His finger stopped on my lip. “Are you going to ask your family to try to get an in for our band?”
“No,” I whispered.
He shook his head. “Then we can’t be together. In my head I know that’s wrong, Bailey, but I have to follow my heart. I’m messed up right now, and I can’t give you what you deserve.”
Suddenly his touch burned like a cold knife. I slipped out from under him, found my underwear on the floor, and pulled it on. “That’s what you said to Charlotte when you broke up with her, Sam. That’s what you said to everyone.”
I ran out of the room and down the stairs. I stopped in the tiny laundry room off the kitchen and fished my clothes out of the dryer. In the darkness I mistook Sam’s shirt for mine until I pulled it on and, in addition to hanging off me, it smelled like him. Cursing, I tossed it into the dryer and found my own.
“I wasn’t lying,” came Sam’s voice.
He was leaning against the doorjamb to the kitchen in his boxers, with his arms crossed, his face grim, his hair wild, looking like the hunky half of an argument in a country music video. “You were special.”
“Oh, was I, in the past tense?” I shot back. “I was different from your other girlfriends, right?”
“Yes,” Sam said.
“Because we screwed.”
His lips parted.
“Tell me the truth,” I insisted before he could speak. “Was this another one of those life experiences you try to accumulate because they make you uncomfortable? Are you going to channel this emotion and use it when you sing?”
He unfolded his arms and stood up straight.
“I see,” I said. “It’s that genre of country song, the one where you break it to your lady that you don’t love her, and she drives away in tears. Sorry, but I’m not going to give you that satisfaction.”
I slipped my shoes on, picked up my purse, and calmly walked outside to my car. Sam stood in the doorway watching me, the mist after the rain curling around him in my headlight beams as I backed down his driveway.
Dead tired, I just wanted to get home and go to bed. That helped me remain calm—right up until railroad crossing guardrails descended in front of my car. The warning signal clanged its bells. The train moaned its off-key tritone, louder and louder and louder until it filled my head and I couldn’t hear myself think.
I slapped my hands over my ears and yelled, “I would like out of this country song now. I want out of this country song right now!”
I wasn’t sure who I was praying to. The ghost of Johnny Cash, maybe. But nothing changed. The train still moaned. The signal clanged and flashed like a migraine. And when the end of the train finally slipped past me and disappeared into the Nashville night, I knew I wouldn’t get to sleep until I wrote this song down.
13
I spent the next afternoon suffering through Hank Williams’s yodeling and wondering about the big party that the record company was throwing for Julie that night. At dinner my granddad told me gently that he’d talked to my mom the night before and tried to convince her to invite me, but she was too afraid the record company wouldn’t like it. I suspected she was afraid I would jump on the buffet and start throwing canapés just to spite everyone.
My granddad seemed especially gleeful that I was going out with Sam again, as if that made him feel less guilty that I wasn’t included in Julie’s celebration. The closer the party time came, the more resentful I felt that Julie and my dad hadn’t stood up to my mom and invited me, and the better I felt that I was about to disobey my parents again.
I just wished I’d been able to do that without seeing Sam. There was the appearance of love, the trappings of it that I put in songs. There was real love, the kind I was afraid I’d felt for Sam last night. And then there was the ache I was feeling, intense and depthless. I had never heard a song like this, either because nobody had ever been this heartbroken, or because a tune that depressing wouldn’t sell.
Sam never called me, but I knew he was in communication with Ace. Ace had said Monday night that he would call to make sure I was coming to the gig at Boot Ilicious if Sam and I weren’t speaking. I knew he wouldn’t have called me four times, though, if a nervous Sam hadn’t been goading him into it. I parked in the deck Sam and I had used and abused our first night together, then walked a few doors down to the eighteen-and-up bar. My fiddle got me a pass inside without paying cover, and the bouncers pointed me upstairs.
At the top of two flights, on the roof with a view of nearby skyscrapers on one side and the Cumberland River and Titans stadium on the other, the band stood onstage as if ready to start playing without me.
I could see them only because the stage was two feet above the roof. The place was packed with college-age partiers. Some of the first people I spotted were the girls who’d gotten a manicure on Elvis day at the mall last week. I saw a few other boys I knew from school, who didn’t recognize me in the tiny, tight red cocktail dress I’d snagged at the mall that afternoon and paired with my red cowgirl boots and red cat-eye glasses in a statement of ironic overkill. So far, no Toby, but there were three floors to this bar, and it was already almost nine o’clock. He was probably here somewhere. The first guy to recognize me would text him so that he could come up here and laugh at me. I could feel it.
But I had a job to do, a work ethic for the forbidden. I sashayed through the crowd. I was still three people deep away from the stage when I saw Sam’s face change under his cowboy hat, from worry to relief. He held out a hand and hauled me up onstage with one strong arm.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“Ace told me to be here at nine,” I said, glancing at my watch. It was five until.
“You know I’m in danger of a stroke until you get here,” Sam growled.
I shrugged. “I had other things to do.”
“I hope you’re not giving her everything you gave to me on her behalf,” Ace said, stepping between us. “You look like shit, Sam. Just back off everybody.”
Sam did look like he hadn’t gotten any more sleep since I’d woken him at six the night before. In fact, he looked like his haggard father imitating Johnny Cash. He gave Ace a sullen glare, then pulled out his cell phone to text us the playlist.
“But you look beautiful,” Ace told me.
I was glad someone had noticed I’d outdone myself tonight, if you liked this sort of thing. I gave him a saucy curtsy in thanks, but I wished he hadn’t said it in front of Charlotte, who’d come from behind her drum kit to lurk, listen in, and scowl.