Page 53 of Most Eligible
He shrugs and pulls his arm back. Instantly, I feel the absence of his touch deep in my bones. The ache is familiar, like I’ve woken up to find him gone, but he’s right there in front of me.
“So that’s your reminder—to follow what you love?”
His smile grows and he glances down, then at me. “Better than I could have put it. I’m not always the best with words.”
It’s so innocent, so vulnerable, that I can’t help but smile. “You don’t use enough words to know whether you’re good or not. But also,” I add, “I disagree. Your lyrics are beautiful.”
He deadpans, folding his lips into a smooth line. “‘Is There a Heaven for Horses?’ is beautiful?”
I fight to keep from laughing. “In its own way, yes.”
He lets out a bark of a laugh and shakes his head, then picks up his guitar. Putting his twang back on, he starts to sing.
Is there a heaven for horses?
God willing, it better be true.
’ Cause I know whenever my time comes,
I ain’t leavin’ if I’m without you.
A smile worms its way onto my face. “Fine. Point made. But your other lyrics—from your second album especially—they’re much more personal, almost like—”
“Like I actually wrote those?” He sets the guitar back on the pavement.
“Wait, you didn’t—”
“I wrote some of the lyrics on my debut. But the more… egregious ones, those were other people. It didn’t feel like me, but they said there was a market, and…”—he looks out over the sunset, face set in grim lines—“there was.”
I wait, hoping he’ll go on, continue giving me more words than he ever has.
“So, the second album was all me,” he says. “Which is why it flopped.”
“It didn’t flop,” I protest. “It just wasn’t as… as…” I search for the right words.
“As truck-driving, beer-drinking, dust-flying as the first?”
I giggle and accidentally snort. “Yeah—that. Well, for what it’s worth, I liked the second one better.”
A wry smile lifts his lips, the same smile he turned on me in my bedroom, teasing me about my selection of records. “It’s worth a lot, actually.”
We’re in dangerous waters. He’s not saying this because I’m a music journalist, and we both know it. I try to dislodge the ball of heat that’s taken residence in the back of my throat, but he diffuses the situation before I can even try, sliding down into the pool across from me until his chest is obscured by the water.
“It makes sense—the music journalism thing. Good cover. Those pieces… they’re more you.”
“I—” I stop myself, the weight of what he’s said crashing down. “How do you know?” I ask quietly.How can you know when you didn’t even give us a chance?
The green in his eyes is shadowed, but every emerald fleck winks at me.
“You’re creative,” he says. “Your voice is unmistakable. But it comes out more when you write about music.”
“Music is…” It’s hard to put into words, but he nods like he understands. It’s exactly what he said last year:You can get lost in it. The echo is a painful reminder of how much I’ve held on to. “It’s special.”
Rhett swallows, and when he speaks, his voice is thick. “Music… It’s a place that holds you. Good music, anyway.” A muscle flexes in his chest with the effort of keeping himself together. I want to extract all the reasons he has to lose himself, lay them all out side by side like sources leading me to the real Rhett.
Iwant to be the one to hold him.
But instead, I tear my eyes away and keep it light.
