When the song ended, Sam took a moment to stare Toby down silently. Don’t do this, I messaged telepathically to Sam. Challenging Toby would only make things worse. But Sam and I had no psychic connection. The crowd got restless. Someone yelled, “Play ‘Freebird’!” Sam glared at Toby for a few seconds more and finally signaled to Charlotte, who started the song.
And Toby grabbed my ankle.
I never stopped playing. The crowd didn’t notice mistakes. They noticed hesitation. I could play right through this number and then deal with Toby.
His hand slid up my calf to pause at the back of my knee.
Now I was shivering, afraid he would yank me offstage and forward into the crowd. My fiddle might get scratched, and my mother would never forgive me.
His hand moved up the back of my thigh, under my skirt.
Sam’s voice and guitar riff disappeared. He’d stopped playing and was staring at Toby. Slowly I lowered my fiddle like Toby was a snake I didn’t want to startle with any sudden moves.
It took Ace and Charlotte another few seconds to stop playing. Even the crowd noise slowed to a halt. Into the dead silence on the rooftop, Sam growled into the microphone so that his words echoed against the brick walls, “Get your hands off my fiddle player.”
Holding my fiddle and bow, I didn’t have a hand free to defend myself. I could only shudder as Toby’s hand crept higher.
Sam dropped his guitar. I felt a spike of adrenaline and the urge to leap forward and catch it. But before the electrified strings’ earsplitting complaint sounded over the speakers, Sam was off the stage, shoving Toby.
Guys shouted. Girls screamed. I reached blindly into the crowd to grab Sam and only succeeded in dropping my bow. Ace leaped past me. The entire crowd shifted to the left, then parted, drawing Toby and Sam away from each other, despite some idiot hollering, “Fight!”
The door to the interior of the bar burst open. “Break it up!” a burly bouncer yelled. Two even bigger men followed him. The crowd stopped moving toward Toby and Sam then and began to drain sheepishly out the door. One of the bouncers grabbed Toby by the collar of his T-shirt and made a show of muscling him out, even though Toby had gone limp. In two minutes, nobody was left but a couple of older men who probably owned the bar, and the band.
I jumped down from the stage to retrieve my bow, which didn’t seem any worse for wear after I’d retightened the screw. Then I sat down on the edge of the stage, crossed my legs primly, and listened to the owners cuss Sam out because they’d had to clear everyone into the first and second stories until the next rooftop band set up, and a lot of those people would probably leave.
“Your patron had his hand on my girlfriend’s ass!” Sam shouted right back at them. “I won’t start a brawl if your security people do their jobs!”
That’s when Ace walked over. “Please excuse us for a moment,” he told the owners. He put his hand on Sam’s chest and pushed him backward across the floor, all the way to me on the stage. Then he hissed, “Shut up. Let me handle this.”
“Ace,” Sam cried, “they—”
“Shut. Up!” Ace insisted. He gave Sam one last glare, then sauntered back to the group of men with his hand out for introductions like he was selling them a car. Sam scowled after them for a moment, then took out his phone and scowled at that.
Charlotte sat down beside me—not between me and Sam, for once, but on my other side. With her eyes on Ace, she whispered to me, “Do you think you could possibly take me and my drums home?”
“Sure,” I said with lots of fake enthusiasm, “if they’ll fit in my car.”
“Ace isn’t talking to me,” she said. “I think I f**ked up.”
“I think you did, too,” I said.
“Thank you,” Ace called to the men, who were retreating through the door into the bar. “See you soon.” When they’d disappeared, he turned to us with rage in his normally placid face. “Well, we’re not blackballed,” he said, “but we have five minutes to clear out before the next band. I swear to God, I’m not sure I even want to be in this band anymore. I am sick to death of you.” He pointed at Sam. “And you!” He had a special scowl for Charlotte. Then he turned to me. “And . . . I don’t know what the f**k you’re doing half the time. The way things are going, I’d just as soon quit.”
“That’s too bad,” Sam said quietly, handing Ace his phone with an e-mail message open, “because tomorrow night, we’re playing on Broadway.”
The next afternoon, at the end of a long four hours touring the mall with Mr. Crabtree and Elvis, I slipped into Ms. Lottie’s chair.
“Well, hon,” she said by way of greeting, “I didn’t think your face could get any longer than it already was.”
Suddenly angry and tired of her teasing, I burst out, “Remember when you told me Sam Hardiman was a heartbreaker?”
She stared at me in the mirror with two hairpins in her mouth and two hands on my ponytail wig.
“I am done with all the sage advice Nashville has to offer. If you’re going to hurt, not help, what are you dispensing advice for?”
Frowning, she spat out the pins, which made the smallest clinks as they hit the floor, and spun me around in the chair to face her. She towered over me with her hands on her hips. “Sam Hardiman is a good man,” she declared angrily.
“O-kay,” I said, hoping my ironic tone would kick her out of my business and shut her up.
No such luck. “He is not a drinker,” she said, tapping her pointer finger with a long, French-manicured nail. “He is at work every time he’s supposed to be.” She tapped her middle finger, then paused on her thumb. “He didn’t cheat on you, did he?”
A lump formed in my throat. I couldn’t even answer her. He had better not cheat on me. But now that we weren’t together, he could do what he wanted. The thought of him hooking up with someone else stopped me from breathing.
“Then you need to get your ass off your shoulders,” she told me, “and figure out how to make it work.”
“There’s more to it than that!” I exclaimed. “You make it sound stupidly simple, like a country song.”
She looked over her bifocals and down her nose at me. “Country songs are so simple because they’re about what really matters.”
“Would you stop it with the aphorisms?”
Abruptly she spun me back around in the chair. We faced each other in the mirror. Muttering to herself, she took the rest of the pins out of my ponytail wig and lifted it off my head. I scowled down at my hands in my lap. I should have been relieved our confrontation was over, but the lump in my throat hadn’t gone away. I swallowed.