Dirty Little Secret Read online

  Leaving the club behind, we reached the intersection with Broadway. We were on the lower, less crowded end of the street, so it wasn’t far to the river, with the Titans football stadium on the other side. I leaned around Ace to look up the hill. The sidewalks along Broadway were packed with tourists, country music overflowed onto the street, and neon signs flashed in the shape of cowboy hats and boots and guitars all the way up the sidewalk. The real action was near the top of the hill, in the three or four bars famous for hosting acts that got discovered by record company executives who wandered into the audience, scouting their next star. I felt better just gazing at it—redeemed, like a girl in a country song who stuck to her guns and made it big, despite the stories her boyfriend told her about herself.

  The light changed, and we stepped into the crosswalk. Sam was looking up Broadway, too, with his eye on that far corner.

  As we crossed the street, I thought I spied the bar where we were headed, only two storefronts down—not a bad gig. But we kept walking right past it, past abandoned and crumbling historic facades, to a building that stood by itself because the buildings all around it had been torn down. A couple of people sat on the sills of the plate glass windows in front, smoking. At least we knew smoking wasn’t allowed inside, and that there were some customers. Two, to be exact. An enormous muscled bouncer stood in the doorway of the building, checking the IDs of some guys wanting in.

  Beyond that, the block diminished into businesses that were closed at night, then a slummy area of deserted shells, ending in a huge construction project that wouldn’t be finished for years. I turned around and looked behind us. A few pedestrians peeled off Broadway and ventured down this side street. Very few. The lights of Broadway seemed far away.

  If the location bothered Charlotte, she didn’t let on. She still talked animatedly with Sam like he was the only friend she’d ever had. She probably didn’t even notice her surroundings because her eyes had stayed glued to him since we’d left his truck.

  “Careful,” Sam told her, pointing out a hypodermic needle lying in the weeds next to the sidewalk.

  “Do you want me to carry you?” Ace joked to me.

  Honestly, I was tempted to say yes. “No, thanks,” I said instead. “I feel safe with my needle-proof cowgirl boots on.” As I followed Sam through the door, I held my head high in an effort to fake the bouncer out and make him think I belonged here. Nothing would be more embarrassing than to be the one singled out as not looking old enough, especially after Sam had made such a big deal about it. The bouncer didn’t pull me out of our little line or ask me for ID, though. I stepped across the threshold.

  The music blasting over the speakers, filler between the live bands, was another country song I loved, but that was the end of my reasons to feel comfortable here. I’d been with my parents to the Station Inn, the most important bluegrass concert hall, which had looked so nasty that I’d been afraid to touch anything. This place made the Station Inn look like the Grand Ole Opry.

  The walls were filled with framed and signed photographs of country stars from decades past—names I knew because I’d walked the edges of the biz for years, but these stars weren’t famous enough for someone to impersonate them at the mall. Instead of posing carefully for publicity photos, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths like they were singing their hearts out in front of an audience. The implication was that they’d been photographed here at this very bar, but the photos could have been downloaded off the Internet for all I knew. I didn’t think so, though. Every facet of the frames and every curve of the little 45-speed records strung from the ceiling was coated with a layer of filth like the place hadn’t been dusted since Elvis died. The dim lights and spotlights in blue, green, and pink didn’t quite disguise the dust.

  Despite the bar looking deserted on the outside and unsanitary on the inside, quite a few customers pushed past each other to the bar or the restrooms. Sam held up his guitar case like the prow of a ship that broke through the ice pack in the arctic. I hugged my fiddle case. As we wound through the crowd, middle-aged tourists and Vandy frat boys glanced up and down my body, curious what a fiddle player in a rockabilly band looked like up close.

  The entrance was a short ramp from street level to the level of the room. At the end of the ramp, Sam stepped three feet up to the tiny stage and pulled me up after him. After being surrounded by people taller than me like I was down in a hole, it was a relief to be saved from the throng. From this vantage point I saw that there were actually two small stages, one to the left of the entrance and one to the right, both of them backed up against the windows onto the street. Charlotte’s drum set took up one stage, and Sam and I balanced on the other, with Ace climbing up behind us. He and Sam both opened their guitar cases in the corner.

  I could also tell from up here that the building had two levels. The back was elevated so those customers could get a better view of the band. They were already lining up against the guardrail that separated the upper section from the lower one, staking out a good vantage point for viewing the band—for viewing us, I realized in a sudden moment of disorientation and pure joy.

  After plugging his guitar into an amp and setting it in a stand, Sam pulled out his phone and thumbed the screen. He stepped closer to me and spoke in my ear so I could hear him over the music. My skin buzzed with the sensation of his breath on my skin. “Do you have your phone with you?” he asked.

  I nodded, pulling it out of my purse.

  “I’m texting all of you the playlist for the first hour.” He eyed me. “Uh-oh. I’ve transposed some of these songs from the key they were in originally. I’m just trying to find the best place for my voice. Is that going to mess you up?”

  Yes, it would. I could play a song in a different key from the original, but I would hear the ghost of the first key in my head, an annoying niggling that was as near as I ever came to schizophrenia. I was a professional musician, though, so I said, “I’ll deal with it. You start and I’ll figure it out after a few notes.” My phone vibrated in my hand with his text.

  I endured a delicious tingle as I felt his breath in my ear again. “One more thing,” he said. “The band gets some money from the bar, but we get a lot more in tips. We keep playing while one lucky member strolls around the room with the tip jar.” He pointed to the large glass jar on the far corner of the stage. The faded and peeling “Pickled Eggs” label still clung to it, but “Tips” was written across the label in marker. He grinned at me.

  “Oh, hell no.” I looked around the room at the crowd watching us, clinking their beer bottles together, bending their heads to talk about us and size us up before we even started.

  “They’re friendly,” he promised me, “and not as drunk as you think. They just want to hear some good music. And by the time you pass the jar around, if we’re lucky, there will be brides.”

  “Brides?” I asked dubiously.

  He nodded. “Bachelorette parties. They tip great.”

  “But, Sam.” I really did not want to dive into that crowd again. “If you’re so keen on the brides, why don’t you carry around the tip jar?”

  “Because you’re a lot cuter than I am.” His words were flirtatious but firm. He wasn’t backing down.

  Charlotte stood at the edge of the opposite stage. She waited for a break in the crowd pushing up and down the entrance ramp, then stepped across the gap between the stages and extended her phone toward us. Her glance flitted from him to me and back to him like he wasn’t technically allowed to whisper in my ear. “Hey, what’s this third song on the playlist?” she shouted over the crowd noise. Needlessly, I thought, because if the three of them had played all these songs before, she could figure it out. She just wanted to break things up between Sam and me.

  Ignoring her, I told Sam, “If I’m a lot cuter than you, so is Charlotte. This is a girl thing, right? You think people will tip a girl better. If she carried the tip jar before, she can do it again.”

  He stared at me a mom
ent. I knew he’d heard me. But he turned to Charlotte, took her phone, and peered at it. “It’s the Cyndi Lauper song. Sorry, I can’t spell.” He handed her phone back and turned away, dismissing her. He told me, “We’ve never played with you before. It’ll be easier to play without you than without Charlotte.”

  “Oh, fuck that,” Charlotte broke in. She sneered at me. “It’s because you’re prettier than me.”

  Sam took Charlotte by both shoulders and spun her to face him. Looking straight into her eyes, he told her firmly, “Stop.”

  Charlotte stared up at him with her lips drawn down and her strange blue-green eyes big as the sky. I thought I saw tears forming at the edges of her lashes, and as I watched, goose bumps popped up on her forearms. Her fingers were splayed in midair, her fingernails scribbled with a type of nail polish I’d never seen before, translucent black. The embrace, or the scolding, or whatever it was, lasted so long that I got uncomfortable as a spectator, like they were involved in a round of PDA.

  Ace must have felt the same way. “That’s enough,” he said, looming behind Charlotte. He punched Sam in the shoulder—gently, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be punched even lightly with that meaty fist.

  Sam blinked at Ace and dropped his hands from Charlotte’s shoulders. He glared at me. And then he placed his cowboy hat on the head of his guitar, and jumped down from the stage. He walked out the front door of the bar.

  Charlotte retreated behind her drum kit like this was normal behavior for all of them. Shaking his head, Ace took a few steps backward, too, into his position onstage. I was left standing there with my hands out and pleading like I wanted to give my violin and bow away to the next person who walked by.

  Exasperated, I called to Ace, “Is Sam coming back?”

  “Yeah. He has to ‘focus’ before gigs.” Ace made finger quotes around focus. He turned his ear to his amp and thumbed one of his bass strings, twisting the tuning peg.

  I wasn’t sure I believed Ace. I looked from him to Charlotte to the expectant crowd watching us—watching me more than any of us, since I was the one out front. I’d complained about my tip jar duties. I’d hesitated to let Sam drag me into this gig. But now I was here, and I’d be damned if I let this opportunity go.

  Depositing my fiddle and bow in my case—and closing the case because my parents had taught me to be more careful with my fiddle than my own body—I sat daintily on the edge of the stage and stepped to the floor, avoiding giving the crowd an eyeful of my underwear. I followed Sam out the door.

  Either the bouncer read the panicked look in my eyes, or he was used to band drama. Before I could say anything, he pointed. I walked in that direction, around to the side of the building. Sam stood with his back against the brick wall, between two metal joints sticking out of the mortar where the building next door used to be. His chin pointed up as if he stared at the stars, but his eyes were closed.

  Boots crunching in the broken cement and glass, I stopped so close to him that he must have heard me even over the music booming from inside. He didn’t open his eyes, though.

  “Sam,” I said.

  “What.” He wasn’t bending over backward to sweet-talk me anymore. He sounded angry and impatient with me—like Toby.

  “What the hell is your problem?” I hated that my voice climbed into shrill fear, but I couldn’t believe I’d gotten so close to this gig, only to have it yanked out from under me because previously adorable Sam had unadorable stage fright.

  “It’s Charlotte,” he bit out. “I can’t have that negative emotion in my head before a gig. Charlotte knows that. She’s a great drummer and a good friend, but if I ever fire her, it’s going to be for fucking with me before a gig.”

  “She wasn’t fucking with you. She was expressing her insecurity about her relationship with you and her position in the band, and she was asking you to tell her she was wrong. You didn’t do it.”

  Now he did open his eyes. He stared me down like I’d just awakened him from a long winter’s nap.

  “Sorry!” I exclaimed. My tone let him know I wasn’t sorry at all. “Am I fired, too?”

  “Maybe,” he grumbled. “Why were you giving me all that guff about the tip jar? You’re the one who got Charlotte started in the first place.”

  “Oh, no. All this between you has been going on for a long time. You neglected to tell me before you dragged me here.”

  “The point is the gig,” he said impatiently. “I’m in the wrong mind-set for the gig. Now I’ve got to turn this thing around somehow.” His dark eyes, warm beneath his long, dark lashes, slid to meet mine. I realized by degrees that he wanted me.

  Self-conscious, and trying not to be, and not a hundred percent sure I was reading him right, I held his gaze, waiting for him to make the first move. When he did, tingles raced up my arms. He took my hand and tugged me closer. “Come here.”

  I held back, not stepping forward until the strength of his pull overcame the gravity rooting me to the spot. But when I did give in to his momentum, I led with my chest and dropped my shoulders so he could catch a glimpse down the front of my dress.

  He looked where I wanted him to look as we stood as close to each other as we could get without embracing. In the warm night I could feel the heat of his body through his shirt and my dress. Slowly he raised his eyes to meet mine. “Would you mind helping me get in the mood?”

  “I thought we were supposed to act like we don’t like each other.”

  “Around Ace and Charlotte.” He lifted his thumb to stroke my lip. Through the coating of lipstick, his touch made me shudder. “Let me kiss you just this once,” he said.

  Just this once was a refrain with him. He was the devil in disguise, the handsome but low-down, no-good sneaky guy from a thousand country songstresses’ revenge plots. Yet there was no way I was turning him down, any more than I could have turned down playing this gig. Ace and Charlotte weren’t peeking around the corner of the building at us—too frightened by Sam’s sudden and insistent exit, I thought—and there were no windows on this wall that they could spy through. Anyway, the two of them were Sam’s concern, not mine. We were on the side of the building facing the deserted end of the street, not Broadway, so there was nobody at all to see us.

  I said coyly, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

  He gave me a small smile, then solved the problem by carefully sliding my glasses off and folding them into his back pocket. His other hand never left my mouth.

  I opened my lips, letting his thumb dip inside.

  His dark eyes widened and he watched me for a moment, like he’d expected to get slapped, not invited, and now he wasn’t sure how to proceed.

  Only for a moment. His thumb slid from my mouth down to trace my jaw. He cradled my chin in his hand and lowered his lips to mine.

  His mouth was unexpectedly hot, like he’d been drinking coffee, or I was even more thoroughly frozen than I’d thought. But he didn’t force the kiss into a big production like Toby had during our first encounter. His mouth pressed mine almost chastely, until I felt the very tip of his tongue rub along my bottom lip.

  I felt like gasping with pleasure and shock, but I didn’t want him to know how he was affecting me, in case he didn’t feel the same way. I kept my mouth on his and inched forward instead, slipping my hands around his waist. Except for a few brushes against him at the mall, this was the first time I’d touched him. I’d thought, and Ace had confirmed, that Sam was an athlete. I still wasn’t prepared for how solid he was underneath my fingertips.

  I shouldn’t have worried that he wasn’t enjoying this as much as I was. As soon as I touched him, he inhaled sharply through his nose, pressed his hand more firmly around my jaw like he never wanted to let me go, and wrapped his other arm around my back. The stubble on his cheeks pricked my face. He kissed me more deeply—still taking his time, but eagerly enough to let me know the feeling was mutual. We took turns leading each other down a dark spiral.

  He pull
ed away, blinking at me like he wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He glanced at his watch. “We have to go in and get started.” Then he looked into my eyes with an intensity that let me know there was nothing he’d rather do less.

  After a year spent feeling worthless, and several months with a boyfriend who treated me like he was making do with me until he found someone better, I was really enjoying Sam. I knew I was being ridiculous, and I half thought he was setting me up and faking the whole thing, because he was too cute and the situation was too perfect. Maybe I was about to get cut down, but as good as I felt right then, I was willing to take the chance.

  Surging with more power than I’d felt since I could remember, I rubbed my thumbs down toward the waist of his jeans before I let him go and drew back. “Is that what you needed?” I said in a teasing voice I didn’t know I had. “Are you in the right mind-set now?”

  “Uh-huh,” he affirmed, eyes still wide on me as if he couldn’t quite focus. He acted like kissing me had blown his mind. It was adorable. “Wow. Yes. I wish we had a song about this on the playlist. Or maybe we do.”

  Seeing a strange shadow across his mouth, I drew his handkerchief from my dress pocket. “Uh-oh, lipstick.”

  He chuckled as I cleaned him up. “Not my best look?”

  “What about me? Am I smeared?” I pursed my lips and lifted my chin to give him a better view.

  “You’re perfect.” He pulled my glasses from his back pocket, unfolded them, and set them across my nose. Brows drawn together like he was deep in thought, he took my hand and tugged me around the corner to begin our gig.