Page 4 of First Moon

Since then, plenty of folks tried to shame me out of a lot of things, including following my gut. But I knew now that no one understood what I wanted or needed better than myself. Heaven knows it was a long enough road to accepting myself as I am. But once I arrived, everything fell into place.

That said, every once in a while, like now, I felt the old insecurity creeping up the back of my neck, and suddenly I’m eight years old again, walking into the room for slow kids, holding tight to my Barbie lunchbox.

Across the room, Madeleine caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod. She probably knew what I was thinking, just like I knew her. Knox hurt her every time he attacked what she did for Jack and his band. If he knew the times she’d come over crying after one of the run-ins, he might treat her a little better. I had half a mind to tell him so. Not now, obviously. Now we needed to record a hit song.

In a small booth. With Jack Wilder and his muscles and his fantastic smelling neck and that hair that kind of dipped over his forehead in a manner much too sexy. Currently, he seemed to be staring at me. I couldn’t tell if he was taking my clothes off in his imagination or planning his escape. It could go either way, really.

Knox, on the other hand, was looking at me with a note of approval in his eyes. Despite all the times he’d hurt my friend, I couldn’t help but respect him. He was an artist, through and through. The real thing is what my Daddy would probably say about him. A man who had fought his way out of poverty and into this room. If he only knew how much he had in common with Madeleine.

“Right.” Rhett clapped his hands together, sharp, and the spell broke. “We’ve got a studio booked and a song to cut. Roman can wait till after lunch. Let’s put these two to work.”

These two. Me and Jack Wilder. My stomach did the swooping thing again.

I walked through a heavy door into the live room where the actual music got made. The live room was big, with high ceilings and hardwood floors, the walls covered in panels of dark foam and patterned wood that soaked up sound instead of bouncing it back. The second the door shut behind me, the room went quiet, like cotton in your ears. No echo at all. My footsteps didn't make a sound on the rug.

Microphones stood everywhere on tall black stands, each one angled toward an instrument. Off to one side sat Grant's drum kit, boxed in on three sides by waist-high padded panels on wheels—gobos, they called them—there to keep the boom of the drums from leaking into everybody else's microphones. Guitars rested in their stands beside a couple of amplifiers, and the big black piano sat along the far wall. Cables ran everywhere, taped down to the floor in fat silver strips.

A woman I hadn’t met yet sat half inside the little vocal booth, fussing with a mic cable. She had dark, soulful eyes and a long silver braid that hung down her back. “Hey, doll, I’m Marisol. I run the board for Hutch.” She tapped the page on the stand. “Chart’s right here if you want it.”

I glanced at the sheet. A chart, in a Nashville studio, isn't sheet music—not a fistful of notes climbing up and down the staff like we all learned in grade school. It's the song's road map. The chords come out as plain numbers instead of letters—ones and fours and fives marching down the page. Thus, the very same sheet works no matter what key a body decides to sing in. Sections stack up in order, verse and chorus and bridge, with just enough chicken scratch to keep a picker from getting lost. There were a few marks for the rhythm, where the harmony slides in, how many times you go around at the end. Every player in town could read one as easy as their own native tongue. A good session singer can glance at one cold and nail a song on the first pass, never having heard it in his or her life.

Most of us propped one on the stand, even with a song we knew by heart, just so we wouldn’t blank on a line with the tape rolling. Not me.

“I’ve got it,” I said to Marisol. A touch too quick.

I never let on how hard the written word came to me. I didn't want a soul knowing I was dyslexic or that I'd spent my whole life faking my way past a page. Only my family knew the truth of it. Letters never would hold still. They slid and swapped and turned themselves backward the second I looked away. And, for me, music on paper was the cruelest of all. The one thing I loved more than anything in life had eluded me as much as words on a page always had. Music had been designed into its own whole language in a code my eyes refused to follow. Notes crawled up and down those lines like ants, chords hiding behind numbers that would stay put. So I'd learned the only way left to me. By ear. By heart. Plus, this song I knew better than any chart could've taught me, because I'd helped write it. “Finally Home” already lived in me, every note, beating right alongside my own pulse.

“Good girl.” Marisol patted the stool. “Then let’s go make Hutch look smart.”

Hutch’s voice came warm over the talkback from the control room, where he sat behind the glass with his hands laced over his round belly. “Y’all good? Jack, get on in there with her.”

Rhett entered the booth with his phone in hand, asking me if it was okay to film us while we recorded. “I have a feeling it might come in handy for marketing purposes.”

Jack came in behind him. “But only if you feel comfortable.”

“Sure, it’s fine with me. I probably should’ve done up my face,” I said.

You don’t need any paint on that face,” Jack said.

“Well, thank you kindly.” I made a little curtsy, feeling pleased. Very much so.

“Good stuff,” Rhett said as he placed his phone on one of those portable tripods. “I’m hitting record, so don’t say anything embarrassing.”

“I’ll try my best,” I said, laughing.

And then it was just the two of us, in a room the size of a closet, with two mics on tall stands, each behind a round mesh pop filter, angled so close that Jack and I stood barely two feet apart, facing each other. My gaze traveled from his worn Lucchese boots, to his muscular thighs in jeans that fit him just right, and a close-fitting black T-shirt stretched against his broad chest that made my fingers ache to feel what was under it. He had a fermata tattooed on the inside of his wrist. In music, a fermata is a small curved arc with a dot underneath that tells the musician to hold that note or rest longer than its written value. To pause for as long as it feels right.

I wanted to know why he’d chosen it. I wanted to know about everything Jack Wilder.

Finally, I looked up at his face. I was just over five feet tall without heels, and I guessed him to be around six feet, so I had to crane my neck to look into his eyes. It was worth the strain. His eyes were the color of my mama’s sweet tea, but I suspected they might change depending on the light. No matter the color, they exuded warmth, but also curiosity and intelligence and, most of all, a steadiness. A man people counted on. A man who came through.

“Howdy,” I said softly. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Hey. Me too.” He reached down to tuck a lock of my hair that had loosened from my ponytail behind my ear, then he bent over to speak directly into my ear. “You’re about the prettiest thing I ever set eyes on.”

Before I could react, a tech came in to the booth and settled a pair of headphones over my ears. The outside world clicked off, and I entered the one that always welcomed me home.

Jack had his headphones on now too. He found my eyes across that little gap and held them, and, Lord, this near I could see the pulse at his neck.