“Okay. Not Tuesday.” Clearly Sam wasn’t going to let me back out of a gig once I told him I was in. And I couldn’t miss Julie’s debut if I actually got invited. I could add that to my long list of items I would never forgive myself for.
Sam pushed his plate of fries away and turned his paper menu over. He looked around the table and then asked, “Anybody got a pen?”
I reached for my purse to pull out a pencil—carefully, without revealing my music notebook inside. Before I could open the flap, Charlotte produced a black permanent marker. As she handed it to him, I realized the marker must be how she was achieving the strange see-through effect of her scribbled black nail polish. I decided then that if we ever reached the point that she no longer pissed me off every time I looked at her, I would take her for a proper manicure.
Sam drew a calendar on the menu. “Not Tuesday,” he muttered in grudging agreement. “But we already have something for Monday.” He scribbled the gig on the calendar, then looked up at me. “It’ll be fun. It’s a surprise birthday party, a pool party! It’s in Chattanooga. Though—Uh-oh.”
“What?” Ace asked.
Sam’s eyes never left me. “Are you working at the mall tomorrow? Could you get off a little early? Or if you’re with Elvis, just walk out on him.”
“I work there Tuesday through Saturday,” I assured him. “Not tomorrow.”
Slamming down Charlotte’s marker, Sam put one hand on the edge of the table and one over his heart like he’d just averted a stress attack. Charlotte patted his shoulder in a way that made me want to pinch her.
He picked up the marker and tapped it on the calendar. “We won’t get paid as much for the party as we do when we work for tips. And obviously, playing in Chattanooga won’t do us any good when we’re trying to make a name for ourselves in Nashville. If it helps us pick up more Chattanooga gigs, though, we could use those to fill holes in our schedule.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to hear himself. He was doing it again, assuming I would play with the band permanently.
“What?” he asked when he looked up and saw my expression. Then he willfully misunderstood what it meant: “Yeah, you’re right. If we’re trying to fill holes in the schedule, Memphis would be better than Chattanooga, because there are so many record company connections over there.” He looked back down at his calendar and stroked a few more words with Charlotte’s marker. “I’m working on something here in town for Wednesday. And now we have the video. With any luck we’ll be playing on Broadway by Thursday.” It was hard to be skeptical when he beamed at all of us like this Broadway gig was a done deal. “Things are getting serious. It would be nice if we finally named the band something other than the Sam Hardiman Ego Trip.” He winked at me. “How about Death Wish?”
“No way,” Ace said. “Sounds like a heavy metal group.”
Sam shrugged. “Redneck Death Wish, for clarity.” As it rolled off his tongue, he grinned even bigger. “I like it!”
“No!” squealed Charlotte, wrinkling her nose.
He pointed at her. “We’ll change it if you come up with something better.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll give you a year.”
Ace put up his hand to high-five Sam diagonally across the table. Charlotte rolled her eyes again, which made me feel a little less like her eye roll while apologizing to me had been an attack. The ice was broken then, and our conversation eased into how our performances had gone the last two nights, and what we could improve for our next three gigs. It was the first time we’d ever talked together as a band. Though the fight-or-flight feeling returned and the hair stood up on my arms, it wasn’t as intense as it had been before. I made up my mind to enjoy the band while I had it, because I might never get it again.
At the same time, I wondered what effect my decision to join the band temporarily would have on my relationship, such as it was, with Sam. I’d told him we shouldn’t date if we were in a band together. He’d said we could do anything we wanted because I’d insisted we weren’t in a band together. And now that we were, at least for the next four days, the panicky feeling turned a sinister corner.
I picked up Charlotte’s marker from Sam’s menu-turned-calendar and reached across the table for Sam’s shoulder. He was deep in conversation with Ace about changing the ending of one of our songs, but he offered his shoulder to me.
Using the marker, I drew a heart on his sleeve. I started with the heart itself, then surrounded it with dots and swirls like a henna tattoo, the kind of doodle I drew to decorate the songs in my music notebook that nobody would ever hear.
Sam still nodded at Ace. But as I finished the heart and backed away across the table, he held out the edge of his sleeve with two fingers so he could see it better. His dark eyes locked on me. My panicky feeling morphed into something like the caramel sundae Charlotte had ordered, sweet and irresistible.
Charlotte stayed in the conversation about music, too, but she managed to give me a pointed look up and down, telling me telepathically that she might have apologized for her tease comment, but she wasn’t really sorry. She reached in front of me on the table and retrieved her marker.
Around midnight we all walked through the warm, heavy night to the lot where Sam’s truck and my car were parked. Two abreast, I took the lead with Sam on the sidewalk, but there was no opening for us to return to the personal conversation we’d had while we were alone. The four of us were brainstorming for songs we could add to our playlist. What I really wanted was not just to talk with Sam but to make out with him like I had the night before, twenty-six girlfriends be damned. I would worry about them later.
But as we reached the lot and leaned against Sam’s truck, chatting, I came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight. He’d proven to me by now that he wouldn’t risk angering Charlotte and tearing the band apart by publicly displaying his affection for me. Resigned, I stopped trying to make smoldering eye contact with him and even asked Ace, more than Charlotte, “Do y’all want a ride back to the van?” I didn’t want to give them a ride—awkward—but I figured I’d better, since Sam’s truck would be crowded with the three of them.
“Oh, we’ll just ride with Sam,” Charlotte piped up breezily. Obviously she looked forward to being crowded between Ace and Sam.