Rust & Starlight
Chapter 5 : The First Night Without a Drink
The barn loft at 2 a.m. was a different world entirely.
Mason knew this because he was awake — had been awake since midnight, in fact, his eyes wide open in the suffocating darkness, his body doing things he couldn’t control. The cot creaked beneath him as he shifted for the hundredth time. The wool blanket was either too hot or too cold, depending on which part of him it touched. And his skin… his skin felt like it was trying to crawl off his bones and escape through the window.
Withdrawal.
He’d been through this before. Twice, actually. Once after the DUI, when his manager had packed him off to a “wellness retreat” in Arizona that was really just a gilded cage with better smoothies. Once after the divorce, when he’d locked himself in a Nashville hotel room for three days and come out looking like a corpse.
But those times, he’d had help. Nurses. Doctors. People whose job it was to watch him sweat and shake and cry. Now he had a barn loft, a wool blanket, and a woman downstairs who would probably just hand him a post-hole digger and tell him to work through it.
His stomach lurched. He sat up too fast, the room spinning, and barely made it to the washbasin before vomiting. Nothing came up — just bile, burning and bitter — but his body didn’t care. It heaved anyway, again and again, until he was left gasping over the chipped enamel.
Water, he thought. I need water.
The pitcher on the table was empty. He’d drunk it all before bed, not realizing how dehydrated he was. There was a pump outside, near the barn door, but that meant going down the ladder, and the ladder required coordination, and coordination was currently a distant memory.
He sat on the floor instead, his back against the wall, and waited for the shaking to stop.
It didn’t.
Downstairs, in the main house, Wren was also awake.
She lay in her bed — a four-poster that had belonged to her grandmother — staring at the ceiling. The clock on her nightstand read 2:17 a.m. Outside, the wind had picked up again, rattling the windows in their old frames.
She wasn’t thinking about Mason.
She was thinking about Luke.
This happened sometimes. The grief didn’t come in waves anymore — not like the early days, when it had crashed over her without warning, leaving her gasping and blind. Now it was more like a tide. Always there, always pulling at the edges of her consciousness, but manageable. Most days.
Tonight, though, the tide was high.
She could see him so clearly. His hands — those beautiful, calloused hands that could fix anything on the farm except himself. His laugh, loud and reckless, the kind of laugh that filled a room and made everyone in it feel lighter. His temper, quick to flare and quick to fade. His drinking.
God, she thought. The drinking.
She’d known, of course. Everyone had known. Luke Cross — no relation to Mason, just a coincidence of surnames — had been the kind of drunk who could hide it for weeks, then explode in a single night. The Army had sobered him up, mostly. The deployment had given him purpose. But Afghanistan had also given him nightmares, and the nightmares had given him bottles, and the bottles had given him a dishonorable discharge and a one-way ticket back to Kansas.
She’d tried to save him. For two years, she’d tried everything. Rehab. Counseling. Ultimatums. Tears. Screaming. Silence. Nothing worked.
And then one night, he’d gone out to the barn — the same barn where Mason was now sleeping — and he’d drunk himself into a coma on the hayloft floor. She’d found him the next morning. Cold. Gone.
The coroner said it was alcohol poisoning. The VA said it was a “service-related incident.” The neighbors said it was a tragedy.
Wren said it was a waste.
She turned onto her side, pulling the pillow over her head, and tried to go back to sleep.
In the barn, Mason’s shaking had worsened.
He was on his hands and knees now, crawling toward the ladder. Not because he wanted to go outside — the thought of the cold made his teeth chatter — but because he needed to move. If he stayed still, the shaking would turn into convulsions, and the convulsions would turn into something worse.
He’d read about withdrawal. The seizures. The hallucinations. The rare cases where people just… died.
I’m not going to die in a barn in Kansas, he told himself. Not after surviving Nashville.
The ladder loomed above him, dark and treacherous. He grabbed the first rung, pulled himself upright, and nearly fell backward when his grip slipped. The bandages on his hands were soaked with sweat, useless.
He tried again. This time, he made it up one rung. Then two. Then three.
Halfway down — because he was going down, he realized, not up — his foot missed a rung, and he fell the rest of the way.
The landing knocked the wind out of him. He lay on the barn floor, staring at the rafters, waiting for his lungs to remember how to work. The hay smelled sweet and musty. Somewhere in the darkness, a mouse squeaked.
This is pathetic, he thought. You’ve played the Ryman. You’ve had dinner at the White House. And now you’re lying in horse shit, dying of thirst.
He laughed — a broken, hysterical sound — and then he cried.
Not a manly cry. Not the stoic tear-tracked-face of a movie hero. This was ugly, messy, snot-and-sob crying, the kind he hadn’t done since he was twelve years old, standing over his mother’s grave.
He cried for his grandmother, who had taught him to play guitar and then died before she could see him succeed. He cried for his ex-wife, who had loved him once, before the drinking turned him into someone else. He cried for the songs he’d stopped writing, the tours he’d ruined, the fans he’d disappointed.
And then — because his body had no more tears left — he stopped.
The shaking was still there, but softer now. The thirst was still there, but manageable. And somewhere in the distance, he heard a sound that didn’t belong to the barn or the wind or the mice.
Footsteps.
Wren found him sitting against the barn door, his knees drawn to his chest, his face hidden in his arms.
She didn’t say anything at first. She just stood there, wrapped in her bathrobe, her hair loose around her shoulders, holding a glass of water.
“How did you know?” Mason asked, his voice raw.
“I heard you fall.” She knelt beside him and pressed the glass into his hands. “Drink. Slowly.”
He drank. The water was cold and clean, and it felt like forgiveness moving down his throat.
“You should have told me,” she said. “About the withdrawal.”
“What would you have done? Driven me to a hospital?”
“No.” She sat back on her heels, studying him. “I would have sat with you. That’s what people do, Mason. They sit with each other.”
“Why?”
“Because being alone makes everything worse.” Her voice cracked, just a little. “Trust me. I know.”
They sat in silence for a long time — her on the barn floor, him against the door. The wind howled outside, rattling the loose boards, but inside, the air was still. Warm, almost.
“The first time I got sober,” Mason said finally, “I had a nurse named Gloria. She was sixty-three years old, weighed about a hundred pounds, and she could curse like a sailor. She told me something I’ve never forgotten.”
“What’s that?”
“She said, ‘Mason, you’re not a bad person who needs to be good. You’re a sick person who needs to get well.'” He looked up at Wren, his eyes red-rimmed but clear. “I didn’t believe her then. I think I might believe her now.”
Wren didn’t answer. But she reached out — slowly, carefully — and took his hand. His bandaged, blistered, shaking hand. She held it in both of hers, her thumbs tracing small circles on his knuckles.
“You’re going to be okay,” she said. “Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But eventually.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re still here.” She squeezed his hand. “And so am I.”
They stayed like that until the sky began to lighten — not sunrise, just the first hint of gray creeping over the prairie. Then Wren stood up, stretched her back, and helped Mason to his feet.
“Breakfast in an hour,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
She walked back to the house, her bathrobe trailing in the dirt.
Mason watched her go. Then he climbed the ladder — slowly, carefully, one rung at a time — and lay down on the cot.
For the first time in weeks, he slept without dreaming.