Yes. She had said that. And then she had taken it back. She had said that it was just because of the sex. And he’d been more than willing to believe it because hearing her say that she loved him had done things to him. Terrible, intense things that made him feel like his chest was being cut into.
He needed to find the volume. Or a sledgehammer.
Before the next part.
But then it was the next part, and it was in his head, his heart, his soul.
You took the clothes off my body
I gave you my yes and I love you
You took the skin off my bones
You gave me nothing at all
I prayed for our sin to disappear
But I didn’t mean for it to end in blood
He found the speaker right then. He found it just a lyric too late. He crouched down, reaching for the knob on the speaker behind the desk. And as he did, he heard the door to the lobby open. He hit the off button on the speaker just as the next part of the song started.
He couldn’t explain the way it made him feel.
He could remember where he was the first time he heard it. The first time he’d heard his ex-girlfriend—was she his ex-girlfriend? He’d never had a girlfriend in his life. And they weren’t supposed to be that, but he’d also never ended a physical relationship with someone and felt like their connection was still there. And yet.
The simple truth was, he’d gotten in deeper with her than he ever had been with anyone else. Much deeper than he’d intended to. And he wasn’t going to say he’d covered himself in glory at the end of all things. But she had seemed to accept it. He’d been up-front with her, from the beginning, about what they were, about what they could be.
So imagine his surprise the first time he’d heard that song. Documenting everything. The most personal, deep feelings he’d ever had in his whole life turned into a sing-along.
Even if no one else had ever heard it, it would have felt too raw and personal for him to listen to.
But people had heard it. So many people.
To make matters worse, her fame and his own niche notoriety in certain circles had made it so there were theories out there on the internet about who the song was about.
Her fans were nuts. They spent all day weaving together theories about what every lyric meant. And he knew that because he’d googled it, because he’d wanted to know what the lyrics meant too.
Dammit.
The terrible thing was, her fans made points. Points he didn’t like, but points nonetheless.
That would have been bad enough. But it didn’t stop there.
Strangers sometimes accosted him on the street and asked him how dare he break Tansey Martin’s heart? Country music’s sweetheart. Barrel-racer-turned-overnight-singing-sensation.
She was beautiful and beloved, and he was the expertly cast villain in her narrative. Set to music, which meant that people could hum his humiliation as a catchy tune.
He could remember clearly the way that she had looked up at him. The way that she had looked up at him when he’d said all those things. The awful sort of things that he’d warned her he would say. As everything had broken apart inside of him, the walls that he had erected around himself beginning to crumble, she had looked up at him, and she had said that he was right.
That he was right, and they shouldn’t be together. That he was right and they should forget everything.
Yeah. He knew that. Because he knew his limitations. And then... And then four months later, completely and totally blindsided by this song. And he’d known it was about them. That it was their story.
It was like she had crawled beneath his skin with those song lyrics. Like she had described his own pain. Like she’d dug into his soul and carved clear arrows to his own motives. To things he’d denied even to himself.
He’d pretended that he wasn’t hanging on to her scarf for any particular reason, and she had immortalized it in song and made it impossible for him to pretend.
But it was the pregnancy scare.
That was what destroyed him the most, because it shone a light on the way that he had fallen apart most profoundly.
The worst, cruelest way he’d failed her.
When something like that happened, you had to take a good look at yourself. Even though there hadn’t been a baby in the end, it had been a come-to-Jesus moment. A look-hard-at-the-man-he’d-become moment.
He didn’t like that man.
It was one reason he’d changed everything. One reason he’d started...working. Really working. Not just on his father’s land, not just on being rodeo champion yet again. But building something that was entirely his.
And he couldn’t let that song into his head. Not now. Because it was the only thing that could get beneath his skin, just like she was the only thing that ever could.
He was pretty good at staying stoic in the face of difficult things.
It wasn’t the fans yelling at him. That was actually fine. That made him mad. Anger, he had found, was fantastic fuel.
It was the pain.
The pain he wasn’t supposed to be able to feel anymore. The pain that ambushed him when he didn’t expect it. When he was alone. The pain that took him right back to the place that he’d been when he was a boy, a place he couldn’t even think about, much less fully remember or relive.
