“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.