The bus was not what I expected. Old, loud, paint-chipped — a relic that looked like it had been driven through three decades and several bad decisions. The logo on the side was faded past recognition and one of the windows had a crack sealed with electrical tape. I stood in the parking lot at six a.m. with my duffel and stared at it.
"She's called Gracie," Jude said, slapping the side panel like you'd pat a horse. "First tour bus. Aiden won't let us replace her."
"He calls it lucky," Tommy said from the steps, already boarding. "I call it tetanus."
I climbed on. Old leather and gas station air freshener. Bunks lined one wall — narrow, stacked, curtains that didn't fully close. A galley kitchen the size of a coffin.
Jude pointed at the bunk assignments, tapping the wall chart with his knuckle. "You're here. Aiden's there."
There was directly behind mine. One wall between us. Thin enough that I could hear my own pulse — which meant he could hear my breathing, which meant I was going to spend every night lying six inches from the man I'd agreed to secretly write songs for. No psychological damage possible here. None at all.
Aiden boarded last — sunglasses, guitar case, the energy of a man who hadn't slept. He looked at me for half a second, something complicated behind his eyes, then dropped onto the back lounge couch without a word.
We'd barely spoken since Otis's office. Since the notebook and the deal and the sound of his voice saying my name in a hallway I hadn't answered. The engine coughed to life, Gracie lurched onto the highway, and the tour began.
Within an hour the bus became a living room. Jude hooked up a gaming console, produced gas station junk food, and Tommy had a cooler of sparkling water. The crew argued about the setlist while Jude destroyed everyone at Mario Kart.
"Allison. You're up." He held out a controller like a challenge. I took it, turning it over in my hands. "I haven't played this since I was twelve."
"Perfect. You'll fit right in with Aiden's skill level."
"I'm sitting right here," Aiden said from the couch, not looking up from his guitar. Jude grinned. "And you're terrible. Come on, new girl."
I drove off Rainbow Road three times in thirty seconds. Jude narrated my failures like a sports commentator and Tommy laughed — actually laughed, a sound I'd heard maybe twice — and Aiden watched from the couch with his guitar across his lap. I could feel his eyes on my neck like a change in temperature.
"You're the worst driver I've ever seen," Jude said. "And I've seen Aiden parallel park." Aiden didn't look up but his mouth twitched. "I parallel park fine."
"You took out a fire hydrant in Austin." Jude held up a finger like evidence to a jury. "That hydrant was in the wrong place," Aiden said, and even his voice was fighting a grin.
I laughed. The kind that comes before you can stop it — full, real, the first one that didn't feel borrowed since I'd walked into that villa. Aiden's eyes were on me when it happened. I caught it in my peripheral — the way his fingers stilled on the guitar strings, the way his jaw softened into something he covered by looking out the window. Don't. Don't you dare read into that.
An hour in, someone connected a phone to the speakers and the opening riff of a Hollow Saints song cut through the lounge. I recognized it in my bones before the first word — a lyric I wrote at fifteen about hunger. Not the kind you fix with food, the kind that lives in the walls of a house where the heat's been off since Tuesday.
Aiden's hands went still on the guitar. Knuckles white, a tremor in his fingers — subtle, the kind you'd miss if you weren't already watching his hands more than you should be. He changed the station without a word. Nobody noticed.
I noticed. And the knowing sat in my throat like something I couldn't swallow.
You're hearing your own theft on the radio and it still makes your hands shake. And now I'm here to hand you more words, because a man in a suit told me my mother's spine depended on it.
We stopped at a desert diner past Barstow — cracked linoleum, coffee brewed during the previous administration. The crew sprawled across booths. Tommy sat beside me and after a few minutes slid his phone across the table — a hand-painted postcard, desert sunset.
"I collect one from every tour stop. Forty-seven so far." He slid the phone back.
"Jude thinks it's weird?" I asked, and Tommy's mouth did something that almost qualified as a smile. "Jude hooks up gaming consoles on a moving bus. He doesn't get to judge."
Aiden was in the booth behind us. I could feel him the way you feel weather shifting. Quiet through the meal, ate what I put in front of him without being told.
On the way back he fell into step beside me, the desert stretching flat and gold to the horizon.
"You're quiet today," he said. The wind pushed his hair off his forehead and for a second he looked like someone I didn't recognize — open, unperforming.
"I'm always quiet." I kept my eyes on the bus ahead. He shoved his hands in his pockets. "No, you're not. You came out of the womb with a comeback."
"Maybe I'm saving my comebacks," I said, and the weight behind the words killed the smile before it formed.
He looked at me with that sideways look, the one that used to be a sneer and had become something harder to name. "For what?"
For the moment you find out what I agreed to. For the day you realize every song I slide under your door has a price tag you can't see.
"For when you deserve them," I said. Something moved behind his eyes but he didn't push. We boarded the bus and the desert swallowed the diner behind us.
That night the bus was dark and rolling. I couldn't sleep. Slid out of my bunk for water and stopped.
The back lounge lamp was on — dim, barely there. Aiden was on the couch with his knees drawn up, and in his hands was the notebook. My notebook. The battered cover, the warped spine, the dirt still ground into the edges. He was reading it the way some people read scripture — slowly, one finger tracing the lines, lips moving around words he'd memorized years ago but still needed to see on the page. His face was stripped of every mask I'd ever seen him wear. No smirk, no armor. Just a man in the dark with stolen words, running his fingers over handwriting that wasn't his, looking like someone visiting a grave.
He carries it everywhere, Otis had said. Every tour, every hotel, every city.
I watched him turn a page. Watched his thumb press flat against the paper like he was trying to absorb the ink through his skin. Jude's breathing was slow and deep behind me. Tommy was silent the way Tommy was always silent. And Aiden sat six feet away reading my fifteen-year-old heart like it was the only thing keeping him alive.
He didn't know I was watching. He didn't know I knew what he was holding. And tomorrow I'd write him more words per Otis's deal and he'd think they were gifts and I'd hate myself a little more with every line.
I backed away without a sound. Climbed into my bunk and pulled the curtain shut. Through the thin wall I could hear him murmuring — a line from a poem about a girl made of thread who keeps unraveling, the same one that became "Threadbare," the same chorus my mother's radio had played in a midnight kitchen while I did math that never added up.
I pressed my hand against the wall. Closed my eyes. And didn't sleep for a long time.