Dirty Little Secret (22 page)

I took the shirt from him. Closing myself alone inside the closet, I exchanged the L.A. blouse I had on for the Nashville shirt that turned me into Sam’s centerpiece. After swapping my heels for shiny white cowgirl boots, I opened the door to show him.

He was staring at the doorway, waiting. “Oh, yeah.” His whole face brightened with his smile. “That’s it. Do you have a skirt?”

Obligingly I retreated into the closet and came out in a miniskirt with an electrified print that I’d thought fit my image last year but I’d never had the courage to wear.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said, the admiration evident in his voice. “You should always wear skirts onstage. That should be your thing.” He held out his hand to me. “Ready?”

It seemed to me
that the gig was over almost before it started. I had almost forgotten how time could fly when I was performing. I was tempted to put down the heel of my cowgirl boot to step on the night and anchor it there before it slipped away.

We played completely different songs from the ones the night before. When Sam texted me the playlist and I asked him about it, he said, “It’s Sunday. A lot of tourists are here for the weekend. If they liked us last night, they might come back tonight, and we need to be playing something different so they don’t get bored. A lot of the bands around here are great, but they’ve got a tiny repertoire. We have to be better.” He glanced up at me, then grudgingly added, “My dad taught me that.”

Ace’s family reunion came. He had to whisper to one college girl from the night before that he couldn’t take off his shirt again because his mom was in the audience, but generally we were under a gag order, forbidden to admit that Ace’s relatives belonged to him. We wanted the bar to think we were drawing a crowd because of our actual talent. The ploy seemed to work. Once while I played staccato notes, keeping time with Sam’s guitar break, I saw the bearded owner who’d been talking to Sam the night before looking with obvious satisfaction over the whole bottom floor succumbing to a line dance that Ace’s aunts had started.

When ten o’clock rolled around and we took our break, I gazed up the street toward the abandoned buildings and new construction, looked at Sam scowling at me, and dropped my phone
back into my purse. I couldn’t get far enough away from the noise of the bar to make my call to Julie without putting Sam’s life and mine in danger. And after she’d ignored my calls and voice mails for a full week, I decided she wasn’t worth it. If she wanted to talk to me, she knew how.

We ended the night on a high note, with the crowd clamoring for more and complaining as we vacated the stage for the next scheduled band. The bearded owner asked us back again. This time, rather than dividing the tips in Ace’s van and sending him and Charlotte on their way, Sam suggested we grab a bite at an all-night restaurant on the edge of the District. I could tell by the way he glanced uneasily at me that he was concerned his line to me about playing with the band “just this once” was wearing thin.

Ace and Charlotte parked the van back in the lot where they’d already paid for the night. Sam and I walked up the hill and stowed our instruments in my car and his truck. We waited for Ace and Charlotte outside the bustling dive. Just as I spied them hiking up the sidewalk together, a train sounded its horn a few blocks over. I closed one eye and made a face and hoped Sam didn’t think I was reacting to the idea he was excitedly telling me about for a new soul cover tune.

He stopped in the middle of what he was saying and stared down at me. “It’s the train, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ugh!” I exclaimed. The relief in my voice didn’t begin to match the relief I felt. Either Sam’s own pitch was close to perfect, or he wanted mine badly enough that he’d thought through the pros and the cons. He understood how I experienced loud, inescapable, off-key tritones, whereas everybody else thought I was making my discomfort up.

Chuckling down at me, he placed his warm hands over my ears, shutting out the plaintive moan of the train.

A second before, the sidewalk had been crowded with people passing in and out of the restaurant, and I’d been aware of the diners on the other side of the glass storefront. Suddenly they were all gone. Sam and I were the only two people in the world. I’d felt close to him while we played for the past two hours. We’d flirted with each other for hours before that. But now his dark eyes held mine and lost all their humor. Tingles raced across my skin.

“Poor thing,” he said in a low, sexy tone.

And then, as quickly as the moment had come, it was gone again. He slid his hands off me and turned away in one movement. Charlotte and Ace had almost reached us. Sam’s body had shielded them from seeing the way he touched me.

I tried not to overthink this as we all took a booth in the restaurant, flanked on one side by a table of tipsy adults who giggled over their barbecue sandwiches, and on the other by teenagers who only wished they could find a way into the Broadway bars. A barbecue sandwich here was as close as they could get. When I slid in beside the window so we could order our own late-night munchies, Sam took the seat across from me, leaving Charlotte to sit next to him. But I didn’t honestly think he had a thing for Charlotte anymore. He had a thing for his band. In deferring to Charlotte’s happiness by taking his hands off me, he was only trying to keep the peace.

While we ate, I noticed Sam picked at his fries. This didn’t make me self-conscious about eating my own. I’d felt so lonely and stressed and skipped so many meals when my mom was out of town during the past year that I figured an extra plate of fries couldn’t hurt me now. But Sam’s lack of an appetite did make me wonder again what he was up to with this sudden band camaraderie. He finally popped a fry into his mouth, almost as a prop for his
casual act, then chewed and swallowed and asked Ace, “Did your dad say the video turned out okay?”

“No, no, no,” I insisted, “what video?”

“The picture is a little dark because of the low lighting and the neon,” Ace said, eyeing me, “but the sound is perfect.”

“What video?” I demanded again.

“I told you,” Sam said as innocently as his guilt would allow. “You can send in a video audition for a lot of the Broadway bars. One of them told me to make the band more special and try again.”

I nodded, biting my lip to keep from bursting into a recitation of exactly what I thought of Sam. He’d brought me here to break it to me that he’d moved on to the next stage of his plan for the band, whether I liked it or not. He was telling me in the crowded restaurant, with Ace and Charlotte present, in the hope I wouldn’t make as much of a scene.

“What part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand, Sam?” I asked.

He eyed me steadily. “The part where you were wrong.”

Infuriated, I nodded. “So you’ll do anything you want, you’ll lie to anyone about anything, if you think you’re right and they’re wrong.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, exasperated, like this was
obvious
.

“Why do you keep trying to convince me to do this?” I leaned toward him across the table. “I’ve told you what my parents are going to take away from me.” I was half waiting for Ace and Charlotte to gasp and ask about this strange deal with my parents. When they didn’t, I knew Sam had already told them.

“Yes, but they’re wrong to do that,” Sam said levelly, meeting my gaze while he ate another fry.

“Just because you think they’re wrong doesn’t mean they’re
not going to do it.” My voice rose. I had a fleeting thought that my parents’ ban on misbehaving in public probably included making a scene in late-night restaurants, but I was so angry that I couldn’t help it. “God, Sam! I swear the only way you would take anything like that seriously is if it happened to
you
. If it happens to anybody else, for you it’s like it didn’t happen.”

“Nothing’s happened, Bailey,” he said soothingly—except I knew he wasn’t really trying to soothe me but rather to make me feel crazy, because he never stopped eating French fries. “Your parents haven’t found out.”

“They will,” I insisted. “You keep telling me, ‘Just one more gig. Just one more gig.’ But I know what you really want. It’s like you’re saying, ‘Just let me touch it. That’s as far as we’ll go.’ ”

I’d meant it as an angry joke. We were eighteen years old, adults. We could make sex jokes to each other.

He didn’t laugh. His eyes widened. He looked cornered, like a tender fourteen-year-old boy overwhelmed by a forward girl. He put his elbow on the table and balanced his temple on his fingers as though he had a headache. Then he cut his eyes sideways at Charlotte, as if she had anything to do with the conversation.

“You obviously know what you’re talking about,” Charlotte said.

“What?” Sam asked sharply at the same time Ace turned to gape at her.

“Isn’t that what she’s doing?” Charlotte insisted. “Dressing like that”—she nodded to my tight NashVegas T-shirt—“acting like a tease, just to get a gig?”

“No,” I said so calmly I was proud of myself. “You’ve gotten me mixed up with Sam.”

Sam and Ace hardly seemed to notice my attempt to defuse her
sharp comment. “Apologize,” Sam told her. That rare angry edge had entered his voice, the one I’d heard at the factory.

Her mouth opened and her eyes widened like she was astonished he’d betrayed her. Then she gathered her wits and said haughtily, “It’s true.”

“Apologize,” Ace repeated calmly but firmly.

Charlotte turned to look at Ace. Their eyes locked for a moment. Something passed between them.

She muttered, “Sorry,” but she wasn’t looking at me as she said it. She was rolling her eyes.

Still glaring at Charlotte, Sam sighed a huge sigh, shoulders sagging so low against the back of the booth that I realized how tight and tense he’d been before. To me he said, “I told you from the beginning that I wanted this audition video. In case the bar calls me, we need to figure out when we’re all available to play from now on.”

“There’s no ‘from now on,’ ” I said instantly, holding my ground. “I told you, I’m not in your band.”

“Are you quitting?” he challenged me.

As his dark eyes drilled into me, my adrenaline spiked, and for once it wasn’t because of the yearning that took hold of me when he offered me a glance. It was a fight-or-flight reaction to a threat: the threat of never being able to play with the band again. I couldn’t keep on playing with them, because my parents would find out eventually. I couldn’t stop playing with them, because my heart would shrivel up and die. There was no solution to this problem. The only tool I had was putting off the decision.

“I can’t quit the band,” I said. “I’m not a member.”

Charlotte raised her hand. “I don’t like this game.” She still wasn’t looking at me. This time she wasn’t looking at Ace or Sam,
either. She stared above Ace’s head at the far wall. But in the stubborn set of her jaw and the hard look in her strange blue-green eyes, I saw what I was doing to her. I wanted desperately to play with the band. So did she. She’d enjoyed the comfort of stability with the band before I showed up. I had thrown the band into a tizzy and ruined everything for her.

And I realized she was right. While I was in this limbo, so were they.

Echoing Sam, I sighed and relaxed my shoulders against the back of the booth, directing my gaze above his head at the Hatch Show Print poster of Johnny Cash so iconic that every business in town displayed a copy of it. “I can’t tell you when I can play from now on,” I said, “but I can tell you for . . .” I held up my hands while I thought about how long I might safely play with them without ruining my future. I was so deep in limbo that I couldn’t even answer my own question. If they’d asked me two days ago, I would have said I couldn’t play with them at all. The deeper I fell in love with the band’s gigs, the longer the safe time stretched.

“A week?” Sam suggested.

I shook my head no.

“Five days?” Ace asked, exasperated. His words moved me more than anything Sam had said. Sam lived life in a constant state of near-exasperation, whereas Ace rarely showed any emotion at all. If even he was exasperated with me, I deserved it.

I owed him better. I owed them all better.

“Four days,” I negotiated. Julie and my parents would be coming back to town tomorrow, but I would still be staying with my granddad so he could keep tabs on me, theoretically. They would be busy with concerts and parties for Julie’s single release and the CMA Festival. That meant my parents would be even angrier if they found out I’d disobeyed a direct order right under their noses,
when Julie’s record company was so concerned about her image and theirs.

It also meant my parents would be totally preoccupied with Julie, my granddad would likely go with them to her concerts, and nobody would be watching me. If they cared so much about what I was doing, they ought to be monitoring me more closely. This would serve them right.

But there was one night I wasn’t sure about. “Maybe not Tuesday.” That was the day Julie’s single was scheduled to hit stores. It was also the night of her Grand Ole Opry debut. The venue wasn’t the biggest in Nashville. It certainly wouldn’t get her as much exposure as her CMA Festival concerts on Thursday afternoon and Friday night. But it was the stage every country musician dreamed about playing on, and Julie had scored it for her single debut day. No matter how big her career got and where her tour took her, she would always remember this concert.