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And then the living room was dark, the lamp flickering off as Sienna’s fingers stalled. Natalie’s voice was swallowed up in a gasp, the cabin plunged into darkness.
Sienna’s phone lit up, and a bright light suddenly appeared as she turned on the flashlight, illuminating the room.
“Do you have any candles?” Sienna asked, keeping the light pointed towards the fireplace so she didn’t blind Natalie.
Natalie used the light on her own phone to gather up the four jar candles she’d purchased in the last few weeks, always struggling to find that balance between making her latest rental her home, but also knowing that she’d be leaving it soon and not wanting to make moving any more of a chore than it already was.
Natalie set them down on the coffee table and found the matchbox on the mantelpiece, lighting each one, hoping that the scents wouldn’t clash, although they all had an autumn fragrance of either pumpkin or apple cider with hints of vanilla.
She turned off the light on her phone and caught the time before she pocketed it. It was coming up to 10:00pm, and a part of her hoped that Sienna wouldn’t feel the need to leave, thinking she’d overstayed her welcome, because Natalie didn’t want this night to end.
It was like she was remembering parts of herself that she’d long forgotten existed. While she wrote new music, it was always tinged with the past and the way her career had imploded right before her eyes. The songs that filled her first three albums were the purist material she’d ever written, back when she had the naivety to believe that she could have it all.
“Will you tell me when you’re getting tired?” Sienna asked, her focus on the guitar in her lap, on tuning it again. When Natalie didn’t answer, Sienna lifted her gaze. “If you don’t tell me, I feel like we could still be sitting here at four in the morning,” she added with a hint of a smile.
“We might just be,” Natalie said, a smile breaking out across her own lips, a warmth radiating through her.
6
Sienna rolled over, away from the light peeking through her thin curtains. She reached for her phone, still half asleep. Her throat felt like sandpaper as she remembered all the singing she had done yesterday.
She nearly dropped her phone as she sat up in bed, her mind flashing back to last night and the reason she was only waking up a few minutes before noon.
Sienna’s heart hammered in her chest, and her thumbs flew across her phone. Yeah. There it was. Natalie Spencer’s name was in her contacts.
With trembling hands, she tossed her phone on the sheets, falling back against the soft fabric of the headboard, her eyes closing again as she tried to calm her nervous system down. She took a deep breath, her skin tingling.
Last night had really happened.
Sienna had that warm fuzzy feeling flowing through her, like when she woke up from that dream she occasionally had of singing on stage to thousands of people, and she just wanted to hold onto that sensation for a little longer, closing her eyes and willing that feeling to stay with her for another few minutes before it faded away.
But last night hadn’t been a dream.
The feeling of embarrassment still lingered. How had she not known what Natalie Spencer looked like? Why had she never Googled her at any point? See what she was to or find out if she was tour. And then Sienna would have known what had happened.
As shocking as last night was, getting to spend hours in the company of one of her favorite songwriters and singing those songs with her, the idea that Natalie Spencer was gay and that her relationship with another woman was what ended her career, that was truly shocking.
Sienna sucked in a breath as she slowly opened her eyes, knowing she should get out of bed and start her day even though it was technically the afternoon already, but she grabbed her phone instead, desperate to find out more about Natalie and Amelia Hart’s affair.
Sienna found newspaper articles and blog posts on entertainment news websites, but because all of the social media apps she used didn’t exist back then, there wasn’t much about them, just the occasional flashback, remember when, style post.
She paused on the picture that had apparently started it all. Natalie and Amelia on the red carpet together. Natalie looked amazing in a red dress, her dark hair sleek and straight, a few inches shorter than it was now. Amelia’s blond hair was pulled back in an updo, her blue eyes vibrant, her jawline chiseled. The black dress she wore hugged her slim figure.
A quick search told her that Natalie was forty-three now and that in those photos from the red carpet, she would have been twenty-five. While just about anyone would have said that Natalie was a beautiful woman, the Natalie that she’d met yesterday was so much more attractive, and Sienna couldn’t put her finger on why exactly.
Yes, Sienna knew she had a thing for older women, but it was more than that. Maybe, it was the casual way that Natalie had been dressed in khaki shorts and a simple black shirt, her hair falling in waves over her shoulders, such a contrast from the red carpet photos she was looking at.
Sienna couldn’t find any recent photos of Natalie. There was one article from three years ago that had several photos of Natalie walking on a busy street in a black winter coat, a cup of coffee in hand, anda scarf wrapped around her neck. The headline was clearly clickbait. Former Country Music Star Still Alone For Christmas.
Sienna felt sick as she flicked through the photos, not even bothering to read the article before she put her phone on the nightstand and swung her legs out from under the sheets.
If she ever wanted this career, she knew that would be part of it. At some point, there would be a headline that was less than flattering, but seeing those words written about Natalie churned her stomach. It must have been because that was the first time Sienna had ever really seen someone in the public eye as just a person at the end of the day and not a celebrity for people to openly critique and judge whether it was their appearance or their dating life.
This was Natalie, the woman she’d spent hours just playing music with last night, and it was hard for Sienna to imagine how awful that year would have been for her. Being outed. Losing her girlfriend. Getting tossed aside by the industry.
Sienna picked up her phone now. She’d almost forgotten that Natalie was waiting on her to go and get her car. Unless she’d already asked someone else.
Sienna fired off a quick text.
