Country Nights

by Winter Renshaw

  “Just so we’re clear,” Harrison said, “it’s four full days on Beau’s ranch, just the two of you. That was his requirement. You’ll get your quotes and material. And I’ll work on setting up a time for the crew to go out and film some stills and get some shots of the farm before you do your final sit-down interview.”

  “Two interviews?”

  “Yes.” Harrison’s brows scrunched as he studied my uneasiness, as if he couldn’t understand it. “His final show is at Madison Square Garden in two weeks. He’ll fly into town and do a sit-down with you the night before. We’ll use clips and footage from his farm as segments in your special.”

  My hand trembled slightly as I gripped my coffee mug and brought it to my lips. I’d interviewed hundreds of people over the span of my career. None of them had that kind of effect of me. The hot liquid scalded my mouth, though I barely felt it, and the second it reached my stomach, it wanted to turn around and come right back up.

  “I’d like to review your questions before you leave. Make sure you’re asking the right ones. His fans want to know why he’s walking away from all this. There’s got to be a reason. Until now, he’s never given one. It’ll be your job to extract that reason from him and share it with the rest of America.” He hovered over me, speaking fast. Of all the interviews he’d booked for me, I’d never seen him so doubtful of my journalistic prowess until now. “Promise me you’re not going to back out of this.”

  “You got your way, Harrison. I’m doing the interview. We don’t need to keep talking about it.” My words were bitter as I pulled my chair back up to my desk to turn my attention to my emails.

  “You’re going to thank me someday.” He backed away, letting his hands fall to the sides of his tailored navy suit. Harrison always dressed for the job he wanted, and, in his case, he wanted to be a network executive so bad he could taste it.

  The early afternoon sun passing through my office window set his sapphire eyes ablaze, and he wore the newly minted flints of salt and pepper on his temples well. It wasn’t fair how well men like him aged. He was a walking, talking, Ralph Lauren billboard complete with an old money pedigree and two Ivy League degrees adorning his office walls.

  “See you at home,” I called after him, eyes still focused on my computer screen. I felt him watch me for a second before he left my office.

  I shut my office door before pulling my phone out and calling my sister.

  “Addison,” I breathed desperately into the phone the second she answered.

  “What’s up?”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “Go back to Darlington.”

  “Why would you be going back to Darlington?” I couldn’t see Addison, but I could sure as hell picture the scrunch-nosed face she was probably making. She hated going home just as much as I did.

  “I have to interview him,” I said, attempting to swallow the balled lump of fear that had lodged itself in my throat the moment I booked my airline tickets. “Beau.”

  Addison was quiet. Too quiet. “You said his name. I’m just shocked. You never say his name. You haven’t said his name in…”

  “Ten years. You see why I can’t do this?”

  “Coco.” Addison’s voice firmed up, and I could sense a speech coming on. “You remember what you told me a few years ago? After Kyle and I broke up? You told me I could do hard things. And you told me you would always have my back. Now it’s my turn to tell you. You can do hard things.”

  I drew in a deep breath, summoning the inner strength that had gotten me through the greater part of my almost twenty-nine years. The mere mention of Beau had a tendency to dissolve it like rain on chalk.

  My entire life had been hard. Hardness was nothing new. It had shaped and molded me into the woman I was destined to become. It tugged and gnawed and gnashed its teeth, nipping at my feet as I scaled mountains few people had the audacity to climb.

  “You’ve interviewed plenty of famous people,” Addison said. “He’s just one more.”

  It wasn’t that. His fame didn’t rattle me or intimidate me or make me place him on a pedestal of any sort. He was Beaumont Mason. My high school sweetheart. My first love. He’d been inside me in every sense of the word. My heart was permanently branded by the promises we’d made to each other when we were too young to know any better.

  “You wouldn’t understand.” I shouldered my phone and gathered paperwork from my desk, organizing it into neat little stacks and darting pens back into the pen cup. Cluttered desks hindered my thought process.

  “Try me,” Addison said.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the words got stuck. She didn’t know everything. She was a couple years younger than me – too young to remember how things with Beau and me went down in the end. And there were things she didn’t know. Things I’d sheltered her from. Things I neglected to mention to her because I couldn’t stomach the chance that she might look at me with anything other than pride. I never cared whether or not my mother was proud, but having a little sister who thought the world of me was something worth protecting. “I have to get back to work. I’m flying out tomorrow, so I guess I’ll get a hold of you when I get back.”

  “I’m a phone call away if you need me.” Addison seemed to linger a bit, and I supposed she wasn’t used to me needing her. It had been the other way around our whole lives.

  My fingers twitched as I ended the call.

  Pull yourself together, Coco. Now.

  I’d imagined running into him again a million times, each scenario different from the one before. I already knew what I wanted to say to him. How I wanted to be perceived. The way I wanted him to feel about me. But they all had one thing in common – they were just fantasies I’d dreamed up.

  This was real. This was really happening. And there was no way to stop it.

  Chapter Two

  “Right this way, Ms. Bissett,” a stocky older man with tufts of white hair sticking out from his Stetson hat led me down a dark corridor. A faded, black Beau Mason ‘Young and Reckless 2012 Tour’ t-shirt hugged his bulbous belly, and he waddled a bit as he walked. He stopped short at the third door on the left. “Here it is.”

  His hand dove deep into the front pocket of his tight jeans as he fished out some keys. He proceeded to try several before finding a match.

  “They never mark these things right,” he said with a cordial laugh, though I could hardly hear him above the blood-rushed thumping of my heart in my ears.

  Echoes of discordant warm-up music from the stage trailed down from the dressing rooms, and various sound and stage crew members rushed up and down the hall with arms full of wires and cords and clipboards and headphones.

  “You’re welcome to wait in here during the show.” He turned and offered me a kind smile, lifting the apples of his rosy cheeks in the process. His name was Mickey, and he had been Beau’s tour manager for the last decade. My heart tightened at the realization that Mickey probably knew Beau better than I ever did. “Or I can get you a backstage pass if you want to watch the show from stage right?”

  “Oh, um,” I said, tugging on my bottom lip before forcing a polite, professional smile on my face. I could sit in his dressing room and go over my list of questions and give myself the silent pep talk I so desperately needed. Or I could go and see him before he had a chance to see me. I gripped the chain strap of my quilted Chanel handbag and lifted my chin up, overriding the anxious tone of my voice with faux, camera-worthy excitement. “Maybe I’ll watch a couple songs and then come back here and prep for the first part of my interview?”

  Mickey dug deep into a back pocket and whipped out a VIP backstage pass and handed it to me. “You sure don’t look like you’re from Darlington.”

  “Pardon me?” My fingers reached for the pearl necklace that circled my neck, grazing the round, smooth beads slowly.

  “Beau said you were an old friend of his from back home,” he said, giving me a friendly once over. “You’
re fancier than I expected.”

  I wanted to ask if Beau spoke of me much or what kinds of things he’d told Mickey about me, but I swallowed my curiosity and instead pretended like I didn’t care. I didn’t want him going back to Beau and telling him I cared.

  “I live in New York now.” I offered a humble smile, running my hand over the length of a cocoa-colored wave that draped my left shoulder. “I haven’t lived in Darlington for ten years.”

  “I see that.” Mickey’s eyes dropped to my bag before he turned to leave. “Just follow the signs to stage right. Ask around if you get lost. Plenty of people here can help you.”

  The door slammed behind him, leaving me alone amongst all of Beau’s personal effects. A garment rack chock full of pressed blue jeans and button downs in every imaginable shade. A stage mirror surrounded by round lights illuminating an empty makeup chair. A red cooler full of beer and bottled water swimming in ice. A pair of boots rested underneath a counter, and lined up by the sink was a myriad of various toiletries, one of which happened to be a bottle of Yves Saint Laurent cologne. The very same kind he wore in high school.

  My eyes stayed glued to the door as I walked backward toward the cologne, unable to resist the urge to give it one innocent sniff. I uncapped the bottle and quickly brought it just under my nose, inhaling a generous lungful of ginger, bergamot, and musky woods. Pure unbridled nostalgia. Closing my eyes, I was transported to that last summer we shared under the stars ten years back.

  “I’m never going to love anyone the way I love you,” Beau had said as I curled up into his arms. We’d found a secluded spot just outside Darlington with a winding drive that led up the side of a small mountain. Houses would be built there eventually, but at the time, it was nothing but a cul-de-sac on top of a hill surrounded by a thicket of yet-to-be-demolished evergreens. We’d slow danced all night in front of the headlights of his blue Ford truck, whispering promises and leaving everything else unspoken. “And never is a promise. You know that, Dakota? Where we come from, never is a promise.”

  Time had a way of standing still when I was young, but all the endless summers in the world couldn’t prolong the inevitable. Walking away from a full ride scholarship to Kentucky wasn’t an option for me, and Beau had just been offered a recording contract by some boutique record label in Nashville.

  “Don’t change on me,” I’d said as I’d rested my ear against his chest. “Promise me you’ll never change.”

  “Never,” he’d whispered.

  “And promise you’ll come back for me someday.”

  “Promise you’ll wait for me,” he’d replied. “Promise you’ll never love anyone else the way you love me.”

  “I wish I could go with you.” Those were the last words I’d spoken to him before things got hot and heavy in the bed of his truck. With my hipbones grinding into a faded quilt as I stared into the stars above, I made love to Beau for the last time.

  Everything changed after that.

  I tried to blend in, though hiding between a mix of middle-aged country music loving roadies and stagehands while looking “fancy” was a bit of a challenge. Denying the fact that I stuck out like a sore thumb, my eyes scanned my surroundings as I positioned myself behind a thick black curtain. I had to see him first.

  It was easy to forget what his voice sounded like. It was easy to forget the exact cadence of his Southern drawl or where exactly my head lined up with his when we stood toe to toe. But it was impossible to forget the way he made me feel. No matter how much I willed away the butterflies fluttering in my stomach, they fought back with relentless determination.

  You still love him.

  Inhaling a cleansing breath, I scanned the area one last time before focusing on the man in tight blue jeans and black button down with an acoustic guitar slung around his shoulders. He chatted with a bassist wearing a belt buckle the size of the Mississippi. He scratched the side of his thick chocolate hair and flashed a wide grin to whomever he was chatting with. Even from where I stood, I could see his deep dimples and the slanted scar above his upper lip.

  Beau.

  And just as I’d anticipated, the world got a little hazy. My knees knocked together and my mouth filled with cotton. Not having seen him for a decade, it was almost as if he were a desert mirage.

  I always thought that if I didn’t Google him – if I didn’t listen to his songs on the radio and obsessively dissect them to see if they were about me – I wouldn’t care. That was my motto – once you care, you’re fucked. I didn’t want to care. I didn’t allow myself to care. At least not at the surface level.

  I’d only caved twice over the years, allowing my fingers to shakily type his name into various search engines and gossip websites. Once was after a fight with Harrison, and another when I’d been having a rough week and my self-control was non-existent. I regretted it immediately both times.

  My career – and my future – took a front seat the second I stepped foot in Manhattan, and my past stayed shoved in a tiny box of faded ink love letters and outdated photographs hidden behind a shoebox on the top shelf of my bedroom closet.

  I watched as Beau waved to his backup singers and pointed stage right as he turned my way.

  Oh God.

  My stomach fizzed as he walked toward me. It all happened in slow motion, and just as his eyes began to lift in my general direction, I turned on my heel and exited the backstage area. I wasn’t ready to see him.

  Not yet. Not like that. Not until I pulled myself together.

  It wasn’t until the opening act finished their final song and introduced Beau to a roaring crowd of thousands that I finally snuck backstage again to watch.

  Beau poured on the charm throughout his show. His signature dimpled half-smile and the deep drawl of his husky voice held an instant panty-melting quality that seemed to have been honed and perfected over the last decade.

  My hands gripped a black velvet curtain that helped shield me from his view as my body, mind, and soul swallowed his music one catchy-yet-heartfelt lyric at a time.

  I stood back and watched as one woman tried to scale the stage and had to be carried out by security, and I stifled a smile when I saw another woman toss a pair of panties on the stage. Folks seemed to calm down after the first couple numbers.

  “This next one goes out to an old friend,” Beau said, his fingers gripping the neck of his guitar as he dug a fresh pick from his back pocket. “I hope she’s listening right now.”

  Don’t assume he’s talking about you. The man has tons of old friends.

  With bated breath, I closed my eyes and permitted myself to truly enjoy one song. I allowed myself to indulge for three minutes and three minutes only, and damn, was that the most beautiful tune I’d ever heard in my entire life.

  The miles were long and the nights were longer…

  I heard you were happy, I heard you’d moved on…

  Beau closed his song with a final run of the chorus, which detailed a story about a guy on the road who was homesick for this girl he’d never stopped loving over the years.

  My heart pounded in my ears, giving off cherry-red heat under a blanket of dark hair. It was too much to take.

  I released the curtain from my desperate grip and headed back to his dressing room to prep for our first interview.

  Ice water veins, Coco.

  It had to be all business from here on out.

  I shoved my feelings back into my shattered-glass heart and forced myself into work mode. This was just the way it had to be.

  Chapter Three

  “Beau! Beau Mason!”

  They screamed my name. All of them. All the time. I never intended on becoming a world-famous country singer. After signing a recording contract at twenty, I figured I’d spend most of my days slinging tunes in Nashville honky-tonks and state fairs. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine any of this.

  “Thank you!” Hot sweat beaded across my forehead. Painted cinderblock walls closed in with each step down the l
ong corridor. I threw a hand in the air and offered a smile as I followed security through a thick sea of backstage pass holders, groupies, and fans that moonlighted as my roadies. I was never anything but a boy with a guitar and a rustic twang of a voice that could carry a tune better than most of them. But over the years, I became something else entirely, which was exactly why it was time to hang up my guitar. “Y’all enjoy the show tonight?”

  The fans screamed and wailed and tugged on my arms and shirt and reached for my shoulders. Hands all over me, fingertips grazing my body, like I was some kind of God.

  “Y’all wait here. I’ll be back in a bit,” I said with a half-smile, glancing into the eyes of a middle-aged woman with mascara-streaked tears sliding down her round cheeks as she squealed “Oh, my God!” over and over again. She wore a t-shirt with my face on it, and a tarnished gold wedding band hugged her ring finger tight. Ten years of this, and I never could understand how being in my mere presence could induce such a reaction from someone who didn’t even know me.

  “Beau! Can I get a comment?” A man wearing a press pass around his neck shoved a microphone in my face. His voice held a barely audible volume above the screams of the women who filled the hallway wall to wall. “You have one more show left, Beau! How does it feel?”

  I ducked away, choosing not to answer him and keeping my comments to myself for the sake of my fans. The truth was, only one person was getting my final interview.

  My bodyguards stepped behind me as I reached my dressing room. They knew the drill. I needed to get cleaned up. Regroup. Take a break. Have a beer. Then I’d be out to greet the fans who’d spent an extra $450 on a backstage VIP meet-and-greet pass.

  Performing tended to suck the life out of me. I always gave my shows everything I had. My fans were good, hardworking folks who paid a pretty penny for a few hours of fun. I at least owed them a good time, even if it drained me practically dead.