting a little tired of being reasonable.
Aire pats the middle of her back once. Cameras flash, washing the nearest tables white.
Someone whistles. Sienna laughs at whatever he says to her, and Aire shakes his head as he heads for the stage.
For a man who has spent most of the evening looking like he’d happily trade places with the salmon on Sienna’s plate, Aire handles a room frighteningly well when he has to.
I clap with everyone else and, as usual, I’m struck by the strange intimacy of watching a room full of people love someone I know privately.
They know Aire’s voice through arena speakers; I know what he sounds like brushing his teeth.
They know The stars know the way home inked along his ribs from photographs.
I know where the words came from, why he chose them, and that he threw up minutes after the tattoo was finished—a detail he has conveniently omitted from every interview since.
They know what he wears onstage. I know he owns a pair of gray sweatpants so old I’ve tried to throw them away three times and they keep finding their way back into his drawer.
The public gets pieces of him, and I’ve never minded sharing them.
Sometimes I just wish I were allowed to admit which pieces are mine.
Aire has never been particularly good at talking about anything personal without a guitar in his hands, but once he starts on Memphis, he sounds more like himself.
He tells them about being a kid who wanted to make music when wanting it was about all he could afford, about teachers who let him stay late and people who lent him instruments they probably couldn’t easily replace.
A kid shouldn’t have to prove how badly they want something, he says, by making do without the tools that could help them get good at it.
He thanks Memphis last, saying this city gave him somewhere to begin back when the rest of the world didn’t give a shit where he ended up.
Not once does he mention the three recording rooms he paid for. He does, however, announce a new Riverlight scholarship fund I knew absolutely nothing about.
I’m so damn proud of him. Proud in a way that makes me want to shout to the whole room that I get to go home with that man.
I settle for clapping with everyone else, laughing under my breath because the same man looked me dead in the face and swore we were done quietly funding new things for the year.
So much for that. He makes it back to his table looking so relieved to be off that stage that my smile only gets worse.