Hi Everyone. I'm definitely feeling the lack of stories right now, but loving the quality of what everyone is posting! Thank you everyone is putting themselves out there to get us through this hiatus. I decided I should dust off some of the random little bits I've been working on. If anyone wants to workshop ideas or chat, then shoot me a PM. This will be at least a 2 chapter story, but possibly a bit more. This chapter is all Rayna's thoughts the night before the wedding but I've got some action and dialogue coming for the next one. Thanks everyone. -Kristy
Think of the way he looks at you.
In the tiny space of Rayna's mind that wasn't being rocked like a row boat in a hurricane, she thought about Tandy. How could a person know you so well and still have absolutely no idea that she'd said the exact wrong thing? Tandy had spent her entire adult life eagerly giving Rayna advice and Rayna listened to it all. She only had a handful of people she could trust like her sister, but more often than not it felt like Tandy was quoting a bad script to a stranger.
Any other bride before any other wedding needed to hear that love was enough. Never in Rayna's life had love been enough and 16 years earlier Tandy had been sitting with a teary pregnant bride the night before the first wedding with the exact opposite speech. He'll be an excellent father; He loves you; You're doing the right thing. Because even Tandy wasn't that blind.
Why did Tandy think she could say 'focus on the love' now and that everything else would fall into place?
Love hadn't been enough to keep her and Teddy happy together when things got rough. The closest it had come was by way of their love for their girls and their true desire to provide them with a home and a family. That love hadn't been enough.
Love had never been enough for her and Deacon either. Love couldn't keep him sober or stop them from yelling. Love may have made their daughter, but it hadn't built them a home or a family or the future together that they'd so desperately wanted. Love hadn't been enough to keep them safe in a rolling SUV or mend the hurt feelings after 16 years of lies. Some other force had healed those, somewhat, but it surely wasn't their love for one another.
Now more and more Rayna was feeling this enormous gulf between her and Luke. She couldn't quite nail it down but she thought of how his eyes flickered the night of the CMAs. It gave her the hollow feeling she'd had when Teddy said that he loved her because she dazzled him. He meant it, and he thought that's what she wanted to hear. Luke had been doing the same thing, only she's feeling more and more like maybe he didn't understand what she meant about the difference between the CMAs and real life. Luke was dazzled. It's getting scary to think that maybe all the show is Luke's real life and she erred in assuming that his comfort with fame was the result of him knowing something she doesn't or of being better at the game than she is. Maybe he's walking around not feeling torn in half because he's not trying to keep a foot in two worlds.
Rayna eyed her mostly full wine glass and deliberately picks it up and pours it down her bathroom sink. She can barely follow her thoughts right now and her need to think clearly tonight is undeniable.
She knows that you can live happily while pretending for quite awhile, right up until the moment you absolutely can't anymore. That's when car's flip off the road and divorces are asked for. That's when the little and big lies all pile on top of one another.
She knew when she was 16 that an authentic life was worth any sacrifice over one that was nothing but show and spectacle. When had she forgotten that?
The way that he looks at you. Yea, Luke looks at her with love but it's not his eyes that Rayna can picture so clearly in her mind. It's not his eyes that see everything inside her. Luke looks at her and while she knows he is truly genuine in his feelings for her, she's feeling more and more like it's not …. enough? not right? not real?
He had made it so easy for her to say yes to everything because he was always that step ahead of her, reaching out a hand. He wanted them to date publicly, he wanted a serious commitment, he asked her to marry him after barely a few months of dating. She said yes to everything, but let him carry her along like a river.
With absolute clarity she remembered that same feeling from her wedding to Teddy. The sense that she'd arrived at this place under the power of forces that she hadn't controlled. Consequences and pushed her and people had nudged her and she was too exhausted from swimming against the current to not grab Teddy's hand.
When was the last time she'd swam?
Running out of the Bluebird, grabbing Deacon's car keys. Reckless and stupid and not watching the road.
Then she woke up in a hospital, unable to speak and so deeply ashamed of herself when she saw the terror on her daughter's faces. She hadn't trusted herself since then.
She'd turned all her focus on to her career, where she felt sure footed and powerful, and just abdicated all control of her private life to the handsome charismatic kind man who had made his move at the right time.
She hadn't dealt with that accident at all. She hadn't dealt with herself at all. She just ran faster and faster, hoping that she could out run her own mistakes and instead she was hours away from making even bigger ones. Now she knew she had screwed up horribly. She'd hurt people she loved and was about to do a whole lot more of it. She had been selfish and irresponsible and wilfully blind. That was going to have to end right now.
She couldn't marry Luke. She wasn't going to marry Luke.
