Day two started with a flask taped inside his guitar case. I found it during the morning check — a routine I'd built in four days at the villa and was now adapting to a thirty-foot metal box on wheels.
Aiden was in the back lounge pretending to tune his guitar while Jude slept and Tommy read a paperback with his feet on the dash. I unzipped the case, lifted the neck rest, and there it was. Silver, scratched, tucked against the velvet lining like it belonged there.
I held it up. Aiden looked at it, then at me, then back at his guitar. "Sentimental value."
"Sentimental." I unscrewed the cap. Whiskey. The smell hit my nose and his jaw tightened — not anger, something underneath it, something involuntary. I poured it into the bus sink while he watched. The amber ran down the drain in a thin stream and his eyes followed it the way a man watches money burn.
"That was a gift from a fan in Nashville," he said, watching the last drops circle the drain.
"Write them a thank-you card." I dropped the empty flask on the counter. "From both of us."
That set the tone. I found vodka behind the ventilation grate above the bathroom — he'd removed the screws and replaced them loosely, which meant he'd planned this before we left.
Whiskey in the equipment box under a tangle of cables. Two beers taped inside a speaker cabinet with gaffer tape, the kind of hiding spot that spoke to years of practice and the particular creativity of a man whose brain worked overtime when it came to self-destruction.
Each time I held the bottle up like evidence. Each time he watched me pour it out with the same expression — annoyance on top, and underneath it something that looked, if I stared long enough, like relief. Like a man watching someone disarm a bomb he'd built but couldn't stop himself from arming.
"You're thorough," he said after the speaker cabinet discovery. He was leaning in the galley doorway, arms crossed, that half-smile aimed at me like a weapon he'd forgotten to load.
"You're predictable." I lined the empty bottles on the counter. "Behind appliances, inside equipment, taped to surfaces. You hide them the same way every time."
"Maybe I want you to find them." He said it light but his eyes weren't light. They were doing the thing they'd started doing since the jacuzzi — tracking my face with a focus that felt less like performance and more like someone trying to memorize a map.
"Maybe you do," I said. I held his gaze long enough to watch something shift behind it, then turned and swept the empties into a trash bag. His eyes stayed on my back. I could feel them there like sunlight through a window.
We stopped for gas in the Mojave — a two-pump station surrounded by sand and heat shimmer and a sky so blue it looked manufactured. The crew scattered — bathroom, cigarettes, a vending machine that looked older than the bus. I leaned against Gracie's sun-hot side panel in whatever shade the overhang offered and opened my phone.
The lyrics came easier than they should have. Something about masks, about wearing a face so long you forget the one underneath. I typed fast, the way I used to write in the notebook — urgent, breathless, words tumbling out before my brain could censor them.
This was the deal. Otis's deal. Write him songs, get a singing career. Simple transaction. Except nothing about the words felt transactional. They came from the place I'd watched him read my notebook last night — that stripped, devotional stillness, his thumb against the page like a prayer. I was writing about him and I was writing for him and the line between the two was getting thinner every hour.
A shadow fell across my screen. I knew before I looked up — knew from the heat that wasn't the desert, from the way my pulse kicked before my brain gave permission.
Aiden. Shirtless because he'd changed on the bus and apparently closing the door was beneath him. Jeans slung low on his hips, tattoos in full sun, the lines of his stomach catching light in ways that should require a permit. He leaned against the bus beside me, close enough that I could see the fine hair on his forearms and the scar on his collarbone I hadn't noticed before.
"What are you writing?" He tilted his head to read my screen.
I angled the phone away. My throat was dry and it had nothing to do with the desert. "Nothing."
"Didn't look like nothing." He reached for the phone — easy, playful, the way he'd reached for it in the villa kitchen — and I pulled it against my chest. Our eyes met. The gesture was too familiar. Both of us knew where it echoed.
His hand dropped. The playfulness dimmed into something more careful. "I saw a few lines. They were good, Calloway." A beat. "Didn't know the help could write."
The irony sat in my chest like a lit match. I was writing FOR him — every word on that screen would end up in his voice, on his stage, sung to crowds who'd never know my name was behind them. And he was standing here calling me the help while complimenting the product he didn't know he'd already purchased.
"Then you weren't paying attention," I said. My voice was steady. My hands were not.
He studied me. That sideways look, head tilted, the desert wind pushing his hair across his forehead. "You’re right." He said it quiet enough that I almost missed it under the sound of the gas pump clicking off.
Jude's voice broke the moment — "Bus in five, lovebirds!" — from across the lot, and Aiden pushed off the panel and walked away without looking back. I stared at my phone screen. The lyrics blurred. I saved the draft and pocketed it and told myself the tremor in my fingers was dehydration.
Soundcheck was at three. The venue seated twenty thousand, all empty except for crew running cables and testing lights. I stood in the wings with a clipboard I didn't need, watching the band work through the setlist. Tommy's bass hummed through the concrete floor. Jude's drums rattled my ribs. And Aiden — Aiden stepped up to the mic and opened his mouth and the empty arena filled with a voice that made the air feel heavier.
They played "Threadbare." My song. The one I wrote at fifteen about a girl made of thread who keeps unraveling, the same one he'd been murmuring last night in the dark with my notebook open in his hands. He sang it now with his eyes closed, one hand gripping the mic stand, and I stood in the wings feeling my own words vibrate through twenty thousand empty seats and back into my chest.
Mid-chorus, his eyes opened. Found mine. Held them for four bars — too long, long enough for Jude to glance offstage and notice, long enough for the sound engineer to look up from the board. He wasn't performing. He was singing my words directly at me, the way you'd read a letter to the person who wrote it, and the look on his face was the same one I'd seen last night in the back lounge. Stripped. Devotional. The face of a man who lived inside stolen words and couldn't find his way out.
I felt it in places I wasn't going to think about. Felt the deal in my chest and his voice in my stomach and the impossible math of hating a man who sang my soul back to me with more conviction than I'd ever been brave enough to feel.
The song ended. He looked away. I wrote three more lines on my phone before the next track started, standing in the wings of a stage I was secretly building for him, my words in his mouth and his voice in my blood and neither of us saying the only thing that mattered.