Kylie sighs, and finally wipes her eyes. “I get it.” She looks up at me. “When are you leaving?”
“Right now. I’ve already said goodbye to everyone else.”
She moves closer to me, and my heartbeat ratchets up to a hammering crescendo just from the scent of her shampoo. She hesitates, then wraps her arms around my middle. I freeze solid, don’t hug her back. Don’t dare. I just let her hold on to me and try to remember to breathe. She lets go finally, and looks up at me from far too close.
Without my permission, my hand lifts, touches her cheek. “I wish—” My voice is close to breaking. “I wish I’d at least kissed you. Just once.” Her eyes widen, and she stops breathing. Then, before I do anything truly stupid, I step away. “But I didn’t. And now…I never will.” Another step backward. “Goodbye, Kylie.” I turn away, and it takes every ounce of willpower I possess to do so.
“Ben?” Her voice stops me. “Will you be okay?”
I stop, but don’t turn around. Slowly, I nod. “Yeah. Eventually.”
A long tense silence. She’s about to say something else. I can feel it, and I wait for it. But then, with a sad exhalation, all she says is, “’Bye, Ben. I’ll miss you.”
I want to look back, but I don’t. I blink hard against the aching burn in my throat, in my chest, in my eyes. “Yeah. Me, too.” It’s unclear, even to me, whether I mean I’ll miss her, too, or whether I’ll miss me.
Both, maybe.
I don’t look back. Not at her, and not at Nashville as I drive past the city limits. When I’m far enough away that I don’t recognize the landmarks, I turn on the stereo, hunt through the songs I’ve got loaded onto the flash drive. Find one that speaks to this moment. It’s a Kylie song, the kind of thing I listened to for her.
It’s “Let Her Go” by Passenger.
I listen to it on repeat until my throat hurts from singing along, and eventually I let the radio take me to other songs, as the road takes me to other places.
I remember what Colt said by the creek that day: Sometimes there is no where, there’s only go.
And I go.
POSTSCRIPT
Kylie
One year later
Performing never gets old. It never loses its patina of wonder for me. Every single time Oz and I get up on stage, I feel alive, like raw energy replaces the very blood in my veins, like life itself is bigger and more colorful and more amazing. We’re on tour with Mom and Dad and The Harris Mountain Boys. This tour has been, very literally, the most amazing experience of my entire life. Each and every day, even if we’re just rolling across the country on the tour bus, holds new joy and fresh and exciting things to see and feel and hear and do.
Oz and I get better each time we play together. Oz, not surprisingly, has turned out be an intense and tireless lyrics-writing machine. He’s got an endless well of emotion and life experience to pull from, and once I persuaded him to give it a try, he found he couldn’t stop the words from pouring out. It works for me, because I’d rather write the music.
We’re on the last leg of the summer tour, making the arc across the northern border and down through Michigan—where Mom and Dad are both from—and back to Nashville. The last date of the tour is Nashville, and I’m scared to f**king death for that show. It wasn’t announced until less than a month ago, and it sold out in under an hour. We sold out the Ryman. In an hour.
Andersen has been instrumental in all this. He’s gotten us huge press over the summer, increased our visibility in a way we could never have expected. Mom and Dad put together the tour, but Andersen used his industry connections to get us noticed, to get people talking about us.
Oz and I? God, I love that man. We haven’t gotten a lot of time alone together over the tour, seeing as we’re sharing a bus with Mom and Dad, and they won’t let us bunk together. It’s okay, though. We sneak off together after shows, or during lunch breaks while we’re traveling. Gareth, Amy, and Buddy, being more our age than Mom and Dad’s, are sympathetic to our plight, so they find ways to give us privacy on their bus whenever possible.
Oz is creative, too. He cornered me backstage one time, in Portland, Maine, I think it was, and dragged me outside into the maze of equipment crates. He pressed me up against the wall, hiding us between a pile of sound equipment boxes and an empty crate that held I don’t know what. We were all but invisible there, and he took full advantage of it. His hips pinned mine to the wall, and his fingers busied themselves lifting my shin-length skirt up around my hips. I wrapped my legs around his, grinning into his neck as he realized I wasn’t wearing any underwear. My giggle at his surprise turned rather quickly into a groan of need, and from there into a barely stifled squeal as he filled me. He silenced me with a kiss, kept his mouth crushed to mine and ate my cries and whimpers, sucked down my breath and gave me his own, holding me aloft with strong hands cupping my ass.
It wasn’t long before we were both trembling and gasping together, straightening clothes just in time to see a sound tech rummaging for a cord. He grinned at us, as if he knew exactly what we’d just been doing. Maybe it should’ve, but it didn’t bother me that he’d known.
I’m still going to school. I’m at Belmont now, studying for a degree in music management. I love playing, and I will to the day I die, but I also love the technical end of it, the business side. I love working with Andersen to get exactly the right sound, tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until the song is perfect. Oz is content to perform, I think. He and my dad have gotten close, and they’re talking about opening up a classic car restoration business together. Dad used to do that for a living, and Oz has a knack for the kind of details that make a restoration look authentic. That’s what Dad says, at least, and I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
I am wondering about our future together, though. I know we’re in love, and I know there will never be anyone else for either of us. But I’m still living with my parents. Oz has his own apartment now, and when we’re in Nashville I stay there more nights than not, but it’s…it’s not the same. Whenever I talk about officially moving in with him, he kind of dismisses the subject, glosses over it and makes it seem like we’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out. And, I mean, we do, I guess, but I want to be with him all the time, and I want that now. I don’t want to have to always go back to Mom and Dad’s for clean clothes. I don’t want to be split between their house and Oz’s. I belong with Oz now. He’s my home.