TWO
Fallon
A pile driver found its way inside my chest, cleaving my heart in fucking two as I walked out of the dusty parking lot, eyes lost in the darkness far out ahead of me. The girl of my dreams waitin’ next to my truck behind me.
I slugged another mouthful of the hot whiskey, the fire burnin’ down my throat and leavin’ a trail of raw fucking pain, just like Augusta Belle had done.
Where in the fuck had she been?
My brain tried to wrap itself around the pain of her leavin’, her comin’ back, fucking with my life in ways I didn’t understand.
I kicked at a rock, watching it tumble over the gray asphalt before I veered left, deciding I wanted to be off this road if Augusta Belle took a mind to hop into my truck and chase me down. I didn’t really care if she drove it, though I’d never let anyone else, but the idea of her sittin’ behind that big wheel made a half smile turn my lips.
Augusta Belle Branson was back, after all these years. I’ll be damned.
And here I was running away from her because I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to do that moment justice. I’d turned her pretty smile over in my head so many times, remembered the way she used to lock her fingers with mine whenever we watched a movie. She wasn’t just most of my good memories—she was all of them. Every other part of my past was tainted with pain. But not her. She didn’t know it then, but she kept me breathing all those nights when it felt like the end of the world was just around the corner.
Blades of stubborn wheatgrass whipped against the rough denim of my jeans as I lifted the bottle over my head, swallowing deep as the lovely liquid burned away the pain of seeing her face again. The sweet contours even prettier than I remembered, full lips that’d taunted me so many nights begging for a taste. Whiskey-laced irises haunting my dreams.
I cussed when my boots hit mud, the soft sound of the sucking like a playlist for how this entire night had gone. Water lapping a shoreline lifted my gaze to a small lake, dark shadows playing off moonlight. The thud of my back hitting the old wooden bench was deaf on my ears as Augusta Belle danced around my thoughts, twisting with a whiskey bottle, fogging my head until the only thing I could do was take another drink.
The first night I ever tasted what would soon become my constant companion, she was lifting a half-empty bottle to my lips, urging me to taste.
“It won’t hurt,” she promised, “too much.” Her eyes glinted in the darkness of her upstairs bedroom, her breath already heavy with the scent of rebellion.
“Your mom would never let me in this house again if she found us both drunk,” I warned, always the cautious one between us.
“She’d never let you see me again if she found you up here in my room.” That defiant twinkle again. If I was sure of anything else, it was that this girl was born to be a rebel. “Scared?”
Hell yes, I’d been scared then, but not of the liquid in that bottle. Scared of the hellfire and brimstone that was her.
I groaned, the memory fading as fast as it’d come.
What in the fuck was Augusta Belle doing back in my life, walking up one day like a ghost? The very ghost that’d sheared my heart wide open and then found its way on to the radio for everyone to feel.
I groaned, throwing back the last of the amber whiskey and dropping the bottle at my feet.
Some fucking foresight that I hadn’t brought a backup bottle.
I’d also had the bitter taste of regret in my mouth about that single I’d signed off on with the music execs in Nashville.
I remembered the meeting only in chunks.
The bitter smell of the chain coffee shop. The green tie loosened at head-douchebag’s collar.
I’d hated both of them from the minute I’d sat down.
But I was a stupid kid with a broken heart and an aimless shuffle in my feet.
“Over a million views on YouTube, you’ve really accomplished something.” His eyes’d sliced up and down my haggard body. I hadn’t had a shower in a few days, singing dive bars all night for tips and then drinking my earnings away till dawn.
It’d only been luck that Augusta Belle had created the YouTube channel, after I’d dragged my feet for months, and uploaded a few of my songs. There were some with her singing backup off-screen, the warmth of her encouragement surrounding me as I strummed and sang my heart out in my bedroom.
And then she’d vanished.
Left me in the dust. For what, I still wasn’t sure. Coulda been dead in another river for all I knew.
Augusta Belle had been gone a week when I uploaded the last song.
The song that flayed my heart open.
The song I still couldn’t sing onstage without something heavy clawing at my throat.
Never would have guessed her coming back could be any more painful than her leavin’, but so it was.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that the channel she’d made for me was the very thing that launched the name Fallon Gentry into headlines.
I was so fucking innocent, using my real name, but I don’t think either one of us thought that humble little channel would get any attention.
But that was all in the past. I’d called my sister the day I crossed the Nashville city limits all those years ago, given her the password and insisted she shut down the account.
The videos still floated around. I had no control over them, but I did have some sort of control of my public persona. It didn’t take long before the writing was on the wall for me. I didn’t want a damn thing to do with anything in the public eye.
Making my music my business had been the gravest mistake of my life. Suddenly the business overshadowed all else, and I’d lost the very thing that’d brought me there in the first place.
Her.
It’d been a few years and a few thousand miles since then, and I was sure I’d seen the darkest corner of every country-rock bar south of the Mason-Dixon. Singing on a lonely stage, locals in every city all the same—tolerate the music, stay for the booze.
My life was simple.
Well, it had been.
Until Augusta Belle.
How this woman had the ability to throw me way the fuck off-kilter whenever I was in her orbit still amazed and annoyed me.
I pushed a rough hand over my face, multiple months’ worth of unkempt beard making me laugh out loud.
Augusta Belle hadn’t seen me with a beard, don’t even think I’d been able to grow one back then, but here I was looking all lumberjacked.
The first time we’d met, I’d been scrawny, legs not bigger than twigs and biceps a fraction of the size I had now. I’d grown big, scary, a little wild-looking, all on account of keepin’ the TMZ bitches off my back. Sellin’ a picture wasn’t much good when the subject was about unrecognizable and flippin’ the bird.
They hadn’t bothered me once since I’d left Nashville. Thank fuck.
That was the last thing I needed to deal with right now.
Augusta Belle was back, for better or worse. The woman I’d written a #1 hit about was in possession of the keys to my truck, and maybe still my heart.
I kicked back on the bench, damp wood cradling my broken body as more memories of us washed over me like a tidal wave.
The first time I met her, she was fixin’ to throw herself off a bridge. How could I have thought that life after meeting Augusta Belle Branson would be anything but extraordinary ever again?