by J. R. Rogue
My heart was taken, but maybe that was our first chance.
Then there was the night we kissed, fell into bed together, tasted each other until dawn. That was our second chance.
Then there was the night of my bachelorette party. When I wanted him to tell me I was making a mistake, even though I wouldn’t have listened. That was the third chance.
We have danced this way for too long.
So many chances we’ve thrown away. So many almosts.
I’m in love with Hunter Hart. He stole something from me so many years ago, and I mourn the time lost.
Some chances are more significant than others. Some leave marks, and some are barely noticeable until they’re over, wasted.
I’m not sure I believe love conquers all things. Your love for yourself should be first. It cannot be gambled away.
Hunter loves his daughters. He loves his life in Georgia. I love my new borrowed life in Tennessee. I know where I’ll land, finally. My heart is set on Nashville, though I haven’t spoken it out loud.
I want it to be the right choice.
And the wonder is there. At my choice of city. At the way my heart waits, when I told him I absolutely would not wait.
My body moves close to his, and he keeps singing, a slow smile moving over his mouth, inviting me in. I accept the invitation.
“Let’s get back to the cabin,” I say into his ear.
It’s Never Easy To Say Goodbye
Sonnet
It’s a slow burn—maybe due to the years of foreplay. I blame it on Hunter’s voice. Singers are a special kind of seduction. Slow drawls and southern charm.
I’m not the only girl to fall for Hunter Hart, and I don’t want to be in line with the rest. Younger. Perkier. Sweet southern Christians he can bring home to his momma.
There are wood-burning fireplaces on every level of the cabin. The west-facing side has stacks of wood. I watch from the porch as Hunter, Chace, and Andrew cut some.
Hunter leaves in the morning, and soon, the cabin will be filled with a new set of faces. It’s my last week, so when he returns, and he says he will, it’ll be our last time together here.
Sera calls out to the guys from a level above. “You know we can pay someone to do that, right?”
“Yeah, but how will we keep our manly figures?” Andrew calls back. “You and Kat are always trying to plump us up. If we wanna stay sexy like Hart here, we need to do some manual labor.”
I laugh and hear Sera mock her brother.
They’re beautiful, all three of them. Tall, brilliant smiles. Andrew is loud, a jokester like Hunter. Chace is quiet, mostly shaking his head at everything the other two say.
There are three stumps set up. Three axes and three men in white shirts of varying degrees of filthy and soaked.
Sera comes down the steps, finding me in the chair outside my room. Blankets are bundled around me, my nerves from the SkyLift finally settling. She’s more dressed for the weather than the boys are, but they don’t appear to feel the cold.
“Every year. Every year they make a show of chopping that shit,” she says.
My eyes rove the woods around us. “Where did the wood come from that they’re chopping?”
“I had it delivered.” She smirks. “Well, just enough for them to make a big deal of. The rest is pre-cut. It’s a tradition at this point, and I would never deprive them of it.”
“You guys really have a family here. Why don’t you move here?” Sera comes and goes, staying for both long and short periods, and I see Brooklyn more than anything. I’ve developed a friendship with the two women. Each of them brings out a different side of me. I’ve needed that.
“We have a house here and one in Nashville.”
“That sounds perfect.” I want to tell her that I’ve decided where I’ll live, and I’ve begun making calls, checking prices on apartments and storage units, but my nerves get to me.
“Yeah. When the city is too much, and it’s growing every day, we come out here.”
“I love this state. I don’t think I can leave it,” I admit, making Sera’s eyes turn to me. The only person I’ve told of my decision is my mother, and she has very complicated feelings with it. I do, too.
“Maybe you shouldn’t, then?” Sera’s eyebrow raises, and it’s that face that gets me. Her dark eyes that make it impossible not to fall into.
“I’ve been calling about apartments around Nashville.”
“Around Nashville?”
“Yeah.” I laugh. “Not in Nashville. I sell a few books, but I’m not you. So, it’ll be the suburbs for me.”
“Oh, we don’t live in Nashville, either.” She waves her hand, but I don’t let her off the hook. I’ve researched the cities clustered around Music City.
I smile. “Okay, where do you live?”
Her own smile is sheepish. “Belle Meade area.”
“Yeahhhhhh,” I draw it out. I don’t want to make her feel weird about being a millionaire, but I can’t help it. “I’ll be looking at the Ashland City area.” It’s not flashy, and it’s not Nashville, but it’s close enough for me—and affordable. I can write for a while without worrying about a job, and if my romance mojo comes back, I can continue to live the dream that tore my marriage apart.
“Is your family back in Missouri?” Sera asks.
I watch Hunter and the rest of the guys, axes swinging, arms taut. It’s rhythmic, the way they move. It’s rhythmic, the way my family volleys back and forth between comfortable and transitioning. “My mother lived in Missouri, her whole life actually. She really helped me through my divorce. But her new soon-to-be-husband is a nurse, like her. He got a job offer in Hawaii, where his family lives. So they moved down there right before I moved away.”
“Her second marriage?”
I laugh. “Oh no, that’s come and gone.”
“That can be hard.”
“Looks like you got a brother you love out of it.” In front of us, Andrew laughs, white teeth and a ballcap on backward. He has his long hair pulled into a low ponytail.
“Yeah. Any stepsiblings for you?”
“Never. She always dated loners. Some tried to do the stepdad thing. Some didn’t even bother with me.”
“And your father?” Her question cuts me. Cuts right to the heart of my issues and quest.
“He…he lives in Nashville.”
“Have you told him you’re thinking about moving there?” Sera asks.
I eye Hunter and the guys. There’s so much I want to tell Hunter about my father, about the way he broke my heart the night we spent together. The reason for my drunken stupor, my black eyes.
“No, we don’t speak.” The blanket goes around me even tighter, as if it can shield me from the truth of my life. From my strange family.
“Oh,” Sera says, turning away.
I imagine my vulnerability is palpable. The urge to retreat to my room is there, itching my skin.
“Do you know why I hate Hunter and why I like him?” I ask, ready to tell her the reason for my pull—the one I’ve never told my mother or Joanne, always hiding behind the reasoning that Hunter is just really hot.
“I know why I like him and why I hate him,” she laughs, “but I would be very interested in knowing why someone like you—someone I like—likes Hunter.”
I stare across the lawn at him as I begin to speak, low enough for only Sera to hear. “Because of the kind of father he is. He has two daughters he puts above everyone else. When it comes down to choosing, he chooses them. I’m okay with him choosing them over love. I don’t know why, because it means I’ll never win. But it’s a game I don’t want to win. Because I would never want his daughters to feel the way my father made me feel,” I tell her.
I pause before continuing. “I drove to Nashville ten years ago to track down my father. To find out why he left, and to see if we could form some sort of relationship. The reason he left? It lined up with what my mother told me, after I begged her for years to tell me why he
would abandon his only daughter. He couldn’t handle the fact that he had to share me with my mother’s next husband. So instead of sharing his daughter, he gave me up. When I gave him the opportunity to start a new relationship with me, he asked me to leave his driveway. He said his wife and daughter would be home soon. They didn’t know anything about me.”
My voice catches at that. “He chose them over me. Instead of attempting to introduce me to them, to be some sort of family, he pushed me out.”
“Fuck,” Sera says, exhaling.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “So that’s why I like Hunter. Because he’s a good father to his daughters.”
“And why do you hate him?” she asks, looking me in the eye.
“Because, like my father, he can’t figure out a way to get over the black and white blueprint he has for what family means to him. He can’t figure out how to take a woman he cares about, and his two girls, and make it work in harmony. He’s choosing to break one heart, for another. My heart is the obvious heart to break, but it doesn’t make it suck any less.”
The truth weighs heavy between us. My desires and heartache laid at the feet of a woman I’m forming a friendship with, when all hope of friendship with anyone had been lost to me for so long.
I like her heavy silence, her wise words. I love the words she writes and the way she lives her life.
“You know, I know we don’t know each other that well and you didn’t ask for my advice about your love life, but I think I’m right when I assume you’ll listen,” Sera edges.
I nod.
“You can’t let him get by with the status quo. He’ll let life slip by in this slow and comfortable way, the way he always does. You have to make him uncomfortable. You have to make him know he will lose you—and whatever it is you guys have started—if he continues to keep his life in neat little boxes.”
“I know, but sometimes it’s just easier to take what he gives me.” I watch Hunter’s long arms, his broad smile, his sharp nose. He looks beautiful out there on the lawn, but Sera’s words cut through me.
“Isn’t that what he did with you for years?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to settle for it in return. Doesn’t mean that you deserve it.”
I let Sera’s words seep into my soul as we talk the rest of the afternoon away, our backdrop being the men we love and their laughter.
The Tennessee sky cools, and dusk takes away the light the boys need.
Sera and Chace promise food, music, and dancing on the upper balcony for our last night here.
Tomorrow I have to begin my goodbye to this place and give a more permanent one to Hunter.
She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful
Sonnet
After a shower, half hour of Googling hotels along the way back north, and a questionable number of tears alone in my room while getting dressed, I go back upstairs.
The upper deck is covered in white Christmas lights, and there are heaters everywhere to warm us. The chill of the approaching winter is creeping in more and more each evening.
Chace and Sera have made a haven out on the deck. I see them inside, setting out dishes with Brooklyn, their laughter echoing in the air.
Outside, Sammy Kershaw plays around me—She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful—and it’s a favorite song of mine. However, the memory is gray and melancholy. My mother loved the song; my father sang it to us as the three of us danced in the living room. I was so small, they would take turns holding me, swinging me around. The memory is more hers than mine, but I know what the song means.
Hunter stands, reaching for me.
“You can two-step?” I ask, looking up at him through my eyelashes, slightly damp.
“Please, it’s the easiest dance there is,” Hunter replies, his hand wrapping around mine.
I let him pull me close when we stand. “Now, you go like this.” He looks down, and my eyes follow.
He has his cowboy boots on. I have on a rugged pair of black boots, scuffed to hell, like my heart right now.
“One, two, back. One, two, back.” He moves, I move. His hand is on the base of my back, his fingers sliding up under the fabric of my sweater.
I look into his eyes. “I like your eyes, you know?”
“Oh yeah?” he says, lip turning up at the side.
“Yeah.” I look back down at our feet. “No one appreciates brown eyes.”
“I do.”
“You never write about them,” I argue.
“Yours are dark as hell,” Hunter says.
“Like my soul?” I smirk.
“Nah. You can keep up the act with whoever you want, but it doesn’t work on me. You’re a romantic. I saw it in those scribbled words you put down for our song.”
“I write what people want to read. I perform for the crowd, performed for you with the song.” I don’t know if I believe myself or if I just want him to tell me I’m wrong.
“No, you write for you.”
“And what do you do?” I ask. The lights are warm; I feel warm. I’ll be cold tomorrow when he’s gone.
“I don’t know anymore. It takes a special person to make a living writing while also writing for themselves. You see it all the time, but they’re a drop in the bucket. One in a million.” He hesitates. I know this is where his pain lives. “Not everyone gets that lucky.”
“What’s it take to make it, for you?” Everyone has their own opinion or recipe for success.
“Talent, and luck. Hard work and luck. Luck plays a part in it. I don’t care who ya are. If ya don’t believe that, you’re lying to yourself.”
“Maybe luck will never favor us.” I look around at the cabin surrounding us, at the life Sera has because of her writing.
“Luck does. We have people who want what we create. It might not make us famous. We may not be millionaires. I may not be selling out arenas, and you may not be hitting the New York Times list, but there are people out there who’d kill for a little sliver of what we got.”
My stomach somersaults at his words. “You’re right. Sometimes I lose sight of it, I think, because of what it’s cost me.” It was never enough for my ex-husband. I never made enough money, and I spent too much of my time on my passion. I couldn’t win. Without time spent writing, how would I succeed? He set me up to fail.
“It’s cost us both a lot,” Hunter says, pulling me closer to him.
I let my arms travel up his shoulder. Our two-step fades into a slow, slow dance. “What did it cost you?” I lay my cheek on his chest, listen to his heart.
“Same as you. Family.”
He must mean his wife. He knows I mean my husband.
It’s hard to share someone with art, because art never rests. Art is an insatiable lover. Art is the one we can never leave.
I close my eyes, let one song bleed into the next, until Hunter stops moving and takes me away from everyone else.
Leaving can taste how you want it. You have to align yourself with the pain, become a masochist, and make your home there. I let my goodbye with Hunter taste good, feel good.
He drops to his knees, just outside the sliding door to my room. The back deck is empty, but it still feels scandalous amidst the laughter above us. His hands slide up the backs of my thighs. I am trembling, and I don’t care if he sees it. The reflection of me will dim as he drives back to Georgia.
I feel his mouth on my panties, his tongue tracing the lace. “No one is like you. God, I never forgot this,” he says, pushing me further and further.
“Just fuck me.” I want this to start, so it can end. So I can mourn us—again—because I am always in mourning of he and I. It’s a state. I never leave it.
And the want? I never leave that state, either.
He bends my knee, spreading my legs, pushing lace aside, slipping his tongue into the folds, finding my clit right away. I buckle, but he is prepared.
Hunter stands, picking me up, carrying me the rest of the way into my bedroom, sliding the door shut, ke
eping the cold out and shutting us in.
I fall back onto my bed, legs spread, head back, ready. I want his tongue and his hands. His hard lines and that voice of his.
Hunter kneels again, spreading my legs, pulling me to the edge of the bed. He presses my knees together long enough to pull my panties up to my knees, over, then off.
Then the air hits me again. I am exposed, wondering if he can feel my racing pulse, feel my fear.
I am in love. In love with someone who lives eight hours away from here. Someone with a guarded heart, like mine.
But this? We always did this well.
“I want you to come,” he says, right before sucking my clit between his lips. I can feel his tongue pulsing on the spot. It’s too much, and I try to pull away, but he has me locked in.
I rip at his hair, and he relents. “You’re gonna have me done too quick.” That’s not what I want. I want him to draw it out. “Just fuck me,” I beg.
“No.” He knows I will fall asleep as soon as he comes, push away the goodbye until the sun rises. He knows the walls will build back up as soon as he’s satisfied. “Tell me exactly where it feels best,” he says, biting my thigh.
Lesser men assume they know exactly how to get a woman off. Most don’t know how. Most are not willing to do the work. And most women are afraid to tell a man exactly where to flick, where to press, where to suck. Hunter won’t let his fragile ego get in the way of getting me off.
“No.” I sigh.
“How often do you get off from sex?” he asks, going up on his elbows.
“What? Why are you asking me these questions?” I close my eyes, grip the sheets. I’m pulsing. And the urge to cry is just below the surface.
“I think this is exactly the time to be asking these questions. I want this whole damn cabin to hear you.”
“I’m not loud,” I lie again.
“Okay.” He moves closer, one long swipe from between my ass cheeks, past my clit.