Page 28 of August Lane

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A ugust never struggled with writer’s block.

Even when the words weren’t there, the ideas would be.

She’d map out themes and imagery and wait to be inspired, which always happened eventually.

But the minute she sat across from Luke, her mind went blank.

She had nothing. Or nothing she could share with him, anyway.

She kept thinking about his divorce. How long were they really together?

Did he still love her? Charlotte had found someone else, but what about Luke?

Had he dated other women in secret? She had a million questions about his life, all centered on the realization that they’d both spent much of the last decade alone.

One of her favorite songs was “Help Me Make It Through the Night” by Kris Kristofferson.

It had been covered by different people: Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, but she’d never cried until she’d heard Tina Turner’s version, with its sleep-thick delivery, like she’d recorded it while lying on one side of an empty bed.

That song was a story of desperation, the kind that whispered in your ear at your lowest. It said take something.

Anything. You won’t last much longer if you don’t.

Was that what Luke had been doing too? All those years. They could have been reaching for each other.

“I’m too distracted,” August told him, because she had to come up with an excuse. She was getting mad about things that only mattered if he mattered, which he did not. He was her golden ticket. An on-ramp. No one pondered their ladder’s feelings about being stepped on. They just used it.

Luke nodded and said, “Terry.” Although it was true that her ex’s appearance had been objectively messy, August didn’t correct him. She gathered her things and lied about needing to go back to work.

That night, she unpacked a box of old notebooks she’d brought to her new apartment.

The rest were still at Birdie’s house. Those were older and filled with naive optimism about her relationship with her mother.

The journals August had packed were more recent, when she was old enough to translate the true meaning of Jojo’s words.

“I’m too busy” meant this isn’t a priority.

“Arcadia is out of the way” meant I hate that place, so stop calling it home.

“I love you” meant this is all I’ll give you, and I don’t understand why it isn’t enough.

August never learned to translate Luke’s words accurately. The truth was skewed by what she wanted. He’d said “You’re amazing,” and she’d heard I see you. He’d said “I need your voice,” and she’d heard I’ll never leave you, which had proved laughably untrue.

Luke was playing guitar when she arrived at the house the following morning. She let herself in and followed the sound to the kitchen, but stopped to listen when he started singing.

There was a reason August had always hated the way Luke sounded on “Another Love Song.” The production was too hopeful.

Too smooth. You just knew the man in that song would ride off into the sunset with the girl at the end.

But Luke’s real voice was smoke and pain, lost love, and the realization that a broken heart will never beat the same.

“When I say I’m fine / it means I need you / If I say go / please stay / I need you / When you see me lying, close your eyes / Listen to the space between / ’cause Lord, I need you.”

When the song ended, he hugged his guitar to his chest and stared at the wall. She thought he’d smile at least, take some sort of pride in his performance, but he looked distant, like he’d gone to a place where things like pride didn’t matter.

“That was really good,” August told him, because it felt wrong not to. Her chest was heavy. The song refused to let her go.

Luke looked embarrassed. He lowered the guitar to his lap. “Sorry. Should have been listening for the door.”

August sat across from him. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“It was on my debut. Most people quit listening after track three.”

“Wait.” August frowned. “Was it the last one? The weird honky-tonk thing with a keyboard in the background?”

“Yep.”

“It sounds different when you play it.” She thought about the rest of the album and its unrelenting optimism from start to finish.

“I was so mad when I heard them layer all that noise over your guitar. It’s gorgeous by itself.

” She shrugged. “That’s why I stopped trying to learn. I would never be as good as you.”

Luke grinned. “So I should stop singing, then. Next to you, I sound like a frog choking on a lily pad.”

“No. You sound like heartbreak.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she focused on his guitar.

“You always did, no matter what you were singing. Rainbows only came at the end of a storm. Every love song was about how you lost it.” She reached over and strummed the first chords of “Another Love Song” but made it their version, slower and sadder.

“People take a sweet thing for granted. But no one forgets what makes them cry.”

Luke touched the guitar, his fingers inches from hers. “I don’t want to make you cry, August.”

There was a scar on one of his fingers, barely visible beneath the letters tattooed on his knuckles. She knew where it came from, what it had looked like fresh and bleeding. She wanted to ask whether all his body art was camouflage, a way to hide his trauma.

August stood and grabbed her journal. “Maybe we could work on some of my false starts.” She flipped the pages and leaned back in her chair. “Tell me what you think.”

He read the page she showed him with a furrowed brow, which made her nervous. It had been years since anyone critiqued her work.

“Is this about Jojo?”

August glanced at the pages. The working title was “Bitter,” and the song opened with a poison metaphor. If I die tomorrow / blame the lies you fed me .

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe?”

“Were y’all fighting when you wrote this?”

She tried to remember. She knew it had been after Birdie’s second nurse quit, and Jojo had been slow about hiring a replacement. Their texts had grown progressively hostile until August said Birdie would probably die before Jojo wrote another check. They didn’t speak for months.

“That’s what we do. Argue over bills. Avoid each other.” Only with Birdie gone, there was no reason to make peace anymore.

“Is that all she did to help you? Send money?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder you got so mad when I offered it to you.” Luke skimmed the lyrics again and said, “This is good.”

“Thank you.”

“Angry.”

“Good art often is.”

He flipped the pages, scanning different songs. “Anything else in here?”

She snatched the journal back. “If you don’t like it, just say so.”

“It feels unfocused. I don’t think you should launch your career with an improvised dis track.”

She read through it again, noting incoherent themes and structure. The song was a stream-of-consciousness rant. “Fine, you’re right. But don’t go digging around in my journal. Some of it’s personal.”

“Everything’s personal,” Luke said. “Trust me, being up onstage with thousands of people judging every word that comes out of your mouth is as personal as it gets. The real question is what you’re willing to give them. Because once you do, it’s gone. You don’t own it anymore.”

“Like ‘Another Love Song’?” She couldn’t help herself. Anytime he brought up ownership, she remembered what he stole.

He nodded curtly and leaned away from her. “Yeah. Exactly like that. I gave it up the minute I sang it on Country Star .” He rubbed his palms against his jeans. “Gave up a lot of things.”

August was hit with a sudden, bone-deep weariness of the topic. Rehashing what he’d done wouldn’t help her write anything new. Based on her lack of progress, it was doing the opposite.

“I’m out of ideas,” she admitted. “I stayed up all night trying to think of something, but I think it’s been too long since I’ve done this.”

Luke leaned in, hands dangling between his knees. “Tell me a story.”

“That’s my trick.”

“It’s a good one. Never forgot it. No one wants to hear mine, but you?” He gazed at her. “I know you’ve got stories to tell.”

“I’m not writing about Terry.”

He laughed. “No one’s asking you to. Start with emotion.” His face grew serious. “When’s the last time someone broke your heart?”

“You really want to know?”

She could swear he was about to say no, but then he swallowed hard and nodded. August crossed her legs, making herself comfortable. “Too bad. I’m not giving that story to anybody.”

He looked relieved. “All right, then. What will you give me?”

“One-night stands,” she said. “Adventures in stress fucking.”

He rubbed his hands over his jeans again. The room was chilly from the air conditioner, so the heat wasn’t causing him to sweat. “I don’t know if—” He frowned. “What’s stress fucking?”

“Rough. Sweaty. All bodies, no kissing.”

“No kissing?”

He seemed annoyed by the thought. August stared at his mouth and decided it was a stupid rule to keep.

His lips looked big and soft, a nice contrast to the roughness of his beard.

Or it could be the opposite—hard, hungry kisses with pillow-soft hair against her cheek.

“No one polices that sort of thing,” she said. “Feel free to improvise.”

Her voice was husky enough to make the joke an invitation. Luke’s body seemed to tense and slack simultaneously. “Good to know,” he said.

She cleared her throat. “Anyway, that’s my love life. Probably too smutty for Jojo’s wholesome homecoming.”

“I wouldn’t call that a love life.”

“Okay, sex life. Either way, no one’s come close to breaking my heart. They’d have to get to know me first.” She bobbed her leg and played with her hair to prove how little she cared. “I don’t make it easy.”

“Maybe they weren’t paying attention.”

“Or they were focused on the wrong things. Like marriage and babies.”

“You don’t want to get married? Have a baby?”