This started as a flashback scene in my first ASIB fic...that I then decided would work better on its own as its own story...that then took me months to figure out, lol. Turns out a tense change was all I really needed. Hopefully there's still an audience for Jack & Ally around here!
Title taken from lyrics to Lady Gaga's "Highway Unicorn."
"Jack?" Ally calls, his name escaping her lips on a surprised laugh. With a single finger from each hand still raised, he abruptly wanders out of the small bedroom in the back of his tour bus. Ally cranes her neck to watch him, inadvertently turning down the bed that had become theirs on the road as she steps back along the length of the mattress to keep him in her line of sight, the covers gripped in her palm coming with her. "I thought we were going to bed; where are you going?" she asks softly.
"I'll be right back," Jack answers as he walks, the Western drawl she'd come to love a distant sound to her ears.
She struggles to make out Jack's movements in the darkened corridor, but a nervousness settles low in her belly as she realizes what he's doing. She swallows heavily as she watches him extend his arm and reach into the tiny top bunk to his left, shoving his hand under the pillow in search of the prize he knows often resides under there. With a bit of an "a-ha!" laugh to himself, his hand closes around the soft leather of Ally's songbook, and he quickly withdraws it from its not-so-secret home. Ally glances down to the floor briefly before moving towards the bed.
By the time he returns, she's waiting for him, reclining against her pillows. Her knees are bent up in front of her, bare toes buried just beneath the edge of the bed covers. She's wearing pajama pants and a tight, blue tank top, her brown hair tied high atop her head in a ponytail. She's the picture of a comfort she doesn't quite feel, and one dark eyebrow raises slightly as she spots the book she already knew would be enclosed in Jack's hand.
"Why do you do that?" he asks before she can say anything. He enters the room fully as he speaks, holding the book up in his hand for her to properly see.
"Do what?" she asks him.
"Pull yourself all the way up into the top bunk like that?" he clarifies.
Ally grins to herself at his question. She's not one of those people who's slightly delusional over the physical limitations of her height. She knows how small she is; it's something she's known since all the other kids kept growing while she just stopped and something she's reminded of every night on stage when Jack still towers over her, even though she's almost always wearing heels. She also knows she's pretty much the antithesis of grace climbing up into the bunk she designated as hers, but being on tour has brought a buoyancy to her spirit that she hasn't felt in years, so when she wants to be alone, she gets a foot into the middle bunk, grabs the edges of the top one, and propels herself up with a hop, rolling the rest of the way into her small hideaway. She'd caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye one afternoon as she pulled the curtain shut behind her; he'd been watching her acrobatic act from a couch near the front of the bus, and he'd looked like it had been taking everything he had in him not to snicker too loudly at the spectacle and give himself away.
She shrugs in response to his inquiry, her eyes downcast, a small chuckle escaping her again. When she looks up to direct her grin at him, she finds Jack already grinning right back at her. He'd told her once that it'd been a long time since anything about touring truly excited him; he'd done it too many times, been on too many buses, rumbled down too many highways in his time, but everything about the experience excites her, a summer music tour having been nothing but an unattainable fantasy for far too long, and in the moments she thinks she's seeing her unlimited joy reflected in him, her heart soars.
"What're you doing with my songbook?" she finally asks.
"I want to hear that song," he says.
"What song?"
"The one you've been sneaking out of bed and shuttin' yourself in that bunk to write."
"I haven't been sneakin'…" she instinctively argues, a smile that says otherwise curling against the edges of her lips and giving her away.
"Then how'd your book get under that pillow?" he teases. "Come on, when I asked you about new songs earlier, you said you thought you'd finished something."
"I did, but…" Ally starts, her protest seemingly falling on deaf ears as Jack plops the songbook sideways onto her stomach. Her voice trails off as her eyes focus on the cover, and she slowly twirls it upright, propping it up against her thighs, contemplating whether or not she's really ready to comply with his request.
It's not as if she's really all that secretive with her writing. For a girl who wasn't comfortable singing her own songs in public until Jack all but forced her onto a stage in Northern California (and not even for another handful of shows after that, if she was being truthful), she'd never really had trouble sharing them with the people she felt comfortable with. She never kicks her father out of the room when he wants to listen to her play. There was even a time during high school when she'd used songwriting to get out of trouble, her father's awe over her talent seemingly overpowering nearly every reason he was ever mad at her. She already misses the afternoons in Ramon's apartment where she'd sing her tunes on his couch while he choreographed dances to them on the spot, and she'd had not a moment of hesitation before she started singing the words that had popped into her head in front of an honest-to-god rock star in the parking lot of a convenience store.
But now, she's just not sure how the deeply personal lyrics buried within the pages might be received by the man they were written for, and she suddenly feels a little like she did when she heard his booming voice ring out through the outdoor arena as he announced, "And I'd just like her to sing it; I think it's pretty fucking good."
"But what?" he asks, heading for the other side of the small bedroom as she stares at her songbook.
"I just…I don't know if…" Ally stutters. She looks up, a part of her hoping he'll see her slight desperation and call the whole thing off. Instead, she finds him coming towards her with her cell phone in his hand. Her mouth falls open as she recognizes the unmistakable way he's holding the phone and she asks, "Are you filming me?"
"Is that what I'm doing?" he replies, his tone still teasing.
Apprehension momentarily forgotten, Ally laughs again and falls to her side, suddenly embarrassed. She buries her face into the plush comforter on the bed. "Why are you filming?" she asks, her voice muffled through the bed covers.
"You're about to sing your next hit song for someone else for the first time," Jack insists sincerely. "It's a moment to remember."
"My next hit song," Ally cynically mutters, picking her head out of the blanket to glare at her boyfriend. She resists the urge to ask him what exactly her first hit song is – she knows he'll claim it's "Shallow," even though the song's not yet gone anywhere beyond his stages and a couple thousand (okay, a couple million) hits on YouTube – instead opting to say simply, "You're full of shit."
"No, I'm not; you're gonna have a whole album of hit songs someday," Jack promises. He reaches his side of their little bed and leans in to the middle of the mattress, the camera in his hand briefly forgotten as he kisses her lips. He smiles against her mouth and says, as if it's an irrefutable fact, "These duets you're writing for us are just the beginning."
"Well, maybe this one's just for me," she reveals.
That bit of information, she notices, seems to do nothing but fuel his interest. He sits down, still paying no mind to the recording device in his hands, and moves towards where she still lay on her side with one arm slung protectively across her songbook. As his hip bumps gently against the top of her head, she rolls onto her back, looking straight up at him. He gazes down, hovering over her as his mischievous eyes meet her insecure ones, and he tilts his head a little. "Well, I'd still like to hear it," he says.
He holds the phone up again, seemingly only just remembering he was recording, and Ally points to the device clutched in his palm. "Seriously," she says. "What the hell are you doing with this?"
"I always record myself singing new songs," he says with an innocent shrug.
"Yeah, with a voice recorder," she points out.
"Guess I hit the wrong button," he says playfully. "You know I don't really know how to work these things." Ally's face hardens as she shoots him a knowing look – it's true, in a way; he's really not much for cell phones, but in this instance, now, he really is full of shit – and his face softens into another genuine smile as he bends at the waist to reach her mouth for an upside-down kiss this time. "You're so beautiful when you sing. Come on," he whispers against her lips.
"I can't play it for you; I don't have a piano," Ally calmly answers. A moment passes, but before he can try to rebut her argument, a realization crosses her mind and she adds, a little more urgently, "I haven't even played it for myself yet!"
Jack places Ally's phone into the wireless charging stand on the little table beside the bed, the camera still rolling. She stays still, following his movements with only her eyes, and when he comes back over to her, he touches the middle of her forehead and peacefully strokes down the center of her face until his fingertip slowly slips off the tip of her nose. She can't help herself when her eyes slip shut upon the sensual gesture.
"I know you can hear it," he mutters, still encouraging.
Ally sighs as she looks up at him again. She hopes a proper amount of annoyance is conveyed in her stare, but she knows she's going to relent. She always does eventually. He holds her gaze as if they're in a staring contest, knowing as well as she that she's ultimately going to give in, and with a slight roll of her eyes, she pushes herself back up to sit next to him. Some of her hair falls around her face as she sits upright, the dark tendrils having worked their way out of her ponytail as her head rubbed against the sheets, and Jack tenderly smooths the hair back behind her ear. He lets his fingertips slide along the curves of her ear and her jawline as she opens her book and snuggles into his side.
"Always Remember Us This Way," he reads from her handwritten page. "This about us?"
Ally nods, a smile teasing the edges of her lips as her focus remains on the book. "It's about this summer," she says.
"Tell me how you hear it," he whispers.
She raises her eyes from the page to take a glance at him and spots the reflection of herself in the still-recording cell phone on the table. "I can't sing with that camera on me!" she protests with another awkward laugh, looking directly into the camera's lens for a moment before holding her hand in front of her face.
"Forget the camera," Jack says as he shifts onto his side and grasps her waist. "Look at me. You're just singing for me." He brushes some of her hair back from her forehead again and adds, "Like you did in the parking lot the night we met."
Ally skeptically glances up and down his face for a moment before her lips soften into a smile, and she nods slightly. With a deep breath, she pivots so she's facing him instead of sitting next to him, her legs looped within each other underneath her book. Jack moves so he's facing her, too, and curls his hand around one of her knees, his touch providing the moral support she needs to share the new song with him. Their eyes meet again, and their loving gaze lingers as Jack waits eagerly. The nerves from before wind their way across Ally's stomach again, but with another small nod of her head, she slips her eyes shut, and then, she sings.
The words are written down on the page in front of her, but she doesn't need them as the lyrics flow from her lips the way she'd been quietly humming them to herself in the small bunk. The lyrics are heavy with emotions they haven't yet openly expressed to one another, so lest she see a reaction she's not ready for reflected in his eyes, she keeps hers closed. Jack's hand squeezes her knee a little tighter as she begins the second verse, and curiosity gets the better of her. She allows herself a peek in the middle of the private acapella performance and catches a glimpse of a look on his face that makes her want to melt. It's what she needs; it gives her the courage to keep singing.
When the love song comes to an end, she closes the book she'd all but ignored in her lap and lightly slaps her hands on top, looking to him for a proper opinion. She knows she always blows him away; he tells her as much nearly every time she shares a song with him, calling her words and her voice a lethal combination of an irresistible power, but as she looks to him for approval (or at least something other than complete revulsion to what she'd more or less just confessed to him), Jack seems to be at a loss as to what to say.
Ally expects holy shit or some other expletive to fall from his lips; that's all his initial reactions tend to consist of, but this time, Jack simply stares into her waiting eyes, a look of almost-wonder on his face. Finally, with a light shake of his head, he leans forward, choosing instead to pour his reaction into a kiss, but before he can reach her, the hand heading for the back of her head stops, and he holds up a single finger in front of her again.
"Hold that thought," he mutters, leaving a bewildered look on Ally's face for the second time that night.
Jack swoops around and reaches for Ally's phone, and an astounded grin teases Ally's lips as it's her turn to shake her head in disbelief. Just as he said she would, she's forgotten all about the video camera. She turns around, wondering if she looks as nervous as she felt on that recording, and places her songbook into a drawer beside the bed as he fumbles with her phone. She doesn't need to know the answer to that question tonight.
"How do you turn this fucking thing off?" Jack mumbles. "Shit."
Ally's still bent over the side of the bed, pushing the drawer shut, when his frustration prompts an uproarious laughter to spill from her lips. As much as she wants to feel the kiss he'd been about to give her, the nerves in her stomach giving way to a different kind of butterflies as he leaned in, a part of her believes he deserves the little hold-up for pushing the video on her to begin with. Even still, Ally leans over towards him and caresses her hand down his back.
"Do you need help?" she asks, a glimmer of amusement sparkling in her hazel eyes.
"I think I got it," he says. Their faces disappear from the cell phone screen, and he turns to look at her.
"You got it," she confirms with a chuckle.
Jack puts the device back in the charging stand as it powers down for the night and, in one fluid motion, Ally sits back up at the same time Jack pivots onto his knees to face her again. He grabs each of Ally's pajama-clad legs, guiding them around either side of his body. When Ally doesn't resist, he slides his hands higher to wrap around her thighs and gently pulls her down so her back's against the mattress. A gasp escapes her at the sudden motion, and she clutches his shoulders. Jack's forearms slide against her sides, holding himself up slightly as his weight settles on top of her, and Ally shifts beneath him, getting comfortable. She rests her heels against his ass and curls her arms around his shoulders, and Jack leans in again, his nose brushing softly against hers.
"That song," he mutters, his voice low. "That how you see us?"
"Yeah," Ally whispers. She looks at him with a bit of a newfound confidence and strokes his cheek as she asks, "That okay?"
"Yeah," Jack mimics, finally meeting her lips in a tender kiss.
Jackson Maine had always been sweet with her, right from the beginning, when he'd woken her up in the big hotel bed to make love to her in the earliest morning light. Ally had thought sex with a rock star was going to be something else – hot, fast, maybe a little rough, probably not terribly attentive to her body or her pleasure, despite the care and concern he'd shown for her injured hand the night before – but instead of meeting her misguided expectations, Jack had treated her like something to be cherished, like he was the one who couldn't believe what was happening, like he was the lucky one for having her in his bed.
He treats her no differently now that she's really his, still happy to spend time warming her up with deep, heated kisses before moving on. When Jack finally leaves her lips, he kisses along her jawline and down her skin until his lips hit the swell of her breast and the low neck of her tank top. He nudges it aside with his nose, just enough to allow him to tug her nipple into his warm mouth, and a small moan escapes Ally's throat. Even when he's drunk, he knows how to gratify her, but he's not drunk tonight – not even a little bit – and a slow-burning passion sparks under his touch and spreads throughout her being until every cell in her body is alive with desire. Jack shifts his weight to slide one of his hands up the side of her body while his tongue swirls around her breast. Ally knows the lovemaking born from her tender tribute to their relationship is going to be gentle and intimate, and she's ready for more.
She threads her fingers through his long hair and tugs as she arches her back and presses her body into him. Without a word, Jack takes his cue from her and lets her nipple fall from his lips. He tactfully puts her tank top back into place with his teeth, drawing a low giggle from Ally, and pulls back just enough to reach between them. Jack pulls on the drawstring of her pajama pants and slides his hand down, slipping inside the front of her panties, too. Her lips fall open on an instinctual sigh; Jack leans up and mouths her neck, and she tightens her grip on his shoulder when his fingers begin delicately exploring the warmth pooling between her legs.
She manages to close her lips into a grin and whispers, "So you liked the song?"
His fingers still, his head drops into the curve of her neck, and she feels his laughter against her collarbone, his body shaking above hers.
"I loved it," he mutters into her skin when the chuckles subside.
His forehead finds hers then, their eyes meeting as his fingers twitch against her and resume their motions. She lets out another small breath, and he tilts his head just enough to touch his lips to hers. Jack smiles and whispers, "I love it," against her lips, and Ally feels his words in her stomach as she wonders if maybe, just maybe, that means I love you.
They haven't said those words to each other yet – though Ally knows she may as well have with the lyrics to the song she just sang for him – and she knows they'll probably be judged when they do, their young romance a fairytale whirlwind, something that she herself would've once thought couldn't possibly last in real life, but Ally can't help herself. She already feels it. She already loves him more than she ever thought she could when he slid his hand down her arm in the dressing room at the Bleu Bleu, and tonight, for the first time, Ally's almost sure he feels it, too.
They're cuddling underneath the covers, and while Ally's pulled her tank top and underwear back on, Jack's lying there in only his boxer-briefs. She's tucked into his side, and they're simply breathing together, her lips puckering against his bare skin every so often, pressing little kisses into the part of his chest she can reach. Jack runs his hand down the length of her back and settles it on the side of her ass, his arm holding her protectively against his body. His other hand holds hers against his chest.
"Will you sing that song at one of our shows?" he asks her, his voice low so as not to disturb the tranquil mood in their bed.
Ally softly scoffs at his request. "I haven't even played it on an instrument yet," she reminds him.
"Well, when you do," he says.
"I…I don't know," she replies.
"Why wouldn't you?" he asks.
"Well…I mean…it's just…not appropriate," she stutters.
"How could it not be appropriate?"
She scoffs again as she says, "Your fans don't wanna watch your girlfriend singing love songs to you."
"My fans just wanna hear good music," he insists. "And that's good music." When she doesn't come back with a reply, he breathes, "Please, Ally."
Ally sighs. "Okay," she says. "Sure."
"You'll play it at a show?" he asks.
"If you really want me to," she agrees. She tilts her head up, looking at him from her place in the crook of his arm and whispers, "But you gotta let me practice it first." She pokes his chest accusingly, his hand still in hers, and adds, "No springing it on me like you did with 'Shallow.'"
"That's good music, too," Jack says.
"You got lucky, boy. Don't do that again."
Jack's closed lips curl into a prideful smile as he finally looks at her. He slips his fingers out of her grasp and brings his hand up to her cheek to pull her into a kiss.
"Can I hear it again?" he asks as they part.
"Hear what?" she asks.
"'Always Remember Us This Way,'" he says as if that were obvious.
"Jackson," she laughs. She buries her face into his chest as she moans, "It's so late."
"You don't have to do the whole thing," he promises. She looks up at him again, and he says, "Just sing us to sleep," as he gives her one last, goodnight kiss.
Ally exhales, her body fully relaxing against him as his fingers begin to lightly travel along the arm slung across his chest, and the nerves she felt earlier, the worry that it was too soon to sing this song, that he wasn't ready, that they weren't ready, suddenly seem silly. She's not about to sing the whole song again and not at her full vocal power, either, but she thinks she'd probably give him anything he could ask for, and it won't be the first time she's softly sung him to sleep from the comfort and safety of his embrace. She closes her eyes again.
"Lovers in the night…"
Thank you for reading! Feedback is always appreciated :)