Page 25 of Resonance

For as jackrabbit-mouthed as Owen tended to be, he didn’t say squat the following morning about the night before, just prattled on about this and that over breakfast and then continued on in the truck as if it’d never happened.

There was one moment when he looked over at me, caught me eyeing him, really, and I’d thought for sure he was going to mention it. But he merely arched a brow like that was going to be his only comment before he went back to fiddling with his phone. I was the one having a hard time wrapping my head around that kiss. It hadn’t been tired fumbling, false enthusiasm, or like an unavoidable prelude to sex. There was boundless energy in it, a magnetic pull to the sensation of his mouth on mine.

I got my rocks off about as much as I wanted, and I didn’t have too much trouble finding something to satisfy me. When I wanted a man, I tended to go for good ol’ boy types who liked it hard and fast, who’d give me some lip before I shoved my cock in their ass and shut them up. On occasion, a guy who’d do the same for me.

Getting starry-eyed over the bright-eyed twink staring out the window of the passenger side, who I saw and interacted with day in and day out, and who I might possibly have to let go at some point if I couldn’t keep my shops afloat, wasn’t on my life agenda—even if it’d been about the hottest kiss I’d experienced in years. I was trying to simplify, not complicate. So when he wriggled around in his seat and my first thought was how that’d feel on top of me, I spent the next handful of minutes searching for some conversation topic to distract me. Until he did it for me. And a damn fine job of it, too.

“You ever gonna tell me the story of why you walked away? Does Ru know?”

“Ru knows better than to ask.”

Owen didn’t back down, though. The silence that stretched was like a fist to my temple. Goddamned whiskey. “Probably not,” I said eventually. My first answer, the pat one, followed by the second pat answer: “I was burned out, that’s the gist.” It rubbed elbows with the truth.

I felt his gaze on my profile, pensive and assessing. He was an excitable loudmouth, but I’d known from day one he was smart, too. Observant, thoughtful, always absorbing his surroundings. He knew our inventory at the shop probably as well as I did, and more than once I’d overheard him and Ru going on about some album or other, debating the mechanics and sound so heatedly I wondered why he hadn’t put himself through a trade program and tried to get himself into the industry on the production side as much as he loved breaking a song down to its tiniest parts.

“Is it true you and Ryder wrote lyrics back and forth, literally line for line?”

I threw a sharp glance his way, a phantom pain trying to sear through my abdomen. That was old shit, I reminded myself. Over and done with. It was just that no one brought it up these days. I could’ve lied to his face or gotten gruff and closed the conversation, but when I opened my mouth, slivers of truth came out instead. “Mostly. We had a notebook we’d trade back and forth. Leave it lying around and someone’d write something down, the other would come back and add to it. Or sometimes we sat there together and did it, passed it between us or talked it out. I liked collaborating like that, feeling like it was a joint effort. We fought like fuckers about shit, too, but we wrote well together.”

Owen smiled wistfully. “Sounds nice. I’d like to do that sometime.”

“Don’t. Write your own shit, and don’t ever be beholden to someone else.”

“Whoa there, Buddha. Don’t go Nietzsche on me. Lotta people do the same.”

Owen got away with stuff like that, saying shit that’d probably make me snap at someone else and when he said it, made me self-conscious of being an obstinate ass.

“True words,” I agreed as he gave me a half turn of a smile that kept my own on my face. “But like I said, I burned out after a while.”

“Mm-hmm.” When I glanced over again, his gaze had drifted back to the window, and he was twisting a little pendant lying on his chest that I’d noticed last night. “You did that solo album, though,” he mused. “After y’all went your own ways or whatever. It was good. Then you just stopped.”

I rubbed my lips together, felt the tops of my teeth biting into the tender lining. Every word I’d written on that solo album had felt hollow. Every note echoed meaninglessly. It was a decent album, but the music was dead to me. “That was me being a dramatic little bitch, a tantrum because…” I thought about how best to neatly encapsulate my tangled history with Ryder.

“You were in love with him.” Owen glanced over at me as my mouth fell open, then quickly cut his gaze back toward the window. “I know all the rumors obviously. Everyone buys into them, feeds into the enigma or whatever. And there’s just enough out there to make us assume that it’s the old standard: someone wanted a solo career or to branch out. That y’all were fighting over Iona. That’s the one I hear most—a woman broke you apart. But I’ve never thought that was it, ’cause see the thing is, I know your music. I know every album y’all put out. I didn’t find ’em ’til I was sixteen, but man I loved them, pored over them. Old interviews, liner notes. Everything double credited, except that one song on the third album.”

Caught off guard, my heartbeat stuttered.

Owen dragged a finger down the windowpane. “It’s the best one on the album, in my opinion. Got looked over a lot.”

The road ahead of me blurred into asphalt shades of gray and yellow, and I remembered it clear as anything, clear as yesterday, sitting at the little table of our tour bus. Ryder still asleep in the back. Pavement humming beneath us, miles of road all around us. I’d had a cup of cold coffee next to me, his taste still in my mouth, a pen in my hand.

We’d argued when it came time to list the credits. I wanted to double credit it like we always did. Ryder wanted it to be single credited.

“Why?”I’d asked.

“Because it’s from you to me,”he’d replied.

It’d sounded romantic then. Sometimes I wondered if he’d had some idea of what was to come. Some idea that we wouldn’t be forever. I hadn’t. It seemed unnecessarily cruel now, and Ryder wasn’t a cruel man. A lot of fucking other things, but never intentionally cruel.

My vision righted, the road coming back in hard lines, straight and narrow. Reliable. There’d been a time in my life when the road was all I saw. There was comfort in a long road. A steadiness. An endlessness. Sometimes, I missed it. But not enough to ever go back to it.

“I was only twenty-two,” I said, as if that was some kind of answer while I shifted around in the driver’s seat. But Owen caught my drift, I guess.

He pulled on a strand of hair, dragging it across that pretty mouth as he nodded. “Seemed big, though, I guess.”

“Huge.”

He nodded again, just once, and went back to staring out the window.