Page 71 of Falls From Grace
Savannah went back to gazing out the window with her thoughts.
“Savannah!”
“What?!” she jumped.
“I know we’re smack in the middle of your own personal romantic drama, but would you get your head out of your ass for two seconds and listen to what I’ve been up to?”
“Oh my god yes,” breathed Savannah, turning her whole body to look at Coral, who she belatedly realized was straight up glowing with glee. “Tell me everything.”
“You so don’t deserve it,” Coral side-eyed her. But she spilled anyway.
The tour stretched on. It was a disorientating way to move through the world and before she went on stage each night, Savannah had to check eight times the name of the city they were in, just to make sure she didn’t greet the wrong crowd.
She’d worried about Tucker - this was her first time touring as a mom - but her son seemed to be having a blast. He loved the intensive mama time with her in the mornings, climbing all over her in bed as she recovered from her late night, sipping coffee and playing peek-a-boo with the covers. The rest of the time, he and Lane were thick as thieves. Somehow her nanny managed to keep Tucker safe and in line, with good boundaries, and yet behaved more like an older sibling. They played for hours, Lane’s energy almost as boundless as his own, and he’d run to them for comfort as willingly as he did his mama. Lane was a goddamn dream come true.
The tour was going brilliantly, the album sales and streaming data were beyond her wildest dreams, and she’d been nominated for more Grammies for this one album than Twice Struck had gathered across their whole run. Despite her sharp left turn from country music - and her coming out as queer - her fans had not deserted her. Oh, there was some predictable fury in the conservative media and some nasty tweets, but any losses she’d made there, she didn’t grieve. If homophobes and the religious right didn’t like her, she knew she was living her life right. Besides, the unexpected gift of her own freedom after all these years still brought tears to her eyes; there was no sacrifice here.
On top of that, her new album had garnered a massive swathe of new listeners outside of the genre. She and the band were having an absolute ball performing the new tracks.
And yet.
Despite the incredible upwards trajectory her life was on, she couldn’t fight the feeling that at her core, there was still something… unresolved. That despite her success, she wasn’t really quite what she could describe as fully happy. When she tried to pinpoint the feeling, it most arose the moment she walked off stage, hyped up and sweating, into no one’s arms. It stirred its head when her own hit the pillow each night, in bed after unfamiliar bed, alone. It struck her when they piled off the bus in Portland to find Jed’s wife Lucinda waiting in the hotel foyer to surprise him and he swept her into his arms, spinning her in a circle, his normally reticent features bright with joy.
She started listening to Jane through her headphones on the bus. It might not have been healthy exactly, but some of her loneliness eased as she listened to Brynn’s voice soaring through all the ways they’d fallen apart. She accepted a handful of dates she got asked out on - a gorgeous model, a rapper with a reputation as a ladykiller, a movie star or two - and she’d had a great time, even a couple of great kisses. She’d never been single as a star before, and it had some serious perks. But to her even greater melancholy, nothing broke her from her unrelenting desire for the woman whose body she’d never quite had and whose voice was still in her head.
The Seattle shows were great fun, but despite losing herself in the music the way she always did when she performed, she arrived into her dressing room feeling an ache in her chest and her lower belly she just couldn’t shake. She remembered her first ever tour, the way she and Cole would run off stage, laughing and swilling whisky and barely making it back to their low budget motel room to make love. She shook her head. Exhaustion was making her maudlin.
A knock came on the door.
“Come in,” she called, leaning in towards the mirror, about to remove her eyelashes.
“Hey there, darlin',” came the slow drawl and she froze still. As if she’d conjured up the devil by thinking about him, there in the doorway stood Cole. “Miss me?” he grinned at her stupefied expression, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him.
“No.” She recovered, getting quickly to her feet as he pretended she’d shot him in the heart. He was as towering and handsome as he’d always been, the growing lines around his eyes only adding to his appeal like it always was allowed to do for men; his plain white t-shirt and day old stubble still sexy rather than slovenly. She hated him for it.
“Great show out there,” he told her. “I was dubious when I heard you were going out on your own, but you proved me wrong, sweetheart.”
“What do you want, Cole?” Her hands were trembling and she fought hard to hide it.
“Come on, you haven’t forgiven me yet? It’s been years. Water under the bridge by now, surely. What do you want me to do, Savannah? Get down on my knees? You always did like it when I did that…”
Savannah stared him down.
“I want you to listen, when I tell you - again - that I don’t want you anywhere near me. I want you to leave.”
“Still singing that tune, are we?” he persisted. He moved closer and she backed away, not quite fast enough. His huge hands came down to cup her hips, making her feel tiny between them, and for one single second, she remembered what they’d been like together and her body wavered. He saw it in an instant and grinned, tipping his face down toward hers. She jerked out of the way and moved back three feet.
“Fuck off, Cole,” she said, forcing her voice to be even. “We don’t do this anymore.”
She saw his face change.
“You look good, Savannah,” he said, and she braced herself. “Now you’ve finally lost all that baby weight.” He puffed out his cheeks and rounded his hands out around his body, miming a blimp. She waited for the sting to land, but to her surprise, this time, it didn’t. All she felt was contempt and a little sorrow for him.
“You aren’t going to even ask about Tucker, are you?” she said softly. “You don’t even have that within you.”
“Oh, come on, darlin’, you know I don’t even know if he’s mine.”
The cruelty and unfairness of the accusation hit its mark, but only briefly. She raised her head, looking at her ex-husband with the exact dark curls and deep brown eyes of her child, the argument that had already been resolved with a court-ordered paternity test, after a decade of fidelity to this same fucking man.
