“You think someone here has a guitar I can borrow?”
Spencer snorts. “Honey, this is Nashville.”
A found guitar and cued-up spotlight later, Grady slides onto a stool, taps the mic, and launches into the first chords. He plays the song that’s been confounding him for weeks now, but he doesn’t try to change it, not a note or word or rhythm. He plays it the way it came to him: the lyrics he scribbled down on an airline napkin, hunched over a tray table on a plane ride home to Nico. This is the music that filled his head, chasing anything else away—doubts and worry and what ifs—so everything slotted into place just right; the song landed somewhere between major and minor, celebration and melancholy.
This song is the one he wants to release, not a song about anyone, a song about him, about finding a home and a love and a wholeness. With Nico. Him.
When Grady starts the chorus, Nico appears, stock still by the hostess stand, as if by magic. Grady falters, then recovers by shutting out the small gathered crowd, the staff, even what he’s doing on stage; his eyes are only for Nico.
Once in a life, a boy comes along
And blows your world apart
With a love that burns so bright
It shines the light
Through the cracks of your broken heart.
The small crowd of patrons gives him a standing ovation, clapping and whistling with a few phones held up taking pictures and video. Grady bows and thanks them, is held up by photo and autograph requests, and Nico is gone when Grady manages to make it to the front of the restaurant. He leaves money with Spencer to pay for the meal he never ate and a nice tip for the waitress.
At Nico and Gwen’s office building, he takes the stairs instead of the elevator; he can’t stand still. Gwen is at her desk when he bangs open the door. “Hello, Grady,” she says, as if she was expecting him to burst in exactly as he did.
“Where’s Nico?”
She looks over, though her fingers continue to fly across her keyboard. “Spencer called him, and he took off out of here like his ass was on fire. I haven’t a clue where.”
“He came looking for me. I lost him. He didn’t say anything?” Grady puts his hands on his hips. Where could he have gone? Is he even more upset now? Grady needs to apologize and he needs to tell Nico about the meeting with Duke and how he has to change that song, but he can’t, and he wants to just let bygones be bygones with his mother and his father and move on, but he can’t.
“No, sorry. He’s been moody as hell all morning. I mean worse than usual.” She looks back at her computer screen and pulls a face, then jams the backspace button on her keyboard several times with end of her pen.
“We got into a fight.” Grady says.
“Christ, you two are exhausting.” She throws her pen at him. “Well, what are you standing there for? Go find him!”
Nico doesn’t have a collection of places he likes to tool around in town the way Grady does. When Grady’s stressed out, he needs to move; when Nico is stressed out he needs to hunker down for a spell. Other than work and places connected to work, Gwen and Flora’s house, and his car, Nico’s sacred safe space is home. Grady checks a few boutiques and vintage stores and also the yarn spinner with the chickens wandering her yard, because Grady needs yarn anyway. Nico’s not at any of them; he should have figured. When he gets home, Gwen sends him a message: He’s back at the office now and snippy. I’m going home. Exhausting, seriously.
Grady yanks rusty bolts and dead wires from the Superbird, plays guitar for a while, and goes to bed alone again.
13
Before, when he got attached to every wrong person at the wrong time, when everyone pegged him as a fast and loose heartbreaker—and maybe he was, if breaking his own heart counts—Grady’s most persistent fantasy was waking up in the morning and walking into a kitchen filled with sunshine and warmth and someone waiting for him at the stove. His partner: Someone who would stay, someone who saw all of him and all of his life and decided he wasn’t too much, he was just right. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask, but all the same, it was. For a long time, it was.
“You’re here,” Grady says. The morning is overcast, and Nico is sitting at the breakfast bar with a full cup of coffee and a half-full carafe. He’s here and he’s waiting for Grady.
“I do live here,” Nico replies in a clipped tone. His eyes flit to Grady’s; they’re sad, not angry. He pours more black coffee into his mug. “We have venues to see today.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Grady goes to the fridge, and its constant-cool temperature is warmer than the air between them. “When did you get home last night?”
“Late.”
Annoyed at the non-response, Grady slams the fridge door closed. “You sure you want to go look at wedding venues?” He asks, not without some bite. This is how they’re planning the rest of their lives together? If this isn’t what Nico really wants, then Grady isn’t gonna force him, as though he’s an obligation Nico has to meet. Grady sits across the breakfast bar from him and cracks open a soda. Nico’s expression pinches.
“Please tell me that’s not what you’re having for breakfast.”
“You’re having what—Two? Three? Cups of coffee? How is that better?” He takes a swig of the Mello Yello and swallows with a loud gulp.
“Coffee has actual documented health benefits.” He jerks his chin up to indicate the soda Grady is chugging. “Unlike that toxic waste. My god, at least eat some eggs or something.”
His tone softens at the end in concern Nico can’t quite disguise; the fretting and fussing over his health and happiness come from love. Grady goes back to the fridge and exchanges the soda for hard-boiled eggs and fruit. Nico nods his approval, then steals half the food, and they eat at the counter, as it starts to drizzle outside.
“And yes, I do really want to go see wedding venues still.” Nico says it to the last dregs of his third cup of coffee, but his tone is gentle and his eyes are warm.
They’ve automatically ruled out any venue in which Grady has performed. “My wedding and home are the only places I get an escape from your career,” Nico said, with the stiff body language that made it clear there was no arguing: spine straight, jaw set, chin tipped up.
“Fine, but no mansions, either,” Grady countered. “Too hoity-toity.” Nico mocked him for saying hoity-toity, but he agreed.
They drive to the first appointment with only the radio filling the quiet, then walk on either side of the event coordinator as she sells them on the features of the historic farmstead. There’s a nice green garden for the ceremony, an old carriage house for the reception, and a large flat lawn for pictures. “We can set up horseshoes or bocce,” the coordinator says, leading them across the lawn. “Croquet. Cornhole.”
Nico makes a sour face, and Grady chokes out a little laugh. They finish the tour and leave with a packet of details and pricing that Nico slides into a binder marked venues. “Cornhole,” he says as he starts the car. “Honestly.”
They tour a church, which is nice enough, then a bed and breakfast outside of town, and a banquet hall downtown after that. With every stop, they talk a little more; the usual ease of their relationship is returning bit by bit. At a rooftop venue overlooking the neon lights of Lower Broadway, Nico presses his shoulder to Grady’s.
“Not a bad view,” he says, scanning the city below.
Grady looks at him: the sharp lines of his face in profile, long, lean torso bent over the balcony, dark eyes darting curiously. Grady can tell his mind is moving a thousand miles a second, taking everything in, and making smart, snap decisions.
“It is.”
Nico gives Grady a wry look. He reaches for Grady’s wrist and commands. “Come here.”
“Yes, sir,” Grady says, dropping his voice and his chin and moving in for a kiss. When their lips touch, it’s like releasing a long-held breath. They still have things to tal
k about and issues to work through, but Grady knows they will.
“The song was perfect,” Nico says, brushing his knuckles down the front of Grady’s shirt. “If that’s what you’ve been tinkering with, I think you got it.”
Grady catches his hand when it comes to rest against Grady’s stomach. “About that,” Grady says, then the close-by click of heels on the rooftop patio interrupts him.
“You guys are a sweet couple,” says the event manager, Kacey. “Would you like to see the area available for a sit-down dinner reception?”
“We would, yes,” Nico says, following her, then waiting for Grady to fall into step beside him. “We also need you to sign a nondisclosure form, for—” He nods at Grady, and the manager doesn’t miss a beat.
“Of course.”
On the elevator down, Grady slumps against the wall and closes his eyes. “I like this one.”
“Are you just saying that so we can be finished already?”
Grady crooks a grin and cracks one eye open. “Only a little.”
Nico laughs, then rubs at his face and the back of his neck; he’s tired, too. “Just one more. I know you hate this stuff.”
Grady frowns, opens both eyes, and pushes off the wall. The elevator slows to a stop on the bottom floor. “I don’t. I don’t hate it. I just want to go ahead and get to the part where we’re married.”
Nico gives him one of those looks where he can’t seem to work out if Grady is some baffling figment of his imagination, then smiles and says, “You’re very sweet.” Grady winks at him. The elevator doors slide open, they step off together, and all hell breaks loose.
“Grady! Grady! Over here!” Twenty people with cameras flashing strobe lights push and shove to get to the front of the mob. “Grady, can you make a statement? Nico! Over here! Are the rumors true?”
Grady shields his eyes and steps back; he needs a moment to get his bearings and— Nico. The paparazzi usually leave him alone in Nashville. Why are they yelling for him? Grady moves to get Nico back on the elevator so he can deal with the pushy gang of paparazzi himself, but the doors have closed.
“Nico, is it true this is all a publicity stunt?”
“I—What?” Nico rears back, groping the wall for the elevator button.
“When’s the wedding?”
“Are you already married?”
“Can you make a statement about the marriage?”
“Has Grady really been dropped from his label?”
“Grady, over here!”
“Nico! Nico!”
“Look over here!”
Nico looks panicked and shocked and about as mad as a nest of hornets, as Grady’s granddaddy would say. The elevator still hasn’t come, so Grady has no choice but to make a statement to dampen the flames.
“Hey, all right. If there’s anything to announce, you’ll know when we announce it.” He forces a winning smile, chats with some of the photographers he’s familiar with, poses gamely, and ignores any other shouted questions and the relentless flash of cameras. The elevator arrives just after a security guard shows up to kick the paparazzi out.
“They know. Everyone knows.” Nico is pressed tight into a corner of the elevator with his arms crossed protectively over his chest and his shoulders high and tight.
“I don’t know how,” Grady mutters, much less shaken than Nico, but dismayed all the same. All their fantasies of a private, intimate wedding have turned to smoke and gone, just like that.
“Someone leaked it, obviously,” Nico snaps.
“Well, I didn’t. Don’t get pissed off at me.” Grady, fuming, turns to face the doors.
“I’m not—I’m just—” Grady can hear his sigh and the whoosh of his hands raking through his hair. “I’m not blaming you.”
Grady crosses his arms. “Sure as hell sounds like it.”
They return to the rooftop, where Kacey greets them with an apology and an assurance that the paparazzi are being dispersed and they will be personally escorted from the building and that, of course, she had no idea they were down there.
“Do you want to just go home?” Grady asks, as they wait on the romantic rooftop deck that they can’t possibly use for the wedding now. “Or if you’d rather go to your office alone…” Nico looks as if he’d like to bolt right over the edge of the roof; he’s pacing and tugging at his bottom lip and messing his hair so much it’s starting to look like his sex hair.
“No,” he says, still short and brusque. “We have an appointment; may as well keep it.”
Leaving Nico to pace behind him, Grady leans over the balcony and can’t decide if he’d rather hit the fast forward button so they’re already married, or the rewind button so they can start all over again. In any event, neither of them wanted the present situation to be this way.
14
“I’m remembering why we put this one at the bottom of the list,” Nico mutters, cringing when the car hits another deep pothole in the gravel road. Time has come to a frustrating, grinding halt as they’ve crept and crept up this hillside thick with trees and, so far, nothing else at all. Nico grits his teeth and tries to speed up; the tires spin and the car fishtails.
“Shoulda driven my truck,” Grady says. He’s not looking at Nico, but Grady can sense the tense shift of his body, can almost hear his jaw grinding.
“You want to do this right now?”
He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to fight now or ever, and the truth is he’s not angry with Nico. He feels guilty for putting him in this situation; he should have done more to protect him and protect their wedding and their privacy.
Finally, they reach a sign. Due to the shadowed dusk of the woods and heavy cloud cover, only when they’re right up on it can they make out the letters burned into the wood: Serenity Lodge. They park at a rustic round building built on stilts, and Nico gets out to fuss over his tires and shocks and the dirt coating his formerly pristine paint job.
“Not a soul would be able to get up here without us knowing,” Grady muses. Nico stops brushing dirt off the fender and looks around; the surly look on his face fades for the first time since the paparazzi debacle.
“That’s true.”
At the bottom of the split-wood staircase leading up to the lodge, the owner, Linden, introduces himself and gestures at a narrow space between the trees behind them. He has a soft, high voice, a narrow face, and a willowy build; he strikes Grady as a gentle forest sprite leading them to a magic portal hidden in the trees.
“I created this space for those who, by choice or necessity, are doing things differently,” Linden says in his musical voice, as they approach a grassy clearing. “The idea is that your wedding day is yours, free from the turmoil of other’s judgments or expectations.” He gestures at the rustic ceremonial area: two rows of natural-cut wooden benches with a leaf-strewn path between and a simple arch made of branches at the end of the aisle. “Ensuring a peaceful ceremony that will lead to a peaceful marriage.”
“If only,” Nico says faintly. The fight is gone from him; he just sounds wistful and sad, and it’s like a knife twisting in Grady’s heart.
A phone trills from Linden’s pocket. “Excuse me for just a moment.”
Nico wanders down the aisle, then back, brushes a stray leaf from a bench. “It’s pretty barebones, but it is isolated.” He releases a long breath and looks up. “And peaceful.”
Grady doesn’t know how to fix this. He can’t just snap his fingers and make the press and the fans and the tours and the demands of his record company disappear. He can’t make his mother better; he couldn’t make his father better. He has no buttons to push to move forward or back or rewrite what’s been already been written. But he will make a promise to love, honor, and cherish Nico; he will do everything in his power to make Nico happy.
“Picture it,” Grady starts, walking backward down the center aisle. �
�It’s late fall, no more heat or humidity or afternoon rain.” Nico tips his head at Grady as he gestures at the tree branches above him. “We’ll hang origami cranes from the branches. Didn’t you say something about that? Cranes?”
Nico’s arms uncross and fall open. “I did.”
“And we can string ropes with paper lanterns all across here,” Grady continues, sweeping his arms over the space above the benches. There’s a large, flat rock to the right of the tree-branch wedding altar. “We can set the band here. Or a harp?”
Nico nods, slowly making his way down the aisle. Grady’s throat tightens. “A band,” Nico says. “Just acoustic guitars.”
He’s playing along, and Grady is reinvigorated. “Yes. And we can decorate this with flowers, maybe?”
“Vines,” Nico counters. “I like the symbolism: strength, perseverance. The cranes mean commitment and longevity.”
It’s not the tedium of wedding planning or the boredom of the seemingly pointless minutia that makes Grady want to skip ahead to the I do’s; it’s how overwhelmingly and completely he loves this man and wants to commit his life to him—all of it: good and bad, ups and downs, sickness and health. His life is a lot, he is a lot, yet somehow he found Nico who is still here, pinning down the details of their happily ever after, despite everything.
“We can come in at the same time from either side,” Grady says, once Nico has joined him on the raised platform beneath the arch. He clears his throat to loosen the sudden thickness in his voice. “And we’ll say the vows that we wrote ourselves—”
“Oh, no, are we doing that?” Nico interrupts, spinning on his heel. “You write songs! That’s not fair; yours will be so much better than mine.” Nico clicks his tongue and flashes a hint of a smile.
“Yeah, they will,” Grady teases back. “Not a dry eye in the house, guaranteed.” He exaggerates his accent on the last word, hillbilly-style. Nico laughs, and Grady takes his hands.
Blended Notes Page 8
