“Inside me,” Grady says, another unnecessary request as Nico’s hard cock is slipping and pressing along his crack. He’s heavy on top of Grady, kissing him with tongue and teeth and pinning Grady’s hands above his head. Grady can’t do much from this position, but the restriction makes him even hotter for it, and Nico knows that; it’s no secret that he likes when Nico gets aggressive like this. The drive was agony for Grady and then made worse when Nico’s hands strayed to Grady’s lap at every red light and stop sign, then moved casually back to the gear shift, as if he wasn’t trying to make Grady come in his Wrangler’s in broad daylight.
Now, he does manage to get his legs free, crosses them over Nico’s back, and presses his heels into the dip low on Nico’s spine. Grady’s pelvis tilts, and his cock rubs on Nico’s belly.
“Okay, okay.” Nico releases one of Grady’s wrists to fumble lube out from a drawer in the side table. With his newly freed hand, Grady grips Nico’s ass and grinds him down even harder, then takes advantage of Nico’s fumbling with the bottle’s cap and licks along the shell of his ear. A groan punches from Nico’s chest, and he drops the lube. “Oh, my fucking—Give me a second, Grady, fuck.”
Grady grins crookedly up at him. Payback is a bitch.
Finally Nico fingers him open, and he pushes in, slowly filling Grady with his thick, gorgeous cock. Grady puts his own hands over his head and crosses them at the wrist, and Nico quickly takes the hint, pins Grady’s hands, and thrusts into him with long, slow rolls of his body.
“Lord almighty, yes.” Grady moans. Nico snickers in his ear, and Grady does not care one single whit. It’s perfect, then better than perfect, when Nico hikes up one of Grady thighs and switches to a quick, hard pace, hitting the spot that makes Grady sees stars. His orgasm starts to wind tightly in his gut, and he works his hand between their bodies to take himself right over the edge—
Nico’s phone chimes with a text message. He stills.
“No, no,” Grady says, trying to move himself on Nico’s cock without much success. “Sweetheart, please.” He’s so close. So, so close.
“Shh, hold on.” Nico reaches out to lift his phone off the table. “Hm. Do we want our boutonnieres to match?”
Grady’s moan this time is one of extreme displeasure. “Who gives a shit? Keep going.” He tries not to cuss too often. It’s distasteful coming from his mouth, or so he was always told. But sometimes a dang or a shoot just doesn’t quite cover it.
Nico clicks his tongue and props up on his hands. “This is our wedding, Grady.” He sits up on his knees and slides out of Grady, almost all the way, until just the blunt tip is still inside him. Grady worries that he’s upset Nico; of course he didn’t mean that. Tensions are a little high at the moment; that’s all. But Nico is smirking down at him and his eyes dance; he’s winding him up again. “I give many shits, and so should you. Now. Will our boutonnieres match, or not?”
Grady takes a slow breath to clear his mind from the ache in his balls and the throb of his dick. Boutonnieres. Flowers. Pinned to their suits. Their suits won’t match so… “Coordinating, not matching.”
“Oh, good answer.” Nico snaps his hips, picking up a new sharp rhythm. He wraps his hand around Grady’s neglected cock and works him over in time with his thrusts. It doesn’t take long for Grady to approach the edge again.
Nico’s phone chimes.
“No,” he means it to be stern; it’s more of a whine.
Nico doesn’t stop, though, doesn’t slow his hips or the rapid movement of his wrist. His voice is strained now, wheezing out, “Rose petals?”
“No,” Grady says again, so lust-addled he’s not even sure what he’s disagreeing with. He’s gone, riding a crest of blissful release, coming down laughing and lax, letting Nico bend him over and pound into him until he finishes, too.
“Roses where?” Grady says when his sense return. He looks to his left, where Nico has flopped on his stomach.
“The aisle.” Nico’s eyes are closed; his mouth is tipped up into a very satisfied smile.
“Oh. Then, no.” Too much. Nico hums a sound of agreement, and Grady takes advantage of the rare moment without layers of beautiful and expensive clothes covering Nico’s body to draw his fingers down Nico’s spine, across the muscles of his lower back in the inward bend, then over the firm rise of his ass. He smacks it, just because.
Nico yelps, flips over to glare at him, and, in the process, gives Grady an even better view. He may look angry, but his cock tells another story: twitching and plumping up. Grady dives in for a hard kiss. He’s pretty confident about the probability of a round two when Nico’s phone goes off, ringing instead of chiming a text.
“Seriously?” Grady says, as Nico sits up to retrieve it from the end of the bed. “Are flowers that difficult?”
Nico shrugs. “Hello?” He stands and turns to face Grady as he listens, which offers Grady the best view yet. If he moved forward just a little, Grady’s mouth would be—
The phone hits Grady’s hipbone. “It’s for you,” Nico says. “Vince.”
Grady picks it up, trying to work out why Vince called Nico’s phone and not his. Oh, he took his pants off on the first floor, and his phone is still in the front right pocket.
“Grady, finally. Thank god.”
“Hey, Vince, what’s up?” He sits with his legs over the edge of the mattress. Nico ruffles Grady’s hair and heads to the bathroom.
Grady loses the thread of the conversation while Nico is walking away naked; he’s too mesmerized by the lift and clench of his ass to think of anything else. He tunes back in just in time to hear Vince’s panicked, “…have to tell them something. The label is breathing down my neck. Are you fixing the song or not?”
Fixing.
Grady’s happy buzz evaporates, replaced by sick dread. “Oh,” he says. “That.”
8
He doesn’t want to be difficult; he never has. He never wanted to be more of burden than he already was, because Memaw and Granddaddy were old and tired and doing so much for him as it was, but his mind and body would zip around and boil over with energy and anger and he didn’t know how to stop it. He doesn’t want to be difficult now, but music is where he channels boiling-over emotions and too much energy and too many thoughts. He doesn’t know how to make music without grabbing it from deep in his soul with both hands and wrenching it out, bloody and alive. That’s the secret: When he’s asked in interviews how he makes music that seems so honest, it’s because he doesn’t know any other way.
For days he struggles with the song. He told Vince he would work on it, so he does. He spends hours in the practice room at home: during the day while Nico is at work, late night when Nico is sleeping, early in the morning when Nico is sleeping. No matter how he tries to rearrange and shift and rewrite, he can’t make it something it isn’t.
“Make it less personal,” Vince advised, well-meaning. He’s on Grady’s side, bless him, truly. “Write it so anyone listening will believe it’s about them.” But it isn’t about anyone.
And when I hold your hand
O, lord, I understand
What a man can do to a man.
He’s spinning circles on the drum stool in a corner when Nico calls to say he’s running late. Grady has never been able to master the drums—too many things to coordinate. He keeps a five-piece kit just in case the band wants to drop by for a quick set. It’s also nice to bang away at on occasion. He twirls a drumstick in one hand as Nico’s exasperated voice comes through the phone speaker. “I’m swamped with shipments right now,” Nico says, the strain in his voice clear over the phone speakers. “Clementine has been MIA so I took on some extra clients and— shit.” Several somethings thump and thunder in the background. Just boxes falling, Grady hopes.
“Call Spencer, he’ll help you.” Grady taps at the edge of the high-hat. Ting-ting-ta-ting.
“Don’t push your luck.” Nico grunts with the effort of picking up something. “We’ll have to drive straight to the bakery, so be ready. I’ll let you know when I’m on my way.”
Grady is only too eager for an excuse to pack it in for the day. “Will do,” he says, complete with a drum roll and flourish. Grady changes out of his mud-spattered pants—he took an ATV break that didn’t clear his head as much as he’d hoped—and into one of the outfits that Nico not-so-subtly placed in the front of his closet. The first is blue chambray slacks, a short-sleeved collared shirt, and brown suspenders.
He stands in front of the full-length mirror in Nico’s closet. The shirt is slim-fit and snug on his chest and biceps. The pants fit just right: The waist is flat on his belly and the top ridge of his hipbones; the hem brushes the top of his feet without folding over. The soft fabric hugs his thighs, and, he cranes to see, his ass looks amazing, if he does say so himself. That man knows his stuff. Grady pulls the suspenders out with both thumbs hooked in the straps. It looks like something he’d have to do in a photoshoot: Turn to the left. Chin down. Flex your arms. Look behind me. Click. He releases the suspenders with a snap against his chest, then sits on the bed to lace up his boots.
Grady touches up his hair with a little anti-frizz cream. He watches some funny animal videos and sends his favorites to Clementine—he knows she loves them—and Nico still isn’t home. He fishes in his knitting basket for his current project, but he needs more yarn. It’s time to visit Nico’s yarn-spinning friend in her funky yellow and purple house. He gives up and goes back to the studio to noodle around some more.
“Here you are. Are you ready?” Nico looks and sounds just as stressed out as he did on the phone.
“I thought you were gonna call,” Grady shouts over the reverb of his wailing electric guitar. He snaps it off, and a jarring silence fills the space.
“I did.” He pushes his hands through his hair, leaving the front standing up like a salute.
Grady frowns, puts the guitar in a stand, and retrieves his phone from on top of a bass amp. Three missed calls: Nico. “Oh.” He must not have heard it. “Sor—”
Nico cuts off his apology with an impatient flutter of his hands. “It doesn’t matter. We can still make it if we hurry.” Nico leads them into the garage, then stops in the space between Grady’s truck and his little red car. “You look nice, by the way,” he says.
“So do you.” Grady hooks two fingers in the gap between the last two buttons on Nico’s shirt; it’s dark blue with an oversized red rose print. “Paul Smith?” His pants are also red; his shoes are brushed tan suede. Brogues, Grady’s pretty sure. He has a hard time telling brogues from oxfords.
“Very good. My car or yours?”
Grady tugs on his shirt. “Do I get a kiss for guessing right?”
Nico gives a little huff of impatience, but turns for a kiss that starts perfunctorily and quickly heats. Nico pulls back with his mouth still soft and his shoulders and spine relaxed just a bit. Grady reaches up to fix his hair, and Nico leans into his touch and sighs, “We have to go eat cake.”
Grady pecks his mouth one more time. “Let’s take the Belvedere.”
“Feeling nostalgic?” Nico says, smoothing his shirt.
“Sorta.” He had been thinking about his grandfather when he was puttering around the house with nothing to do. He’d given the Belvedere a polish and remembered the old pictures he would show Grady. He would set Grady on his knee in that worn out recliner of his, with its scratchy green upholstery that smelled like cigar smoke and always had a newspaper stuffed into the side. Grady has very few memories of his grandfather that don’t feature that old recliner.
Back when cars were cars, he’d say in his voice that was like whisky: deep and rich and smoky, he’d call his car: My best girl. Memaw would tut, Granddaddy would rasp a laugh, and Grady would nod as if he knew. Granddaddy’s car was a two-tone light blue V-6 sport coupe and Grady’s is a cherry-red and white V-8 club sedan. Granddaddy sold his to buy an engagement ring and a down payment on a house for his new bride, and Grady bought his with his second big royalty check, after he’d wrecked the car he bought with his first one. He touches the faint scar on his bottom lip. He’d been lucky to walk away from a major wreck with only that, but at the time he’d wished he was a little less lucky.
On the way to the bakery, the rock-country station plays on the radio, the brand new air conditioning blasts—naturally his grandfather didn’t have that in his best girl either—and Grady asks about Nico’s day, he loves listening to Nico when he rambles on about his day; how animated he gets; how he’s so excited to share it all with Grady.
He likes his new clients, Nico tells him; they’re all nice enough and easy to work with. Then he goes on for a while about each of them, and Grady can tell he does enjoy working with them. Nico explains how it’s just that he’s gotten accustomed to having only one, and big star or no, it means less inventory. “And I know what Clementine wants now, what works. Easy.” Nico flips the sunshade down; this time of the year the sun is still blazing low in the sky even as the clock claims it’s evening.
“Are you unhappy doing it?” Grady asks. If he can figure out this song, get another hit, another big tour, Nico wouldn’t have to work at all. Isn’t it Grady’s turn to take care of him?
“It’s okay.” Nico checks the map pulled up on his phone. “Next right. How about you? Were you working on something? I thought you were done.”
It’s his chance to tell Nico everything: How Duke wants to change the song and Vince is on his case, gently, but still; how he wants to make everyone happy, especially Nico, but how he can’t do it without compromising his convictions; how conflicted he is and how, no matter what he does, he can’t make the song be anything other than the truth of his heart. “I’m tinkering,” he says. Then, “Sweet Thang Bakery?” Grady asks as a pink and green sign comes into view.
“It comes highly recommended, so we’re just going to go ahead and ignore that name.”
They’re warmly greeted by two pale-haired women, one older and one younger, who turn out to be mother and daughter bakery owners, and they are both just as sweet as can be, even though he and Nico are a bit late and everything is rushed. The whole place smells like vanilla and buttercream and chocolate. Grady’s stomach growls when they sit at the tasting table.
“This is my dinner,” he confesses to Nico.
“Grady,” he chides, then flips a page in the laminated wedding cake binder and admits, “Mine too.”
Grady sneaks a smiling kiss to his cheek.
“Okay, you two are adorable,” the daughter says. Nico thanks her, and Grady sends her a wink. She blushes bright pink.
“Behave yourself,” Nico says, then to the mother, “Could we start with the citrus cake with lemon curd filling and orange lemon icing?”
“What about a wedding pie?” Grady asks, taking note of a key lime pie in the display case that makes his mouth water. Nico sends him a sidelong glance with his mouth pinched. Well, regardless, that key lime pie is coming home with him tonight.
On the drive home they’re too full of cake to talk about much of anything, and when they get home it’s too late for Grady to do much more than deposit his pie in the fridge, take Nico to bed, and chase the taste of German chocolate cake and coconut pecan frosting from his tongue, while he sighs and whines and whispers Grady’s name.
9
If Grady spends one more day cooped up in the house accomplishing nothing, he’s liable to start climbing the walls. Gone crazy as a bedbug, Granddaddy used to say to him after too many rainy days stuck inside. He takes the Plymouth out for a drive.
He takes a highway west out of town and eventually drives down narrow country roads that cut through woods and farms and not much else. He’s got the windows open, the radio loud, and his left arm draped out in the warm, rushing air. Out here, poor and forgotten t
owns spring up suddenly, like pockmarks on the otherwise clear horizon.
Grady’s grandfather worked second shift as a chrome buffer at a tool manufacturing warehouse. He ground down rough edges before sending industrial tool parts off to the assembly line until he was too sickly to work, when Grady was eight or so. Until then, Grady had rarely seen his grandfather without a drink in his hand: a bourbon or whisky neat.
At five o’clock every evening they’d have happy hour, and Granddaddy would set Grady down in his old recliner and hand him cheese and peanut butter crackers while Memaw fixed dinner. With dinner, grandfather would have a Bloody Mary, until his doctor told him his liver was shot and he switched to plain tomato juice. It was too late to really make a difference.
Grady catches a whiff of a smell that he’d know anywhere as he comes around the sloping bend to another rough blue-collar town: barbecue. He follows the billowing smoke of the pit to a church: a single-room, white clapboard-sided building with a bell tower pitched high on the roof. Parishioners are gathered on the lawn balancing paper plates on one hand with their minds half on eating and half on gossiping; Grady knows that from experience.
He’s strayed so far from Nashville that he’s crossed over the imaginary barbecue line, from Nashville’s spicy red-sauce doused ribs to a Memphis-style dry rub. Yet the table is covered with potato salad, cole slaw, deviled eggs, cornbread, and at the end, cobblers and pies and cookies and cakes exactly like the church picnics of Grady’s childhood, as if he drove all this way to come back home.
He loads a plate so full of food the center bends in and the edges droop and if he closes his eyes he can imagine Memaw tucking a paper napkin into his collar and tutting at him to try chewing for a change, land’s sake, Grady.
Blended Notes Page 5
