Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone sidling up next to me at the wall. I turned to glare at whoever it was. Nobody but the band should have been back here. Ace wouldn’t go out of his way to talk to me, and Sam had better not. Not tonight. And the last person I wanted to talk to right now was—
Charlotte. “I see you’ve decided to let the crowd focus on Sam rather than you tonight,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to distract anyone with what you’re wearing.”
“You know what?” I turned on her so suddenly that she stepped back. “This may be the last time I’ll ever play in public, and I wanted to go out with a bang. Sam gave me the line last night. ‘I’m messed up right now, and I can’t give you what you deserve.’ Remember? You got what you wanted, so turn that frown upside down.”
I turned to gaze at the stages along the river again and waited for her to scamper inside the bar in search of Sam.
“That’s not right,” she said. “That shouldn’t have happened to you.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that, and I didn’t care anymore.
“I know I’ve given you a lot of grief,” she said, “but I just didn’t want Sam bringing random people into the band without checking with me, when I’ve worked so hard with these guys. And then it seemed like Ace . . .”
As her voice trailed off, I looked over at her. Her eyes were searching the restless crowd for Ace, not Sam.
She turned back to me. “You don’t understand. Ever since Sam’s girlfriend—”
“Which one?” I asked sharply.
“Emily.” Her tone made it sound like I should know all about Emily. “Ever since she died, it’s like that was so intense for him that he can’t really feel anymore. He’s had a lot of girlfriends, but I don’t think he ever got this serious with anybody. He didn’t with me. If he did with you, and then broke up with you, it sounds like he’s getting worse.”
“His girlfriend died?” I echoed.
“He didn’t tell you that?”
I swallowed. “He told me he had a friend who died in a drunk- driving accident.”
Charlotte watched me carefully now as she realized I knew way less about this than she’d thought. “The police said it was an accident.”
I pulled my hand away from my face right before I rubbed under my eye. “Is that why he went to counseling?”
“Grief counseling, yeah,” Charlotte said. “I wish they hadn’t kicked him out. All he did was ask a girl in the group on a date, and her dad had a fit and complained about Sam, which was exactly what he didn’t need right then. If he’d stayed in the group, I think he’d be a lot better now. Ever since then, I don’t think he’s meaning to be a playboy or to be cruel. It’s just that girls are attracted to him and feel sorry for him and want to save him. He likes them, too. He likes everybody. He wants to feel that emotion. But then, when he starts to feel too much for a girl, he’s scared she feels the same way about him. And he doesn’t want anybody to feel that strongly about him again, because of Emily. He tells me he doesn’t believe she killed herself over him, and he doesn’t feel guilty, but I think that’s just what he’s telling himself so he can survive.”
She met my gaze. “I’m really sorry, Bailey. I am honestly shocked that you got the line from him, too. I thought you were different.”
“I knew I wasn’t.” I pushed off from the wall, snagged my purse from the top of my fiddle case, and shoved my way toward the door inside. I probably should have thanked Charlotte for all the information, but I wasn’t in a grateful mood.
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 assholes 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.”
He looked sharply at me.
“At first it seems like you feel more than other people,” I said. “But I’ve finally figured out Charlotte’s right. You feel less. You’re numb. And you’re trying to get some of that emotion back, even if it hurts. Even if it hurts other people. I really thought you and I had a connection. I know I didn’t always show it. I tried not to. But when you broke up with me, you broke my heart. And I swear you made it worse on purpose. You wanted to make it the ultimate breakup by consummating our love first.”
“The way you acted, I honestly didn’t think you cared,” Sam said. “Not like I did.”
“I see.” I nodded. “You’re telling me I’m an emotionless bitch.”
“Not a bitch,” he said levelly, ever the gentleman.
“Really,” I said. “Here’s how much I care about you, Sam.” I opened my purse and pulled out my illustrated notebook of songs. I flipped through the pages and ripped out four together. “Here’s a song about you screwing me and then breaking up with me, thus trapping me forever in a f**king country song. This is how I felt about that last night.” I shoved the pages at his chest.
He opened the pages in his hands, but I didn’t watch him read them. I was already searching backward through the notebook for another choice song. “Here’s how I felt when I first met you, since that obviously wasn’t clear. Oh, wait.” I flipped in the other direction. “Would you rather know how I felt when we couldn’t get along, but I knew we’d be onstage together the next night anyway? Or how I felt when you undressed me in your truck?”
“Bailey,” he said sternly, like I was a little girl making a scene. “We have a gig.”
“I beg your pardon,” I exclaimed. “A gig! There’s nothing more important.” I yanked the torn pages from him, folded them inside the notebook, and shoved the whole thing back into his chest. “Here are my songs, my emotions about you, that I will never have again. Take them and climb to the top with them. I have no use for them or for you.”
I spun on my boot heel and pushed through the crowd and the stuffy air to the rooftop. As I emerged under the stars and the twinkling lights strung along the walls, I saw Charlotte and Ace at the guardrail where Charlotte and I had talked. She was on her tiptoes, about to kiss him. The hair on my arms stood up.
“Oh, don’t do it,” I said to myself, but I meant it for her. Whatever was standing between them, they hadn’t worked it out, and she was about to ruin everything.
He stayed stock-still for a moment. Then he slipped one hand behind her head and kissed her deeply. Just as suddenly, he stepped away from her. He was angry at her, pointing his finger in her face, pointing out at the crowd. I saw him mouth, “Sam,” and Charlotte burst into tears.
“That’s right,” I told her, though she still couldn’t hear me and it was none of my business, anyway. “You should never start something when you haven’t finished the last thing. People feel used that way.”
“What?” Sam demanded. He’d caught up with me.
“Absolutely nothing,” I said, grasping the hand that Ace offered me from the stage. Charlotte still stood against the guardrail, sobbing.
“Well, this will be a fun set.” As I grabbed my fiddle and tuned up, I noticed that the manicure girls stood near the door, talking with Aidan Rogers. He gazed up at me and opened his mouth in utter amazement. Immediately he pulled out his phone and thumbed the keyboard.