Dirty Little Secret

by Jennifer Echols

  No such luck. Even during CMA week, the Grand Ole Opry wasn’t selling out on a Tuesday, when the headlining acts were middling stars and Julie was unknown.

  While I was talking to the cashier, choosing seats, someone slipped my billfold out from under my elbow on the counter. I turned in alarm. When I saw it was just Sam, I continued my conversation until I came away from the window with tickets.

  Sam held my billfold open, staring grimly at my driver’s license. At my real name.

  He looked up at me, and the accusation in his eyes hurt.

  He already knew I’d lied about my name. But I suppose seeing it on my license hit it home to him, like seeing Julie onstage tonight was going to hit it home to me that country music was her life, not mine.

  Our seats were high in the large, steep auditorium. To know what was going on, we relied on one of the huge screens that focused on the star onstage. I could tell by the way Sam expressed no surprise at the show that he’d been here as often as I had over the years. The Grand Ole Opry was a theater production but also a live radio show that had been ongoing and pretty much unchanged since the twenties: some old-fashioned commercials for potato chips and ice cream, an elderly man in a sequined cowboy getup telling jokes about his sex life, a musical act—often bluegrass rather than country—that had been an Opry staple for decades but never made it big, and finally a newbie the record companies were trying to promote, or a genuine star. Repeat four times for a two-hour show. Julie was the newbie for act three.

  I thought the announcer would never stop reciting his commercial for hand salve—and then, before I was ready, Julie was walking onstage amid polite applause, wearing a fixed grin, her face turned purposefully toward the audience.

  The thing that struck me about her was how beautiful she looked on the jumbo screen. With her face blown up the size of a Chevy, every imperfection in her face should have been noticeable, but she didn’t have any. Her skin was flawless, her lipstick glossy, her brilliant blue eyes outlined in smoky shadow, her blond curls shining in the spotlights. She might have been nervous, she might have sounded off, but the camera loved her, and she looked like a star.

  But underneath the gorgeous hair and perfect makeup, I could tell she was terrified. Her easy smile when we used to play together, even onstage, had morphed into a tight one. Her hands moved robotically across the guitar strings. Normally she was good at using the whole stage so the audience didn’t get bored watching her. This time she stayed rooted to the lighter circle in the very center of the wooden floor, hauled here from the Grand Ole Opry’s original home, the Ryman Auditorium, and saved again after this new theater’s flood. She stood on it like it was her life raft in the vast sea of the empty, brightly lit stage, her backup musicians pushed to the edges and too far away to save her.

  She played two songs, both insipid, the upbeat first one better than the slower follow-up. They were cute and they would get radio airplay, but the tunes weren’t catchy. The conceits in the lyrics I’d heard a hundred times. The upbeat one was about going away from home and missing her dog (first verse), her friends (second verse), and her family (third verse). The other was about her true love for her boyfriend (first verse), her parents (second verse), and God (third verse). Nobody would remember them in a year. She would be exactly as successful this week as the record company’s marketing efforts made her, coupled with whatever notoriety she could gain from being only sixteen. These songs wouldn’t help her.

  The second song ended with a big buildup. Though I hadn’t heard it before, I could tell she was supposed to hit a money note. She took it down a fifth, like a spooked figure skater at the Olympics attempting a double axel rather than a triple. As the tune wrapped up, my self-absorbed thoughts assaulted me. I’d never wanted Julie to fail. But I did feel a bit self-righteous. If my family hadn’t shut me out, I might have prevented this fiasco by pointing out how crappy the songs were, or just by standing in the wings, supporting her, when she went onstage.

  And I was bitter. Bitterness and I were old friends by now, but at the moment bitterness was trying to go down my bra in public. I had spent the last year so depressed that Julie got this opportunity when I didn’t, yet this was the upshot of it? It was an opportunity squandered, a year of bitterness over nothing at all.

  Sam and I sat through the entire show without getting up, hardly moving. Neither of us laughed at the jokes. We were movie critics, sports writers, record company scouts, leaching all the joy out of watching a performance. And after the heat between us over the past few days, we each stayed in our own cold personal space, never touching.

  Finally the show was over. The lights turned up. The audience en masse edged along the narrow rows and up the stairs to the exits. Only Sam and I stayed in the uncomfortable bench seats built to imitate the church pews in the Ryman, staring at the blank screen where Julie’s pretty face had been.

  “What’d you think?” I asked.

  He sighed. “I’m eaten up inside with jealousy. I don’t like myself very much right now.”

  I felt him looking at me. I met his gaze. In his eyes I saw that he understood what I’d been going through for a year. Not that this helped us now.

  “You think you could have done better than her,” I guessed.

  “She was nervous,” he said diplomatically. “We want to think we wouldn’t be scared shitless if we ever got this opportunity, but we wouldn’t know for sure until we got here.”

  I nodded. “You think her songs were duds.” I thought her songs were duds. Any second the music notebook in my purse would begin to glow, and we would see the light escaping around the edges of my purse’s leather flap.

  “I can’t write songs,” he said, “so I’m in no position to judge.”

  I wasn’t sure why I’d expected Sam to be honest with me, now that he and I had no plans for the future. But I was annoyed that he would flake out on me for the sake of politeness after days of brutal honesty. I baited him, “You think if you got a contract, you would make damn sure your songs were better than that.”

  “Her songs are . . .” He paused and eyed me, searching his mind for a truthful adjective that wouldn’t offend me. “Cute. They have pop crossover potential.”

  “But not blockbuster potential,” I mused.

  He said nothing, letting his silence pass for inoffensive agreement.

  “What she lacks in catchy songs, she might make up for in pure bubbly personality,” I thought out loud.

  “If she works on her stage presence.” With a huff of impatience, Sam turned to me. “I’ll be honest with you, Bailey. I don’t know if I’m supposed to try to make you feel better about her chances, or worse.”

  “That’s fair,” I said. “I don’t know, either.” I squinted at the faraway stage, into the wings where Julie had disappeared half an hour earlier. “Her handlers aren’t going to like this.”

  “Oh, you’ve met her handlers?” Sam asked in surprise.

  “Yeah.” I added bitterly, “And before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell her handlers about you, or the band, either.”

  He chose to ignore that remark. “Are they good, like Carrie Underwood’s handlers, or do you get the feeling she’s going to be like one of the also-rans on the singing contest TV shows?”

  Since he was keeping the conversation mature and unemotional, I tried to do the same. “I think they’re okay in terms of the advice they give her, but they don’t actually talk to her. They talk to my parents.” In turn, I would bet money that my mother was giving Julie the lecture of her life right now. Don’t you want this? Didn’t your daddy and I give up our jobs and go on tour with you because you wanted this? You need to start acting like it. On a normal night, Julie would call me in tears at ten o’clock, wishing for her old life back. I would talk her down, reminding her that this was what we’d both always wanted.

  Suddenly I realized I was hanging on to the edge of the bench with a death grip, and my fingertips had gone numb. Taking a deep breath and
making a conscious effort to relax, I saw that Sam and I were nearly alone in the auditorium. Only a few ushers laughed in the far corner, wondering how long they should give us before they kicked us out.

  I turned to Sam. “So, I wanted to come clean with you and show you everything I know about my sister. Her first single is out today. She has enormous record company backing. She may or may not drop the ball. It’s too early to tell, I guess. And I am persona non grata. I bought these tickets myself.”

  “Regardless, you could still use your connections to get us an audition with the record company if you swallowed your pride and asked.”

  Oh, so he wasn’t going to play nice after all. Hurt and shocked and insulted, I told him, “I knew it was going to be like this from the moment I met you. I wanted to show you this, and I was hoping we could save whatever we had. But the bottom line is, you don’t want to be with me now, and I don’t want to be with you.”

  “I want desperately to be with you,” he said quietly. “I just know that I would be angry with you every second of my life, and it wouldn’t work.”

  I met his dark, worried gaze. “You wear your heart on your sleeve.” I reached out and touched the heart I’d drawn on the soft cotton of his T-shirt. My finger slipped under the material and stroked his warm skin, then pressed his hard biceps more firmly. His arm didn’t give.

  The feeling started small, tingles of awareness around my fingertips where they touched him. The feeling raced up my arm and across my chest. I knew my face was flaming, and I tried to figure out why. We’d kissed, after all. He’d put his hands pretty much everywhere there was to put them. There was no reason for me to blush with my ears burning just because I was touching his arm.

  But as the strange warmth continued, I realized what was different this time. Instead of him touching me, propositioning me, coming on to me, I had touched him. He’d talked about my stand-offishness, that gulf between us. Without meaning to, I’d reached across it.

  And I couldn’t take it back now. He was thinking what I was thinking. Head tilted and eyes down, he watched my hand stroking his skin. His eyes didn’t rise to mine. Maybe he suspected, as I did, that if our eyes met, we’d be acknowledging what was going on, and the spell would be broken.

  The spell was too good. We both wanted to stay under it.

  I continued to move my fingers across his skin exactly as I had before, but I needed to make a decision. I had reached for him, but I could back out of it by trailing my fingers down his arm and settling my hand in his, like I wanted us to be friends.

  I didn’t want us to be friends.

  Ever so slowly, I slid my hand up his sleeve, across his shoulder, and up his neck to cradle his jaw, prickly with stubble.

  He bit his lip. “Let’s go back to my house,” he whispered, “and we can discuss our differences in private.”

  We’d both forgotten about the storm blowing up. As soon as we climbed the stairs and slipped through the doors into the lobby, we could hear the rain beating on the windows.

  Sam turned to me in question. I replied, “I still don’t have an umbrella.”

  “Give me your keys and I’ll bring your car around.”

  “I’ll get soaked on the walk to the driveway, no matter what.”

  He continued to look questioningly at me. He’d been raised a southern gentleman. Whether the ladies were already soaked or not, gentlemen brought the car around in the rain. Their alcoholic fathers taught them this. The fathers might not be much good to the family, but they would bring the car around in the rain. This was another song in the making, one I struggled to push to the back of my mind. Now was not the time. I took Sam’s hand and said, “Come on.”

  We agreed silently that it would do us no good to run. The rain came down so fast that no puddles formed, only swift rivers down the sidewalk. Under an awning near the driveway, several people huddled, laughing that they were wet, waiting for a shuttle to the huge hotel nearby, but those were the only folks we encountered all the way across the shining parking lot, empty except for my car. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since we first entered the theater. A stiff, cold breeze chased us the last few yards.

  I shut my door and yelled, “Yuck!” I started the ignition.

  “Yeah.” Sam turned up the heat. He adjusted the dials as I drove and the windshield fogged up. He placed his other hand on the inside of my thigh, not high enough to distract me from driving, but in exactly the right place to remind me where we were headed.

  Back at his house, I parked as close to the side door as I could get. “Let me unlock it first,” he said. “Most families would have umbrellas waiting in the vestibule or whatever, but we don’t have a vestibule, much less an umbrella.” He trudged to the door, unlocked it, then nonsensically came back for me as if I couldn’t walk three steps through a downpour by myself, and ushered me inside.

  We kicked off our shoes on the rug just inside the door, and he poured water into an automatic coffeepot. Then he came back to me, placing himself between me and the door like he thought I might escape. “Why don’t you take your clothes off,” he whispered, “and I’ll put them in the dryer.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t freezing anymore, even in the air- conditioned kitchen. Heat raced across my skin. I knew what we were going to do. I had accepted this since the end of Julie’s show. But every new hint at it was like an electric shock to my system.

  He stood in front of the door with his arms folded across his tight, soaked T-shirt, melting my insides with his dark eyes. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to watch.

  I might have tried very hard in the past year to give off the vibe that I undressed in front of boys every night of the week, but it just wasn’t true. Swallowing, I asked, “Could you turn off the light?”

  He reached to the wall and flicked the switch. The kitchen vanished. All that was left was his silhouette in front of me, framed by the streetlight streaming through the window in the top of the door. He could probably still see me pretty well. Now that I couldn’t see his face, I felt more at ease.

  The soaked cotton of my T-shirt felt like a cold compress on a wound. After I stripped it off, my skin burned hotter. All I had on underneath was my black bra.

  I tossed the T-shirt to him.

  The jeans were harder. Now that they were wet, they hugged me even more tightly. I struggled to force them down my legs, hoping my black lace panties made this striptease worthwhile to Sam. I had no idea what I was doing.

  I half expected him to chuckle in the darkness. He didn’t make a sound. I finally tossed the jeans to him, and his silhouette caught them with one hand. He cleared his throat. “Be right back.” His voice broke. He turned and disappeared into a room just off the kitchen. I heard his own clothes slide off his body and the dryer shift to life. In nothing but boxers, the muted light smoothing his taut muscles, he crossed the shadowy kitchen and poured us each a cup of tea.

  With shaking hands rattling the teacup on its saucer, I followed him through the old house, the small rooms and narrow passageways and squeaky wooden floors. Upstairs he led me down a short hall and opened a door for me. I expected his room to be wallpapered with signed posters of the Eli Young Band or the Zac Brown Band. Instead, I walked into a guest room with blank powder-blue walls and a crazy quilt on the bed. The weight bench in the corner was probably his, but everybody stored their exercise equipment in the guest room.

  Wondering why Sam was taking me here instead of his own room, I looked back over my shoulder at him. Maybe there was something in his own room he didn’t want me to see—in which case I wanted to see it. When I’d first met him a few days ago, I’d tiptoed around him and let him keep his secrets. That time was over.

  “My mom erased me,” he explained. “The plant shut down for a week in May. That doesn’t happen often when people are buying a lot of cars, so she always tries to get as much done around the house as she can. She’d already planned to make my room into a guest room when I went to college. She
just did it a little early while she had the time.”

  “If she erased you,” I said, “where did you go?”

  He turned around and nodded to the boxes lined up against the wall. Here were the rolled-up posters of country bands, no doubt. In the shadows of one box glinted his gold football trophies. He paused, gazing down at them as if looking for himself.

  I took his cup from him. As I moved, cool air brushed past my bare thighs, and I remembered I was walking around a boy’s room in my underwear. But that was what I’d come here for. I turned and placed one cup on either bedside table, then crawled onto the bed.

  He left the room, then came back with a lit candle and placed it on the dresser. He turned out the light. The candlelight dashed across the room and rippled on the black ceiling like water. His shadow crossed to the far wall and opened a window. The sound of the rain and wind rushed in. The light on the ceiling transformed from a gentle ebb and flow into a stormy sea.

  As I watched him, I sipped my tea. My mouth filled with hot sweetness. Now he crawled onto the foot of the bed and moved forward to meet me. All of his bare skin warmed all of mine in the cool room. My heart raced and my skin sparkled with the knowledge that no one would disturb us now. No one would stop us. There was nothing to prevent us from losing ourselves to each other, except logic, and heartbreak, and every sound reason in the world.

  We moved very slowly. It was like fooling around in front of a glacier. We couldn’t see it advancing, but we knew that it was about to crush us, yet we didn’t get out of the way.

  What felt like hours later, when we were naked and totally open for each other, he interlaced his fingers with mine so that our hands were clasped. He nudged our hands with his prickly chin, watching me. “I want to,” he whispered. “Do you?”

  Heart pounding, I nodded. “I do.”

  “Promise?” he asked.

  “Promise.” My voice came out hoarse.

  He rolled off the bed and crossed the room. With a start I realized he’d disappeared out the door. I’d been stuck on the fact that I’d seen him, all of him, naked. Like an afterimage when I’d stared at the sun, I kept seeing him though he wasn’t there.