Jude invented a card game on Hollow Saints' first tour and refused to explain the rules to anyone who hadn't been on the bus longer than forty-eight hours. I'd now been on for fifty-two, so he dealt me in between Barstow and the Nevada border while Tommy kept score on a napkin with handwriting so neat it looked typeset.
"Fours are wild, queens cancel kings, and if you play a seven you have to name a country that starts with the same letter as the person to your left."
I stared at him. "That's not a card game. That's a hostage situation." Tommy said "She's catching on" without looking up.
The crew piled in and within minutes the galley was a wall of noise — elbows and laughter and arguments about whether S-countries included "South Korea." Jude played like a man possessed. Tommy played like a man who'd memorized every rule and was quietly letting everyone else lose. I played terribly and didn't care because for the first time since the tour started, the deal wasn't the loudest thing in my chest.
Aiden didn't join. He sat in the back lounge picking at a melody that went nowhere, starting and stopping like a car that wouldn't turn over. The notebook was nowhere visible but I knew it was close — tucked in his bag, or under the couch cushion. The shape of it had started showing up everywhere, a rectangular ghost in every space he occupied.
"Your boy's brooding," Jude said, following my gaze. "Someone should check on him." I kept my eyes on my cards. "He's not my boy."
"Right. And I'm not devastatingly handsome." He laid down a queen and took the round. "Go talk to him. He gets worse when he marinates."
I left the game and walked to the back lounge. Aiden looked up and held up the piece of paper I'd slid under the bus bathroom door that morning. My handwriting. His confusion.
"What is this, Calloway?" He studied me like a locked door. "Notebook Girl is voluntarily handing me her diary now? Last week you accused me of building an empire on stolen lyrics and now you're sliding them under my door like love notes." His mouth curved. "Which is it — am I a thief or a charity case?"
My stomach tightened. "I heard you struggling with that melody all morning. Thought fresh material might help."
"Fresh material. So generous." He held the page between two fingers like something fragile and dangerous. He read it, and I watched his expression shift — sarcasm dimming, performance going quiet, something raw flickering underneath. He looked up. "It's diary stuff. Earnest. Fine for a journal but if you're writing for a stage — earnest doesn't sell."
I leaned against the doorframe. "You sang 'Threadbare' last night with your eyes closed and your hand on your heart. That song is nothing BUT earnest."
Something moved behind his face — the flicker of a man who'd been caught. He covered it. "That song had production. A hook that makes people feel smart for singing along. Your stuff is raw material."
"Then make it one." I crossed my arms. "That's supposedly what you do."
"What I do is perform. What you do is —" he looked at the page and his jaw worked "— something I can't explain and it makes me want to break things."
The confession landed sideways. He heard it leave his mouth and his eyes widened — barely, half a millimeter — and then the armor slammed back down.
"It's diary stuff," he repeated, but the edge was gone. He folded the page and put it in his back pocket, which was the opposite of throwing it away, and I filed that detail in the place where I kept every contradiction Aiden Blackwell handed me.
The banter followed us into a small-town diner thirty miles from Nevada — cracked vinyl booths, a jukebox playing nothing but country, a waitress who called everyone "sugar." I ended up across from Aiden with Jude beside me and Tommy against the window, and the proximity was a problem because the booth was narrow and Aiden's knees kept touching mine under the table and every contact sent a jolt up my thigh that I refused to acknowledge.
He ordered a burger. I ordered fries. He ate half his burger, then reached across the table and took three fries off my plate without asking.
"Those are mine." I slapped his hand. He grinned — the real one, the one that cracked his face open and made him look seventeen — and took another fry. "You'll live, Calloway. Yours taste better anyway." He chewed slowly, watching me. "Everything tastes better when it's stolen."
The word sat in the air between us. He heard it. I heard it. Neither of us touched it.
Jude looked between us with the expression of a man watching a nature documentary. "You two fight like an old married couple, you know that?"
The table went quiet. The jukebox switched tracks. Aiden's knee was still against mine and neither of us moved it. Tommy studied his water glass with an intensity that suggested he wished he were anywhere else. Jude looked at me, then at Aiden, then back at me, and his grin stretched wider. "I'm just saying."
"Don't just say," Aiden said, but his voice was soft and his knee pressed a fraction harder against mine and I stared at my fries like they contained the secret to surviving this tour with my sanity intact.
The bus rolled on. Nevada opened up outside the windows — flat, gold, endless, the distant shimmer of Vegas rising out of the desert like a mirage deciding to become real. The crew dozed. Jude put on headphones. Tommy read. And I found the last bottle.
It was under the back seat — a full pint of bourbon, not hidden well, almost left there on purpose. I didn't hold it up this time. Didn't pour it in the sink with an audience. Instead I walked to the front of the bus where Aiden was sitting alone on the steps of the open door, feet on the gravel of a rest stop, staring at the neon glow bleeding across the horizon.
I sat beside him and held up the bottle. "Last one?"
A long silence. His eyes stayed on the distance. "Last one." The word came out tired, not defiant. I turned the bottle in my hands. "Why do you hide them if you know I'll find them?"
He didn't look at me. The wind pushed his hair across his forehead and I watched his throat move as he swallowed something that wasn't liquid.
"Because the part of me that hides them is louder than the part that wants to stop." He said it flat and steady, the way you say something you've known for a long time but never put into words. "I hide them because if they're there, I still have the option. And having the option is the only thing that makes me feel like I'm choosing to be sober instead of being forced into it."
The most honest thing he'd said since I'd met him. No performance, no armor. Just a man on the steps of a bus, telling the truth to the person whose job it was to take away the thing he was describing.
I unscrewed the cap and poured the bourbon into the dirt. It soaked in fast — the desert swallowing it like it had never existed. He watched it disappear and something in his shoulders released.
The bus rolled into Vegas at sunset, the sky on fire behind the strip, and I sat in my bunk thinking about what he'd said. The part that hides them is louder than the part that wants to stop. I knew that arithmetic. I'd been doing my own version of it for weeks — the part of me that wrote his songs per Otis's deal louder than the part that wanted to tell him the truth.
We were both hiding bottles. His just had labels on them.