Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 13: Studio B
They were back in Studio B the third afternoon, not because they’d planned it but because there was nowhere else Maya particularly wanted to be, and when she thought about why, she stopped thinking about it.
The song was finished. She knew that. She’d played the final version twice that morning in her hotel room, alone, to make sure it was real and not just the late-hour trick of a good session that collapses in daylight. It held. It was genuinely finished, and finished in the right way — not patched or concluded but actually arrived at, the way you arrive at a destination you didn’t know you were driving toward.
They weren’t working today. That was the unspoken understanding. She’d brought her guitar because she didn’t know how to leave it anywhere, but it was still in its case. Dash had the studio booked through the evening and Marcus had set up the monitors and left them to it.
They were listening to the playback.
Marcus had made a rough mix of yesterday’s session before he left — just enough to give the tracks shape, a temporary arrangement so they could hear it outside of the moment they’d recorded it in. It was raw but honest. No reverb vanity, just the song at its actual size.
Maya sat in the center of the control room floor. Not in a chair — she’d migrated to the floor at some point without deciding to, her back against the front of the producer’s desk, knees up, eyes closed. The studio monitors were the large kind, mounted at ear level, and the sound in this room was full and accurate and unforgiving in the best possible way. She could hear her own voice with the dispassion of distance. She could hear where she’d gone for the break in her chest register and trusted it to stay, and where it had stayed.
She could hear, in the guitar part, the melodic inversion she’d resisted for forty-five minutes.
She opened her eyes on the second chorus.
Dash was standing near the back wall. She’d thought he was sitting but at some point he’d stood, or maybe he’d been standing all along, she hadn’t been paying attention to his geography. He was watching her face.
Not looking at the console. Not looking at the monitors. Watching her face while she listened.
She held that for a moment.
The song reached its third section — the new one, the one they’d built from the seam up — and started its approach to the final chord. She tracked the melody without meaning to, her fingers moving slightly against her knee. Settling. In all three ways.
The chord rang.
Went quiet.
The playback ended.
In the silence after, she was very conscious of the room. Of the monitors. Of the distance between her position on the floor and where he was standing. Of the fact that she had been about to say something practical — *the low end needs work* or *Marcus should pull the guitar back in the intro* — and instead she got to her feet, and crossed the room.
She kissed him.
Not dramatically. She stepped into the distance between them and put her mouth against his and it was quiet and intentional, nothing accidental about it. He was very still for a second — not pulling back, just registering — and she felt that second like a held note.
Then he stepped back.
Not away. Just enough.
“Maya.” His voice was low. She had never heard her name in his voice before and she stayed calm about it.
“I know,” she said.
“I don’t think you—”
“The clause in your contract with Sable Records,” she said. “No romantic involvement with supporting artists while on tour. Applies to both parties, practically speaking, even though you’re the one who signed it. If it comes out, it creates a narrative. That narrative follows me longer than it follows you because I’m the smaller name.” She looked at him. “I know.”
He searched her face. “You knew before you—”
“Yes.”
He exhaled — not frustrated, something heavier than that. He moved to the console and put his hands on the top of it, not operating anything, just grounding himself against its solid surface. “I’m not trying to—”
“Protect me?”
“Be the reason something happens to your career,” he said precisely. “That’s different from protecting you. You don’t need protecting. I just don’t want to be the thing that costs you something.”
She thought about that. It was an honest answer and she gave it the weight it deserved.
They sat on opposite sides of the room. Not dramatically — she went back to the floor near the desk and he took the producer’s chair and they both looked at some middle space between them. The studio was quiet except for the low hum of the monitors in standby, a white hiss at the edge of hearing.
One minute. Two.
She thought about the clause in the contract. She thought about the narrative and how narratives work, how they travel ahead of the person they’re built around and arrive first in every room. She thought about her parents’ restaurant and playing piano between the tables on weekend evenings while her father carried plates and her mother kept the books, all those years of practice that existed before anyone outside that restaurant knew her name.
She thought about how you know something is true about yourself before you want it to be.
Ten minutes. She watched the clock on the wall. It was not a clock with no hands. It was a perfectly functional studio clock.
She heard him move.
She didn’t look up until he was three feet away, and then she did, and he stood there for a moment — that specific stillness he had, the one that looked like reluctance but wasn’t reluctance, it was precision, a man who didn’t act until he meant it.
He sat down next to her on the floor.
He put his hand under her jaw, tilted her face up, and kissed her.
Slowly. Carefully. With the quality of a decision that has been weighed and will not be reversed. Not an impulse — she could feel the difference and it mattered to her, it mattered completely, that this was not an impulse. His thumb was at her cheekbone and the tattoos on his left arm were at the edge of her peripheral vision and the crow was still mid-flight, still frozen at the moment of maximum wingspan, and maybe that was what it meant to her — not frozen, she thought, held. The moment of being most open to the air, held.
She kissed him back with her hands in her lap because she didn’t quite trust what she’d do with them.
When it ended they were both very quiet and very still.
“You knew,” he said again. Softer now.
“I knew,” she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. There was something moving in his expression — not emotion in the generic sense, something more specific than that, the particular look of a person arriving somewhere they’d taken a long route to reach.
“Okay,” he said.
It wasn’t the most romantic word. It was also exactly right.
Outside, Nashville finished its third and final afternoon of their tour break, going dark in its slow Southern way, lights coming on in the buildings across the street, the sound-of-guitar scale from the floor below still going — the same scale, patient and repeating, someone getting a thing right by doing it again and again until it stopped being effortful and became just the truth of how your hands moved.
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