Chapter 4: Knoxville Rain

The storm hit Knoxville at nine that night and took the whole hotel dark.

We had spent the afternoon at an outdoor station event, and the rain had ended it at four.

Joanna had shaken hands for five hours under a white tent, and I had sung two songs under an umbrella someone held over my head.

Now the elevators were dead, and the hallways smelled of wet carpet and candle wax.

A bellman had brought us a box of candles and a lighter.

"Power should be back by morning, ma'am," he had said.

I had lost the coin flip the night before, so I was on the sofa in a T-shirt, with a hotel blanket pulled up to my chin.

Thunder cracked over the river and shook the glass.

I was not asleep, and I could hear that Joanna wasn't either.

The bedroom door opened, and she stepped out into the candlelight.

She wore a loose gray sleep shirt and nothing on her feet.

Without the suit and the lipstick, she looked younger and tired and much more dangerous.

"I can't sleep with the noise," she said.

"It's a good noise."

"Is it?"

"It sounds like somebody moving furniture in heaven."

She almost laughed.

She came and sat on the far end of the sofa, and I pulled my feet up to give her room.

For a while we listened to the rain.

"You said in the studio that you saw me at the wedding," she said. "Why did you remember me?"

"You stood in the back for four hours and never looked at your phone."

"Is that unusual?"

"It's the strangest thing I've ever seen at a wedding."

She turned her head and looked at me in the gold light.

"I was thinking about my father," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"He'd have liked you. He liked anyone who could carry a tune."

"Do you sing?"

"No," Joanna said, much too fast.

I let that go.

Lightning lit the whole room white, and in the flash I saw her look at my mouth.

Then the dark came back, and the thunder came after it, so loud that I jumped.

She put her hand on my ankle through the blanket, to steady me.

It stayed there.

"Callie," she said.

"I know."

"This isn't in the rules."

"Then break one."

She kept her eyes on mine for a long breath.

Then she leaned across the cushions and kissed me.

It was nothing like the stage.

There was no audience now, and no timer, and nothing to be careful about.

Her hand slid up from my ankle to my knee, and I pulled the blanket away.

I took hold of the front of her shirt and drew her down until she lay half over me, with her hair falling against my cheek.

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