Dirty Little Secret Read online

  “Walk,” Sam barked, giving me a little shove on the small of my back. I started down the sidewalk in the direction he pushed me, toward the bar. Normally I would have protested being pushed around, but he still looked furious. As he walked beside me, he demanded, “What were you doing?”

  “Making my phone call, like we discussed.”

  “Did you have to walk to Georgia? You were calling your boyfriend, weren’t you?”

  “My boyfriend?” I repeated, confused and disgusted at the thought of running out of a gig with Sam to convey some breathless secret message to Toby. “No.”

  Sam was jealous. This registered with me on some level, blank as I felt.

  But the next thing he said made me think he wasn’t jealous after all, only wary that I was manipulating him. “You called someone who you didn’t want to hear the music,” Sam insisted. “Someone you didn’t want to figure out where you are.”

  “It was just my sister.” I caught the pointed toe of my boot on the broken sidewalk and tripped. Sam saved me from falling with a hand on my elbow. He held me for a few seconds while he looked over his shoulder again in the direction the man had gone.

  Several minutes too late, the little good sense I usually possessed came rushing back. I began to realize how close we’d both come to tragedy. I squealed, “Were you going to knife that guy?”

  “No,” Sam said firmly. “I was going to show him my knife and get you away from him. Which I did. Were you going to let him grab you?”

  I didn’t know. Now that I had my wits back, I couldn’t quite puzzle out what I’d been thinking when the strange man stalked like a shadow into my bright circle.

  “You were going to let him grab you,” Sam said incredulously. “Do you have some sort of death wish?” As we walked, he looked behind us, then to our right at the empty lots, then to the left across the street, ahead of us at the bar, and behind us again.

  “Me!” I exclaimed. “He could have turned that knife around and used it on you. Why are you walking around with a concealed weapon, anyway? Is this neighborhood really that unsafe?”

  “I didn’t expect you to walk a mile down a deserted road to make a phone call,” he said testily. Then, glancing sideways at me and looking almost sorry, he said, “I didn’t know it wasn’t safe. I think it would be safe if you hadn’t wandered in that direction alone.” When I glared back at him and didn’t give in, he sighed. “Okay.” He pulled his knife out of his pocket to show me. I drew back in surprise before I saw it was his shiny silver guitar slide covering his entire middle finger.

  “Oh.” As relieved as I felt that he wasn’t actually brandishing a knife, my heart went out to him. When he’d seen that guy coming for me, he could have watched the shit go down and called 911. Instead, he came for me, armed only with sleight of hand. He might as well have threatened to slay a dragon with a banana. I was overwhelmed with warmth for him, and somehow unable to tell him so.

  “Yeah, lame.” He examined the slide ruefully, turning his hand over to look at it from both sides. He deposited it back in his pocket. That was that, until somebody needed him to use a guitar pick to disarm a bomb.

  I still wasn’t sure how he’d found me in the first place. “Were you watching me?” I asked.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” He turned all the way around and walked backward beside me for a few steps, satisfying himself that the sidewalk was empty and the man wasn’t coming back. Then he put out one hand and touched my shoulder, stopping me. “Bailey. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said lightly. Maybe later I would think back over what had happened and feel the terror I knew I should have felt at the time. My heart had finally sped up, but only at Sam’s sudden appearance. That I hadn’t quite gotten over, and I was still panting shallowly. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded, squeezing my shoulder. Then he seemed to shake the whole incident off, refocusing himself to sing.

  “Do you need me to help you get in the mood?” I asked hopefully. I really wanted him to get me in the mood. I wanted my heart pounding for a different reason.

  He didn’t bother to take off my glasses this time. He put both arms around me and pressed his mouth on mine, sweeping his tongue inside.

  Initially surprised by the depth of the kiss, I recovered to meet him passion for passion, opening my lips for him.

  As suddenly as it began, it was over. He let me go and took a shuddering breath.

  I sidled forward and put my hand in the pocket of his jeans. Feeling warm as his eyes widened, I shoved my fingers as far down as they could reach into his tight jeans and fished out his guitar slide. I placed it on his middle finger and lifted his hand to my eye level so I could see my tiny, rounded reflection, then brought my lipstick out of my own pocket and reapplied it.

  He laughed. “You have style, Bailey.”

  “I ain’t nothing but class,” I agreed.

  We waved to the bouncer and walked up the ramp again. Ace sat on one of the tiny stages with his legs hanging off the side. If I’d been sitting there—which I would not, because the stage was sticky—I would have been afraid of being crushed by the even larger crowd now. But Ace, while mild mannered, cut an imposing figure. Nobody would get close enough to him to crush him. Charlotte sat beside him, alternately cupping her hand over his ear, shouting above the throbbing music, and flashing the evil eye to girls who walked past them. Charlotte thought she should have not just one boy, not just the other boy, but all the boys. I hated to break it to her, but if girlfriend truly wanted to start a collection, she needed to do something about her hair.

  They stood when they saw us. Sam stepped onto my stage and helped me up before grabbing his guitar and hat and returning to his place on the bar. We were clearly still messing around and tuning, and Sam took a moment to text us a playlist, but a cheer went up when the audience saw us. From my vantage point three feet above the floor, I spotted a white veil that hadn’t been part of the crowd before. In a white T-shirt with “Bride” bedazzled across her boobs was a girl flanked by a group of her friends wearing matching “Bridesmaid” shirts. To the bride’s left I spotted the girl who’d made the phone call outside the bar. The bride was very young and I had a fleeting wish that she wouldn’t settle for David, that she would wait for her Sam to come along.

  But not my Sam. The girl was whispering in the bride’s ear as they both lifted their eyes to him.

  And he was after me. “I’ve never tried to impress a girl with yodeling before,” he said into the mike.

  “Nobody has,” Ace yelled across the aisle.

  The people who’d been in the bar for our first set laughed at this exchange. The newcomers didn’t know what to make of it and tittered impatiently. Sam sized them up with one sweeping glance from wall to wall. “ ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues,’ ” he murmured. He glanced back at Charlotte. The crowd’s whoop was cut off by the sudden two-step beat of the drums.

  After the intro, I settled into my usual staccatos for the verses. But as he entered the chorus and started yodeling, I decided to stick with my short chords for that section, too. He didn’t need anyone competing with him, for one thing. And I wanted to hear him.

  Sam’s Hank Williams imitation wasn’t so much of a yodel as a very controlled falsetto. I could tell he had practiced this. Depending on how early he got the idea to tap me for his band, he must have been punching the air and yelling Yes! internally when I mentioned Hank that afternoon, because he had this song ready. The fake Hank at the mall had been off-key. The real Hank had howled like a stray dog, which was his appeal. He was a poor boy from Montgomery who spent too many nights boozing on an Alabama lake, and he looked it. Sam’s voice was rich and full, a bad imitation but a great interpretation, and the crowd loved it. He nodded to me so I would take a solo. During the first few measures, I could hardly hear myself over the cheers for Sam.

  I didn’t think, just let the bow flow over the strings to the rockabilly beat with a hint of funk, Hank’
s original modernized by Ace and Charlotte. At the end of the solo I glanced down the body of my fiddle at Sam. He briefly took his finger off his strings and twirled it in the air: Go again. I kept fiddling. The crowd grinned up at me. On the second level in back, the Texas two-step had resumed. Sam twirled his finger with an offer of another solo. I moved my head shortly: No. The music was for the audience, not me, and they would get restless. I’d had my turn.

  Because of Sam’s expert yodeling, the song ended with much louder applause than we’d gotten in the whole first set. But when his “Thank you, thank you” finally broke through the crowd noise, he added, “Miss Bailey Wright, ladies and gentlemen.” I felt the force of their cheers in my chest.

  “Thank you,” I said into my own mike, grinning and taking it all in and not quite believing my luck. At the same time, “Miss Bailey Wright” echoed in the back of my mind. For the first time, I was glad my parents didn’t allow me to have social media accounts for fear of what I might post about Julie. If I had, and I’d had the poor foresight to label myself Bailey Wright Mayfield, these folks might have searched for me and found me and posted pictures of me on my own page for my parents and Julie’s public relations team to see. As it was, I was caught between feeling safe and exposed, between wanting the crowd’s praise and wishing I could squeeze into my fiddle case to hide.

  Charlotte started the next song before I was ready, which broke me out of my downward spiral. We played country megahit after hit, interspersed with funk classics that I thought were strange choices until I saw how the crowd loved them. Sam motioned for me to pass around the tip jar earlier in the set this time. He’d been right: while I pasted a confident smile on my face, which was so much easier wearing makeup and a dress that felt like a costume, nobody treated me disrespectfully, not even the drunks. And the bridesmaids tipped great, twenty upon twenty tumbling into the jar.

  Back onstage and about ten songs in, I thought we must be nearing the end of our night. I didn’t want to stop. Sensing my sadness, maybe, or reacting to his own, Sam announced a slow song that hadn’t been on the playlist, then looked pointedly at Charlotte and Ace to make sure they’d heard him. He looked at me.

  From under the shadow of his cowboy hat, his dark eyes lingered on me a little too long for this to be a signal between band-mates. He was asking me if I was having the best night of my life.

  I mouthed, “Yes.”

  He glanced at Charlotte, who launched the ballad. If yodeling had been an obstacle course for Sam’s voice, the ballad was his weight-lifting competition, just him and the song with his every weakness exposed. But he had a strong voice, a little husky, a voice anybody could pick out on the radio and say, “That’s a Sam Hardiman song.” He might need me to get attention for his band, but he didn’t need anybody if he ever wanted to get voice work for himself. I bent my chin to my fiddle and enjoyed the last few minutes as the set closed down. My bow stroked the strings and sent the rough vibration through my body. Sam’s voice filled my ears.

  Done. “Thank you,” Sam said into the mike. “Y’all have been kind.” With that understatement, ignoring the wild “Woooooo!” that erupted, he simply handed his guitar and mike across the aisle to Ace and jumped down from the bar, holding his hat with one hand.

  I was surprised by the band’s sudden bustle, but of course they’d done this many times before. Ace packed up his bass and slipped out the door—to fetch the minivan, I assumed. Charlotte and Sam took turns, one carrying an instrument case or piece of equipment or drum from the stage out the door while the other waited with the pile on the sidewalk. I joined in. There was a lot to clear away and some pressure to hurry because the next band was already unloading their own van in the street. But as I muscled a tom onto the sidewalk where Charlotte was waiting, I realized Sam was gone.

  Reading my mind, she said flatly, “He disappears like this. He doesn’t care as much about us as you think.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, not wanting to get in a fight with this damaged girl, and not wanting to betray Sam by agreeing. I let her sit there on her drum stool while I went back for Sam’s guitar. Inside, the crowd milled from bathroom to bar again. Way back on the second level, Sam stood at the rail, talking to a man with a full gray beard. He could have been anybody—especially since Sam probably knew as many losers on the Nashville music scene as I did.

  I’d made a few more trips, with Charlotte now watching me contentedly and making no effort to trade jobs with me, when Sam bounced outside, beaming. There was no lead-up in Sam’s world, no “Guess what?” He immediately burst out, “They asked us back!”

  “Dude!” Charlotte exclaimed, raising both fists.

  Sam looked at her, then at me. I think he would have hugged me or her if he’d been with either of us alone, but he sensed that something was broken out here and he was not going to step into the middle of it.

  Luckily Ace drove up then, his athletic physique an ill match for his pristine mom-mobile. While Charlotte and I each picked up a drum, Sam opened the passenger door and leaned inside to shout to Ace, “They asked us back!” I couldn’t make out what words Ace used in response, but I could hear him crowing. I wished I could see his excited reaction, because it seemed about as typical of Ace as driving this van.

  “When’s the next gig?” Charlotte asked as Sam deigned to walk back and help us pile the drums in the van.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said. “Cool?”

  “Cool,” she said.

  I waited for him to ask me if it was cool, and I didn’t know what I would say. I wanted to say yes. I needed to have this night again. I ought to say no, because every night I played put my future in jeopardy. A gig this good couldn’t last forever, and then I would have thrown away college for nothing.

  The new band started with a blast. “In,” Sam said, gesturing with his head to the van. We all closed ourselves inside so we could hear each other. He took a wad of cash out of his back pocket—what the bearded bar owner had given him, probably—and then dumped out the tip jar on the seat between us. I helped him flatten and count the money. He handed a stack of bills to me, one to Charlotte, one to Ace, and stuffed one back in his pocket.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to seem unseasoned or unprofessional, but I had never. In my life. Seen so much money.

  Of course, I’d never actually gotten paid for a gig before.

  I folded the bills into my fiddle case rather than my purse. If the scary man came back and I was mugged on the street, I would give up my purse and let him steal my license and credit card and identity before I let him get my fiddle.

  “Bailey and I will walk back,” Sam told Ace. “See you same time tomorrow.” He and Ace bumped fists. He gave Charlotte a high five.

  “Good night, Bailey,” Ace called as I rolled the door open. “Nice work.”

  “Same to you.” I opened my mouth to acknowledge Charlotte, but she was staring pointedly out the window.

  Deposited on the sidewalk, watching the van drive toward Broadway, Sam and I picked up our cases and headed in the same direction. “Do you mind walking?” he asked. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “You just wanted to stay in the District a little longer,” I accused him. But I didn’t blame him. As we reached the intersection, the excitement was palpable. Happy barhoppers swayed up and down the sidewalks, and music poured from every door.

  We stopped outside a bar that seemed particularly rowdy. As on the stage we’d just left, the drummer and the bass player were backed up to the window. Between songs, the bass player looked over his shoulder at us like he was just as curious about the people staring as they were about him. He locked eyes with Sam and lifted one finger off the neck of his guitar in greeting. Sam gave him a little wave.

  “You sound better than them,” I told Sam.

  “We sound better,” he corrected me. “And you sound better than everybody. The tips prove it.”

  “You told me this was your first gig in the District,
” I reminded him. “You don’t know what the tips would have been like without me.”

  He lowered his dark brows at me. “It’s a compliment, Bailey. Take it.”

  “No,” I joked. But I really did wish he wouldn’t say things like that. So far I’d done a fairly good job of enjoying the night without thinking about the consequences or the future.

  His brow wrinkled with confusion, just for a moment, before clearing to its usual pleasant default setting. As we crossed Broadway, I watched the road ahead of us, knowing he was looking up the hill at the promised land.

  Safe on the opposite sidewalk, I commented, “Ace and Charlotte are really good.”

  “I know,” he said appreciatively. “I can’t tell you how many bands I’ve tried to put together over the years. This is the first one that’s stuck. Ace and Charlotte have been in bands before. They just needed a new place to call home, you know? Ace was playing R & B until now. You can really hear it in his bass line.”

  “Yes!” I said, realizing only after I’d exclaimed that I’d sounded way more enthusiastic than I’d intended. Sam smiled at me like I’d just given away a secret. The truth was, I used to have nerdy conversations about music with Julie. It had been too long.

  I cleared my throat and said more calmly, “I noticed Ace was adding a seventh sometimes that wasn’t in the original.”

  “So cool, right?” Sam asked. “It makes the whole game more interesting to watch, like throwing an elbow. And I rescued Charlotte from our high school jazz band. She has a lot of experience playing for the local middle schools and old folks’ homes.”

  “This is a good thing?” I asked.

  “Yes, because she’s hungry. She lives in an apartment. She can’t practice at home because the neighbors complain. It’s not even her drum set—it’s her set from the high school band, and she’s just neglected to give it back yet. That driving beat she gives us comes from a lot of years in the marching band. But you can also hear how much she appreciates having a place to play and people to play with, and how bad she wants to keep doing it.”