by J. R. Rogue
“Yeah. It was before Chace and I really got together. It was a dark few months and I wrote about everything I was feeling. When it came time to finally publish my own poetry, I wanted it in there. And, Chace reads everything I publish. It hurt him that Tristan hurt me, but it wasn’t jealousy. Well, maybe some.” She smiles.
A pause and then, “Anytime you love someone, and you know they had intense feelings for someone else that isn’t you, you feel a pang. I don’t care how emotionally mature you are, it’s there. And you either let it eat at you, or you realize it’s life. And, fuck, we contain so many layers. He loves the whole of me. You need to find someone who loves you fully—every shade. Every letter that comes from you. I love a writer. I married a writer. So he gets it. You don’t have to settle down with another writer for them to get it, but they need to be emotionally mature enough to realize that writing has everything to do with you, and really, nothing to do with them. It’s about you. It’s about carving your heart out and lighting it on fire for the public to see.”
I’m in awe of her. Sera’s my age, but so far beyond me. In her writing and in her relationships. In her career and in life in general.
“What? What did I say to make you make that face?” she asks.
I shake my head. “It’s nothing. I’m just thinking about what a mess my life is.” It hits me then. Like a cold bucket of water, drenching me.
“That’s bullshit,” her husky voice says, caressing the curse. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing besides freeloading.” I think of the songwriters here. I see two in the corner of the main hall—notebooks, laptops, and guitars in tow.
“You paid for your stay, so don’t think that at all,” she says.
“I’m not even writing. I’m stuck, and I suck.”
“Have you ever written poetry?” she asks.
“No,” I admit. I admire Sera’s work; I envy it. Everyone who’s read my novels says I have a poetic voice, but I’ve never been able to shake the fear enough to try.
“I’m going to dig up some prompt lists for you.” She stands, drinking the last of her coffee. “I don’t want to see anything you write, and I won’t even ask if you’ve used them. I just want you to have them. I think they could open a door in there.”
“Okay.” I’m hesitant, but intrigued. I know I need to open the locked doors in my head, to step outside my comfort zone.
So, I decide to look for Hunter.
Cover Me Up
Hunter
I have a life back in Georgia, and I need to get back to it when this week is over. I have my daughters, my dog, my parents, and my grandparents.
Tennessee isn’t my home anymore. It hasn’t been for a while, and it can’t be again. Not yet, anyway. Not until the girls are both out of school, and off to college.
The thought of living in Tennessee again is something I’ve pushed to the back of my mind. I let it sit there, knowing I can revisit the notion when the time’s right.
But now I’m here, in the mountains, with the last woman I ever expected to see again. And it’s making too much I’ve shoved to the back of my mind come to the surface.
I need to figure out this thing with Sonnet Rosewood, once and for all. I feel like I’ve been on pause since the night we met ten years ago. I felt a connection with her. I felt that thing or whatever.
To be honest, I’m not sure I believe in soulmates. It seems so final. What if you meet yours and they’re with someone else, spending years with them? Or forever?
I never worried Sonnet would spend forever with her husband. It was black and white, the way she felt.
He was secure. He offered her all the things she felt she needed in life because she had been sold on the dream her entire life. I don’t sell my daughters that garbage. I tell them they can be anything, do anything. That they can go to college and make their own dreams. They can backpack through Europe, visit Africa.
They don’t need a guy to complete them.
Maybe I just never want them to find a guy and stop looking at me like I hung the goddamn moon.
I didn’t like the way their mother and I talked to each other when we were married. We brought out the worst in each other. So, I asked for a divorce. Because I knew their mother deserved better. And the only way my daughters would know what they deserved was to see their mother get what she ought to have.
Unfortunately, she never moved on.
I reckon I look like the bad guy, but some might say I haven’t moved on yet either since I also haven’t remarried. But I don’t view marriage as the end-all, be-all anymore. I never really did, but my momma did, and so did my father. Then, I met Theresa, and we just fit the narrative.
A knock on my door yanks me back into the present.
I open it to Sonnet, a mug in her hand, steam rising. She walks past me into my room, and I don’t mind. I don’t mind one damn bit. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since last night.
“Whatcha got there?” I don’t know if it’s tea or coffee or cocoa, but it looks like something I want. Not the drink, but her hands around me. A tight grip. Her pouty mouth about to take a taste.
“There’s coffee upstairs. Brooklyn just made a fresh pot. She’s the one who told me where your room was. I’m across the hall, you know. I actually heard you the first night I was here, talking to a girl. You dating someone? Left that out when we were catching up?” She sets her contents on the chair in the corner of my room, by the fireplace—a book, a notebook, her phone, and headphones.
“I was talking to one of my daughters. And no, I’m not dating anyone. Good job fishing for information there. Almost sounded natural and not at all awkward.”
She glares at me, and I just smile in return.
Finally, I nod at the items she’s placed on the chair. “Writing or reading?” I ask, walking to the fireplace.
She looks cold, with a fuzzy blanket pulled close to her. “I haven’t decided yet. What are you doing today? Gonna play me a song?”
“What do you wanna hear?” My guitar is on the floor next to her.
“Cover Me Up,” she replies, low.
I blush a little at her words. And, shit, that’s not something I do. I know she only named a song title, but I want to cover her up. With my body. With my mouth. “I reckon I could play that one.” The Jason Isbell song is a favorite of mine, and hers.
Sonnet has excellent taste in country music. She loves new stuff with soul, and maybe some I can’t stand, but also older stuff—Garth, George, Ty.
I remember the night she spent with me. My eyes kept drifting back to her. Long dark hair, hips swaying in her red skirt. It wasn’t short or tight, but flowing. Her midriff was on display in her little black crop top.
She broke one of her high heels that night, so I hoisted her onto my back when we left for my place.
I bought her a pair of flip-flops from a street vendor so she would have something to wear home the next morning.
I wanted her to stay the rest of the day, though. Instead, I watched the Nashville sky light up on the Fourth of July, alone. She was out on the streets again, partying the night away, and I was too scared to ask her to come back.
You lose a lot of cool points if you ask your one-night stand to come back the next night.
I think our lives would have turned out differently if I had.
Maybe she wouldn’t have said yes when her ex-husband proposed. Maybe we would have done the long-distance thing. Perhaps I would have convinced her to move to Nashville.
Maybe she would have met my girls by now.
She could have fit in, in my life. In the life I keep from everyone else.
Maybe she wouldn’t have asked me for more, and she would have just asked for me.
It’s never enough for the other girls. They want babies of their own. They want babies with me, and that’s not something I can give. It’s not something I want to give.
I grab my guitar after getting
the fire going.
Sonnet pulls her blanket down, puts her hands up toward the fire. Her palms are red and orange in the glow.
That woman is color and a poem and a song. She can’t see it the way every guy who looks at her does.
When I start strumming, she turns her attention to me, and I like the way she looks at me when I sing. It’s not obsessive. She looks away, plays with her hair. As if staring at me for too long will burn her.
Or maybe I’m not as good at keeping her interest as my ego wants me to believe.
Dangerous
Sonnet
Chasing your dreams can kill you, make you ill, and ill-fit to be in anyone’s life. You drive family and friends away. You drive the one you love away. You burn bridges and don’t realize it until you’re standing on the other side, alone.
I burned a whole town down. Regret and release rage within me as I look down at the notebook in my hand. The disjointed lyrics haunt me, have been pouring out of me all day, in Hunter’s presence. Finally, the dam broke.
The ache and the numbness had been warring inside me. I was a shell for a year, a walking nightmare. I’m starting to feel like myself here, and I can’t help but worry that if I fall into this again, if I let a muse take me, I’ll never recover. Who else will be marred, live in the ruin of me and my words?
I think of the last time Hunter had asked me to write with him, of my fantasies and my inability to realize that I didn’t need to be with someone who was just like me. My therapist helped me come to terms with that knowledge.
I’m not alone in this. So many women fall for artists, and this jackass drew me in every time. His voice and that damn Georgia twang. And when I gushed over his voice to people I knew, I was talking about the way he sang. But in my head, there was a more profound truth. I loved the way he spoke. I loved his speaking voice just as much as his singing voice. And voices have always been addicting for me.
I look around my room. I’m thirty-six, with no home, nowhere to go when my time is up here in this cabin. With my grief, I burden the few left close to me.
Me: Why do dreams become lodged in your throat sometimes? Some you speak out loud, some you devour, some give you air. I hate it.
Mom: Write that shit down.
I want to travel. I want to travel, and I never want to be tied to someone or someplace, and that is exactly what I let happen. I allowed myself to become tied to a small town and a man who made me feel guilty for wanting more. He loved me, but his dreams looked different than mine when you lined them up.
You can’t heal when you open a wound over and over again. And when I was writing, I was opening the wound. There’s a reason I left it all behind.
Spending time with Hunter will be dangerous. Forget the fact that I’ve seen him naked and know what it feels like to have him inside me. Screw the fact that he’s still incredibly sexy and makes me laugh. He’s dangerous because he represents art to me. And art is the one thing that’s hurt me more than anything in this world. Because it made me hope, and hope is cruel and cunning.
I don’t want that road to be stretched out in front of me again, allowing me to take the wrong turn, to make the wrong choice.
I can’t trust a humming body. A steady pulse is what I need in my life right now. And I need it to be my own.
My phone vibrates on the bathroom counter. And when I pull it up, seeing a number with a Georgia area code, I smile. I guess it’s safe for him to text me now, unlike in the past, when I treated him like a dirty little secret.
The text says it was good to spend the day with me, and he hopes I’ll come back across the hall again tomorrow.
Why does he want to write with me? I know the obvious. He always told me he liked my writing. Even after I wrote him as nothing more than a five-hundred-word chapter in a novel designed to wreck my world. I wrote that he was forgettable, and he proved to be anything but.
I text him back.
Me: You don’t have to wait until tomorrow. I’ll be knocking on your door in an hour.
We Really Shouldn’t Be Doing This
Hunter
She texts me back, and even though it makes me smile, it brings back thoughts of the night she texted me years ago. The night of her bachelorette party. I hurt for the girl back then, but also, I thought she was an idiot, that it was clear she didn’t need to be getting married. Only, she wasn’t backing out. Instead, she was sending drunk texts to a me—a fling.
I still remember the messages: Is marriage all it’s cracked up to be? You think I shouldn’t do it, right?
Some people are so scared to do the thing they know they should. So they need a damn scapegoat, and Sonnet wanted me to be it. But I refused to be that man.
If she didn’t want to be married, she needed to call off the wedding. She needed to face the shit-storm that came with it.
The invitations? Fuck that. The church? Fuck that. Fuck it all. A life with someone you love, but know you shouldn’t be with? Fuck that.
I’d done that. I’d done the right thing, not what I wanted, and it ended in divorce.
As far as I’m concerned, too many follow a blueprint given by our parents, passed down from their parents of what a life should be—two-story house with a two-car garage, kids in private schools, college fund, PTA meetings, and bake sales.
My parents are country Baptists. They pray to God and are faithful in all they do in this waking life.
I don’t know what Sonnet’s parents are like. But I imagine she got the same spiel. Hell, she lives in the Bible Belt.
Do whatever you think you need to do. That was the kind of answer I gave Sonnet in the past. She needed to make her own decisions. She needed to figure it out on her own. I couldn’t give her what she needed me to give her then, but I want to give her what she needs now.
We spent the day in my room. I strummed my guitar; she wrote in her notebook. We talked and we laughed. We brainstormed ideas for our song.
We should speed it up since we only have a short time together here, but I can’t rush her. I’ve never rushed her since I first met her. I’ve always let her set the pace, and I plan to keep the course.
My phone vibrates on my bed, reminding me of the text from Sonnet saying she’d be back over to my room in an hour. After she left to take a shower, my room felt smaller, quiet, and lonely.
The girls before and after Sonnet were girls I could forget.
Sonnet wouldn’t let me forget her.
This time, I’m not going to let her forget me.
Lonely Ain’t The Only Game In Town
Sonnet
I once had a boyfriend who told me—at my lowest weight—I still had work to do. I once had a boyfriend cheat on me a week after losing my virginity to him.
I didn’t dump either of them right after these instances, varying in degrees of shitty. Now, I can safely say I would tell a friend to drop any guy who pulled either one of these stunts.
But, something happens in life. It’s slow, sneaky. It starts from birth, rests on the shoulders of a father’s love. And when that love lacks, somewhere along the way, you convince yourself you deserve someone who does shitty things. You convince yourself you should stay with someone who does shit your book boyfriends never would.
And if you can convince yourself you should stay with a dick who does shit like that, you can convince yourself you should stay with a man who doesn’t—even when he clearly isn’t right for you.
There were times I wished my ex-husband did something horrible to me. Something to push me to end it. Something so wrong, I could safely walk away with no guilt.
What I really wanted was a reason to call him the bad guy, because I didn’t want to be the bad guy. I didn’t want to leave someone who loved me. Someone who loved me but just wasn’t for me. Maybe he was waiting, too. And, I did do unforgivable things; I just never let him catch me.
My hand is smudged, inked and dirty, but the words are flowing.
I mourn my marriage—the right way. No
t in liquor or drawn curtains. I mourn it with lyrics, bordering on poetic. With rhyme and meter. With sorrow and simplicity. It’s a proper burial.
I wonder if Hunter is the kind of man who would love me even when I wrote of ghosts.
He should know what it’s like. We take our past, and we wring it dry. We write it and we sing it.
I want to love so loudly that there’s no room for sad words. No room for novels that sound like breakup letters. I don’t want to write breakup songs for those who still love me.
I watch Hunter across the room. The way he rests his notebook on his knee. The way he touches his guitar.
His fingers are long, and those arms belong elsewhere—around me, caging me.
I want the papers gone. I want to feel him next to me, inside of me, filling me with words and more.
I stare at him for so long, he finally looks up, making me wonder if the back of his neck tickled with awareness or if he just wanted to look at me too.
“Hi,” I mouth to him, and he mouths it back.
Fuck. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t want this half-friendship, half-lust.
It won’t come out in the wash. This is the kind of thing that stains.
With my hands, I start to gather my things, but I barely feel it. I just feel Hunter’s eyes. I feel the eyes of everyone in the common room, and I wonder at their wonder. We’ve spent the last two days together. Behind closed doors, out in the open. Writing together. Laughing together. Flirting around the fire.
My mind wanders to my mother’s last text: He’s right in front of you again, and you’re both single, and you haven’t even kissed him yet?
I’m halfway down the steps to my room when I hear Hunter behind me. We walk down to our rooms in silence. When I reach my door, I toss my things inside, then turn to him, crossing my arms.
“Oh, you’re coming in my room? Pretty presumptuous of you.” He laughs.