by J. R. Rogue
Fire Escape
Sonnet
“Take chances in life. Because without them, you’re just existing.”
My mother gave me that advice, and I realize now, I’ve spent years ignoring it.
I spend the rest of my dinner barely eating, listening to Brooklyn talk. She doesn’t eat. There’s no time to eat with all the information coming out of her mouth. I’ve never seen someone talk as fast as her.
I nod my head and laugh as she talks. I feel at ease, comforted by the fact that we have so much in common. We love some of the same books. Some of the same TV shows. We have the same political beliefs, but not the same musical taste. She hates country music.
Eventually, our food is too cold to pretend we’re eating it, so we leave the main hall to go to my room. I need a blanket or a giant sweater if I’m going outside, because it gets chilly at night and I know the fire will need some help in warming me.
Brooklyn tells me about her high school in Sevierville. Her love of town native Dolly Parton—her namesake, and the only country singer she listens to—as I tear my suitcase apart. I’m looking for my favorite mustard-colored sweater when I hear the words Nashville and Hunter.
I stop, turning to her. “What?”
“What?” she repeats, looking startled.
“What did you just say? Sorry, I was thinking about the damn sweater I’m looking for.”
“I said everyone in my family grew up here but my Pop. He grew up in Nashville, but he came to the Smokies to visit my Uncle Teddy. They were big hunters, and the cost of living in Nashville was getting too high for him when he was ready to retire. So now the whole family lives here.”
“Oh.”
“What did you think I said?” She already talks to me like we’re friends, and I don’t mind it.
It’s been so long since I’ve had a friend to spend my time with. I love my mother; I wouldn’t have survived my divorce without her. But I can’t hop in the car to go to her house to binge Netflix in our pajamas anymore. She’s off starting over, again, in Hawaii. I no longer get to do with her all the things I used to do with my ex-best friend. Before my grief became too heavy for that friend to handle.
“Nothing,” I say to Brooklyn, pressing my fingers to my temple. “I’m still feeling worn out from my drive in.”
She turns to the sliding door, opening it.
The sound of laughter and guitar finds my ears, bringing a smile to my face. I’m in Tennessee. I’m in Tennessee, and I’m about to sit around a fire while people sing country music. Maybe I want the memories to come back. Maybe I want to be reminded of Hunter.
“Jesus Merry Christmas!” I exclaim when I find the damn sweater.
Brooklyn turns back to me, and we lock eyes. We laugh at the same time, and I hear her ask me, “What the hell?” at my weird phrase, but I just shrug.
“Okay, let’s go listen to some music,” I say, walking past her and out the door.
She follows, shutting the sliding glass door, clutching a blanket to her. It’s one she made. Because she knits. I know that now, along with at least two dozen other things about her. What would take someone years to learn about me, she’s offered up in the space of an hour.
She’s a comedian, a cook, a college student, a chicken lover, a feminist, a DIY obsessor. She’s juggling three lives rolled into one out here, and I can’t manage to write two words.
There’s no better muse than sorrow, but even sadness hasn’t been able to pull the words from me. The hole in my chest gets bigger and bigger with each passing day.
So, in the absence of words, I spent the past year tucked away in my little apartment learning marketing. Falling down the rabbit hole of numbers and figures helped me stay afloat in the lack of a new release.
I need a new muse. The ones I turned to are gone, divorced, or ignored. Maybe I can make this place my inspiration.
“Do you like living out here in the woods?” I ask.
We’re still standing outside my patio door. Ahead, there’s a circle of people around the fire. No one is singing at the moment, but there’s still laughter present, and the strum of a guitar. The guy holding it has his back turned to us.
“More than anything,” Brooklyn replies. “I guess I’m not like a lot of people my age.”
“How so?” I ask, because I want to know why she thinks she isn’t.
“I hate having my phone on me. I hate documenting anything. I have a camera roll full of photos that I never post. I hate Snapchat, and I hate when people can get ahold of me.”
“You don’t seem like the hermit type either,” I tell her with a laugh.
“I’m not. I love people, and I love being around people. I just hate phones. I want chickens and an open field. I want a barn and cows. I want goats! I want to talk to people face-to-face. Do you know how hard it is to find someone who wants that too? These days?”
“I wouldn’t think it’d be too hard here in the woods,” I admit.
“Yeah, same. But it’s proving to be difficult. Out here, you see the same people day in and day out. And I love that, but when you’re single, it makes gettin’ a boyfriend a little difficult.”
“Another observation, but, you don’t seem like the kind of girl who needs a boyfriend.”
“Oh, I don’t need one. I can get shit done myself. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life a lone ranger. So to find dates, I have to resort to Tinder, or eHarmony, or I gotta go down to Barker’s pub.” She points her thumb toward the bottom of the mountain.
“Mountain men don’t frequent the pub?”
“They do.” With that, she deflates. “I dunno, maybe I’m just picky. I want someone to fall off the grid with me.”
“Just walk the strip every Saturday?” I lean on the deck railing separating us from the field behind the cabin.
“Tourists. That’s all there is there.” She rolls her eyes.
“I’m single, and I want to stay that way for a while. So, I’m no help. Sorry.”
“You don’t want to settle down someday?” she asks, pulling her blanket tighter around her.
“I did that. Not sure I want to again.” A half-lie. “All I want right now is to write. And to do that, I need a muse.” At least that isn’t a lie.
“And what does one of those look like to you?” She waggles her eyebrows.
“It’s not really what one looks like, but more of…what one sounds like,” I confess.
Brooklyn shakes her head, considering my words.
I pull my sweater tighter around me, preparing to walk toward the fire.
And then, the man with his back to us begins to sing, making my stomach dip.
I know that voice.
Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler
Sonnet
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me when I hear him. There’s no mistaking his voice. I know it. Regretfully, I must admit I listen to it when I think of him. And I think of him more than I want to admit—to myself, or to my mom.
That’s the curse. In the past, he would’ve slipped away to the dark places of my mind. I would have tucked him there, buried him there, but social media places him in front of me. I can blame it on the Internet, even if it isn’t true.
But, I never unfollowed Hunter. Though I deleted his contact from my phone so many times even Apple told me to go fuck myself. I typed in the H and the U, hoping it would conjure up his name. But it never did, and my pride wouldn’t let me ask him for his number again. Though I’ve thought about reaching out to him a few times since I split up with my ex-husband.
He’s supposed to be in Georgia, three hundred and eighty miles away from me. Not sitting in front of me on a tree stump, singing one of my favorite songs.
The first day I heard him sing, he belted out a Garth Brooks song I wanted to hear. He smiled when I hollered the song request, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Some men in life just piss you off. Hunter is that man for me, and I’m not an idiot. I know the
more he pisses me off, the more I want him. But reconciling myself with that knowledge isn’t something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
He’s a smartass, never serious, and I’m always serious. Well, I wasn’t serious with Joanne. We could be idiots together. But I don’t have someone I can share a full-body in-person laugh with anymore.
Hunter calls me on my shit. And for so long, I wasn’t in the mood to have someone shove a mirror in my face. To call me out on all my crap. I like his candor, but I fought it. After being married to a man I could never communicate with, I wasn’t ready to look that in the eye.
So yeah, some men in life just piss you off, but he was the one I couldn’t stay away from. No matter the miles between us, we orbit the other. My ex-husband and I were once that to each other. Hunter and I…I didn’t understand us. The time we spent together shouldn’t have been anything extraordinary.
But something stuck. A part of him always stuck inside me.
When I got drunk, his was the number my fingers typed in. Until I erased him so many times I couldn’t pull him from my phone anymore—not without admitting to actively trying to get rid of him in my sober moments.
Hunter Hart unnerved me. From the beginning, really. So unabashed, saying whatever he felt. And reading me. He could read me, and that frightened me.
I could have gone to him after the separation, as soon as I’d been free to date someone new, but it was then that I stopped searching for him. Because the rejection would have stung.
We always placed a subtle wall between us in the past—the reason, the rule. The other persons to keep everything between us just a flirtation. Just two friends who couldn’t help but get under each other’s skin.
I blink away the past, staring at the man I thought would stay in it.
I should just talk to him when he takes a break. Ask him for his phone number again. Maybe it’ll humble me to see his disappointment.
He knows my marriage ended. He was one of the first people I reached out to. He just didn’t reach back, evidently thinking it was another false alarm. Another time I counted my chickens before they hatched.
What does he think of me and my train-wreck marriage? And why had he always let himself sit just on the edge of it?
“Tell me what it’s like?” I’d said.
“What?” he asked.
“Going through a divorce,” I responded. And no answer came.
I’m suddenly reminded of the time he said, “I just want to be your friend. That’s all.”
The rejection stings again, feeling brand new, and suddenly I want to be anywhere but here, in these shoes, heading toward the fire.
I don’t want him to see me. I don’t want to be open and free for him to pluck my petals. But if I walk back to the cabin now, it’ll be obvious I’m trying to avoid someone. So I skirt around the fire, and Brooklyn follows. We take a seat outside the circle, at a picnic table in the shadows.
“Why does your face look weird?” Brooklyn asks when I finally glance at her.
I can feel how my face looks—scrunched up, on edge, sharp angles. And…desire. “I know the singer,” I say. Hunter isn’t looking, but I feel like a giant spotlight is on me.
Brooklyn looks and I shush her so loud I sound like my mom. She snaps her head back to me, eyes wide. “Him?” She points in Hunter’s direction, and I want to die.
“Yes,” I say, grabbing the cardboard coaster in front of me on the picnic table, ripping a piece off.
“How do you know him?” she asks.
I could say I heard him sing in Nashville once, or that I just found him on social media. But a gentle truth or a lie doesn’t feel right. So I just say it. “I slept with him once.” My skin is absolutely buzzing. I feel light-headed, and I know I’m an embarrassing shade of red.
Brooklyn laughs, positively giddy.
“I know. Trust me. I fucking know. I can feel it. Jesus Merry Christmas.” I can’t keep my cool, and I feel alive for the first time in months. It’s not an unpleasant feeling—the embarrassment and shock and desire all merging together. Because I can’t lie to myself. I feel my body humming, just by being in the same place as him. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, and my body knows it. It remembers the elevator and the couch. It recalls the way he said, “Come over here,” and the feel of his hands.
He’s a thorn, supposedly unaware of his effect on me but so skilled at pissing me off. Probably very firm in the knowledge that it’s foreplay, the way we fought with each other.
What do you do with years of foreplay?
You burn with it.
“God. I need a drink,” I mumble, regretfully. Why do I always land here?
“I’ll get you one,” Brooklyn replies, leaving me in the dark, with my memories.
The bar was off the strip. Just down a side street. Joanne and I went there to get away from the crowds, from the college frat boys hollering out the windows of a second-story bar.
There was only one table open, close to the front of the bar, and the singer. I took a seat facing him; Joanne took one with her back to him, but turned on her stool as soon as she sat down.
He was singing a Travis Tritt song. I smiled, thinking of Missouri and country roads. Thinking of my mother and the windows down in her car as she sang, and I hummed along.
I didn’t have a voice then, and most days lately, I don’t feel like I have a voice now.
But, I’d also thought of Preston as I sat on that barstool in Nashville—him, back home, still denying our future, weighing his options with me.
I felt free being away from him. Like I could breathe. It was my first time in Nashville. I didn’t know it would become a city I loved more than any other, and then, in the blink of an eye, one I would loathe.
A waitress came by and took our drink orders.
When she walked away, I smiled at my friend. “He’s good.”
“I know,” Joanne agreed. She pulled out her phone, and I knew she was investigating, finding out who he was. I didn’t even have to ask. “Hunter Hart.” She smiled, flashing her phone at me.
“How the hell do you do that?” I laughed.
“I checked the bar’s Facebook page. They announce everyone who goes on stage and how long their set will last.”
I grabbed my phone from the table and searched Instagram and Facebook for the man in front of me.
He wasn’t a guy I would brag about. At least at that time. He was average in looks, not built, just a skinny man with a guitar. And tall. I could tell he was tall by the length of his legs.
But his voice? It held me. He was a skilled mimic. He started into a Tracey Lawrence song next, his voice changing to reflect the singer he was currently impersonating.
“I like this place,” I said, taking a drink, trying to push away the reason for my trip to Music City.
“Me too,” Joanne replied. “Let’s get day drunk.”
So we did.
Now, Brooklyn returns with two beers.
I look up at her, and in the dark, she probably can’t see the tear in my eye. One tear. One small tear, that’s all I will allow myself to feel for the past. For Nashville and the men who either clung too tightly to me or let go completely.
The movement must catch Hunter’s eye. I see his face turn. I see his hand fall from the guitar. I hear his voice stop.
I see his eyes through the dark, over the fire.
And then, I see that same smile he gave me all those years ago.
Brand New Man
Sonnet
I tell Brooklyn I’m not feeling well and that I want to retire to my room. I can tell she knows it’s a lie, but she doesn’t fight me on it. We’re too early on in what could be a friendship for her to call me out.
I text my mom—someone who will give me shit—as I close the sliding glass door to my room. The sound of Hunter’s voice slips right in behind me.
Me: I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life
Mom: What’s up?
I s
mile despite myself as I pull my phone to my chest. This is what I need. Someone who knows me, and my history with Hunter.
Me: This is the week songwriters are here…
Mom: Oh, that’s cool. But what happened?
Me: Hunter is here. Hunter is mother effing here!
The messages come in rapid fire. My phone buzzes in my hand, and I need a breath. Or another drink. Something—anything—to calm myself.
I hear the music stop, but Hunter’s voice continues. He’s laughing, excusing himself, leaving the fire.
Did he see where I went? I hear the sound of boots on the deck. Then, the shadow of a man outside the glass. I see it, but I’m frozen.
When he gently knocks on the sliding glass door, I don’t jump. I turn in the dark, letting the light of the phone illuminate my face.
My hand raises, giving him a small wave, and it’s as if the limb is not attached to me.
“You wanna open that door?” he asks, laughing.
I throw my phone on the bed behind me, turn on my light, and face him. Hunter crosses his arms while I open the door. He’s country. Down to his jeans and his scuffed boots. He doesn’t wear a cowboy hat, but you’ll never see him without a ballcap on. He hasn’t changed in a lot of ways, and I’ve changed in many since the last time we saw each other face-to-face. I wonder if he can see it on the outside. I feel flush, red all over.
“You look great.” He has yet to uncross his arms, and looks so uncomfortable standing in the doorway.
I pull my cardigan tighter, the chill closing in on me. “You do too.” My hand is reaching for his like it has a mind of its own. He drops his defensive stance and lets me take it. I squeeze it once, then pull away.
I haven’t touched him in ages. How many years has it been? Ten? Jesus.
He looks more fit than he did before—which is ridiculous, what the fuck—even though he was younger then. We both were. He isn’t supposed to look like this. He’s supposed to look like he let himself go. Not hot. Not sexy. Not every damn thing I want.
