Chapter 24 Rye #2
The timer cuts through the moment, beeping until I silence it and pull the chicken out.
The smell fills the kitchen—garlic and lemon and herbs—familiar and grounding.
We eat mostly quiet, the music filling gaps where words might go.
But the silence carries weight, charged with everything we’re working toward.
“How are the new hires working out?” he asks, breaking the tension.
“Jessa’s good. Experienced. Cade’s enthusiastic, maybe too much so. Jovie caught him trying to alphabetize the liquor bottles by distillery yesterday.”
“Ambitious.”
“Or desperately trying to impress someone. He keeps asking when you’re playing again.”
“Kid wants to be a musician?”
“Kid wants to be you. Came to Nashville with big dreams, playing open mics, working wherever he can to pay rent.” I pause. “Sound familiar?”
“Is that why you hired him?”
“I hired him because we needed help and he was willing to work for tips plus minimum wage. But yeah, maybe I saw something familiar in him.”
We clear the table together, washing and drying with easy coordination.
He rinses, I dry, our hips bumping occasionally as we work.
It feels normal in a way that scares me more than passion would—this domestic rhythm that makes me imagine what it would be like if this was every night, not just stolen hours while Lily’s away.
“Dessert?” he asks, reaching for the refrigerator where he’d stored the mousse.
“Later.”
He turns back, leaning against the counter, studying me. “What are you really afraid of?”
“You want the list? You leaving. You staying and resenting it. Lily loving you. Lily losing you. Me falling for someone whose first love will always be the music. Me opening up again just to watch someone take pieces of me when they go.”
“Music isn’t my first love.”
“No?”
“Music is how I breathe. It’s how I process the world.
But it’s not love. Love is messier. Love is standing in someone’s kitchen, terrified they’re going to ask you to leave.
Love is writing songs you can’t record because they’re too personal, too much about one specific person with trust issues and a daughter who makes killer French toast.”
“Darian—”
“Love is being willing to have the hard conversations instead of just the easy heat.”
I move closer, pulled by something I’m tired of resisting. “Is that what this is? Love?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like to find out. If you’ll let me.”
“Even knowing what I’m afraid of?”
“Especially knowing.” His hand finds my waist, thumb brushing the strip of skin where my shirt has lifted. “I can’t promise I won’t tour. It’s my job. But I can promise to come back. To call Lily from every city. To make this my home base, my real life, not just a stop between shows.”
“How do I trust that?”
“You don’t. Not yet. Trust takes time. But maybe you could try? Maybe we could try?”
Instead of answering with words, I kiss him.
Not soft or tentative, but with all the want I’ve been suppressing since that morning I ran from his apartment, since that night at the venue when we both gave in to what’s been building between us.
He kisses me back like he understands the war happening inside me, like he’s willing to wait for me to sort it out.
We move through the house without discussing it, muscle memory guiding us through doorways and around furniture.
We stop to press against walls when the need to touch becomes too urgent to delay.
His mouth finds my neck, that spot below my ear that he discovered weeks ago, the one that makes me gasp and grip his shoulders.
My fingers tug at his shirt until he pulls back long enough to yank it over his head.
“Rye.” My name comes out rough, like he’s been thinking it for hours.
“Bedroom. Now.”
We barely make it, clothes disappearing in a trail that I’ll probably be embarrassed about tomorrow. We fall onto my bed in moonlight streaming through curtains I never close properly, enough light to see each other, to watch expressions change, to witness what we’re doing to each other.
He looks at me like I’m something precious, something worth coming back for, and that look alone nearly undoes me.
“You’re sure?” he asks, hand skimming my ribs, tracing patterns that make me shiver.
“I’m sure I want this. I want you. The rest we figure out as we go.”
He takes time anyway, learning my body with renewed attention, finding the places he discovered before and new ones that make me arch off the bed, that make me moan his name, that make me forget every reason this might not work.
His mouth follows the path of his hands, tasting, exploring, rediscovering.
When I try to reciprocate, to flip us over and take control, he catches my wrists gently.
“Let me,” he says against my stomach. “Just let me.”
And I do. I let him worship me with his mouth and hands until I’m shaking, until I’m begging, until I pull him up and guide him inside me with a desperation that surprises us both.
When he moves inside me, it’s different from before—not the desperate heat of that first time in his apartment, not the intense passion from the venue. This is deliberate, conscious, full of possibility.
“Look at me,” he whispers, and I do, finding his eyes in the darkness, seeing my own want reflected there, doubled and returned.
We move together, slow and deep, finding rhythm without rushing, choosing each other with every movement, every breath, every whispered word that might be my name or his or just sounds that mean yes and more and please.
After, we lie tangled in sheets and each other, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on my spine. The house settles around us with small sounds—the refrigerator humming, the air conditioner clicking on, Nashville existing beyond these walls but feeling very far away.
I prop up on an elbow to look at him properly. “What if I can’t handle it? The leaving?”
“Then we figure out how to make it easier. Shorter tours. You and Lily visiting me sometimes. Video calls every night. Whatever it takes.”
“You’d do that? Adjust your whole career?”
“I’d adjust my whole life.” He traces my jaw, fingers gentle. “That’s what you do when something matters more than everything else.”
“I don’t want to be the reason you give things up.”
“You wouldn’t be. You’d be the reason I have something worth coming back to.”
“I want you to stay,” I whisper against his chest.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
We make love again, slower this time but no less intense. I straddle him, taking control, riding him with a rhythm that makes his hands tighten on my hips hard enough to leave marks I’ll see tomorrow. His eyes watch where we’re joined, mesmerized by the sight of me taking him in, over and over.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he groans, sitting up to capture my breast in his mouth, teeth grazing my nipple in a way that makes everything below my waist clench and throb.
I thread my fingers through his hair, holding him there while I grind against him, the angle perfect, the friction exactly what I need. His hand slides between us again, expert fingers working my clit while I ride him harder, faster, chasing another release that’s building impossibly fast.
“That’s it,” he encourages, voice rough with his own need. “Take what you need. Use me.”
The words push me over again, this orgasm different from the first—deeper, longer, pulsing through me until I can’t tell where I end and he begins. He follows immediately, groaning my name as he pulses inside me, his face buried in my neck, breathing me in like I’m necessary.
When we finally collapse, we’re both trembling, sweat cooling on our skin, bodies still joined like neither of us wants to separate. His softening cock still inside me, my walls still occasionally clenching around him with aftershocks.
“Jesus,” he breathes against my shoulder. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Good way to go though,” I manage, still catching my breath.
He laughs, the movement shifting him inside me, making us both gasp. Slowly, carefully, we separate, and he pulls me against his side, my head on his chest where I can hear his heart still racing.
“Now dessert?” he asks, making me laugh against his shoulder.
“Now you want dessert?”
“I want everything. Every normal moment. Every complicated conversation. Every fear you have about this.”
We eat chocolate mousse in bed at midnight, sharing a spoon, not caring about the sheets or the mess.
He tells me about life on tour—the loneliness of it, the way cities blur together, how he started dreading the road even before he met us.
I tell him about the other side—being the one left behind, watching Jason’s career take off, raising Lily alone, and then meeting and falling for Gage, only to be burned by him.
“Play something,” he says, setting the empty mousse bowl on the nightstand.
“It’s late. The neighbors—”
“Something quiet. Something just for this room.”
I grab my guitar from the corner. Settling back against the headboard, naked except for the sheet pooled around my waist, I feel exposed in ways that have nothing to do with clothes.
My fingers find chords I’ve been working on, a melody no one’s heard, something I’ve been writing in fragments when I can’t sleep.
It’s about fear and wanting, about learning to trust again, about the way some people walk into your life and rearrange everything without trying. I don’t sing the words—they’re still too raw, too honest—but he hears them anyway in the way the melody builds and retreats.
When I finish, he takes the guitar carefully, setting it aside before pulling me back against him.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For letting me in despite being terrified. For giving this a chance even though I’m exactly what you promised yourself you’d avoid.”
I kiss him instead of answering, tasting chocolate and wine and the specific flavor of possibility.
Outside, Nashville sleeps or parties or writes songs in rooms just like this.
The venue’s probably packed, Jovie charming customers while Gus checks IDs, Jessa mixing drinks with Memphis flair, and Cade probably trying to impress her by carrying more glasses than humanly possible.
“No promises,” I whisper against his mouth.
“Just presence,” he whispers back, understanding what I need—not declarations or guarantees, but just this moment, this choice, this conscious decision to see what happens when you stop protecting yourself from what you actually want.
And for now, that’s enough. More than enough. It’s everything.