CeCe

Nothing in my life has ever felt as good as Holden’s kiss. Not the top of my first roller coaster ride, right before the plunge. Or the first time I performed one of my own songs in front of a crowd. Not even the day my Uncle Dobie said he thought I had a future in country music.

At first, Holden is gentle, kissing me like he’s not sure where the line is. I’m the one who deepens it. I loop my arms around his neck and pull him closer, opening my mouth beneath his and inviting him in. He accepts. I’ve never been kissed like this. Thoroughly. Completely. Expertly.

And that’s what it feels like. As if Holden knows exactly how to coax, persuade, entice. A couple minutes of this, and my mind is blanked of everything but him. I explore the ripples of abs. His breathing quickens, and I trace the other side.

He runs his hands down my back and under my bottom to anchor me up against him, as if he needs me to know what I’m doing to him. Knowing I’m not ready for what I’ve so clearly asked him for, I pull away and study his far too good-looking face, my chest feeling as if I’ve just run a marathon.

“I’m sorry, Holden,” I say.

He smooths my hair back from my face. “If this ever happens between us, it has to be for the right reasons.”

Sanity begins to wash over me in a wave. And along with it, a tide of mortification. “Thank you.”

He laughs. “Thank you?”

“For taking my mind off Hank Junior for a few minutes.”

“It was entirely my pleasure. Should I feel used?”

“Maybe a little.”

“It’s not so bad, being used by you.”

I smile, then just as quickly feel the tears well back up and spill down my cheeks.

Holden physically slides me to the middle of the seat and climbs in, shutting the door. He hooks an arm around me and tucks me into the curve of his shoulder. “He’s going to be all right,” he says. “We can wait here until someone comes to open up.”

“You don’t have to stay with me.”

“I want to.”

“Why?” I ask, my voice muffled against his shirt.

Holden glances out the window. “We had a dog when I was growing up. A yellow Lab named Lucy.”

He’s silent for a bit, and I say, “Yeah?”

“Our yard was fenced, but some of the kids in the neighborhood unlatched the gate one day when we weren’t home. She got out, and that night after we came back, we looked everywhere. The next morning, my mom called the pound to make sure she wasn’t there, and they said she wasn’t. We put up flyers and kept looking for days. Every day my mom called and gave them her description again. They kept telling her she wasn’t there.”

My stomach drops, and I’m not sure I want to hear the rest of this. But I wait, unable to tell him that.

“Someone my dad knew called and said he’d just heard we were missing our dog. He had seen a yellow Lab at the pound when he and his family went down to adopt a puppy.”

I want to say something. I can’t because it feels like my voice is locked up inside me.

“My mom and dad and I jumped in the car and drove to the pound as fast as we could. Mom showed a woman at the front desk Lucy’s picture, and just the look on her face made me run out of the place.”

“Oh, Holden.”

“We’d been calling for days, and they said she wasn’t there.”

I hear the bitterness behind the words, and I can barely bring myself to ask, “Did they–”

“The woman said they’d held her for the required period of time, but when the kennels became full–”

I reach up and touch my fingers to his lips. Tears run down my face, and I’m not surprised to see that the same is true for Holden. I lean in and kiss each of them away, my heart feeling as if it has splintered into a thousand pieces.

We sit silent for what feels like a long time, me absorbing, Holden reliving, I guess.

And then he finally says, “When I think about someone leading her to some room and taking her life while she’s wondering where we are. . .while we’re looking for her–”

A sob rises up out of me, this image of Lucy more than I can manage right now. Sorrow for her and renewed fear for Hank Junior swallow me.

Holden pulls me closer, and while I know I should be comforting him, he’s the one comforting me. “So that’s why I want to wait here with you,” he says.

I’ve barely known Holden for any time at all. It feels like I’ve known him forever.

♪

WE’RE QUIET FOR the next hour or so, arms locked around one another, like we both need this mutual infusion of empathy and understanding.

The truck’s digital clock says 4:07 when Holden reaches beneath the seat and pulls out a notebook. I sit up and watch him remove a pencil from the spiral binding.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Just a thought for a lyric.”

He writes a line on the blank page.

So I got a few things I need to say

He’s still for a bit before writing:

Never thought my life would turn out this way

His pencil is quiet again. This time several minutes pass before he writes down:

Do you ever think about the choice you made

And what those who loved her have had to pay

Then he adds:

Chorus

What you took from me

You can’t give back

I wait for the next line, trying to guess what it might be. Several minutes pass before he writes:

You took the sun

You took the stars

You took the ground beneath my feet

The words are out before I realize I’ve said them. “You even took the air I breathe.”

Holden looks at me and nods. He writes it down.

You even took the air I breathe

And then adds:

Everything, that’s what you took from me

“For Lucy,” I say.

“I don’t know what else it will end up being. I never do at this point.”

The sun has started to lighten the horizon behind the pound building. I feel a settling sense of peace that it’s all gonna be okay. That very soon, I’ll have Hank Junior back, that his fate will be different from Lucy’s. Holden’s sweet Lucy.

Sitting here with him as he writes on his rumpled pad, I have no way of knowing that in a few months, one of Nashville’s most well-known artists will hear Thomas singing Holden’s song, the one he started in this truck with me, at a club downtown. Or that in a year and a half, that same artist, whose wife was killed by a drunk driver, will release it, and the song will hit number one.

Looking at him now, the intensity on his good-looking face, my heart feels like it’s becoming aware for the very first time of what it was made to feel. It’s both terrifying and wonderful all at once.

He has a girlfriend. I know this, but my heart isn’t listening. Just like it hasn’t listened to all the reasons why turning my dreams over to Nashville might not have been the safest route for me to take.

Some things, our hearts don’t let us have a say in. For me, music is one. And right here, right now, I believe Holden Ashford might be the other.

Someone once said every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. The trick then has to be letting go of the safe, the known and reaching out for what we can’t yet see.

I’m ready to reach.

I really am.

♪