Road Tapes

I'm Bri Rios, forty-two years old, and I have been the tour manager for this band for six years. That means I book the rooms, count the merch money, and make sure five grown men with guitars get on the bus before the driver loses patience. It is not a job that leaves much room for fooling around, which is probably why I've spent the last four months fooling around over email with our lead guitarist.

Jeremiah Wilks is twenty-eight, and yes, I did the math on that the first night it started. Fourteen years. I turned it over and over and decided I didn't care. He's a grown man. I'm a grown woman. Nobody's getting hurt unless we both say yes to it.

It started in Nashville, back in March, after a session that ran until two in the morning. He walked me to my rental car and I said something dumb about his pedal steel sounding like rain. He emailed me the next day. I answered. Four months later we're still answering.

The playlist showed up in my inbox on a Tuesday, somewhere past the Missouri line.

It was twelve songs, all of them slow, and the title of the email was "For the long drive, when you can't sleep." I sat in my bunk with my laptop and my cold coffee and I read that subject line three times.

Bri,

Made this for you. Every track made me think of you. Don't overthink it.

J.

Don't overthink it. Sure. A man sends a woman twelve slow songs at one in the morning and tells her not to overthink it. I typed my reply right there in the dark while the rest of the bus snored.

Jeremiah,

This is the most transparent bid for attention I have ever received from a musician, and I have worked with musicians for fifteen years. That is a genuinely competitive field.

Also I listened to it twice and the third song is unfair and you know it.

I'm riding all day tomorrow. Don't make me crash a tour bus.

Bri

He answered in about ninety seconds, which told me he was still awake too, which told me other things.

His text came with a photo. Just his hand, pressed flat against the window beside his bunk, the highway lights blurred behind the glass. Big hand. Guitar calluses. He'd captioned it, thinking about your hands.

I stared at that photo longer than I want to admit, even here. Then I pulled my laptop back onto my knees and typed the longest email I'd sent anyone in years. I have read it since, about forty times, and I still stand by every word.

Jeremiah,

You asked once what I do during the show, since I'm not up on the stage. I told you I run the setlist and handle the payroll and watch the door. That was true, but it wasn't the whole answer, and you knew it, which is why you asked.

Here's the honest version. I watch you.

I watch you when you tune between songs, the way your jaw sets and your head tilts toward the amp like you're listening to something nobody else in the building can hear. I watch your fingers on the frets when you're not thinking about them, when the song is carrying you, when you close your eyes on the last chorus and the whole crowd disappears for you.

I have watched you play maybe two hundred shows. I could draw your hands from memory. I have imagined those hands in a great many places they have never been, and I am a forty-two-year-old professional woman typing this in a bunk that smells like diesel, so believe me when I say I don't do this sort of thing.

The third song is unfair because it's the one I was humming in the shower in Nashville, and I think you noticed, and you put it third on purpose.

Your hands. Yes. That's my answer to the photo.

Bri

He didn't reply that night. Or the next morning. I chewed on that for a full day, somewhere around the Missouri line, telling myself I'd blown it, that I'd come on too strong, that the fourteen years had finally shown up and sat down between us.

Then, at midnight in a truck stop outside Kansas City, my phone buzzed. Not a text. A voice memo, forty seconds long.

I pressed play with my headphones in, curled in my bunk like I was hiding from my own phone.

"Bri. It's me. Obviously." A breath, shaky. "I'm in the bunk, everyone's asleep, and I read your email about six times and I'm... okay, I'm just going to say it. I've been hard since I read it. Just from your words. Just from you watching me like that." A long exhale, rough at the edges. "Every night up there I find you at the side of the stage now. I look for you. You're the thing I play to, and I didn't know that until you said it. Des Moines. Room 214. I'm knocking. If you'll have me. Goodnight. God, goodnight."

I lay there in the dark with the whole bus rolling under me and my heart going hard, and I did not sleep.

So at 2 a.m. I called his number knowing he'd be asleep, planning to leave a voicemail, which is apparently what I do now, confess things into machines at terrible hours.

"Jeremiah, it's Bri. You're asleep, which is good, because I can say this easier to a phone than to your face." I took a breath. The bus hummed around me. "I'm in my bunk too. And I'm going to tell you exactly what I'd do if I crawled into yours, and then you can decide in the morning whether you still want to knock on 214.

"I'd pull the curtain shut behind me. It's a narrow bunk and we'd have to fit, your chest against mine, and I'd put my hand flat on you the way you put it on that window. I'd start at your shoulder and work down slow, because I've spent four months imagining the exact weight of your hand and it's my turn.

"Then I'd get my hand around your cock.