“I feel better if I come with him,” Ace said quietly. “He ought to be able to take care of himself. But sometimes he forgets where he is and what he’s doing. A sociopath would kill him over the couple of hundred dollars in that guitar case right now.”
I nodded. “Is that why you want to be in the band? Because he wants you to be?” I was fishing for information about myself more than Ace. I knew I couldn’t be in Sam’s band, but I desperately wanted to be. And after Charlotte’s warnings, I wondered whether this was an idea that Sam had put in my head, a conclusion I never would have reached if he hadn’t kissed me.
Ace poured a packet of fake sweetener in his tea and stirred it with his straw. “Like I told you last night, Sam and I played football together.” I recognized this phrase as boy code for We are very close friends. “I used to play bass for my brother’s R & B band, but after he moved to Chicago, I put it away until I happened to mention some of my past gigs to Sam at football practice. He got all excited and wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to jam with him. And we sounded great together. Sam would sound great with anybody, really, but he made me feel like I was holding my own. It was this really strange mix of James Brown and John Denver, but we made it work, you know?”
I nodded. Just like I could make it work when some crazy old lady wanted me to play Reba McEntire.
“Sam and I played with anybody who wanted to start a band in high school,” Ace said, “but most guys aren’t serious about it. They want to be in a band so they can impress the ladies, but they don’t want to practice, and the band lasts a week. Then Sam started dating Charlotte.”
He took a sip of his tea. It was just a pause in his story, and after swallowing he would go on with the story of Sam dating Charlotte. But he drank and drank, the seconds stretched on, and most of his tea was gone in one pull.
He dabbed his lips almost daintily with his cloth napkin and went on as if he hadn’t strangely stopped. “They didn’t date long. Ever since, we periodically have these knock-down, drag-outs about whether Sam decided we should all form a band because he was dating Charlotte, or whether he sought Charlotte out and started dating her so that she would join his band. I don’t know the answer to that myself.”
“It sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,” I pointed out.
Ace’s face wasn’t expressive—he was the opposite of Sam in that regard—but now that I knew him a little, I could tell from the slightest tightening of his jaw that he was upset. “Charlotte asks me about it all the time. She comes up with a new theory, a new angle, and wants to discuss it with me. You’re not helping.”
Without meaning to, I sat back in my chair. I didn’t like being blamed for this. Whatever problems the band had, they’d definitely had them before I showed up last night. I’d only brought them to a head.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands in a show of truce. “It’s not your fault. Anyway, they were still dating when Sam came to me with this idea of a band. I did not want to be in a band with Sam and his girlfriend.”
“Because he’s had fifty-two girlfriends this year,” I guessed.
“Oh,” Ace said, shoulders sagging. “Charlotte said that to you.”
With my stony silence, I told him yes.
“It hasn’t been fifty-two,” he said carefully. “That would be one per week. Don’t get me wrong. There have been a lot. Maybe more like twenty-six.”
“Now you’re just rubbing it in,” I said, hinting that it would be okay if he shut up about this now.
He eyed me uneasily, thrown off by my protest, and unsure where to take this argument from here. He said awkwardly, “Well, so, and, Charlotte was girlfriend number twenty or thereabouts, so he was pretty far along in this pattern. I knew they were going to break up in a week or two, and then I’d be in a band with Sam and his ex-girlfriend.”
“And besides the awkwardness anybody else would expect, that was a special problem for you, because you were in love with her.”
I don’t know what made me say it. I’d suspected she had a thing for him—besides her more obvious thing for Sam—by the way she’d sat protectively beside him onstage last night and watched other women jealously as they passed. I’d thought he had a thing for her because of the way he watched her flirt with Sam without ever commenting that he was tired of it or it was gross, just taking it with a carefully composed blank face. I’d deduced the feeling was mutual because they’d ridden to the gig together. Who’d set that up, and what excuse they’d used, I didn’t know, but they’d both allowed themselves to be assigned to that minivan together, and to work as a team against Sam when he seduced a fiddle player later in the night.
I could have stayed quiet. Should have, maybe, if my goal was to get out of this band. But the longer we’d talked and listened to Sam singing below us, the more resigned I’d become to the fact that I was probably stuck with them, at least for tonight. At least until I got my fill. And I needed Ace’s confidence now, because that way he might help in my exit strategy later.
“I was not in love with her,” he said so loudly that several people at the very back of the crowd around Sam looked up at us curiously.
“I see,” I said smoothly. “You only had the worst kind of crush on her, then. You felt guilty that you had a thing for your best friend’s girlfriend. Then they broke up, and you and she became friends, and the crush only got worse, and you fell in love with her more gradually, later.”
“We’ve ridden together to all these gigs for months, and we are friends, and that’s all,” he said self-righteously. I didn’t believe him, and I was pretty sure he knew that, but there was nothing he could do about it but brush it off. He sat back in his chair and tried his best to relax his shoulders so I wouldn’t notice how antsy he’d gotten. Too late.
“To answer your question,” he said, “no, I didn’t want to be in this band just because Sam wanted me to, but that’s part of it. He’s had a really hard year.”
Because of the fifty-two girlfriends? Poor baby.
Ace went on, “Anybody who knows him, even all the girls, will tell you he’s a great guy, and they’ll do anything for him, right up until they want to kill him.”
I nodded. We were on the same page there.