Just playing with something a little less angsty... We know nothing much about who Deacon was before he became a hot flannel-shirt wearer, so a little filling in of some blanks...
One of the windows on Deacon's truck had been cracked as long as Rayna had known him. Their roadtrips were accompanied by a backing track of whistling wind, louder the faster they drove. Sometimes they whistled along, creating their own little winding tune that grew increasingly elaborate until one of them dissolved into laughter, followed a second later by the other. The crack was on Rayna's side, and when it rained, cold droplets squeezed their way through it and landed on her arm, snaking down her skin and making her shiver. She'd flick drops over at Deacon, chuckling at the momentary surprise on his face before he'd reach for her knee and lean over to her, swiping at her neck with his wet tongue in revenge. Long straight roads at the edge of nowhere afforded a lot of playing. 'As long as you keep one hand on the wheel, you can do whatever you like with the other,' she'd tell him, and he found a lot of ways to take her up on it.
They'd been on one such long straight road for a couple of sweat-slicked hours, the vinyl of the front seat hot under Rayna's bare legs. Deacon had taken off his shoes and the peddles pressed into the soles of his feet, one arm propped out of the open window. They were headed to the ranch he'd grown up on, not so much out of choice as on request.
'Deacon, your poppa and I have been discussin' and we'd very much like you to get your be-hind right on home,' his mother's voice had announced through his answer phone one morning. 'Seems there's some talk goin' round about our very own son carryin' on with a country singer, no less.' It wasn't a conversation he wanted to have with them, and he'd hovered over the delete button, calculating how long he could get away with pretending he hadn't picked up her message before she sent the National Guard out to drag him by his earlobe. It wasn't what she'd said next so much as the crack in her voice, almost undetectable, that had halted his finger. 'We miss you son. Jimmy's been seein' to the chickens, got a good lot of eggs this summer. We make your favourite omelette every Sunday.'
Deacon had discovered, upon apprehensively calling her back two days later, that it had been his father who had seen the pictures. He'd been buying slug pellets - 'pesky little brutes' - in Bill Perry's grocery store when he'd caught sight of his son's face on the cover of a glossy magazine. 'You haven't heard?' Bill had said, leaning across the counter on one dry elbow. 'That's the girl who sings that catchy song's been playin' all over the radio. Your boy's the talk o' the town. Course y'all don't go near town short of a 'mergency so you wouldn't know, 'spose.' They'd been at a party the label had thrown for their first number one, at a honky tonk in Nashville they'd hired out for the night. Rayna was a little wobbly on her feet, one hand clutching Deacon's arm, the other wrapped around a glass of bubbles. Deacon's face was soft, looking down at her like she was the most perfect thing he'd ever seen, which of course she was. Jack Claybourne had regretted flicking to the somewhat more telling and less permissible photographs inside. 'Boy done good for himself,' Bill had thrown in with a wink, nodding his head towards one of Deacon kissing her in what they'd thought was a secluded corner outside the bar a considerable amount of liquor later that night.
Their relationship wasn't public, so the pictures had irked Rayna when they'd come out. Deacon didn't care who knew, not yet famous enough to understand why he would one day put a whole lot of stock into privacy. At that time, it meant nothing to him - he wanted to kiss her in the middle of the street and he didn't give a damn who saw, he was a lucky fuck and so be it if everyone knew it. Rayna's manager hadn't exactly agreed. She'd only been working with Bucky Dawes for a few months, and she liked him a lot - he got her, where she wanted her career to go. He realised early on that Deacon was her Achilles' heel. They weren't seeing each other - technically - at the time she'd fired her manager and got an early morning call from Watty White, who had heard word of Bucky around town and thought she should meet with him. She'd hired him the same day, and had called Deacon to come down to the bar where they were discussing his contract. Bucky had felt the tremor the second he'd walked up to their booth and slid in beside Rayna. He'd heard, of course, about their chemistry, their partnership was becoming big news on the circuit, but he hadn't yet seen them play and he hadn't quite prepared himself for the electricity that shot between them even as they sat in a half empty bar lifting their glasses in a toast to him. Watty had recommended him for a reason - Bucky was a savvy man, and he knew what people wanted. The first time he did see Rayna and Deacon play was later that week, and he'd been entranced, by the two of them, but even more so by the reaction from the small audience, who had hung on every word, besotted with the way they looked at each other. He'd studied that look over the months, had felt the change in them, the intensity that cranked up when he knew they'd given into the temptation they posed to each other, though he was too respectful to note it. Bucky knew that grainy paparazzi shots of her guitar player's hands sliding up under the hem of her dress would generate more publicity than if they played a hundred promo gigs, and the morning they landed on his desk in an unassuming manila envelope, he talked Rayna calmly round, and watched their record sales skyrocket. What he also knew was that the thrill of the chase was a powerful tool. 'At this stage of your career, people thinking you might be together will sell more than people knowing you are,' had been his take on it, his way of handling their growing popularity with care. Bucky was nothing if not careful. There was little, however, that he could do about the fire they were playing with.
And so Deacon found himself loading overnight bags into his truck, the city sprawl in his rear view mirror and Rayna beside him, his mother's voice ringing in his ears telling him she was slow-cooking a stew for dinner and would he ask Rayna if she liked turnips? When he'd nervously broached the subject of paying a visit to his childhood home, something his face told her he was less than keen on, she'd thought it might just be a blessing in disguise - there could be a worse time to get out of Nashville for a few days. The press had been following them far more than usual, hoping to catch another incriminating exchange, something Bucky had warned them not to let happen. 'Not so much as a look,' he'd said, and Rayna had felt like they were being given detention for getting caught making out behind the bike sheds.
She was also curious. Deacon Claybourne was an incredible guitar player, was as soulful and stubborn as he was insatiable, and she'd spent the better part of the two years she'd known him thinking she'd got him figured out, only for him to prove her utterly wrong. She was discovering pieces of him every day, and the chance to see where he grew up, to meet his family, was too enticing to pass up on.
'What if they don't like me?' she asked, and he laughed.
'Baby, I like you one hell of a lot, so it doesn't matter what they think,' he said, averting his eyes to look out of the windscreen ahead. 'Of either of us.'
She studied his profile, the set of his jaw. 'How long has it been since you saw your parents Deacon?' she asked quietly.
It took him a moment to reply, and when he told her 'a while,' she didn't press him. He didn't speak of them much, and Rayna of all people knew to leave well alone. She felt the knot in her stomach tighten, and lifted her feet up onto the dash, crossing them at the ankles and leaning back. Deacon wasn't subtle in the way he raked his eyes up her legs, and she shook her head. 'You're a pervert Claybourne,' she said with a devilish smile.
'Wait 'til you meet my cousin Ronnie.'
He pulled off the road suddenly, steering them into the forecourt of a gas station that looked like no one had been near it in twenty years. 'What are you doing? We still have three quarters of a tank,' Rayna said, confused, and he leaned over and unbuckled her seatbelt, lingering by her ear.
'You can't go around lookin' like that and expect a guy to be able to concentrate on driving,' he said, his fingers stroking the back of her knee and making her shudder. 'And my folks aren't really free love kind of people, I'm gonna need to help you bank a couple o' good ones so you don't ravage me in the middle of the sheep pen.' He took her hand and pulled her out of the cab and towards the dubious bathroom around the back, the sole attendant not so much as looking up from his newspaper when they ran past in a clatter of boots and laughter, or when they stumbled back to the truck half an hour later with flushed faces and half-buttoned shirts.
Alice Claybourne had never intended to marry the carpenter's son. He'd been a year above her in school, in all the bands and all the bars, his name scrawled in black ink on all the girls' notebooks. Alice wasn't like those girls. She kept to herself at the bonfires down by the lake, had never smoked cigarettes in the convenience store parking lot. She went to church on Sundays, wore white dresses in the summertime. But Alice was beautiful, and she had absolutely no idea, which made Jack fall and fall hard. The girls that threw themselves at him were pretty girls, that was for sure, but hell did they know it. It got old after the twentieth hair-flick, the hours spent being grilled by their fathers while he sat in paisley armchairs waiting for them to apply unnecessary coats of lipstick. Alice listened to the words he sang instead of swooning over the fact he could hold a guitar, looked into his eyes and felt every last one of them. He hadn't meant to get her pregnant at seventeen, that had been a mishap he'd have paid for dearly if her daddy had been a better shot with a rifle. The Claybournes were good and proper people - with a few exceptions, but cousin Bobby had said he was sorry for burning the neighbour's barn down and Aunt Mary had been to confession three times a week since she'd cheated on her husband with the butcher - and Jack had married her before she'd even gone up a dress size. They'd never had a plan, but if they had, it wouldn't have included Jack drinking one of his kidneys onto its death bed, and they'd probably have left out the fight he got into that had landed him a week in a cell, still none the wiser over who had picked up the last rack of ribs first. There was a lot more they would have left out too, a lot Alice would never speak of in polite conversation, but the love they had for one another was something they could never have done without. It was hard to say whether they would have chosen it, if the choice had ever been theirs to make, but love didn't work that way. Love tied you to a person even when you should run for the hills and never look back.
Rayna hadn't expected the blonde in the sundress who ran down the porch steps towards them. The smile on her face was as joyful as it was sad when she threw her arms around Deacon, and she closed her eyes while she held him in her embrace. 'Hey momma,' he said, and Rayna was certain she'd never heard his voice sound quite that way. She cupped his face with thin fingers and looked at him as though reacquainting herself, before she turned to Rayna in apology and took both of her hands in her own. 'It is a delight to meet you,' she said, in a wispy voice Rayna fell instantly in love with. 'Our boy's been keeping you something of a secret.' On first glance she looked young, too young to be someone's mother, but every one of the lines around her eyes told a story, and there was something in the way she wrapped her arms around herself against the wind that had started up, teasing the creaky swing that dangled from an old oak tree in front of the house.
Deacon's father didn't come down to meet them. He stood on the porch until they reached him, and it was Rayna he greeted first. He looked a lot like Deacon, she thought, trying not to stare. He had the same troubled eyes that she suspected could turn mischievous at any moment, heavier stubble and longer hair, and the wind-kissed skin of someone who worked the land. He pecked her chastely on the cheek and she almost blushed at the gesture, smiling up at him when he introduced himself with all the charm of a good country gentlemen, and she was right - his face crinkled into a smile that probably had a lot to do with why Alice had married him. He shook Deacon's hand and nodded at him, his wordless way of saying he was glad his son was home, that he was happy to see him, and Rayna watched, wondering if there had ever been a goodbye.
If there was one thing Jack Claybourne knew, it was dangerous love. When his son turned and reached for the hand of the girl with the red hair who looked for all the world like she would follow him anywhere, leading her into the house he'd loved and lost his wife in, he felt his heart sink.