Rockstar & Roadie: Bonus Chapter

Big Sur
by Jace Wilder

A scene too hot for retailers. Six weeks after the Kia Forum. Free and exclusive to readers of Rockstar & Roadie.

The cabin sat on a cliff three miles south of Pfeiffer Big Sur, on a private dirt road that ended in a turnaround above the Pacific, and Sean had booked it for two weeks in mid-June and given us the keys at the LAX baggage claim with a kiss on each of our cheeks and a single sentence that had been her only instruction for the trip.

Don’t break each other.

We had not, in five days, broken each other.

We had, in five days, broken three wine glasses, the lock on the back screen door, and the small ceramic vase in the master bedroom that Jax had put his hand against for balance the night we had christened the bedroom and the bedroom floor and, eventually, the bedroom rug. The owner of the cabin was going to bill Sean. Sean was going to bill us. We were going to laugh about it for years.

It was day six.

I woke up at nine to a wedge of sun coming in through the gauze curtain, and Jax was already up.

I could hear him in the kitchen. I could hear, specifically, the small rhythmic tap of his pen against the edge of the counter — the sound he made when he was working through a chord progression with a coffee in one hand and a notebook open on the counter beside him — and then I heard the kettle click on, and I heard him hum something low through his teeth, and I lay in the bed for ninety seconds with my eyes closed, listening to the man I was engaged to be domestic in a kitchen on the cliffs of Big Sur on a Tuesday morning in June.

I touched the band on my left ring finger. It was warm. I rolled out of bed.

I pulled on a pair of his boxers — they were on the floor, they were closer than mine, they fit fine, and Jax had developed a small private thing over the last six weeks about seeing me in his underwear, which I was going to exploit — and I padded down the hall.

He was at the counter. Bare feet. Black T-shirt. Grey sweatpants riding low on his hips. Hair pulled back into a sleep-loose bun. The morning sun coming through the kitchen window catching the silver in the throat tattoo above his collar and the brushed steel of the wedding band on his left ring finger that we had gotten in a hurry from a jeweler in Santa Monica three days before we had flown up here, because — Jax had said, lying in bed in our apartment in Boerum Hill the week before the trip — Boston, I am not flying to Big Sur with you for two weeks without a ring on my finger that says you said yes.

He looked up. He saw me. He set the pen down.

He said, soft, “Hi, Boston.”

I said, “Hi, boss.”

He said, “You found my boxers.”

I said, “I found your boxers.”

He said, “Look at you.”

I said, “Boss.”

He said, “Coffee.”

He pushed a mug across the counter to me. He had — he had, every morning of this trip, made my coffee before I was awake. He had remembered the splash of cream and the half-spoon of brown sugar I took. He had done it, the second morning, without asking me how I took it, because he had clocked it on the first morning and filed it for the rest of his life. The man was a tactical operation. The man was my tactical operation, now, by law, and the rest of the legal piece would follow whenever Sean found us a date that worked for the band, the imprint, and Frank’s backyard.

I took the coffee. I sat on the stool across from him. I drank it slow.

He watched me drink coffee in his kitchen in his boxers in his ring with his pen down and his notebook open beside him, and his face did the thing — the thing it had done in the morning at the Phoenician, the thing it had done in the loft of the cabin on the Sandy River, the thing it had done in the king bed at the Mark in May — and after a long quiet moment he said —

“Boston. I want to do a thing today.”

I said, “…okay.”

He said, “I want to bring the speaker out to the deck. I want to play you the song.”

I said, “Hale?”

He said, “Hale. The mix. Mel sent me the rough mix yesterday. From the studio. I have not let myself listen to it without you in the room, and I want — Boston, I want to put the speaker on the deck, and I want to put it on, and I want — ”

He stopped. He looked at his coffee.

He said, “Boston. I want to do a thing while it plays.”

I set my coffee down. I said, “Boss. What kind of thing.”

He said, “The thing.”

I said, “Use your words, baby.”

He laughed once, into his fist, and he leaned across the counter so his mouth was about eight inches from mine, and he said — quiet, not embarrassed, just quiet, the way he had learned to be quiet about the things that mattered to him —

“I want to put a blindfold on you.”

I closed my eyes.

I closed my eyes because I had been waiting for him to ask for this for nine months, and because I had clocked it as a fantasy of his somewhere around the cabin in Oregon, and because I had been carrying it as a thing I knew without him telling me, and because — this morning, in his kitchen on the cliffs of Big Sur, with the rough mix of Hale on his iPad and a wedding band on his finger and my coffee in front of me — he had finally asked.

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Yeah?”

I said, “Yeah, Jax.”

He said, “And I want to play you the song. And I want to take you apart to it, Boston. Slow. The whole way through. I want — I want you to hear what I made you. I want you to hear what Mel made of what I made you. I want you blindfolded so you have to hear it, you cannot look at me, you have only the song and my hands, and I want — ”

I said, “Jax. Take me to the deck.”

He said, “Yeah.”

He set his coffee down. He came around the counter. He took my hand. He led me out.

The deck of the cabin was twenty feet of redwood on cliff struts that hung two hundred feet above the Pacific. The railing was wrought iron painted black. There was a low futon-style couch against the cabin wall, deep enough for two people lengthwise, with a thick wool throw across the back of it. The Pacific was three hundred feet down a vertical drop and out, gray-blue and rolling, with two pelicans gliding parallel to the cliff and a fog bank a half-mile out at sea that had not yet decided whether it was going to come in.

He brought the Bluetooth speaker out. He brought a small soft black cloth from his suitcase that I had — when I had clocked it in his bag two days ago — pretended I had not seen. He had clearly been carrying it for the trip. He had clearly been waiting for the right morning. The right morning had turned out to be Tuesday, June 2026, in Big Sur, on a deck above the ocean, with a song he had written about me coming through a Bluetooth speaker for the first time in mixed form.

I sat down on the futon. He sat down next to me. He held the blindfold up.

He said, “Boston. Last check. We have a word.”

I said, “Stillwater.”

He said, “Stillwater. If you want it off, you say it.”

I said, “I’ll say it. Yeah, Jax. Put it on me.”

He put it on me. He tied it behind my head, careful, the cotton soft against my temples. The world went black. The wind came in off the water. I could smell the salt and the cypress and the faint warm trace of his shampoo from where he had showered before I had woken up. I could hear the surf — distant, two hundred feet down — and the call of a gull a long way out.

His hand found the side of my face. His thumb moved across my cheekbone.

He said, against my ear, “Look at you.”

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Stay there.”

I heard him stand up. I heard him pad across the deck. I heard the small click of the speaker’s power button. I heard him scroll, quiet, on the iPad. I heard him pause.

I said, “Jax. Play it.”

He played it.

Hale, in its rough mix, on a Bluetooth speaker on a redwood deck above the Pacific, was — God, it was — different from the parlor-acoustic version he had played me on the porch in Oregon, and different from the take he had cut alone in Burbank in August. It was the band now. It was Ryker’s bass coming in low under the second verse like a hand at the back of the neck. It was Kade’s drums — soft, soft, the brushes, the pulled-back kind he did when he was being deliberate — sliding under the chorus and anchoring it. It was Nova’s keys, two octaves above the melody, doing a counter-line in the bridge that I had not heard before because Mel had put it in late, that did the thing — that Mel-specific thing — where the production lifted the lyric without overwhelming it.

I sat on the futon with the blindfold on my eyes and the song playing and my husband’s voice coming out of a Bluetooth speaker on the deck of a cabin on a cliff above the Pacific, singing about the man he had come down to a bunk for in May 2026, and the man he had ridden in a leather couch in Sacramento, and the man he had been in love with for two years before he had told him.

I cried, just a little, under the blindfold. I had cried at Hale every other time I had heard it. I was going to cry at Hale every time I heard it for the rest of my life, and that was the deal, and I was going to die hearing it, and that was also the deal.

The song moved through the first chorus.

His hands found my shoulders. He had come back to me. He sat down next to me on the futon. He pulled my back against his chest. His mouth went to the side of my neck, soft, just there, and his hand slid down my chest under the T-shirt I was wearing — his T-shirt, the one I had pulled on with his boxers — and he said, against my ear —

“You hearing it, Boston.”

“I’m hearing it, Jax.”

“Tell me what you hear.”

“I hear — Jax, I hear me. I hear the hands. I hear the wing. I hear the partition in Chicago. I hear the bath in Phoenix. I hear — Jax, I hear you saying Boston in the second verse, and that is — Jax, that is — ”

“Yeah.”

“That is me.”

“That’s you, Boston.”

I broke under the blindfold. I broke quiet, a single small sob, and his arms tightened around me from behind, and he pressed his mouth to the side of my neck, and he said I got you into the skin behind my ear, and the song moved into the bridge.

The bridge was where Nova’s keys came in. The bridge was where Mel had put the strings — three cellos, layered, not on top but underneath, holding — and the bridge was where Jax’s voice broke, on purpose, the way it had broken at Red Rocks the first time he had played Mother Tongue live, and the way it had broken the second time at MSG, and the way it would break, I knew now, every time he sang the bridge of Hale live for the rest of his career. He had built the break into the song. He had built it in because that’s where he had finally figured out how to be a man who broke in front of the man he loved instead of running.

I sat against his chest with the blindfold on, and the song moved, and his hand slid down my stomach, slow, and his other hand found the hem of his own T-shirt on me and pulled it slowly up.

He undressed me on the futon. He undressed me to the song. The first verse, my T-shirt over my head — he was careful around the blindfold, his hand at the back of my skull, lifting the cotton off and dropping it on the deck. The chorus, his boxers off — he peeled them down my hips, slow, kissed the small fresh tattoo on my left ribs that I had gotten in May, two letters in his handwriting, J.B., the one that matched the F.H. on his ribs. The second verse, he turned me — gentle, careful — and laid me on my back along the futon, my head on the throw, my body bare to the deck and the wind and the Pacific and his eyes.

I could not see his eyes. I could only feel them.

He was on me. He was over me. His weight had not yet come down. His hands were on my chest, both of them, palm-flat, pressed there, and he was — I could feel him — looking at me.

He said, “Boston. I have wanted to do this for a year. I am — I am a little nervous.”

I said, “Yeah, baby. Be nervous with me.”

He came down.

He kissed me through the second chorus.

He kissed my mouth. He kissed the corner of my jaw. He kissed my throat, slow, and the spot under my ear, and the line of my collarbone, and the tattoo on my left ribs, and the inside of my wrist where his fingers had laced through mine in countless beds across the country. He kissed down my chest and down my stomach and my hip and the inside of my thigh, and the song went on, and his mouth was hot and his beard was scratchy and I had no idea, no idea, where on my body he was going to land next, because I could not see him, and the song was filling my ears, and the wind was moving against my skin from the ocean, and I was — I was — completely, completely his.

He took me in his mouth on the bridge.

The bridge — Nova’s keys, the cellos, the break in his voice — and he took me in his mouth, slow, the metal of the tongue piercing dragging up the underside of me, and I made a sound that I could not have controlled if I had wanted to, a low broken open-mouthed sound that came up from my stomach and went out across the redwood deck and down the cliff and into the wind.

He took his time. He took his time the entire bridge. He pulled back just before I could go over. He kissed my hip. He kissed my stomach. He came back up to me, mouth on my mouth, the taste of me in his kiss, his hand moving down between my legs and finding me — slick, somehow slick, the man had a small bottle on the side table and had clearly slicked his fingers without me hearing — and he worked one finger into me on the last chorus.

The last chorus. The song was building. The strings were rising. The drums were lifting. Mel had built a swell into the last chorus that the parlor-guitar version had not had, and the swell was coming in now, and Jax had — he had timed it, he had timed it, the man had timed the entire morning to the song —

He worked a second finger into me on the bridge instrumental.

He worked a third on the line these hands built the stage I stand on.

He pushed into me on the line and the body that came home.

I came apart.

I came apart blindfolded on a futon on a redwood deck above the Pacific Ocean with my husband inside me and his song in my ears and his hand laced through my left hand on my chest, the rings against each other, the strings rising, and his mouth at my throat saying Boston, Boston, Boston into my pulse, and the song was moving toward its last line, the line he had added to the song on a Sunday night on a tour bus rolling south out of Oregon a year ago —

Mother, I made it home.

He sang the line at me. Out loud. Quiet, into the side of my face, in time with his own voice on the recording, and his hips were moving slow, deep, the long roll he had used the night I had said yes in Vegas and the morning I had said I’m not afraid in Oregon and the night he had asked me to marry him at the Forum, and he sang the line at me.

I broke.

I broke in a way that was not about coming. I broke in a way that was about being known, completely, in the specific way that this man had been spending two and a half years learning to know me, and he held me through the breaking, his mouth at my mouth, his weight on my weight, his rhythm slow and steady, and after a while I came back.

I came back, and I said, against his mouth — “Jax. Take it off.”

He stopped.

“The blindfold,” I said. “Take it off, baby. I want — I need to see you. I need to see your face.”

He pushed himself up on one arm. He reached up, careful, and he pulled the cotton off my eyes.

The light came in.

I blinked, slow. The deck. The Pacific. The pelicans, gone. The fog bank, a hundred yards in. Jax above me, on his elbow, his hair fallen down around his face, his ice-blue eyes wet at the corners, his mouth open, his cock still inside me, his weight still on me, his ring against my chest where his hand had landed when he had put his weight on me.

He looked at me. I looked at him.

He said, “Boston. I love you. I want to come looking at you.”

I said, “Yeah, baby.”

He moved.

He moved slow, the long roll, his eyes on mine, his forehead pressed to mine. The song was still playing, moving into its outro, the slow long fade of the last chord that Mel had let ring out for sixteen full seconds in the rough mix because Mel was a producer who knew what a chord like that needed to do, and Jax was moving in me to the slow long fade, and his eyes were on mine, and his ring was warm against my chest, and the wind was on my bare skin, and he came.

He came inside me with my name in his mouth and his eyes on mine and his hand laced through my left hand against my chest, and I came right after, my hand fisted in the back of his hair, my mouth open against his mouth, my cum hot between our stomachs, his hips against mine, the song fading.

The song faded out. The deck was quiet. The Pacific was below us.

He held himself still inside me for a long time. He did not pull out. I did not ask him to.

Eventually he leaned down. He pressed his forehead to mine. He said, very soft —

“Boston. Thank you. For — for trusting me with that. I am going to — Boston. I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to be worth that. Forever?”

I said, “Forever, Jax.”

We did not move off the futon for a long time.

The fog rolled in eventually. We pulled the wool throw over both of us and lay tangled on the cushions while the cliff faded out behind a wall of pale grey, and the gulls went quiet, and the world went quiet, and we lay there and breathed.

He kissed the top of my head. I kissed his collarbone.

He said, after a while — “Boston. Hungry? Eggs?”

I said, “Yeah, baby.”

He said, “I’ll make eggs.”

He pulled out, slow. He kissed me, slow. He stood up and he walked, naked, across the deck and into the cabin to make me eggs at ten-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday in June 2026, six weeks after the proposal at the Kia Forum, and I lay on the futon under the wool throw and I watched his back and the line of his hip and the small F.H. tattoo high on his ribs disappear into the cabin, and I thought —

I thought: we are okay.

I thought: we are going to be okay.

I thought: the album is going to drop in eleven months and the tour is going to start in eleven months and three weeks and the wedding is going to be in Frank’s backyard next summer and we are going to have a dog by Christmas because he keeps mentioning it and a brownstone by 2028 and our second imprint artist’s record is going to drop in October and we are going to have a hundred ordinary mornings like this one on twenty different decks for the rest of our lives.

I thought: and on six of those mornings, maybe, he is going to put the blindfold back on me, and I am going to let him.

I thought: because some things you do not need to be asked twice.

I closed my eyes. The fog moved. The Pacific did its work.

I went, for an hour, back to sleep on the deck of a cabin in Big Sur with the smell of cypress in the wind and the sound of my husband breaking eggs in the kitchen behind me, and I was — I was — Home. That was the word. Home.

The end of Big Sur.
— Finn Hale, June 2026.

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