Dirty Little Secret (7 page)

I stopped automatically, then wished I hadn’t. Now I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard him. He was making everything more difficult. The more I interacted with him, the harder I was going to fall, and the worse the rest of my summer without him or anybody else was going to be.

The damage was done, though. I turned to face him as he jogged the few steps between us, holding his guitar by the neck. “I’ve been waiting for you. I almost didn’t recognize you.” He stared at me, taking in my eyes, then my hair, but not with the appraising expression girls wore when they commented on my looks. A small smile played on his lips like he appreciated the way I was done up but also—a little disturbingly—found it amusing.

To break the silence, I finally said, “I don’t wear the June Carter Cash wig home. Or the Dolly Parton Does Vegas outfit on my Dolly Parton days.”

His brows shot up. “You have Dolly Parton days?”

“And Willie Nelson days, and that’s just the first week.” I confided, “Mr. Nelson was a bit fried.”

“I’m sorry.” Sam sounded genuinely sympathetic.

“The outfit was okay, though, in comparison. How did you get away with wearing your own jeans and shoes while Ms. Lottie sewed me into a circle skirt? Only your hair got caught in the time machine.”

“Yeah.” He laughed, putting one hand through his damp waves. “I’ve been doing this awhile. I know what Ms. Lottie will put up with and what she won’t. The real question is, how did
you
snag so many days a week of work so soon after you started?” He lowered his guitar to rest on the toe of his shoe and spun it as he said, trying to sound casual, “Your granddad must have a lot of sway.”

“Somebody at the casting company owed him a favor,” I acknowledged. “But he doesn’t have any real clout in Nashville. If he did, everybody in my family would have had a recording contract years ago.” I shifted my fiddle case to my other hand and gazed impatiently at the parking lot like I had something to do tonight besides watch television with a seventy-year-old man and hate myself. “Why were you waiting for me?”

“Oh.” He swallowed. “I just wanted to apologize for all the drama between my dad and me.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I did worry about it, and I wanted to know more, but I waved the drama away with one hand. “I was playing at the very same place in the food court on Tuesday when I got into it myself with Elvis.”

“Oh, man, they stuck you with Elvis, too? Who
didn’t
they give you to? Was he a prick to you?”

“You could say that.” I decided not to inform Sam about my night of intense anxiety or the fact that in my mind, Elvis had caused me to become a homeless prostitute. “Anyway, maybe there’s
something about standing between Baskin-Robbins and McDonald’s that drives us all batty and makes us turn on each other. In high school I knew groups like this were playing around town. I might have passed Loretta Lynn once or twice on my way to shop for shoes, but I never pictured myself actually having this job. And I sure never knew the concert in the food court turns into a reality show. They should advertise it. People would come to the mall just for that.”

“We musicians are impossible,” he said in a dead-on imitation of Ms. Lottie.

I almost laughed. Almost. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a short noise. I did want him to know how funny I thought he was, so I said dryly, “You sound just like her.”

“Ms. Lottie is full of wisdom,” he said. “She used to do makeup and costumes for the Grand Ole Opry, and once upon a time she was married to a record company executive.”

“I guess she doesn’t have the sway to get anybody a contract, either,” I said. “Everybody in this town knows somebody who was Somebody with a capital
S
at some point.” When he didn’t say anything, I finished with a zinger that reflected what I’d suspected when he mentioned my granddad. “If she had any clout, you would have used her by now.”

He lifted his chin and turned his head, as if he couldn’t see me clearly, and looking at me with the other eye might help. “Why does that bother you?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you do anything to get a recording contract?”

“No,” I said too loudly. My voice echoed against the flat, blank concrete walls of the mall. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t use somebody.”

His dark eyes widened in surprise—which surprised me in turn. Though I’d walked around the mall with him for hours, I hadn’t
had the chance to watch him much. He’d stood on the other side of his father most of the time. Only now was I noticing how expressive his eyes were, and how tall he was, and how young he seemed all of a sudden, like he hadn’t been tall for long and he wasn’t yet used to his own height.

But what he said next surprised me more than anything else he’d said or done. “I am so disappointed you feel that way, because I wanted to use you.”

He uttered this with such confidence that I thought his innuendo was intentional. And despite the fact that I did not—
did not
—want to be used, chill bumps popped up on my arms in the hot sun.

His eyes grew even wider. “That’s not what
I meant.” He closed his eyes and cringed. “God, what else can I say to embarrass the fuck out of myself?”

He’d teased me that afternoon, but this time I could tell his discomfort was sincere. And it was adorable. I wanted to hug him and help him out of it.

I couldn’t, though. I stood paralyzed in front of him, letting him flail as if I enjoyed watching it.

With a final tortured look at me, he burst out, “When I first met you, I wasn’t sure how old you were. It’s hard to tell whether somebody is thirteen or thirty without seeing what they’re wearing.”

Perplexed, I asked, “How old am I?”

“Eighteen, like me. Please, God, say you’re eighteen like me.”

He sounded so desperate that I repeated automatically, “I’m eighteen like you.”

“And I’m so glad,” he rushed on, “because I didn’t figure a thirty-year-old woman would be interested in my band.” He looked around the empty loading dock and over both shoulders at the parking lot like somebody might be crouching behind the cars, listening in. “I couldn’t say anything when my dad was around. I mean . . .” He rolled his eyes at his own words, just as he’d done several times that day. I got the impression that his mouth moved faster than his brain. He seemed to blurt out a lot of things before his brain caught up. “My dad knows about my band. It’s not a secret. But he doesn’t want me to pursue music as a career because
he
wasn’t successful and therefore there’s no way
I
could be successful either, get it? My only musical activity that gets his approval is backing up his loser impersonation job.”

“Got it.” I didn’t, exactly, but I wanted to hear the rest.

He talked fast. “So I have this parentally acknowledged and yet discouraged band that plays country and rockabilly. Some Cash, actually. Alan Jackson. Zac Brown.”

“Michael Jackson?” I ventured.

He grinned and opened his hands, forgetting he was balancing his guitar on his foot. He snatched it up before it touched the concrete ramp. “See,” he said, “I
knew
you would get it.”

I flushed with pleasure, basking in the glow of his approval.

“Yes,” he went on, “the Johnny Cash songs do have a tendency to morph into Michael Jackson’s funky deep cuts, and the Zac Brown will sometimes give way to Prince. There might be some Chaka Khan thrown in. . . .” He slowed, less sure of himself as he saw my skeptical expression. “And some Justin Bieber for irony, and maybe a little Ke$ha. Look.”

He stepped closer and stooped so that he looked straight into my eyes. I got the feeling he’d done this before. Maybe he’d never asked a punky fiddle player to come see his band, but he’d persuaded plenty of girls to follow along with his outlandish schemes. In his words I could hear the echo of every other time he’d done this to every other girl since he was a blond kid.

“A good song is a good song,” he said. “You know that. The most important thing is the unrelenting beat. We’re a dance band, a
crazy party band, emo with a side of redneck. So far people seem to like us, but we’ve only played our friends’ parties and a street festival and my mom’s cousin’s retirement party, and then it’s a long story but there are a lot of immigrants from Laos living south of town and we were fortunate enough to get on the Lao wedding circuit. But tonight we have a
gig
.” Remembering to secure his guitar this time, he opened only two fingers of that hand and all the fingers of his other hand as he said
gig
.

“A
gig,
” I repeated, imitating him by opening my own hand, not the one holding my fiddle case.

“Yes,” he exclaimed, delighted that I was mocking him, “and it’s at a
bar
!”

“A
bar
!” I echoed, trying hard not to laugh at the ecstatic expression on his face. He was excited about this gig. He wanted me to come see him play. And I couldn’t, because I was grounded—at least, as grounded as a legal adult could be. “Good luck!” I stepped past him.

“Wait, what? No.” He jogged backward until he was in front of me again. When I didn’t stop moving, he kept walking backward into the road. “This bar where we’re playing may not be on Broadway,” he said, “but it’s close, in the District. I want to take the band to the next level. We’re getting there, but slower than I want to go. We’re not getting the attention we deserve. There are too many bands around town for anybody to give us our big chance. You know what we need?” He tripped backward over a curb around a tree.

“What?” I asked at the same time I instinctively caught his elbow to keep him from falling. Too late I realized he weighed a lot more than I did.

Using his guitar as leverage, he managed to balance himself again and keep me from falling in turn. We both held our instruments
out to one side and gripped each other’s free elbows. A shock ran through me—the pain of his strong fingers wrapping around my arm, and the tingle of awareness that went with it.

If he felt the tingle, too, he was oblivious to it. He released my elbow, then patted my arm as if to make sure he hadn’t hurt me, that’s all. “We need a fiddle player! I knew it as soon as I heard you play.”

It had seemed to me yesterday that my trials with these bands were a test to prove I wasn’t worthy—as if I didn’t know this already. Now, here was the final task. I was being given the chance to do the one thing I wanted most in the world: play. The chance was presented to me by a guy so gorgeous, my skin turned to fire when he touched me. And joining a band was the thing I was most forbidden to do, the thing that would ruin my future.

Sam was still talking. “I thought so when you were dressed like 1956. But now that I’ve seen you for real . . .”

I walked past him, over the curb and around the tree to the parking lot on the other side, hoping he wouldn’t see how my face had fallen. He
hadn’t
seen me for real. He never would. That me was gone. Who was the real me anymore, anyway? Had I ever existed?

All of which was unbearably self-centered. I couldn’t seem to stop focusing on myself these days, and frankly I made myself sick. “What are you saying I look like?” I shot back at him over my shoulder. It came out more bitter than I intended or he deserved.

“Like you belong with us. Some of the bars on Broadway are really friendly to new bands. At least, it seems that way at first. They have a reputation for hosting the hottest new acts in Nashville, and record company execs wander in and discover bands that way. These bars will let anybody upload an audition video. But I did that last month. They said our sound was there but we needed something extra to bring people in. You are that extra.”

I turned to face him, leaning against my car and letting the sun-heated metal warm my back through my shirt. The car was a small secondhand Honda that I should have been grateful my parents had bought me. It didn’t compare with the red Porsche Julie had earned, which was sitting in the garage at my parents’ house, hardly ever driven, waiting for her to come home.

Out with it. It was a simple admission, but every word felt like a knife in my mouth as I said, “I can’t join a band right now.”

Stopping a few paces across the asphalt from me, he watched me for a moment and narrowed his eyes, as if he could read in my expression how loaded that statement was. How badly I wanted to join his band and play funky Michael Jackson covers on my fiddle, and how important it was to my future that I walk away.

Nodding, he said carefully, “Sure, you don’t want to commit when you haven’t played with us yet. Come try us out tonight, just this once.”

I couldn’t. But despite myself, I pictured it for a moment: a night out with this adorable guy, who had reined in his enthusiasm to avoid scaring me off, but whose intense, dark eyes still gave away how desperate he was for this. I winced as I repeated, “I can’t.”

“You can use our amp,” he said. “Do you have an electric pickup? I can scrounge you up one if you don’t.”

“I have one.” The equipment to amplify my fiddle had been coiled in my case for the past year, waiting for the son of a Johnny Cash impersonator to sweep me off my feet.

“Then what’s the prob? Please, Bailey.” He moved forward and put his hand on mine—this time on the hand holding my fiddle case. “I really want to play with you again.”

If he heard his own double entendre, implying that he might play with me in more ways than one, he didn’t acknowledge it. His
hand rested lightly on mine, putting no pressure on me, holding back the pressure to come.

I felt myself relax, reluctantly, under his touch. I knew this gig was going to get me in trouble, and I was fully aware of the exact moment I started rationalizing that maybe it wouldn’t. My parents didn’t want me to play in public, yet my granddad had gotten me the mall job. He would let me play with Sam, too, just for fun, just this once.

Now that I’d decided to take this step, suddenly I realized I might not be able to after all. I let out a frustrated sigh. “What time is the gig? I have to make a phone call around ten.”

I figured he would want to know more about the phone call. He would declare that he wasn’t going to plan his gig around a phone call, and if that’s the way I wanted it, he could find another Goth fiddler.