by J. R. Rogue
He was always near me. Making jokes, whispering shit. Making me lose my cool, blushing.
I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what he wants. We just agreed on more time, just a little more time while I’m here, closer to him. I need to make a decision about my life. Very soon.
I feel antsy. I want to explore. I want to buy a truck, throw a camper shell on the back, and just drive. For the first time in my life, I have nowhere to go. I have no one to stop me from living whatever life I want.
Hunter’s gone now, but I know he’ll be back soon. He’s decided to spend the next two weekends here in Tennessee with me before my month’s stay is over.
Now, I’m sitting in the main hall, out in the open for the first time since he drove away. And I’m waiting. Waiting for someone to come ask me what’s up. I know they want to.
Finally, Sera walks in from the front-drive, making her way toward me, putting me out of my misery. She doesn’t hesitate. “I was surprised to hear from Hunter last week. Didn’t think he’d be back so soon.” Her hand is on her hip, eyebrow raised.
“How long have you known him?” I ask, ignoring where she wants to go with the conversation.
“Seven years or so. Tell me the story of how you guys met again, but spare me the PG version.” She smirks.
“I slept with him ten years ago. Before I got married. Just one month before I got engaged.” I lean back, leaning into our past. “Actually, for the longest time, Hunter thought I had a boyfriend when we slept together. He thought I cheated on my ex-husband with him.”
I pause, wondering why I’m a leaking faucet around her. Sera has such a quiet soul, you can’t help but want to fill in the spaces. “We kept in touch, once we sorted things out. Once I set him straight on his assumptions. It was easy to be his friend when I never saw him in person. When I never had to hear him sing or hear his voice. But now, it’s not so easy. I’m single, he’s single, and you think it’d be easy. But it’s not.”
“People have a way of throwing up their own obstacles when the obvious fall away,” she says.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be him. I don’t have kids. I don’t have anyone relying on me. I don’t have to be a role model, and I don’t have to worry about how my decisions affect someone. I did once, and all I did was hurt the people who cared about me.”
“I don’t know what that’s like either. Not yet, anyway.”
“You want kids?” I never ask women this question unless they bring it up, because I know how it feels.
“I don’t want to give birth to kids, but I want kids. And Chace is ready now, so we’re looking into adoption. He didn’t have the best childhood, and mine wasn’t ideal, so we never wanted to do it the traditional way. We’ve done our crazy traveling. We’ve created what we set out to create. We have the school in Nashville. We have this place. Now it’s time to create a place that’s about more than just the two of us. And it doesn’t have to be that way. You can have a home filled with just two, or even one.”
“Maybe this is dumb. I can’t be a stepmother. And also,” I throw my hands up, “he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t even want a girlfriend because of…I don’t know, this stupid fucking timeline he has. It’s annoying.” The spell of Hunter is always broken when he leaves.
She looks like she feels sorry for me, and the fact that she’s known Hunter as long as I have doesn’t make me feel better about that look. She knows him, knows his past, and his commitment-phobic ways.
“I think he wants to be with me,” I say. “He just doesn’t know how to spread himself out that way. He compartmentalizes his life.” The old wounds clutch at me as I say it. Reminders of my father. “He’s one person with women, and another with his daughters. He never blurs the line. He never lets anyone in. I shouldn’t expect to be special in any way.”
“I think you are special to him, though. I see the way he is with you. It’s weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yes, weird for Hunter. He never acts like he gives two shits to see a girl past one night. It’s been like that the entire time I’ve known him. And you’re the first girl his age I’ve ever seen him with,” Sera says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with an age difference—I married a younger man—but there has to be a maturity match-up, and goals aligning.”
“That’s something I’ve called him out for, for years.”
“And you’re probably the only girl I’ve seen him with that calls him out. He always has these doe-eyed girls who hang on every word he says. They hear him sing, and they fan their faces, and they just get lost in it. They don’t want to create waves, at all.” She rolls her eyes.
“What would you do if you were me?” I ask.
Sera smiles, leans on her hands. “Be the girl I see him looking at.”
“And who’s that?”
She pauses for a moment, rolling over my question. “The poem you want to be, and the song he can’t bring himself to write.”
Rope The Moon
Sonnet
I can hear a party going on at a smaller cabin next to ours. The laughter echoes in the Smoky Mountains. The stars and the moon are so bright above me, and my body feels so warm.
“Do you know the constellations?” I ask Hunter, who’s lying next to me in the bed of his truck, pointing to a cluster of stars.
“No. I reckon I can find the Little Dipper if you give me a minute or two,” he says, reaching up to take my hand. He brings it to his chest, and I let him, settling my palm there, over his heart. I don’t turn his way, though.
“Do you regret your marriage?” I ask.
“No. It was good for my girls.”
“But they had to go through your divorce.”
“At least they knew their parents loved each other enough to try.”
“Do you sometimes wish you guys would have worked out for their sake?” Every day I spend with Hunter makes me bolder, and every time he returns to the cabin, I find more footing in whatever the hell we are.
“I think any normal person would have wished for that at some point. But we stopped being excited about each other. We stopped growing in the same direction. Wishing we would have worked out would be like wishing we were different people than the ones we’ve become. I don’t wish I was different, and I sure as hell am not gonna be the guy who says he wishes the mother of his children was different. She’s a damn good mother,” he says.
“I don’t think I have it in me. I’m not that selfless. I couldn’t give up something I really wanted, something that makes me who I am, for anyone else. I guess that’s why I’m divorced.” I will always choose the words over the man.
“I didn’t give up music for them. I just gave up the idea of what music would do for my life.”
I don’t know if I believe Hunter. I don’t know how happy he is in Georgia, but I also know that commercial Nashville is not what he wants. He wants to sing old country music. He wants to stick to the roots of the music, and being carried away in the pop-country scene was never what he was destined for. He wants to write, same as me, without selling out.
And for many, that means not making it in the cutthroat rat race of any artistic field. It’s the same with writing novels, in some ways. The war between writing what the public wants and what I want is always being raged inside.
I pull the blanket closer to me, feel the weight of my notebook sitting on my hip. I’ve been writing poetry, writing notes on a new novel. I’ve been writing. It’s as simple and freeing as that.
And my heartache, over my marriage failing, is fading.
Sometimes you don’t know who to blame for your heartache. Do you look in the mirror? At the mess you made? Or at someone else?
One month after Preston and I separated, I moved out of our house and in with Joanne. My whole life was crammed into a tiny room.
I understood what Hunter meant about wishing, for a while, that his marriage could be saved. While I lived with Joanne, I would spend some nights at Preston’s, my old home, tryin
g to figure out where we would go from the broken state I put us in.
In a way, I believed we were working to come out better on the other side. He said I broke him—permanently. At least that was his excuse when I went over at two in the morning, insomnia gripping me, and found another vehicle in his driveway.
I felt numb as my finger found his contact name and called. Over and over and over again.
No answer. And though I had a key, I was too chicken to go inside. I wasn’t the type to make a scene. I wasn’t the type to throw open the door and ask who the fuck was there.
So I drove away.
Did I believe him when he said nothing happened? That he and this faceless girl were just hanging out? Yes. I did. Because in over ten years of knowing Preston, I knew one thing: he wouldn’t lie. But his plan was an omission. He never intended to tell me about the girl. I would have gone along with the lie that we were working things out, obliviously thinking we were working on the marriage I broke.
I ran away from our marriage so many times, because running was easier than fighting. And no one taught me to fight. But the nail in the coffin was this betrayal. The one person I never thought would lie to me or keep things from me, was caught.
I never found out if anything happened, and he never dated. Like Hunter said, maybe Preston had been waiting for me to move away, and on. It was a mercy. I couldn’t imagine having to see your ex every week, the way Hunter and his ex-wife had to for their daughters. Did the pain lessen? Did it lessen for him, but not for her?
“Do you ever want to get married again?” It’s a risky question to ask. Men always think you’re asking because you want to marry them. I just want to know how Hunter feels about marriage, the second time around. Because I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t know if I can go through it again. I don’t know if I want to. The labels and the legalities. The name changing, which I was never a fan of, and will never do again. All of it exhausts me to think about.
“I don’t know. For a long time, I said no. And now, with my age...” Hunter trails off.
“People get married in their sixties, even later,” I argue.
“To hold onto that kind of romanticism that late in life, I don’t know. That’s a special kind of optimism.” Hunter laughs, and I feel it under my palm.
“You’re an optimist.” He is. It’s one of the things I like about him.
“And you’re a cynic. And a romantic.” I see his smile in the dark.
“I’m a romantic?” I push up so I can look down at him.
“You write romance, don’t you?”
I do. But can I again? I wrote about happily-ever-afters. I sold happily-ever-afters. Do I even believe in it at all, anymore? I sold something I wanted to buy myself. I wanted to be on the other end. I wanted to be the one reading romance and believing it.
“You don’t have to be romantic to write romance,” I say, thinking of Colleen Hoover, a favorite author of mine. She’s a self-professed non-romantic who won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Romance numerous years.
“You think people can’t see through the bullshit? People know when you’re selling something you don’t believe in. So maybe your fans know you better than you do.”
“You think so?” What a notion. I like it.
“Anyone who reads your words can see who you are.”
I grab his jaw, turn his face to mine. Such a small compliment, but it heats me. I can’t do anything else but kiss him.
Meet Me In The Middle
Sonnet
Gatlinburg reminds me of one of those little villages you see in a snow globe. Tourists line the streets. Shops are filled with overpriced boutique clothing and taffy. I see people with bags of gourmet popcorn and jars of moonshine as I walk in silence, absorbing the feeling of being unknown.
It’s small and cute, with manufactured small-town vibes, and I know I won’t be running into the local pastor who knows me or my kindergarten teacher.
I need that.
Beside me, Hunter licks an ice cream cone, walking toward the SkyLift. It’s chilly, but he still insisted on ice cream. He also insisted on taking me up into the sky. I’m ignoring both of his bad decisions.
“Are you really coming back next weekend just to see me off?” I ask.
He nods.
My body already misses his nearness, his jokes, and his body, and he hasn’t even left yet. “What kind of job lets someone drive back on a Monday, just to leave on a Friday?” I ask him.
“A job where you’re the boss. And I’ll leave Friday after work, so I’m only missing one day,” he says, finishing off the cone.
Hunter works in construction now. He works in the Georgia heat, has his own office, drives a company truck. He’s the boss, and he makes the rules. His college buddy hired him, knowing he’d be taking many long weekends. I wonder how the nine-to-five life feels, after so many years singing for tips in downtown Nashville. The steady paycheck has to be comforting. But I bet he aches for the days he sang for income.
I know how it feels to have a fluctuating amount of money coming in. I didn’t start publishing when self-publishing first started. People like Sera paved the way for authors like me. I’m lucky to make a living at it, but I’m not flying off to Paris anytime soon.
The key to making a living writing is consistency. It’s creating a schedule and a plan. My divorce wrecked that plan. It ruined the warm feeling I felt toward love, and it’s hard to write about romance when your marriage is failing.
Although I was already known for my melancholy in writing, I lost my hope.
And sorrow and hope are critical components of Rosewood romance.
All thoughts of romance leave me when we finally make it to the SkyLift. Panic takes over. The last time a man convinced me to go up in the sky was during my honeymoon. I trusted my husband, and though I know Hunter far less than I knew the man I married, I trust him too.
That realization doesn’t quell the terror in my body, threatening to take over. “Why?” I ask, voice pleading.
“You can do it. Come on.” He takes my hand, and I follow.
We ascend, higher and higher, into the sky. I feel like I can’t breathe. I hate heights. My ankles throb when I step on a step ladder, for Christmas’ sake. Why did I agree to this? Oh, yeah. Because Hunter can get me to agree to anything.
He has my hand in his as I squeeze my eyes shut. “You’re a pain in my fudging ass,” I say.
“Goddamn, girl, don’t say that. Did you see that little fudge place we walked past? I’m watching my figure, so I was avoiding it. Now I won’t be able to.” Hunter bumps my shoulder, and I tense.
“Watching your figure?” I laugh.
“Yeah. No one wants a dad bod.”
“Actually, a ton of women like dad bods,” I counter.
“Not me.” His thumb brushes over my knuckles.
“You’re a dad,” I argue.
“I don’t want to look the part.”
I shake my head. “You know, men don’t get it the way we do, but they get shamed for their bodies too. It’s bullshit either way.”
“You into dad bods?” he asks.
I shrug, eyes still closed. My husband got soft around the middle as the years went by, and it didn’t bother me. As my weight fluctuated, he still wanted me the same. Though we had our differences, that was one way he never failed me. He always complimented my body. It sounded shallow, but I felt comfort in knowing he loved me and didn’t care if I put on some weight.
In the end, it was my obsession with my work that made him hate certain parts of me.
“I’m into guys who are into me,” I joke. Hunter’s easing me; I feel it then, and I don’t care that I’m hundreds of feet up in the air, miraculously.
“How’s that work for you?” Hunter asks. I can hear him shifting in his seat, and his voice is closer.
“It’s always a yes until they get to know me.” I peek at him, then get a glimpse of the ground below and feel sick.
“I know you, and I still like you,” Hunter says, closer, into my hair. I can feel his warm breath.
“You don’t know me the way I mean. I mean day in and day out, through the hard shit, without makeup or therapy.” I’m missing my weekly sessions. Venting to my mother or chatting with Sera and Brooklyn isn’t the same as seeing a therapist.
“Therapy?” he repeats.
“I had to quit when I came here, but yeah, I started seeing a therapist when Preston and I separated.” I can talk about my ex-husband easily with Hunter. I never see a flair of jealousy, and I don’t think it’s in him. How often can you feel jealous when you haven’t been in a relationship in years?
“How do you feel being away from it?” he asks.
“Okay, but I can’t do it forever.” I’ve learned to realign my language with therapy. I used to be the kind of person who would say, ‘That person needs therapy.’ As if only the truly deranged needed it. As if going meant there was something wrong with you. Not just the simple fact that you needed someone to talk to. That you needed maintenance.
When I was sick, I saw a doctor. When I felt ill in the head, I went to bed. It worked for a time. But the numbness always caught up.
Finally, I decided to treat my heart and mind and soul with the same care I used to treat my immune system. I wasn’t immune to the mental illnesses I once had no understanding of.
With age, my anxiety grew. Little things that used to be no big deal became almost unbearable, and my divorce made me afraid of going out in public. I let small-town minds and mouths create a hermit out of me. Without my therapist to talk me through my emotions here in Tennessee, I turned back to the old standby: the drink. I need to quit.
Hunter’s hand leaves mine then settles on my thigh.
I open my eyes, and when I look at him, his head is back, his own eyes are closed, and he’s singing, soft and low.
I saw him singing once before our one-night stand ten years ago. It was the summer before I kissed him. Joanne and I got a picture with him. I followed him on his social media, but I didn’t say much else after the photo was taken; instead, I walked away and wondered about him.