Page 74 of Making the Save

It was making me horny. Everything about him was making me horny. The muscles under that shirt he wore. The way he’d stand up and pull up his shorts. His hands on his hips like he meant business. The bead of sweat heading down his neck.

Horny. Horny. Horny.

The guy was a thirst trap.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like it’s a little country, sure, but it’s…deeper, you know? The lyrics sound like you, like you’re singing from your life.”

I hummed, not quite able to take the compliment yet.

Last night, for some reason I did not understand, he insisted on sleeping on the couch again. After everything we’d done it seemed a little old fashioned to me, but when Wyatt decides something it’s decided.

“You’re sore,” is what he told me. “You don’t need me pawing at you in the night.”

What I didn’t say was that I wanted him to paw at me. After yesterday, I wanted more of him. In every way I could get it.

I took all those feelings and poured it into the new song. I was calling it Paper Doll and it was everything I’d been feeling thelast few years. It was sad, sure, but mostly it was angry. I really loved it.

An hour passed like that. Me working. Him working. The birds landing in the trees nearby and taking off again. At one point, Wyatt pointed out a deer walking through the edge of the clearing.

I didn’t need golf tournaments or celebrity interviews to get myself back on track.

I needed this place. This silence.

This man.

He held a hand to his back and winced as he straightened from the crouch he’d been bent into.

“We should go couch shopping,” I said.

“Couch shopping?” he asked, rubbing the sawdust out of his hair. It flew up into the air and got caught in the sunlight like he was sending out sparks.

“That couch is the worst.”

“How the fuck are we going to get a couch up this mountain today?”

I smiled and set aside my guitar. “This is the fun part about having money. You can make all the problems go away.”

Wyatt

“I can’t believewe pulled that off,” I said.

“You don’t shop much, do you?” Syd asked. She was wearing that Peaks ball cap and a pair of big sunglasses. If she thought she was in disguise, she wasn’t. She sparkled through downtown Telluride. Tinker Bell on a shopping trip. “Because that’sbasically how it works. You go in, you pay a bunch of money for something that the shop provides.”

“The delivery, is what I’m talking about.”

“Well, that’s because you’re with me,” she said with a sassy little walk.

We were walking out of one of the few furniture stores in Telluride. A place that specialized in rustic cabin decor. The leather couch that Syd picked out with those awesome copper rivets was both a couch and pullout bed with a really comfortable mattress.

Liam and Dad would be thrilled the next time they visited.

Plus, the shop was going to deliver it in the next couple of hours. No extra charge because the owner of the store was apparently Sydney Malloy’s biggest fan.

A fully grown woman with silver hair and a thriving successful business went fully fan girl, complete with squealing and tears. “That first album of yours,” she’d said, hugging Syd like she was a long-lost daughter, “got me through my divorce. I just had it on repeat in my car all the time.”

Syd laughed and cried with her and I stood back and just marveled. She’d been seventeen when that album came out and her songs had provided comfort to a woman in her forties going through something awful.

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