Dirty Little Secret (17 page)

When another girl came along, one with more talent and better style than me, he would do it again.

“Sorry,” Sam murmured in my ear. He hefted himself off me, momentarily crushing my arm—“sorry, sorry, sorry”—and pulled me after him so we both sat upright. Then he bailed out of the driver’s side of the truck and slammed the door.

Charlotte peered through the open passenger door at me. Blinking innocently, she said in a superfriendly voice, “When you first showed up tonight, did he tell you to act like the two of you weren’t into each other?”

Sam had rounded the truck and reached her. “Could I speak with you privately for a moment behind that Audi?” He shoved her along in front of him until they disappeared around the next car.

Ace stood with his arms folded in the empty space next to Sam’s truck, looking over his shoulder in the direction Sam and Charlotte had gone.

Buttoning my dress, I called to Ace, “Well, that was awkward.”

“Sorry,” he grumbled.

We could both hear Charlotte’s increasingly shrill voice: “ . . . just bring her into the group, Sam, without asking anybody’s opinion? Like we don’t even
matter
?”

I couldn’t make out any of what Sam said in response. I could hear only his stern tone. It must have worked, because she replied with indiscernible words, and then he stalked back toward the truck.

When Sam drew even with Ace, he stopped and gave him a glare. Ace just raised one eyebrow at him.

Sam threw up his hands in frustration, closed my door, rounded the truck again, and slipped behind the steering wheel. As he started the ignition and backed out of the space, I thought about opening my door and flouncing away. But I would have no way home. The last thing I wanted was to make a phone call to my granddad to
rescue me from the District. I stayed put, watching Charlotte come from behind the car to meet Ace in the empty parking space. Their heads turned to follow us as we drove off.

“I’m so sorry about that,” Sam said quietly, his face blinking pale and then dark again as we passed under fluorescent lights spaced along the ceiling. “I should have warned her I was bringing you tonight. She was comfortable with the band the way it was, and she never accepted we needed to add somebody new. She won’t act that way to you again.”

She certainly wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t be around. She would be reacting exactly the same way to the next girlfriend Sam brought in.

But I didn’t say any of that. I owed Sam nothing, not even a fight about it. I stared out the window as we exited the parking deck, onto the side street. The lights of the District grew fewer and farther between until they faded into the neon wash of the larger city.

Sam’s voice broke the silence. “The gig is at the same time tomorrow night. Want to tell your grandpa we’re going on another date, and actually grab a bite to eat beforehand? If you’re not busy earlier, maybe we could spend the afternoon together.”

“I’m not playing the gig,” I said flatly.

“You’re—” he burst out, then pressed his lips together, controlling himself. He’d been afraid I would say this, and he’d only been pretending he thought I might not mind what Charlotte had told me. He said, with admirable calm considering how upset he must be, “But they asked us back.”

“But
you
didn’t ask
me
.”

“No,” he said. “Wait a minute. I
told
you that they asked us back, and you didn’t say you wouldn’t play with us. You’ve decided this
only now, after what Charlotte said. Listen, Charlotte is a great girl and I love her—”

He kept talking. My brain paused here like time stood still. He loved Charlotte. And he glossed over it. This was a warning to me.

“—but she’s a few bricks shy of a full load about some things.”

“About you,” I accused him.

“We dated,” he acknowledged carefully. “I did not date her just to get her to join the band.”

“Did you tell her to act like you weren’t into each other when you brought her into the band with Ace?”

“Maybe,” he said, meaning
yes,
“because Ace would
think
I was dating her just for that. But I wasn’t. And I definitely was not doing what I was doing with you just now to get you into the band. You’re already in the band.”

“I most certainly am not,” I said. “I never agreed to that. Charlotte may be a few bricks shy of a full load about you, but I’m not.”

“Bailey!” he exclaimed before I’d quite gotten all of this out of my mouth. “You can’t turn this down. We already have a gig. We scheduled another gig with you in it.”

I shrugged. “Go back to the bar owner and say your special guest star won’t be joining you, and ask if he still wants you.”

“He
won’t
. That’s been the whole point of this, Bailey. I can’t do this without you. If I could, I would have done it last week.”

I wasn’t sure that was true. He’d gotten the first gig without me. I was quickly learning that Sam said what he needed to say to get people to do what he wanted. Judging from the force behind his words, maybe he’d even started to believe them himself.

“Look,” I said with a sigh, “I told you from the beginning that I can’t be in your band. I’m not allowed.”

“You’re not
allowed
?” he asked incredulously.

“No.”

He grimaced out the windshield, considering this idea. “That’s why you walked to Georgia to phone your sister. Or whoever you were calling.”

“It
was
my sister, and yes.”

“That’s why your grandpa didn’t want to let you out of the house. Why aren’t you allowed to play a gig, Bailey? That’s insane.”

I nodded my agreement. And I had to explain the insanity to him, or he would never leave me alone. “I’m staying with my granddad because my parents are gone with my little sister. They all came home for my graduation, which was when I got in so much trouble about the wreck. For the past year, usually one of my parents has been home with me, physically, because they don’t trust me. But when they’re here, their minds are with my sister.”

“Doing what?” he asked quietly, like he was sure by now he didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Touring with her while she opens for bigger acts, and letting her get a lot of practice.”

His mouth dropped open. “She has a development deal with a record company?”

Of course he would guess. He might even understand more about the music business than I did. I said, “Yeah.”

“Is it working out?” I could see in his eager expression that he hoped it was working out, like Mr. Crabtree was eager for another Elvis song to play at the mall, a dog waiting for someone to throw a ball. If Sam had his way, he would network with my parents and my sister, around and then right over me. And he would ruin me in the process.

“So far, so good,” I said, understating by several hundred thousand dollars.

“Did she get discovered on the bluegrass festival circuit?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“But you were on the circuit, too.”

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“So she got discovered, and you didn’t.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He sighed in frustration and gestured with his hands on the steering wheel as he exclaimed to the broad, dark street, “Too late. We’re talking about it, and you owe me an explanation.”

I almost said,
I don’t owe you shit
. But I thought back to my week at the mall. The anticipation I’d felt before I played with a group for the first time in ages. The way my hopes had been dashed when the group didn’t measure up to Julie. The elation I’d circled back to when I discovered Sam. The way the roller coaster had crashed to the bottom again when he and his father fought.

I knew how excited he’d felt when the band came together tonight. I’d felt that excitement myself. I was dashing his hopes now, as mine had been dashed repeatedly. I shouldn’t have agreed to play with him in the first place. I should have refused like a good girl and let his hopes lie there in the dust. So I
did
owe him an explanation now.

“The record company agreed to sign Julie,” I began.

He nodded his acknowledgment, face tight with barely controlled anger.

“My parents tried to get the company to sign me, too, and keep us together as a duo. The company flat-out refused. Single teen girls with pop crossover potential are what’s selling right now. But Julie and I had been playing together forever. We’d never played apart. The record company thought it would be terrible for their
public relations, and for Julie’s, if it got out that they’d snatched her from an inseparable sister duo and shunned me.”

“It would.” Sam’s grimace had relaxed a little. He was beginning to see where I was coming from.

Not that I cared. I was offering him this explanation to detangle myself from this mess, not to involve myself further with a manipulative playboy.

“The record company told my parents I should disappear. They didn’t want Julie to mention me in any of her interviews, because reporters might come looking for me and discover that ugly past. They made me get off social media so I couldn’t post stabs at Julie that everybody in the world could copy and paste. And they specifically said they didn’t want me to pursue a music career that might distract from Julie’s, or embarrass her, or advertise the fact that they’d left me behind.”

Turning off the broad street and onto Music Row, Sam looked like he was squinting into the streetlights, but I could tell he was really thinking hard, coming up with a way to talk me down. “You say the record company wanted
you
to do this stuff. But their contract wasn’t with you, surely. It wasn’t even with Julie. She’s too young to sign a contract. Their deal was with your parents, so how can the record company tell
you
what to do?”

“They can convince my parents to say that if I get in any trouble, I can’t go to college.”

“Oh,” he mouthed, but no sound came out. He recovered from his shock to say, “And by trouble, they mean a gig.”

“They also mean going to a drunk graduation party and getting into a car with my tweaked-out boyfriend, who drives into a lake.” I was back in my parents’ kitchen, talking with them around the table rather than in the more comfortable den, because I was still wet from the lake and my mother didn’t want me dripping on
the carpet. My thigh throbbed and swelled, the discoloration visible below the short hemline of my sequined dress. I hadn’t complained about it, and my parents hadn’t asked. They told me I had better be damn glad this had happened now. What if it had happened a week from now, on the day Julie’s first single dropped? Did I think the tabloids wouldn’t be all over me like stink on shit?

Julie had stared at me from the kitchen doorway, her face contorted with an expression so anguished that I couldn’t even read it. Julie and I loved each other. We were there for each other. And she walked away from me.

I caught myself rubbing my eyes and forced my hands down. “But yeah, gigs are included in the bad behavior, too. My granddad said he would work on my parents so I could keep playing at the mall. He is
not
going to work on them if he finds out I played this gig in the District tonight after I lied to him. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into it. This has to be the end.”

Sam pulled to a stop in front of my granddad’s hill of a front yard. I hoped I could just bail out of the truck. No such luck. Sam wasn’t done with me. He turned off the ignition and placed one hand on my knee.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” he said. “Your parents put you and your sister on the bluegrass circuit and tried to get you a deal. They got one for your sister, and they kind of gave up on you.”

No, that wasn’t right. I clarified it for him. “They
totally
gave up on me.”

Without lifting his hand, he shifted his whole body toward me. The soft light from the porch touched his hair but left his eyes in darkness as he asked, “Why have
you
given up on you?”

“Because
they
did,” I said shortly. “Everybody did.”

“
You
are part of everybody,” he pointed out. “As long as you have faith in yourself, you still have someone’s support.”

He sounded like the tail end of a TV gospel show, or a fortune cookie. “That is cockamamy.”

He squeezed my knee. “You have
my
support.”

Done with him, I knocked his hand away. “Of course you’re going to say that. You want me in your band.”

“Why would I want you in my band if you weren’t good?” he protested. “I’m not operating a charity mission here. You
are
in my band.
Our
band. You heard how good we sound together. No professional musician would walk away from that.”

“I guess I’m not as professional as you thought.” I opened my door, slid out of the truck, and waited for him to slide out, too, so I could retrieve my fiddle.

He stared across the seat at me. I still couldn’t see his shadowed eyes, but I could read the outrage on his parted lips. I thought he might refuse to move, holding my fiddle hostage.

Slowly he slid out and even bent the seat forward for me. But as I reached in for my case, he said, “This has to be about what Charlotte said to you. There’s no way you would turn this gig down unless you were mad at me. Come on, Bailey. You have to be bigger than that.”

Jerking my case free, I shoved the seat back into place and slammed the door, then backed a few paces to stand on the concrete staircase up the hill. “
I
have to be bigger than that?” I shouted at him over the roof of the cab. “
You
should have been bigger than that when you decided to make out with both of us. Unlike you, I don’t take just any gig I’m offered.” I whirled around, the thin skirt of my dress failing to make as dramatic an exit as my heavy circle skirt that afternoon. I jogged up the stairs.

As I fished the key out of my purse and opened the front door, all my attention was on Sam’s truck behind me. I listened for him to rev the engine and tear off down the street, but he didn’t. Maybe he
wasn’t as mad as he’d seemed. He’d only feigned anger to try to get what he wanted, but he didn’t care as much about having me in his band as he’d claimed. Tomorrow night he’d be feeling up another fiddle player in the parking deck.