Inside, I wound around knots of bawdy frat boys and giggling fashionistas to find Sam and Ace in a dark corner. When Sam glanced up at me and stopped talking, I knew they’d been conferring about me. As if that wasn’t obvious enough, Ace turned to look at me, too, and his eyes widened.
I stood in front of them. “Can I have a minute with Sam?” I asked Ace.
Ace cut his eyes to Sam, who looked like he wished Ace wouldn’t abandon him there with me. Ace didn’t dare stay after he saw the look on my face, but he did tap his watch. “We don’t have much time,” he said as he dove back into the crowd.
I turned to Sam. “Now,” I said, “tell me about your girlfriend.”
Some small part of me held out hope that Charlotte had been wrong, or lying, and Sam would have no idea what I was talking about. But he knew exactly who I meant. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach as he eyed me and said, heartbreakingly serious, “I told you about Emily.”
“No, you didn’t,” I assured him.
His brow furrowed. “I didn’t want to mess things up between us.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have screwed me and then broken up with me.”
“I did not screw—” His eyes flew to the girls in clubbing dresses who turned to look us up and down. Then he whispered to me, “You can’t do this to me right now.”
“I can’t do this to you?”
“At a gig,” he explained. “We’re still in this band together.”
I could tell from the blaze behind his eyes that he was not backing down. Nothing mattered except this gig, until the gig was over.
I wasn’t backing down either. Not this time. “You need to get over that,” I said. “What if the next girl you take advantage of confronts you right before you go onstage at the Opry?”
“No,” he said firmly, forgetting that he was trying not to attract attention to our fight. “Do not go there. Girls always say guys took advantage of them or talked them into something. Guys say girls seduced them. What you and I did was mutual. Don’t you dare say it wasn’t.”
“You have some kind of problem,” I told him, “and you used me to try to get over it, like you’ve used a hundred other girls in the past year.”
“A hundr—” He stopped himself with a grimace, glanced around at the crowd, and started again. “I don’t want that kind of excuse. The truth is, Emily and I dated for a year. That’s a long time for me, longer than I’ve ever dated anybody. At first she was really excited about my gigs, and I was excited about her being excited. But we started to get on each other’s nerves. She never seemed to have her own . . . not a gig, exactly. She didn’t play gigs. But she never had her own metaphorical gig. A thing. An event. A sport she played, something she did so I could come watch her. Maybe I should have been flattered by that, but it got to be too much. I felt suffocated because all her attention was on me all the time, and I didn’t feel the same way about her.
“I’d decided to tell her that and break up with her, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, because we’d had a lot of fun together and I still liked her. Then she wanted to go to a party and I refused to go. Sometimes I skip parties if there’s drinking. I don’t mind other people drinking, but at parties the ass**les want to get me drunk for the first time because they think it would be hilarious. So I told her I wasn’t going, and I planned to tell her the next time I saw her that it was over between us. At the party she got drunk. She didn’t have a ride home. She crashed her car into a guardrail and died.”
He said all of this matter-of-factly, with no change in the tone of his voice. But his fists tightened, and the muscles moved in his forearm.
“Her family wanted me to sit with them at the funeral, which I did. All her relatives and friends were telling me if only she hadn’t died, we would have been together forever.”
“They said that to you?”
“Yes, which . . . you forgive people for saying weird shit when somebody dies. The thing is, none of it is true. She wasn’t the love of my life, and I’m not going to pretend she was just because she’s dead.”
He peeked out from under his cowboy hat at the crowd, like he was about to get caught with his hand in my dress. I wished now that our problems were that simple. I wished for the fight from our first night together.
He said, “And then sometimes I think I’m being really weird about that because as long as I’m angry about the whole thing, I can’t panic.”
“What would you panic about?” I asked. “That you weren’t there?”
“To drive her home. Yeah. I had told a couple of friends that I was going to break up with her. After the wreck, some people were saying she’d heard about that, and she drove off the road on purpose. In another version, she just got really drunk at the party because she was so upset about me, and that’s what caused her to have a wreck later. Either way, it’s my fault. Maybe I was put on this earth to do one thing, to get her home safely, and I didn’t do it.”
I looked around the bar, at the girls sipping beer and laughing. The way they eyed Sam, I knew any one of them would be glad to comfort him in his grief and loss. Maybe valuing myself as much as I valued him made me strangely cold. As his friend, I would have been glad to help him get over his problems. I didn’t appreciate being surprised by them as his lover.
“You date a girl until you start to have feelings for her,” I told him, “and then you break up with her. But you never got very far with anyone. Which means one of two things for me. Either I’m incredibly easy, and you knew that and took advantage. Or, you felt less for me than you’ve ever felt for anybody, because you were able to get so far with me before you got uncomfortable and ended it.”
His nostrils flared in distaste, and he stood up straighter against the wall. “You think I’m a nice guy and you can say anything to me, but there’s a limit to how much bullshit I’ll listen to from you. Emily doesn’t have anything to do with you. I didn’t break up with you because of her. I just realized we can’t ever be together. You’ll always wonder whether I’m just using you for your sister’s connections.”
“And you really will be using me.”
He looked down, half an acknowledgment.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m not saying you broke up with me because of Emily. Charlotte also told me that when Emily died, that’s when your emotional problems started.”