He showed up at my door the next morning in a clean shirt and jeans and an expression that was trying very hard to look casual and failing spectacularly. His hair was wet from a shower and he smelled like hotel soap and he was holding two coffee cups like a man approaching a negotiation he wasn't sure he'd survive.
"Walk with me," he said. Not a question. Not quite a demand. Something in between — the voice of a man who'd spent the night figuring out how to ask for something without calling it what it was.
"Where?" I took one of the coffees. Still hot. He'd remembered I took mine black.
"Somewhere that isn't this hotel." He leaned against the doorframe. "Somewhere without a stage or a setlist or a minibar or a man in a suit pulling strings. Just — out. You and me and the part of this city that doesn't want anything from us."
I should have said no. The confession from last night was still fresh — I could see it in the careful way he held himself, the extra inch of distance between us, the way his eyes kept finding mine and then looking away like the looking cost him something.
We were bruised. We were navigating the aftermath of every secret being laid on the table and neither of us knew yet if the table could hold the weight.
I said yes. Because the coffee was good and the morning was bright and because the careful way he'd asked — not assuming, not performing, just offering — was a version of Aiden I wanted to see more of.
He took me to a Vegas tourists never see. Not the strip, not the casinos, not the neon grotesquerie of a city built on the promise that money could buy joy. He took me to the quiet parts — the edges, the margins, the places where the real city lived underneath the performance.
First: a rooftop bar that was closed on Mondays, twelve stories above the strip, accessible only because the owner owed Aiden a favor from a benefit show three years ago.
No crowd, no music, no bartender. Just two lawn chairs on a concrete roof with the entire city spread below us like a circuit board, the mountains beyond it bruised with morning shadow. He'd brought pastries from the hotel in a paper bag and we ate them sitting in lawn chairs with our feet up on the railing and powdered sugar on our fingers.
"When you were sixteen," he said, not looking at me, looking at the mountains. "What did you want to be?"
"A singer." The answer came out before I could dress it up or soften it. The oldest truth I owned — the one that lived underneath the barista and the keeper and the deal and the daughter watching her mother's spine give out.
"I wanted to stand on a stage and sing my own words and have people feel something. That was the whole dream. Simple and enormous and completely impossible for a girl whose mother couldn't afford a guitar."
He was quiet for a while. The strip hummed below us, already warming up for the day's performance. "A musician," he said finally. "Not because I thought I'd be good at it. Because music was the only thing that made me feel alive."
He turned one of the pastries over in his hand without eating it. "Everything else was newspaper in my shoes and someone else's kitchen and food I couldn't touch. But when I heard a song — a real one, the kind that makes your chest ache — for three minutes I wasn't the kid with the wet paper smell. I was just a person feeling something. I wanted to live inside that feeling forever."
Something shifted between us with those words. Not the dramatic shift of confessions and promises — something quieter, more fundamental. Two people who'd grown up in the same kind of want, who'd built different walls against the same wind, sitting on a rooftop acknowledging for the first time that the thing driving both of them had the same name.
Second: a restaurant three blocks off the strip, tucked behind a dry cleaner, no sign on the door. The chef came to the table — a small woman with scarred hands and sharp eyes who looked at Aiden and said "you again" with the affectionate contempt of someone who'd known him before the albums.
"Glad to see you too, Michelle." He grinned — not the stage grin, something younger and less defended. "And guess what — I'm not alone this time. This is Allison."
Michelle looked at me. Looked at him. Looked at me again with the slow appraising focus of a woman who'd been reading people across a kitchen counter for thirty years. "She's too pretty for you," she said to Aiden. Then to me: "What do you eat, honey? And don't let him order for you — he always picks the same thing and it's boring."
"Whatever you think is best," I said. She nodded like I'd passed a test and disappeared into the kitchen. Aiden watched her go with an expression I'd never seen on him — unguarded fondness, the face of a boy who'd been fed when he was hungry by a woman who'd never asked for anything in return.
The food was extraordinary — simple, unfussy, the kind that happens when someone cares more about flavor than presentation. He told me he'd first come here broke and pre-label, wandering in because it was the cheapest thing on the block. Michelle had fed him for free and told him his jacket was ugly.
"She's the only person in this city who's never asked me for anything," he said. "She just feeds me and insults my clothes." I meant it when I told him I liked her already.
Third: the desert. He drove a rental thirty minutes outside the city to an overlook where the lights dropped away and the sky opened up. Stars obscene in their abundance, the kind of sky you forget exists inside neon. We sat on the hood with our backs against the windshield and the engine ticking as it cooled.
"I need to ask you something," he said. His voice was different out here — quieter, stripped of the acoustic armor that every room and venue added to it. Just a man's voice in the dark.
"Ask." I pulled my jacket tighter against the desert cold and waited.
"The duet. The song we wrote together." He was looking at the sky. "Was any of it — did you write your part because of the deal, or because —"
"I wrote it because I wanted to." I cut him off because the question didn't deserve to finish. "The deal was Otis's pages under your door. The duet was mine. Every note. Every harmony. I wrote that because sitting across from you watching you find your own words for the first time was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I wanted to be part of it."
He was quiet. The stars were absurd — too many, too bright, the sky showing off like a city that didn't know when to stop. His hand found mine on the hood of the car. Fingers interlacing the way they had in his bed, except this time there was nothing between us but the night air and the truth.
"I'm going to fix this," he said. "What Otis did. What I did. All of it." His thumb traced a circle on my palm — slow, deliberate, the gesture of a man making a promise he intended to keep. "I don't know how yet. But I'm going to fix it."
I didn't say anything. I held his hand and looked at the stars and let the silence be enough. The confession had changed the air between us the way a storm changes a landscape — the old terrain was gone, replaced by something raw and open and new.
We weren't pretending anymore. We were two people sitting in the desert with the full weight of their history and the first fragile threads of something that might, if they were careful, become the thing neither of them had ever had. A future built on wreckage. Built on truth. Terrifying and real.