Mockingbird: a Songbird Sequel

Prologue: Colt

                            One Year Earlier

"Dad, you need to breathe."

Breathe?

BREATHE?

Easy for him to say. He'd never proposed to the girl of his dreams before. Then again, he was fourteen so... thank God for that. We lived in the south, sure, but we weren't that deep south.

"I'm fine," I mumbled, more trying to convince myself than anything else.

My son, Beau, laughed. "Yeah, sure you are, pal."

I just shook my head and fiddled with the ring box in my jacket pocket for the five hundredth time that hour.

"She's gonna say yes. We all know it already. Why you even nervous?" Beau continued looking at me with twinkling dark eyes that were now level with my own.

Puberty had hit my kid hard. He was damn near taller than my 6'2" frame, and skinny as a rail. Last week he'd decided he needed to start shaving, because the faint porno mustache that he was starting to grow apparently wasn't working for him. Fuck, we looked more like brothers than father and son, he just had his mom's lighter hair.

"You keep telling me that," I sighed in return.

"Dad, it's been a year since we moved to the farm, almost two since y'all started dating. I already call her Mom, so this is basically just a formality."

"We've never really talked about marriage..."

"Because you're basically already married!" Beau cried with a laugh. "Come on, dude. Relax. At this point the only thing that changes is her last name."

I chuckled and arched an eyebrow. "If she changes it. She may not want to."

Beau rolled his eyes. "Whatever. She's already a Hayes. Always has been."

I smiled to myself. I'd be lying if I said I didn't agree. Lennie Tyler had been a part of my life since I was a kindergartener: puppy love and holding hands on the playground and all of that. Fairly certain I'd been in love with her since before I knew what the word meant. But life got in the way, got in the way in more ways than I could count. The first time when we entered high school, the second when she took off for Nashville after graduation. I moved to Atlanta with my band and Beau's mother and thought that I had the rest of my life planned out, even though Lennie's absence had always left a gaping hole in my heart. Rachel, Beau's mother, got pregnant when we were barely more than kids, and at twenty-one, we had Beau. And then everything took a nosedive.

Rachel wasn't happy, not stuck in the small Georgia town of Snyder, and not with me, who was on the road or recording more than he was home. She took off one night while I was on tour, leaving Beau with my mother. She and her friend were drunk, and neither one made it out of the wreck that night. That moment was where I pretty much stopped living. I quit the band, I moved back to Snyder, and I did my best to raise my kid on my own, despite the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. My heart, my head, my emotions, all of it was on lockdown. I didn't want to deal with any of it, so I shut it up and threw away the key. That is until Lennie Tyler walked her pretty ass back into my bar and set my dark, small world off its axis.

I was done for the second I realized who she was, though it took me a few months to admit it, even to myself. After a whirlwind summer spent losing ourselves in each other, I very nearly lost her for good, pushing her away under the guise of freeing her, or protecting myself or some other cliché excuse. Fact of the matter was, I was terrified of setting myself up for another loss, another disappointment, another heartbreak. But it didn't last long. Lennie being nothing more than a character in passing in the story of my life forced me to come to terms with a lot of things, but mostly with the battles going on in my own head. I got therapy. I cleaned my shit up, and I won her back.  Now, here we were, damn near eighteen months since our second reunion, and it was time to lock her down, once and for all. That is, if I could get my nerves together so I could actually fucking speak without stammering.