Morning light did what morning light always does — made everything harder to hide from. I woke in his sheets with his arm around me and the deal sitting on my chest like a stone. He was asleep — face slack, jaw unguarded, the cruelty stripped away by unconsciousness. He looked like the boy in the kitchen.
I didn't move for a long time. Then I got up. Showered. Put on yesterday's clothes and stood in the suite's living room with wet hair and a decision forming in my chest that I hadn't planned but couldn't stop.
He emerged twenty minutes later. Hair wrecked, eyes swollen, moving with the caution of a man navigating a hangover and the memory of what he'd done the night before. He stopped when he saw me. The space between us filled with everything we hadn't said — the bench, the confession, the way he'd held still and said tell me when.
"Hi," he said carefully. The word hung between us like a hand extended across a canyon.
"Sit down." I pointed at the couch. "I'm going to teach you something." Whatever he'd expected from the morning after — awkwardness, regret, the silent retreat of two people pretending the night hadn't happened — this wasn't it. He sat. I pulled the desk chair across from him and set a blank hotel notepad on the coffee table with a pen beside it.
"What is this?" He looked at the notepad with the expression of a man who'd woken up expecting coffee and been handed a grenade.
"This is you learning to write." I crossed my arms. "Not my words. Yours." His face closed — the openness from last night shuttered behind a wall so fast I could hear it lock. "I can't write, Calloway. That's the whole point. That's been the point for six years."
"You told a duck your entire life story last night." I leaned forward. "Your mother's hands. The kitchens. The newspaper in your shoes. The notebook. You sat on a bench and turned your life into a story with a beginning and a middle and a punchline. That's writing, Aiden. You just didn't have a pen."
He stared at the notepad like it was a live grenade. His jaw was working and I could see the war behind his eyes — the part that wanted to reach for it fighting the part that had spent six years building an identity around the belief that he couldn't.
"Pick up the pen." I said it the way I'd said back up in the corridor — steady, no room for negotiation.
"No." He said it the way he said everything that scared him — flat, final, a door slamming shut before anyone could see what was behind it.
"Pick up the pen or I'm walking out that door and taking my cute little poems with me." Something flickered in his face — not anger, not amusement. Fear. The particular terror of a man being asked to do the one thing he's convinced will prove he's nothing. He picked up the pen.
"Write about the duck," I said. "Write about Ron." He looked at me like I'd suggested he write about his own autopsy.
"I'm not writing about a duck." He said it with the same wounded dignity Ron would have appreciated. "You named him," I said. "You confided in him. You told him things you've never told another human being. Write about what it felt like to sit on that bench and say the truth out loud for the first time. Not pretty. Not polished. Just honest."
He put the pen to the pad. Wrote a word. Crossed it out. Wrote another. Crossed that out too. His hand was shaking — not the hangover shake but the deeper one, the tremor of a man reaching for something he'd convinced himself didn't exist inside him.
"It's not —" He pushed the pad away. "It's nothing. It's garbage." I pulled it back. Read what he'd written — three lines, scratched and crossed out and rewritten. Rough. Ragged. But underneath the mess, something was there. A line about silence being louder than a stadium. A half-finished thought about a man-made lake reflecting a man-made life.
"This isn't garbage." I set the pad in front of him. "This is a first draft. Every first draft is garbage. The difference between a writer and everyone else is that a writer keeps going." He looked at me. The fear was still there but it had company — a flicker of something fragile and dangerous. Hope.
He picked up the pen. Wrote. Crossed out. Wrote again. I sat across from him and didn't speak and didn't breathe too loudly because what was happening on that notepad was a man teaching himself to exist without stolen words, and the slightest pressure could collapse it.
Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Scratching pen on paper, occasional curses, pages torn off and crumpled and thrown at the floor. Then he stopped. Read what he had. His face did something I'd never seen — a sequence of expressions so fast they blurred. Disbelief. Fear. And then something that looked like the first breath after drowning.
He reached for the guitar leaning against the wall. His left hand found a chord — instinct, muscle memory — and he started fitting words to melody. His words. His chords. The fragments finding a home inside the music, rough-edged and imperfect and alive in a way his polished recordings never were.
I sat in the desk chair with my arms crossed and my throat tight and watched Aiden Blackwell write a song that belonged to him for the first time in six years.
It wasn't good. Not yet. The lyrics stumbled in places, reached too far in others. But the bones were there — a song about silence and fake lakes and living inside someone else's voice — and the bones were his, grown from his own marrow, and the sound of them made something crack open in my chest that I couldn't close.
He looked up at me. Eyes wet. Jaw tight. The pen still in his hand like he'd forgotten he was holding it.
"It's not finished," he said, and his voice was wrecked in a way that had nothing to do with the hangover. "Nothing ever is." I stood up. Walked to the couch. Sat beside him close enough that our shoulders touched. "Play it again."
He played it. I listened. And then — without planning it — I opened my mouth and found the harmony. His melody, his words, my voice weaving underneath, finding the spaces between his notes. Not writing for him. Not replacing him. Two instruments playing the same song from different sides.
He stopped playing. Stared at me. "Your voice," he said. "Allison, your voice is —" He set the guitar down. Picked it up again. "Let's write this as a duet. Your harmony, my melody. A real collaboration. Not me stealing from you — us building something together."
I said yes. The word came out easy and clean and it was the most honest thing I'd said since the tour started.
And underneath the yes, the calculation I couldn't ignore. Teaching him to write means he won't need your lyrics. You're sabotaging the deal with Otis. The singing career he promised — the Adrian Voss session, the connections — might disappear. You are dismantling the only leverage you have because a man picked up a pen and you couldn't stand to watch him live without his own words for one more day.
He played the chord progression again. I found the harmony. And somewhere between the first note and the last, I made my choice — not the deal, not the leverage, not the cage Otis built. The key. The man holding the guitar and the song that belonged to both of us and the terrifying certainty that some things matter more than survival.
We played it three more times. Each time his voice got steadier and mine got braver and the deal got quieter and by the fourth time through, I'd forgotten it entirely. That was the most dangerous thing of all.