Don't own the characters or the show…just playing around with the what if's…I'm a huge Rayna and Deacon shipper and want them to get together like yesterday! Hope you guys enjoy this.

CHAPTER 1

Philadelphia, PA

1:05 am

Drama.

That was the only word that Rayna Jaymes could think of as she washed off her make-up in the hotel bathroom sink.

She stopped to stare at her reflection in the mirror, watching water droplets run down the bridge of her nose, chin, and cheeks. There were dark circles under her eyes and a weariness in her gaze.

Drama…the word continued to ricochet around in her head, teasing and taunting her. How had her life, the life that she had so carefully worked to build, come to this point? She had made so many sacrifices over the years to build her career and construct a safe and stable world for her children just to watch it crumble around her in a matter of days. Drama was not a word she liked to associate with her life.

Still gazing at her reflection in the mirror, she went through a mental checklist, taking inventory of her current situation. Her marriage was in ruins and the evidence of its failure was national news. Her children were traumatized. Her career…well as successful as this current tour was, she was still on the road with Juliette Barnes, which was a blow to the ego in and of itself. Her relationship with Deacon was even more strained and oh so fragile. And her heart was in pieces at her feet. She felt like a failure. Everyone she had tried to protect was hurting and there was no easy answer as to how to fix it.

It had been over a month and a half since she sang for Deacon at the Bluebird during his birthday party and a little over a week since Rayna and Juliette's entourage with the Red Lips/White Lies tour had once again hit the road to take America by storm. They were slowly beginning to make their way down the East Coast and had just left New York. They had two nights of shows in Philadelphia before trekking down the other Atlantic states and then heading west. There were still a lot of days left on the road. A lot of days to feel guilty for leaving her children at home and a lot of days to stew in her personal misery. Rayna had brought Maddie and Daphne with her to New York to help ease them through the initial transition of her heading back out on tour since telling them and she and their father were getting a divorce. This also gave Teddy some time to get his new routine under control. She would have loved to keep the girls with her, but they had to go back to school and she wanted them to find a new sense of normalcy at home…not that it would feel normal to them for a long time…another failure to add to the list. Thankfully Tandy had been a big help and Rayna felt confident that the girls would be okay until she got back.

Rayna finished in the bathroom, flipped off the lights, and padded into her master suite. She was tired and she was sad. She wanted Deacon, but now that desire presented a whole new set of problems. Sometime, between his birthday and two weeks ago, while she was still scrambling to do damage control for her children and find emotional footing for herself, Deacon met someone. Not just a friendly let's mess around someone; this relationship already appeared to be serious. He looked happy, younger and more carefree than he had in years. When he looked at her, Rayna no longer saw the storm of emotion and longing. He simply looked at her like he did everyone else. He was distant and distracted, like he could walk away from her and not look back. This had never happened before. He had always been there, even when he wasn't. She wanted to be happy for him. The rational part of her mind told her that he deserved this happiness. She has been pushing and pulling him around for years; more recently, pushing him away, keeping him at arm's length. She knew he felt her cold shoulder, knew he believed, no matter how much she protested, that she had once again given up on him. Yes he more than deserved to find happiness and love with someone else. Her head told her all of this, but her heart was screaming don't leave me, please don't leave me; you said you loved me. How can you walk away?

She slowly sank to the edge of the bed, sighing as she cradled her face in her hands. "I wonder," she mused aloud, "if this is how he felt when I married Teddy and announced to the world that I was pregnant?" Her words were absorbed into the empty room. For the first time in her adult life she felt alone, really alone and it was terrifying and overwhelmingly sad. The thought of drowning her sorrows in alcohol briefly crossed her mind. She remembered the momentary relief she felt bar hopping with Liam after Deacon kissed her in an elevator and Teddy asked for a divorce, but drama and drinking went hand in hand. Rayna was determined that she was going to divorce that word once and for all. No, neither alcohol nor Liam McGuiness for that matter was the answer to her problem.

She turned out the lights, crawled under the covers, and willed the pain in her heart to subside enough so she could go to sleep. Tomorrow would come soon enough and bring all her problems along with it.

Two floors down Deacon hung up his cell phone and stretched out onto his bed. He lay staring at the ceiling for a while contemplating his good fortune. Just when he was about to give up on the possibility of being able to live a happy and uncomplicated life Lynn showed up. She was smart, fun, witty, knew what where she was going and what she wanted out of life, not in the music industry, beautiful, unattached, and uncomplicated. She appreciated Deacon for who he was and what he was able to bring to the table. She wasn't constantly looking for signs and symptoms of relapse and Deacon had yet to feel that she was waiting for him to disappoint her. It was a freeing feeling. To top it all off, she was just about as different from Rayna as she could possibly be…not that he was particularly looking for different from Rayna…or someone who was not Rayna. He hadn't been looking at all, but here she was.

For the past few weeks he had been floating on cloud nine. Heading back out on the road had been tough and he was finding that while he was physically present, he was mentally back in Nashville with Lynn. The only time he felt grounded at all was when he was on the phone with her. He smiled to himself. He was smitten. It was crazy how fast it had happened and how uncharacteristic it had all been. He knew that he needed to pull it together a little better than he was currently doing. Juliette was beginning to lose patience with him and he had absolutely no idea what was going on with Rayna other than that she had had the girls and Tandy with her a few days ago in New York. He needed to check back in, but in some ways he was reluctant to circle too close to her, afraid that he would get sucked back into her gravitational pull…he was free floating and was enjoying it. As he was falling asleep, Deacon decided that he would make a point to catch up with her tomorrow. It would give him a chance to test the waters.

TBC