Dirty Little Secret (25 page)

“I’m still mad about Saturday night,” I admitted, “and Charlotte, and all the girlfriends. I’d thought that—” Telling him I’d hoped we could be together . . . that assumed too much under the circumstances. “I don’t know what I thought,” I finished. “But Charlotte opening the door of your truck was a shocker.”

He sighed, too, much to my relief, and leaned back on one hand in the grass. His anger was over. “There’s more to it than that. These past few days, I keep thinking you and I are going to do something, but you’re sending me mixed signals.”

“No,
you
—”

He broke in, “No,
you
respond when I flirt with you. But then last night, when I was telling you good-bye, you just stared up at me and gave me a polite good night like I was the president of Vandy.”

“No,
you
didn’t kiss me last night because you were afraid of what Charlotte would think.”

“I’ve told you about that,” he reminded me. “She doesn’t have any claim to me. I also don’t want to be mean to her or piss her off.”

“Because of the band,” I grumbled.

“Yes,” he exclaimed, exasperated, “and I don’t think I’m wrong to try to keep the peace in the band, and I don’t think I’m being a tease.”

“I don’t either,” I admitted begrudgingly, watching an ant crawl across my bare foot in my sandal. My voice sank lower as I said, “Jealous. Frustrated.”

He nodded. “I can’t change the past, Bailey. Believe me, I would if I could.” He got that far-off look into the sky again but reined himself in before he got lost. He looked into my eyes as he said, “I can’t change that I dated her. I can’t change that I dated a lot of people. I’ve told you I wasn’t serious with those girls.” He moved his hand onto my bare knee, and the afternoon suddenly heated by twenty degrees. “Whatever’s wrong between us, I want to get over
it, because I’d like to get serious with
you
.” His hand moved to cup my whole knee. “I wanted you last night.”

I felt my face flush, and my neck, and my chest where he couldn’t see. So many times in the past year I’d made out with Toby or some other guy. There had been fewer of them than there had been of Sam’s girlfriends, but I’d been no better than him for going to that place with them when I didn’t really care.

In those dark moments at parties, my body had gone electric for them. But not in the middle of the day, in an open field, with a boy’s hand on my knee instead of down my panties. There was no reason for Sam and me to share this look right now and feel this way about each other, except that we did.

He glanced down at his watch and said in defeat, “And now we have to go.” Brow creased, deep in thought, he reached behind my head and pulled me toward him.

Without thinking, for once, I sat up on my knees and leaned forward, bracing myself on the grass with one hand as my lips met his.

He tasted sweet, and the kiss was sweet and chaste, until his hand slipped under my shirt. His touch on my bare waist made me gasp and break the kiss.

Eyes on mine, he said as if convincing himself, “I want to play this gig tonight.”

I nodded. “So do I.”

He moved his hand around my waist to the button of my shorts, a preview of what was to come. Then he backed away from me and stood, holding out a hand to help me up. “But it’s going to be a long night.”

11

Sam was wrong.
The entire afternoon and evening seemed to flash by in a second, because we were having fun.

Sam and I met Charlotte and Ace at his dad’s car dealership. We parked the truck and crawled into the middle seat of the SUV that Ace had chosen for the day. As Ace pulled into traffic, Sam said, “It’s like our Mystery Machine. All we need is a Great Dane.”

Charlotte leaned around her front seat to say, “My drum kit is our Great Dane. Only it says ‘Crash!’ instead of ‘Rowr?’ ”

Something about her Scooby-Doo imitation struck me as funny. I laughed uncontrollably for a few seconds. It felt so good that I kept laughing until Charlotte stared at me like I’d grown another head. I supposed my laughing was about as common as Charlotte doing impressions.

Sam was watching me from across the SUV with a bemused look, like he didn’t quite know what to make of my laughter either. Finally he called, “Who gets to be Fred, and who’s Shaggy?”

“I call dibs on Fred,” Ace said.

“You’re totally Fred,” Sam agreed. “Stodgy.”

“I guess we all know who gets to be Daphne, and who’s Velma,” Charlotte said bitterly.

“I can’t see a thing without my glasses,” I piped up, quoting Velma and nudging my cat-eye glasses with one finger.

Charlotte turned around one more time and blinked at me. Clearly she’d meant that she was fashion-challenged Velma. I’d thought at first she was mad at me for taking her self-deprecating punch line away. But her expression wasn’t angry, just surprised. She said something to Ace that I didn’t catch and reached forward to change the radio station.

“That would make a great album cover, actually.” Sam grinned at me. “The four of us, dressed like the characters. You would be the sexiest Velma ever. I wonder if we’d have to pay a licensing fee.”

Electricity rushed through me when he said I was sexy. I had to fight down that pesky feeling in order to be annoyed with him. “That would be a great idea,” I acknowledged, “if we were a band.”

He gave me that dangerous look I didn’t see very often. My heart raced. For a second I thought we were going to have it out, once and for all, right there in the back of the SUV.

But the look vanished as fast as it had come. “Aw, honey,” he said, “let’s not fight.” He reached around my shoulders and drew me to him, too hard, a joking hug that I put up with because it meant our argument was over for now. He relaxed his hold, but he kept his arm around me.

Though Ace was talking to Charlotte, I saw a flash of his eyes in the rearview mirror, and I knew he was watching us. Then he rolled down his window, letting in the warm summer breeze and the smell of cut grass.

During the drive, I was surprised that Charlotte didn’t engineer some excuse to trade seats with me so she could sit with
Sam—
Oh, I must sit near the back so I can put one hand on my tom to keep it from falling
—but she seemed content to keep her place in the front. She was absorbed in conversation with Ace about a TV show they both watched. Sam interjected a joke now and then, but I was utterly lost. I’d spent most of my nights practicing fiddle.

Along the drive from Nashville to Chattanooga, exits and billboards petered out until nothing was left but trees streaming by our windows. The interstate was a wide expanse of asphalt cut through the forest, tilting to one side and climbing mountains. When I blinked, I opened my eyes again and felt dizzy, disoriented because of the strange angle of the ground, and the SUV climbing the road like nothing was wrong.

As I looked around at the scenery that seemed normal and yet not, I glanced at my reflection in the window. The wind blew my short black curls around my head, the longer pieces in front teasing the tip of my chin. The sun lit my face. But what surprised me was that I was scowling at the landscape. That’s not how I felt. With effort, I lifted the corners of my mouth into a smile for my own reflection. Then I glanced at Sam so close beside me.

When he felt me looking at him, he smiled. He squeezed my shoulders, more gently this time, then let me go, because two hours would be a long drive with his heavy arm around me. But he rested his hand on my bare thigh.

I would remember this bright afternoon forever.

Arriving at the most luxurious house
I’d ever seen, we pulled up to the back lawn, at the end of a pristine pool, and the boys got out to unpack Charlotte’s kit. I couldn’t help feeling curious about the gig. I imagined the record company execs who’d thrown parties
for Julie had even more astonishing homes, but I hadn’t been invited.

Between trips back and forth from the pool to the van, while Sam wasn’t around, of course, Charlotte kindly explained that one of Sam’s exes had arranged for us to play this gig, her aunt’s surprise fiftieth birthday party. She went on to inform me that the band’s Lao wedding circuit was also a result of an ex with an in. She stated these facts as joylessly as she could manage, but I knew her ulterior motive. If she’d decided to back off me after I claimed Velma and let her be Daphne, she’d forgotten all about that when Sam put his arm around me.

It was hard to be angry with her after the party guests started showing up, bused in by a hired service so the birthday lady wouldn’t see their cars and suspect what was up. When she came in the front door and two hundred of her closest friends leaped up from behind her living room furniture, she screamed. Then she cackled with joy and dashed upstairs to change into her bathing suit. I hoped I could enjoy life that much when I was that old. Or . . . ever.

I’d never pictured myself playing a gig so crazy, much less playing it in a bikini top and a denim skirt. The party was a riot, full of great food and fun strangers, even if most of them were middle-aged and probably shouldn’t have been wearing bathing suits that small. Between sets, the band went in the pool, too. Mostly Sam and Ace and Charlotte and I talked together about music and Nashville and the CMA Festival starting Thursday—I carefully avoided any mention of Julie—but Sam and I kept finding excuses to flirt and rib each other. Several times when I teased him, he found it necessary to grab me, his hands strong around my wrists in the cool water.

The only negative of the night came when Charlotte quipped that I shouldn’t get my hair wet because the ink might run. Ace
splashed her, and Sam dismissed the comment by putting his arm around me and changing the subject. However, at midnight when the party finally closed down and we packed the SUV with Charlotte’s drum kit, I was still thinking about my hair and other people’s perception of it, dyed an unnatural black.

After I’d deposited the last cymbal in the back, Sam opened the front passenger door for me. I was afraid he intended to take the back with Charlotte, just to keep her happy and spread the love around, while I sat up front with Ace. I asked Sam carefully, “Oh, are you driving back?”

“I always drive back at night.”

As I climbed into the passenger seat, I held my breath to keep from sighing with relief so loudly that everyone could hear. I had another two hours in proximity to Sam—though I would probably sleep through most of it. Three late nights were catching up with me.

“I’ll never know whether I inherited the alcoholic gene from my dad,” Sam was saying as he slid behind the steering wheel and slammed his door, “but I definitely inherited the barfly gene. I can’t sleep at night, and I can’t get up in the morning.”

I could see that. Sam was creative and dedicated, but his wasn’t the plodding bright-and-early work ethic of the morning person, like mine. It was the crazy creative burst of the night owl, long dark hours of despair before dawn.

“Here.” He hadn’t pulled his T-shirt back on after our last dip in the pool and our last set of songs. Now he wadded it up, crammed it into the console between our seats, and gently pressed my shoulders until I laid my head down. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and tried to relax. Sam was at the wheel, and I trusted him. As he started the SUV and cruised past the mansion’s marble columns, I wondered if Julie would buy a house like this
in the next few years, and whether she would throw parties like a record company exec, or if she would never get a chance because she would always be gone.