Only The Beginning (Rockin' Country) by Laramie Briscoe

tables to eat. Once they sat, Shell gave Hannah as much time as she needed. After long minutes, Hannah finally opened her mouth.
    “I trusted Ashton with everything. You know that right?”
    Shell nodded. Ashton had even been given some control over her public persona and had tried to change her into a person that just was not Hannah Stewart.
    “I was comfortable with that for a long time just because I was young.” She licked her lips and played with the paper her muffin sat in. “I was twenty-one years old when we got together. I had been doing this for a few years, and I was just ready to be an adult. I thought that letting someone that I loved handle everything was being an adult. We were a couple, and I was content to let him be the man.”
    “I hated that,” Shell laughed. “Remember the arguments you and I got into about it when he tried to tell you how to dress?”
    “I do,” Hannah nodded. “And that should have been my first clue. But I was stupid.”
    She stopped for a long time, and Shell wasn’t sure that she would go on. She got a far-off look in her eyes as she watched kids playing in the park, couples jogging or bike riding, older people walking. It seemed as if she didn’t want to continue, or maybe she was just arguing with herself. Trying to figure out how much she wanted to reveal.
    “You weren’t stupid,” Shell coaxed. “You were in love.”
    “No, trust me, I was stupid,” she shook her head, a self-deprecating smile on her face. “It was good up until a few months before we broke up. Him telling me what to do was really startin’ to get on my nerves. At one point he even told me I needed to learn to talk without my accent.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah, he wanted me to go to voice lessons to get rid of it. I’m Nashville born and bred. It’s not just gonna go away. You might as well make me learn to write right-handed. It just ain’t happening.”
    “Where was I through that?” Shell knew that there was a time in her and Hannah’s friendship where they hadn’t been as close as they were now, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember Ashton being that damn controlling.
    “I kept everybody away and at arm’s length, just because I didn’t want anyone telling me what an idiot I was being. It was around the time you dated ‘he who shall not be named’…so you were kind of not paying a whole lot of attention to me and my relationship. You had stars in your eyes too.”
    “Oh yeah.” Shell wrinkled her nose in disgust. “We were both dumbasses.”
    “Pretty much. Anyway, touring was getting to be a lot of work. I was doing it more than normal, and Ashton and I were in different cities most of the time. His sales were starting to pick up, and his record company had him doing a radio tour. I was hearing rumors of him being with other girls, but you have to understand, I heard that the whole time we were together.”
    Shell knew that the rumors about the country golden couple had run the gamut of good and bad. A lot of it had been lies, so there was no reason that Hannah should have believed anything other people were telling her.
    Her face burned as she admitted the next part. “I did ask him about it. One night when we were in a hotel room in Chicago, I asked him because I noticed a weird mark on his back. He was my first, and I’m not what one would call wild in bed. I’m not a scratcher or anything like that. The mark on his back looked like fingernails, and I asked him what it was. Of course he said he got it working out.”
    Holding up a hand, Shell stopped her. “That makes me sad for you, honey. That no man has ever made you want to be wild enough in bed to scratch his back. Please give me your phone so I can text Garrett.”
    A laugh bubbled up from Hannah’s throat, and she let it out, glad that Shell had broken the tension of the conversation. “You will not be texting Garrett anything. This is me being honest with you.”
    “We’ll keep it between