He rolled onto the bed beside me again, kissed my forehead, and tore the package open. I watched him put the condom on. And all the while I was thinking through what this meant. He knew I was on the pill. He was using a condom anyway. My doctor had lectured me that the pill protected against pregnancy but not STDs. She’d said I should use a condom too unless I was in a committed, monogamous relationship.

That wasn’t what this was. It never would be. And if Sam wanted to protect himself or me with a condom, either he hadn’t believed me when I’d said I was a virgin, or he’d been lying himself.

“Hey,” he whispered. “My eyes are up here.”

I laughed nervously and met his gaze. At some point I’d clasped my hands in front of my mouth. I must have looked to him like I was terrified.

And maybe that was the reason for the condom. He could tell how scared I was, and he wanted me to have no doubts.

He wrapped one hand around both of mine. “Your hands are cold.” He inched forward until our foreheads touched. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ready?”

Was I?

“Yes,” I said.

I tried not to think about him and me. I didn’t see how things could possibly work out between us, even though he obviously wanted that now, and I did, too. The best-case scenario was that he was a boy I loved, who would break my heart and leave me. We would stay together for days, weeks, even months. When I looked back on it later, though, I wouldn’t remember our slow fall out of love. All I would remember was this one night.

So I tried to commit to memory every feeling of my first time. But there was a point when everything turned a corner and left me shocked by what I saw there. He made me feel too good, and I loved him too much. There was no way we could leave each other after this.

Much later, the rain stopped, leaving only the sound of the breeze in the window. The candlelight had dimmed on the ceiling. Sam lay facing me with his arm across my waist, and his chin nestled against my shoulder. My body felt completely flattened, so tired and satisfied that I sank into the mattress. Yet every molecule of me was aware of him, as though I were standing in the makeshift dressing room in the mall, na**d and listening for his voice or his guitar.

I murmured sleepily, “I thought it wasn’t supposed to be any good the first time.”

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at me like I’d gone loco. “Girls may say that. Guys don’t.” He grinned at me and stroked a lock of hair away from my face. “I hate to say this, but you’d better go. It’s getting so late that even I won’t be able to explain it to your granddad. I don’t want you to have to drive across town so late, but if I drove you, that would—”

“No, that would just be harder to explain,” I agreed.

His mouth turned down, and his dark eyes grew serious. The candlelight played eerily across his face as he said, “I want you to know how much this has meant to me. I’m so glad we were each other’s first.” His brows knitted. “That didn’t come out right. This is why I don’t write songs.”

I wondered if he was backtracking because of the look on my face. He sounded like he was saying we were each other’s first, and that was the end of it.

Suddenly he gushed, “Bailey, you have completely turned me upside down in the last four days. Which makes sense, right? There’s a country song about this. Deana Carter sings about it. Lady Antebellum sings about it. Gosh, not just country artists. Katy Perry. Everybody has a song about it because everybody’s been through it. You find that person at eighteen and you lose yourself. And the tragedy is, it’s the person who’s completely opposed to everything you’ve ever wanted. You bond with that person, and that person breaks your heart. I’m that tragedy for you, and you’re mine.”

This was definitely the end of it.

“What about Alan Jackson?” I breathed.

Sam gazed sadly at me, stroking my bottom lip tenderly with one callused finger. “Not everybody can be that lucky.”

Those words were still sinking in as I murmured, “I started the night thinking that way, Sam, but now . . . don’t you want to try to work this out?” I sounded a lot more desperate than I wanted to.

His finger stopped on my lip. “Are you going to ask your family to try to get an in for our band?”

“No,” I whispered.

He shook his head. “Then we can’t be together. In my head I know that’s wrong, Bailey, but I have to follow my heart. I’m messed up right now, and I can’t give you what you deserve.”

Suddenly his touch burned like a cold knife. I slipped out from under him, found my underwear on the floor, and pulled it on. “That’s what you said to Charlotte when you broke up with her, Sam. That’s what you said to everyone.”

I ran out of the room and down the stairs. I stopped in the tiny laundry room off the kitchen and fished my clothes out of the dryer. In the darkness I mistook Sam’s shirt for mine until I pulled it on and, in addition to hanging off me, it smelled like him. Cursing, I tossed it into the dryer and found my own.

“I wasn’t lying,” came Sam’s voice.

He was leaning against the doorjamb to the kitchen in his boxers, with his arms crossed, his face grim, his hair wild, looking like the hunky half of an argument in a country music video. “You were special.”

“Oh, was I, in the past tense?” I shot back. “I was different from your other girlfriends, right?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Because we screwed.”

His lips parted.

“Tell me the truth,” I insisted before he could speak. “Was this another one of those life experiences you try to accumulate because they make you uncomfortable? Are you going to channel this emotion and use it when you sing?”

He unfolded his arms and stood up straight.

“I see,” I said. “It’s that genre of country song, the one where you break it to your lady that you don’t love her, and she drives away in tears. Sorry, but I’m not going to give you that satisfaction.”

I slipped my shoes on, picked up my purse, and calmly walked outside to my car. Sam stood in the doorway watching me, the mist after the rain curling around him in my headlight beams as I backed down his driveway.

Dead tired, I just wanted to get home and go to bed. That helped me remain calm—right up until railroad crossing guardrails descended in front of my car. The warning signal clanged its bells. The train moaned its off-key tritone, louder and louder and louder until it filled my head and I couldn’t hear myself think.

I slapped my hands over my ears and yelled, “I would like out of this country song now. I want out of this country song right now!”

I wasn’t sure who I was praying to. The ghost of Johnny Cash, maybe. But nothing changed. The train still moaned. The signal clanged and flashed like a migraine. And when the end of the train finally slipped past me and disappeared into the Nashville night, I knew I wouldn’t get to sleep until I wrote this song down.

13

I spent the next afternoon suffering through Hank Williams’s yodeling and wondering about the big party that the record company was throwing for Julie that night. At dinner my granddad told me gently that he’d talked to my mom the night before and tried to convince her to invite me, but she was too afraid the record company wouldn’t like it. I suspected she was afraid I would jump on the buffet and start throwing canapés just to spite everyone.

My granddad seemed especially gleeful that I was going out with Sam again, as if that made him feel less guilty that I wasn’t included in Julie’s celebration. The closer the party time came, the more resentful I felt that Julie and my dad hadn’t stood up to my mom and invited me, and the better I felt that I was about to disobey my parents again.

I just wished I’d been able to do that without seeing Sam. There was the appearance of love, the trappings of it that I put in songs. There was real love, the kind I was afraid I’d felt for Sam last night. And then there was the ache I was feeling, intense and depthless. I had never heard a song like this, either because nobody had ever been this heartbroken, or because a tune that depressing wouldn’t sell.

Sam never called me, but I knew he was in communication with Ace. Ace had said Monday night that he would call to make sure I was coming to the gig at Boot Ilicious if Sam and I weren’t speaking. I knew he wouldn’t have called me four times, though, if a nervous Sam hadn’t been goading him into it. I parked in the deck Sam and I had used and abused our first night together, then walked a few doors down to the eighteen-and-up bar. My fiddle got me a pass inside without paying cover, and the bouncers pointed me upstairs.

At the top of two flights, on the roof with a view of nearby skyscrapers on one side and the Cumberland River and Titans stadium on the other, the band stood onstage as if ready to start playing without me.

I could see them only because the stage was two feet above the roof. The place was packed with college-age partiers. Some of the first people I spotted were the girls who’d gotten a manicure on Elvis day at the mall last week. I saw a few other boys I knew from school, who didn’t recognize me in the tiny, tight red cocktail dress I’d snagged at the mall that afternoon and paired with my red cowgirl boots and red cat-eye glasses in a statement of ironic overkill. So far, no Toby, but there were three floors to this bar, and it was already almost nine o’clock. He was probably here somewhere. The first guy to recognize me would text him so that he could come up here and laugh at me. I could feel it.

But I had a job to do, a work ethic for the forbidden. I sashayed through the crowd. I was still three people deep away from the stage when I saw Sam’s face change under his cowboy hat, from worry to relief. He held out a hand and hauled me up onstage with one strong arm.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Ace told me to be here at nine,” I said, glancing at my watch. It was five until.

“You know I’m in danger of a stroke until you get here,” Sam growled.

I shrugged. “I had other things to do.”

“I hope you’re not giving her everything you gave to me on her behalf,” Ace said, stepping between us. “You look like shit, Sam. Just back off everybody.”

Sam did look like he hadn’t gotten any more sleep since I’d woken him at six the night before. In fact, he looked like his haggard father imitating Johnny Cash. He gave Ace a sullen glare, then pulled out his cell phone to text us the playlist.

“But you look beautiful,” Ace told me.

I was glad someone had noticed I’d outdone myself tonight, if you liked this sort of thing. I gave him a saucy curtsy in thanks, but I wished he hadn’t said it in front of Charlotte, who’d come from behind her drum kit to lurk, listen in, and scowl.

“I don’t know what to play for these people,” Sam was muttering at his phone. “I guess . . . all of the Ke$ha. Then what?”

Because he needed her so badly, Charlotte stepped close to him, looked over his shoulder at his phone, and made suggestions from our repertoire for the playlist. Without looking up, he reached behind her and rubbed the back of her neck in an overly friendly gesture of camaraderie. It was amazing that she stayed upright, because her shoulders collapsed like a rag doll under his hand.

Ace’s eyes locked with mine in a mutual understanding of jealousy and disgust. But knowing Ace was dying inside, too, didn’t make me feel any better. I wound my way to the back of the stage, brought out my fiddle and dumped my case, and rushed back to the front before the restless crowd started chanting.

When I first surveyed the audience, I’d been afraid they wouldn’t like our music, at least after we ran out of Ke$ha. But they were enthusiastic to the point of frenzy, and a couple of fights broke out at the edges of the rooftop. I thought the difference was that this audience was younger than our usual spectators, and some of them were drinking underage and weren’t handling it well. It was also the largest crowd I’d seen at Boot Ilicious. The pushing that resulted made everyone testy. Normally the audience would be spread out over three stories of dance floors, but tonight most of them seemed to be crowding here.

It didn’t bother me, as long as they didn’t touch me or nudge my bow. It bothered Sam, though. Between songs, he kept casting a worried eye across the sea of screaming faces, and he didn’t respond with much enthusiasm to the calls of “Sam!” from the groupie girls from his high school who had finally caught up with him. When we’d almost reached our ten o’clock break and I pointed behind Ace, wordlessly asking him to pass me the tip jar, Sam shook his head at both of us and pointed at Ace. Ace got down from the stage and held the jar instead of me. I didn’t mouth a thank-you to Sam, but judging from some of the grinding that had been passing for dancing in the crowd, I was grateful.

At the break, Sam set his guitar in its stand and headed inside. I knew I wouldn’t be following him. Better to get through this night as far away from him as possible. Instead, I headed to the back of the stage and set one elbow on the guardrail at the edge of the roof. Preparations were still under way for the CMA Festival that started tomorrow. Julie’s first performance of the festival would be tomorrow night, almost directly below me at the Riverwalk stage. On the other side of the Cumberland River, the Titans stadium glowed. Tomorrow it would host some headliners for the CMA Festival, probably six country superstars back-to-back in one long concert. The next night, Friday, Julie would be one of them.

Not one member of my family had contacted me about going. Both concerts were probably sold out by now. I hadn’t checked. I wasn’t going to spend my life following Julie around and lurking in her shadow. I’d had enough of that last night.