My heart is in bits and pieces after the first two amazing episodes of this new season - I am so in love with these two and their endless pain, it's excruciating. Anyone needs me I'll be in a ball weeping and eating chocolate until Scarlett comes and tells me to man up.
It's the song that kicks up the dust. The damn song, written during an argument about something neither of us even remembers, sung to each other so many times when we needed to remind ourselves. We don't need to remind ourselves the night he whispers its name into my ear and beckons to his band - comprised of half of our band, people who know full well what the song means, what it has always meant - to come in with the intro. We don't need a reminder that what we've always felt for each other has only ever been a hair's breadth underneath our careful surfaces, that there is no one else but the other.
I forget things that don't make it onto hastily scribbled grocery lists, I forget where I put my favourite earrings. I forget what my name is when I've done twenty seven shows in a row and all the ceilings and all the carpeted hotel floors look the same. I forget to call my sister to tell her I landed safely.
I don't forget, I don't ever forget, that I'm in love with Deacon.
I've tried. We both have, though Deacon gave up quickly and let himself be consumed by the tortured love we had to put in a box so that we could stay above water. It's not a pretty little box with bows and ribbons. It's a box made of splintered wood and covered in saltwater tears and spilled blood, filled with the pieces of ourselves we gave to each other and can never take back. It holds the memories of the times when we were good, when we loved and lived on each other and music and nothing else. It holds memories of times we would rather it didn't, the claws we aimed at each other when we were trying to hold on, too tightly, the pictures in our minds that we wish were hazy and not so high fucking definition. The box has been coated in dust over the years, layers and layers that numb the pain and muffle the longing, but dust is nothing but particles of dirty air and it can be blown away with a mere whisper. The box's lock is rusty and cracked, and something has been stirring inside, rustling and restless long before the night at The Bluebird. That's the night the lock breaks.
I haven't dreamed about the feel of Deacon's skin sliding across mine for a long time. Those nights stopped when Daphne was born, to my relief and I'm sure to Teddy's - laying next to someone who gasps another man's name in her sleep is surely not ideal material for casual dinner party conversation. My husband hands me a coffee and I blink the sleep from my eyes but Deacon won't budge quite so easily - I can feel him, I can smell him. What I can't do is look him in the eye later that day when he sits across from me while Bucky chirps about new tour buses and beds. Beds and enclosed spaces and Deacon. It's the razor sharp butterflies that shoot across my stomach at the thought that crank the alarm bells in my head to full blown danger mode. Trouble is coming, some would say. Some would be wrong. Trouble isn't coming for Deacon and I. We are the trouble.
I try to stop it, and I do, for a while - I cancel the tour, step away from the temptation, like a good wife should, though perhaps the very fact that I've dangled such temptation before me all those years cancels out any wifely act. But it isn't what it may seem to me when I'm weak and guilty late in the night and berating myself for choices I've made. I've kept Deacon in my life for myself, sure. The thought of any other option is no option at all. But I've also done it for him. I've kept him close so he could know his daughter as she grew up, so she would know him, so he wouldn't miss out on all those moments I could never deprive him of. I've kept him close because I could never remove myself from him. He needs me. He needs to know I've never let go of our someday.
We've both gotten pretty good at the charade, at play-acting that we are friends who aren't on the brink of flinging each other's buttons across the floor at any given moment. We don't fool many. We don't fool ourselves. The Country Club blows any cover we have left. Deacon has always resented Teddy for taking from him what rightfully belongs to him. He's made no secret of it, has asserted his ownership in front of Teddy's face plenty of times, but the lid he has put on his public jealousy has been tightly screwed for years. And then, just like that, it comes unscrewed. He is the Deacon of old as he reminds Teddy exactly who I belong to, the dark Deacon, the man who turns from the black of night and walks into the fire.
It's like slipping, sliding. It starts with a song, melodic little words, an unravelling, a fraying of ropes that have held us together and kept us apart. Where does it end? All we do to climb back onto safe ground does nothing but push us further towards the inevitable. It has always been inevitable. They say blood runs thicker than water. They lie. Love runs thicker than it all.
I crave the sound of the lake outside our house. I don't go there, I haven't since Maddie was born. I go to the river instead and sit on our bench, a compromise I allow myself. I close my eyes and let myself drift back. I imagine I can hear the little paddle boat tugging on its rope, can smell the fresh air, the pond weeds. I imagine Deacon is beside me, his hand rubbing unconscious circles on my knee. I don't think of the day he torched the bench on the grass, or the day I almost drowned trying to pull him out of the water. I don't think about how many hours I spent looking for him in the reeds when I woke one night to find him gone, his side of the bed cold and hollow. He thinks he's waiting for me, that I need to see him how he is now, that he's saved himself the way I never could. Truth is that's a lie, one he's never believed. The years pass and I feel it just as clearly, the floor spiralling away under my bare feet as I stood before him in the robe I'd left hanging on our bedroom door when I'd listened to everyone and left him. I'm still here, it had said, a simple piece of cloth, limp and lifeless on its hook. I'm empty, but I'm still here. I see it just as clearly, the look on his face when we both realised there was no further to go. I love you more than anything in the world. I did too. Always have. I still do.
He pushes and I pull, away, apart, against. He pulls and I push, I hold on, dig in. We are bound, entwined, nowhere to run. I tell him in a park where people stroll and ride bikes, walk their dogs, fly kites, we have to let go, I say, as much to him as to myself. I tell him we need to see what's around the bend, but all that's ever around the bend is him, is me, is each other. Our bend is a circle, a continuous path away from and back to each other. It always will be. It doesn't matter what I tell myself, what I tell him. It doesn't matter what we do. It doesn't matter how many ribs I snap, how many scars our bodies carry now. We are covered in scars long before the car rips our skin and breaks our bones.
He follows me into an elevator and I feel the sizzle before he even touches me. I feel the cold panel on my back and the scrape of his stubble across my skin. I don't feel the guilt, I don't hear the voice in my head that has spent years warning me to stop before I get too close, I don't care about anything but his hand in my hair and his breath in my mouth. And then we are pulled, like puppets on strings, snapping across the room, away from each other. It is never for long, even when it feels like it's final. Even when it feels like we don't get any more chances, that this is our last. It is not our last until we need no more chances, until finally we get it right.
Neither of us had the easiest of childhoods, the most solid of foundations to build ourselves on. Right when we could have splintered, become shadows of the people we might be, we found each other. We built our own foundation, together, infused it with love and support and belief in each other's worth. It's been the same ever since. We find each other in every shadow, every time we start to slip away. It's unspoken, unconscious, something only we understand. To find each other is to find ourselves.
They write about us, about the affair we never had, the headlines ironic to a fault. He reads them, I do too, everyone does and they half-believe it, people who watch us and all the times we collide. They don't know how much of it is real. Neither do we, if we're honest. I tell him happy birthday. What I mean is I'm coming back, I've always been coming back. I never left.
And then he surprises me. She's pretty, the girl, blonde and uncomplicated and everything I'm not. That's why he chose her, she won't remind him of me when he lays in bed at night looking down at her. But it doesn't matter; he can't forget, no matter what he does. No matter what either of us do. He's tried to fight it, he says, this thing between us. This thing. I know the feeling. I'm all out of punches. I tell him I love him and he's always known, but the look on his face makes me wish I'd said it sooner, that I hadn't ever let him doubt it. The morning comes too soon; it always does with us. I wake in his arms and time has stood still, has given us back all that it took from us. But the morning is cold, too sharp. The morning has never been kind to us.
I wake and I'm alone, he's not and he's drunk. A half-empty bottle keeps him company, and the light stings my eyes when I try not to cry. The ring makes an ominous sound as it bounces at his feet and skitters away from him, and I do the same. Don't stop, get your hands off me, marry me baby. A week passes, two, a month and I don't see him. I don't think I have any tears left, perhaps no liquid in my body at all, I feel like a shell. And when the sickness starts, I tell myself it can't be possible, no twist of fate could be so cruel, to take him from me and drown him in whiskey, to give me instead his child and banish me from him, alone and in pieces. I tell myself it can't be possible because nothing can hurt any more than it already does. I'm wrong, so wrong. It has only just begun.
My heart wears black for all the years we've lost, all the moments we never got to share. I mourn for what we were, for what we could have been, for what we could be now but don't know how to be. We are lost. All around us is pain, wrecks and ruins made up of glass bottles and silver rings, shattered windscreens and spinning tyres, love letter lyrics and ripped up promises. We see each other, in the distance. We are faint, but we are there. There is a graveyard between us filled with all the deaths we have survived, barely, and we are there, we hold on.
The ring has been in the bottom of my mother's music box all these years. I used to get it out, toy with it, watch the little ballerina spin on her toes and think of him. I used to put it on my finger, imagine, hold Maddie to my chest, when I was alone in the house and she was so tiny her face burrowed into the crook of my neck, like it had been made to fit just there. I cradled her close and wore the ring her father gave to me on a night he can't remember, a night he whispered while he stole my breath that he would never forget. I wore it in secret, my hope never dead. As though it would save me. As though it would bind us together, bring him back to me. And then it does. Then I'm in his bed, my face burrowed into his neck, like it has been made to fit just there. We kiss in closets, we lock dressing room doors. Time is no time at all, is a concept that means nothing. This thing, this thing means everything. Fourteen years later and his ring is still in my music box, waiting. The ballerina keeps our secret, twists and turns on the grave of the 'I do' we never got to say. Maybe this time will be different.
We don't rise to a peak and fall back to the ground. We build and explode, and then we do it again, and again, and again, burning molten and drowning in our own ashes. We love fast and hard, top down, foot to the pedal. And then we crash.
Sometimes it's all we can do to keep breathing.