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 moment. 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, f**k 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 f**king with me before a gig.”