Dirty Little Secret

by Jennifer Echols

  “Apologize,” Ace repeated calmly but firmly.

  Charlotte turned to look at Ace. Their eyes locked for a moment. Something passed between them.

  She muttered, “Sorry,” but she wasn’t looking at me as she said it. She was rolling her eyes.

  Still glaring at Charlotte, Sam sighed a huge sigh, shoulders sagging so low against the back of the booth that I realized how tight and tense he’d been before. To me he said, “I told you from the beginning that I wanted this audition video. In case the bar calls me, we need to figure out when we’re all available to play from now on.”

  “There’s no ‘from now on,’ ” I said instantly, holding my ground. “I told you, I’m not in your band.”

  “Are you quitting?” he challenged me.

  As his dark eyes drilled into me, my adrenaline spiked, and for once it wasn’t because of the yearning that took hold of me when he offered me a glance. It was a fight-or-flight reaction to a threat: the threat of never being able to play with the band again. I couldn’t keep on playing with them, because my parents would find out eventually. I couldn’t stop playing with them, because my heart would shrivel up and die. There was no solution to this problem. The only tool I had was putting off the decision.

  “I can’t quit the band,” I said. “I’m not a member.”

  Charlotte raised her hand. “I don’t like this game.” She still wasn’t looking at me. This time she wasn’t looking at Ace or Sam, either. She stared above Ace’s head at the far wall. But in the stubborn set of her jaw and the hard look in her strange blue-green eyes, I saw what I was doing to her. I wanted desperately to play with the band. So did she. She’d enjoyed the comfort of stability with the band before I showed up. I had thrown the band into a tizzy and ruined everything for her.

  And I realized she was right. While I was in this limbo, so were they.

  Echoing Sam, I sighed and relaxed my shoulders against the back of the booth, directing my gaze above his head at the Hatch Show Print poster of Johnny Cash so iconic that every business in town displayed a copy of it. “I can’t tell you when I can play from now on,” I said, “but I can tell you for . . .” I held up my hands while I thought about how long I might safely play with them without ruining my future. I was so deep in limbo that I couldn’t even answer my own question. If they’d asked me two days ago, I would have said I couldn’t play with them at all. The deeper I fell in love with the band’s gigs, the longer the safe time stretched.

  “A week?” Sam suggested.

  I shook my head no.

  “Five days?” Ace asked, exasperated. His words moved me more than anything Sam had said. Sam lived life in a constant state of near-exasperation, whereas Ace rarely showed any emotion at all. If even he was exasperated with me, I deserved it.

  I owed him better. I owed them all better.

  “Four days,” I negotiated. Julie and my parents would be coming back to town tomorrow, but I would still be staying with my granddad so he could keep tabs on me, theoretically. They would be busy with concerts and parties for Julie’s single release and the CMA Festival. That meant my parents would be even angrier if they found out I’d disobeyed a direct order right under their noses, when Julie’s record company was so concerned about her image and theirs.

  It also meant my parents would be totally preoccupied with Julie, my granddad would likely go with them to her concerts, and nobody would be watching me. If they cared so much about what I was doing, they ought to be monitoring me more closely. This would serve them right.

  But there was one night I wasn’t sure about. “Maybe not Tuesday.” That was the day Julie’s single was scheduled to hit stores. It was also the night of her Grand Ole Opry debut. The venue wasn’t the biggest in Nashville. It certainly wouldn’t get her as much exposure as her CMA Festival concerts on Thursday afternoon and Friday night. But it was the stage every country musician dreamed about playing on, and Julie had scored it for her single debut day. No matter how big her career got and where her tour took her, she would always remember this concert.

  And I was still holding out hope that my family would invite me.

  “Today’s Sunday,” Sam reminded me. “You can’t say, ‘Maybe not Tuesday.’ Either you’re in or you’re out.”

  “Okay. Not Tuesday.” Clearly Sam wasn’t going to let me back out of a gig once I told him I was in. And I couldn’t miss Julie’s debut if I actually got invited. I could add that to my long list of items I would never forgive myself for.

  Sam pushed his plate of fries away and turned his paper menu over. He looked around the table and then asked, “Anybody got a pen?”

  I reached for my purse to pull out a pencil—carefully, without revealing my music notebook inside. Before I could open the flap, Charlotte produced a black permanent marker. As she handed it to him, I realized the marker must be how she was achieving the strange see-through effect of her scribbled black nail polish. I decided then that if we ever reached the point that she no longer pissed me off every time I looked at her, I would take her for a proper manicure.

  Sam drew a calendar on the menu. “Not Tuesday,” he muttered in grudging agreement. “But we already have something for Monday.” He scribbled the gig on the calendar, then looked up at me. “It’ll be fun. It’s a surprise birthday party, a pool party! It’s in Chattanooga. Though—Uh-oh.”

  “What?” Ace asked.

  Sam’s eyes never left me. “Are you working at the mall tomorrow? Could you get off a little early? Or if you’re with Elvis, just walk out on him.”

  “I work there Tuesday through Saturday,” I assured him. “Not tomorrow.”

  Slamming down Charlotte’s marker, Sam put one hand on the edge of the table and one over his heart like he’d just averted a stress attack. Charlotte patted his shoulder in a way that made me want to pinch her.

  He picked up the marker and tapped it on the calendar. “We won’t get paid as much for the party as we do when we work for tips. And obviously, playing in Chattanooga won’t do us any good when we’re trying to make a name for ourselves in Nashville. If it helps us pick up more Chattanooga gigs, though, we could use those to fill holes in our schedule.”

  I stared at him, waiting for him to hear himself. He was doing it again, assuming I would play with the band permanently.

  “What?” he asked when he looked up and saw my expression. Then he willfully misunderstood what it meant: “Yeah, you’re right. If we’re trying to fill holes in the schedule, Memphis would be better than Chattanooga, because there are so many record company connections over there.” He looked back down at his calendar and stroked a few more words with Charlotte’s marker. “I’m working on something here in town for Wednesday. And now we have the video. With any luck we’ll be playing on Broadway by Thursday.” It was hard to be skeptical when he beamed at all of us like this Broadway gig was a done deal. “Things are getting serious. It would be nice if we finally named the band something other than the Sam Hardiman Ego Trip.” He winked at me. “How about Death Wish?”

  “No way,” Ace said. “Sounds like a heavy metal group.”

  Sam shrugged. “Redneck Death Wish, for clarity.” As it rolled off his tongue, he grinned even bigger. “I like it!”

  “No!” squealed Charlotte, wrinkling her nose.

  He pointed at her. “We’ll change it if you come up with something better.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll give you a year.”

  Ace put up his hand to high-five Sam diagonally across the table. Charlotte rolled her eyes again, which made me feel a little less like her eye roll while apologizing to me had been an attack. The ice was broken then, and our conversation eased into how our performances had gone the last two nights, and what we could improve for our next three gigs. It was the first time we’d ever talked together as a band. Though the fight-or-flight feeling returned and the hair stood up on my arms, it wasn’t as intense as it had been before. I made up my mind to enjoy the band while I had it, because I might
never get it again.

  At the same time, I wondered what effect my decision to join the band temporarily would have on my relationship, such as it was, with Sam. I’d told him we shouldn’t date if we were in a band together. He’d said we could do anything we wanted because I’d insisted we weren’t in a band together. And now that we were, at least for the next four days, the panicky feeling turned a sinister corner.

  I picked up Charlotte’s marker from Sam’s menu-turned-calendar and reached across the table for Sam’s shoulder. He was deep in conversation with Ace about changing the ending of one of our songs, but he offered his shoulder to me.

  Using the marker, I drew a heart on his sleeve. I started with the heart itself, then surrounded it with dots and swirls like a henna tattoo, the kind of doodle I drew to decorate the songs in my music notebook that nobody would ever hear.

  Sam still nodded at Ace. But as I finished the heart and backed away across the table, he held out the edge of his sleeve with two fingers so he could see it better. His dark eyes locked on me. My panicky feeling morphed into something like the caramel sundae Charlotte had ordered, sweet and irresistible.

  Charlotte stayed in the conversation about music, too, but she managed to give me a pointed look up and down, telling me telepathically that she might have apologized for her tease comment, but she wasn’t really sorry. She reached in front of me on the table and retrieved her marker.

  Around midnight we all walked through the warm, heavy night to the lot where Sam’s truck and my car were parked. Two abreast, I took the lead with Sam on the sidewalk, but there was no opening for us to return to the personal conversation we’d had while we were alone. The four of us were brainstorming for songs we could add to our playlist. What I really wanted was not just to talk with Sam but to make out with him like I had the night before, twenty-six girlfriends be damned. I would worry about them later.

  But as we reached the lot and leaned against Sam’s truck, chatting, I came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight. He’d proven to me by now that he wouldn’t risk angering Charlotte and tearing the band apart by publicly displaying his affection for me. Resigned, I stopped trying to make smoldering eye contact with him and even asked Ace, more than Charlotte, “Do y’all want a ride back to the van?” I didn’t want to give them a ride—awkward—but I figured I’d better, since Sam’s truck would be crowded with the three of them.

  “Oh, we’ll just ride with Sam,” Charlotte piped up breezily. Obviously she looked forward to being crowded between Ace and Sam.

  “See you tomorrow, Bailey,” Ace said. He pushed Charlotte in front of him as they rounded Sam’s truck to the passenger side and got in. I almost thought he was giving me time alone with Sam on purpose—or giving Sam time alone with me.

  Sam squared himself in front of me. Looked down at me. Licked his lips. Turned to look over his shoulder at the cab of his truck, presumably to see whether Charlotte was watching us through the back window. I couldn’t tell with the streetlights reflecting on the glass, and honestly I wasn’t interested. Sam wasn’t going to try anything while Charlotte was anywhere around.

  The interesting thing was watching him struggle through it. The diffused lights from overhead softened his features and darkened the stubble on his face, but I clearly saw two embarrassed points of red flush his cheeks as he blinked slowly at me and thought about last night.

  “We usually meet at Ace’s dad’s car lot and all drive together when we have a field trip out of town,” he told me. “I could pick you up and take you there tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Sounds good,” I said brightly, as if a gig was all I expected from him.

  He lowered his brows at me and hesitated, unsure whether I was toying with him. I wasn’t going to clarify. After feeling like I was stumbling around under his thumb all afternoon, I enjoyed finally taking the lead in this dance. My only response was to raise my eyebrows like I wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, though electricity raced just underneath my skin because he was standing a few inches away.

  “See you then,” he said suddenly. Walking to his truck, he looked up at the sky, searching for strength. With his hand on the driver’s door, he turned back to me. “You leave first, so I know you’re safe, considering your death wish and all.”

  “Ha.” I got into my car obediently, though, and drove off. Stopping at the intersection, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that both Charlotte and Ace turned toward Sam, probably ribbing him about me, Girlfriend Twenty-seven. Sam stared straight ahead, watching my taillights until I turned the corner.

  10

  I climbed the steps of my parents’ house, toward my room, but Sam stopped me with an arm encircling my waist. “Bailey,” he breathed, gently flattening me against the wall. Above us, a framed photo of Julie and me in our bluegrass festival outfits creaked on its nail.

  In reality, I was descending the steps inside my granddad’s house. After a long morning of sanding guitars and sweeping the floor, my repeated fantasies about what Sam didn’t do to me in my parents’ house the previous night had become a lot more interesting than my real life. I wondered whether the bride from our gig was doing something similar, fantasizing about Sam while she made love to her David or wandered around her house or drove through her lunchtime commute, titillated in her compact car.

  “I can’t,” I whispered, bracing one hand against Sam’s chest to back him away. The hard pressure of his hands on my upper arms and his groin against mine never changed. He said in my ear, “I know you’re holding back, Bailey. There’s something you don’t want me to know. Whatever it is, I promise it won’t matter. I want you, and I know you want me, too. Let go and feel, just this once.”

  I let out a sigh agonized enough that my granddad heard me in the kitchen and asked me what was wrong as I crossed the showroom to the front door. “Nothing,” I called back. “See you later.”

  “Here?” I asked, blocking Sam’s hand with mine just before he unbuttoned my shorts.

  Sam glanced down the carpeted stairs, then up. “You don’t like risk?” he asked coyly.

  “I—”

  “That’s okay. I want you to feel comfortable. Come on.” He took my hand and led me up the stairs, away from the last portrait of Julie and me together at a festival. He put his hand on my bedroom doorknob and turned it. And in real life, I pulled open the front door—

  —and jumped ten feet in the air, registering only a split second later what had startled me so badly. Sam was standing there with his eyes wide and his hands out to save me.

  “Holy fuck!” I yelled at him.

  He put his fists on his hips and eyed me skeptically. “Yeah, I get that a lot from the ladies.”

  “What’s the matter?” my granddad hollered, concerned, but not concerned enough to turn off the polisher.

  “It’s just Sam,” I yelled back.

  “In my day, the young people didn’t greet each other that way,” my granddad called. Sam had a mysterious effect on him. He’d never attempted even this lame humor before.

  “Bye,” I yelled. Stepping out onto the front porch and pulling the door closed behind me, I explained to Sam, “You startled me. I was thinking about you.”

  He grinned. “I was thinking about you, too. I thought we could hang out before we need to leave for the gig.”

  “I can’t,” I told him, hoping he heard the sincere regret in my voice. “I was just leaving for a doctor’s appointment.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Why not?” His eyes were suddenly two dark points, his mouth drawn into a small, worried circle. “What’s wrong?”

  Surprised by his reaction, I put my hand over his heart to reassure him. It raced under my fingertips. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said, self-consciously removing my hand again.

  “Then why are you going?” he demanded.

  “It’s my annual exam.”

  “Then why can’t
I go?”

  I’d just had a similar mortifying conversation with my granddad at breakfast. He hadn’t wanted to go, but he’d demanded to know exactly where I was going and why. Exasperated, I enunciated every syllable so Sam would be embarrassed into backing off. “It’s with the gy-ne-col-o-gist.”

  His face didn’t change. He asked suspiciously, “If it’s your annual exam, what happened a year ago that made you go in the first place? Wasn’t that right when you got mad at your parents and went wild?”

  I folded my arms. “Yeah, but not like you’re implying. You’re starting to sound like Elvis at the mall.”

  I’d intended that comment to shake Sam out of this strange worry and into anger. Anything was better than this intense stare he was giving me, like he knew something terrible had happened and I was keeping it from him.

  “I’m a virgin,” I blurted.

  His shoulders sagged then, maybe with relief, maybe with defeat.

  “Right,” I said. “My mother wouldn’t believe that, either. She’s the one who suggested I get on the pill. She was worried I would embarrass the family further and she wouldn’t be around to stop me. She made sure I took precautions.”

  Sam pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his shorts, wiped his palms, blotted his forehead, and stuffed the cloth back in his pocket before he told me, “I’m a virgin, too.”

  “You’re a virgin? What about the twenty-six girlfriends?”

  His dark eyes widened at me again, then slid toward the door. I felt my face flush, expecting my granddad to burst onto the porch to inform us that young people did not mention the V-word in his day.

  After several tense moments with no telltale footsteps across the creaking wooden floor inside, Sam cleared his throat and said quietly, “Yes, I’m a virgin, despite the twenty-six girlfriends. It takes more than two weeks for me to make my move.”

  “Ha.” My short syllable carried a huge amount of relief. I’d told myself I didn’t care how serious he’d gotten with how many girls, but obviously I did.