Page 23 of Dirty Little Secret

“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 h*ps 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.

“I’m sorry I made you admit that,” he said. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I just worry sometimes. Last year I was in counseling for worrying.”

I winced. “You were?” Sam was so candid about his dark side, and it always took me by surprise. It was so easy to forget when he sang, and when he smiled. When he’d told me his whole family had been in counseling because of his dad’s problems, I’d assumed that was long ago, not last year.

“Yeah. It was a group of sad and depressed teenagers. That’s how I knew there was something wrong with you as soon as I met you at the mall. You act like those girls sometimes. It’s like you want to laugh, but it gets caught here.” He touched my chin. “Or maybe here.” He touched the back of my head. Then, because of the way I was looking at him, he slowly put his hand down.

“Are you still in counseling?” I ventured.

“No, I got kicked out. I asked a girl on a date.” He laughed. “We weren’t supposed to do that. They said they’d told us that up front, but I never read the fine print. What kind of crazy group is it if there are girls in it but you can’t date them?”

“The world has gone mad,” I said.

He pointed at me. “That’s what I told them!” He gestured down the steps through the yard, toward his truck parked at the bottom of the hill. “So, I’m driving you to your appointment.”

“Oh.” I wrinkled my nose. “You’re not going into the exam room with me.”

“Oh, God, no!” he exclaimed. “I would pass out.”

“Well, the doctor isn’t going to—”

“No,” he cut me off. “I’ll just be there for you in the waiting room.” Walking down the steps in front of me, he hugged himself tightly.

“You don’t have to go, Sam,” I protested. “You look so uncomfortable right now.”

“I like doing things that make me uncomfortable. I try not to have a comfort zone.” He stopped on the stairs. “You know what? It might get late, and we need to leave early enough to make it to Chattanooga even if there’s traffic. We can’t be late to a gig. Why don’t you go ahead and get your bathing suit?”

“Bathing suit!” I exclaimed.

“It’s a pool party!” he reminded me, exasperated. He leaned in and whispered, “And get your fiddle.”

I galloped back inside, tossing to my granddad that Sam was taking me to a pool party. Technically, not a lie. I stuffed my bikini and a towel and my fiddle case into my beach bag together and ran down the steps to Sam’s truck before my granddad could get suspicious.

No, I was the one suspicious. After I explained where my doctor’s office was and Sam started down the tree-lined street, I said, “I have a theory.”

“What’s your theory?” Sam asked gamely.

“You don’t really have a burning desire to go with me to the doctor’s office. Boys are afraid of anything having to do with the inner workings of girl parts. I’ve seen them go out of their way to avoid touching brand-new, unopened boxes of tampons. You just want an excuse to hang out with me until the gig tonight.”

He gave me a devilish grin. “That’s a good theory.”

“And it’s not because you like me. It’s because you’re deathly afraid I’ll change my mind and I won’t show up. You’ve got better stuff to do than hang out with me, but the gig is worth it.”

His face fell. “Bailey. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a l—Well, I take that back. I guess I am a liar.” He turned to look at me across the truck cab, sunlight filtering through the leaves of the trees overhead and playing across his face as he drove. “But not to you.”

A song popped into my head about that, along with the perfect melody and even an unusual chord structure for the chorus. He was a liar but not to me, or so he said, and that made me feel special. But Toby had lied to me about the drugs he was doing and the girls he was messing around with on the side. I knew I had my flaws, but I didn’t make a habit of lying. I was no match for a flat-out liar.

That was the message of the song. The words kept changing, and I worked through them in my head. During the rest of the drive and wait in the doctor’s office, Sam kept asking me what was wrong. Every time he spoke, I lost a piece of my song. Finally I asked, “Don’t you ever feel the need to practice guitar in your head?” That gave me an excuse to finger the imaginary notes in my lap. Connecting them to my imaginary fiddle helped me remember them.

The nurse called me into the examining room. In the pause between taking off my clothes and talking to the doctor, I snatched my notebook out of my purse, my paper gown crackling on top of me, and managed to dump the whole song onto the staffs. By the time the doctor came in, which usually stressed me out because I didn’t want to be touched, I was so relieved and relaxed that I could have taken a nap.

The exam went almost exactly like the first time. The difference was that instead of prescribing the pill, the doctor asked me how I felt on it. But just as before, she made a studied point of not letting her eyes linger on my heavy makeup or punky hair. Cheerfully she examined me and then felt me up. She asked me if I was sexually active—I said no, but she hardly waited for my answer, like she didn’t believe me anyway—and she made me promise promise promise that if I did become sexually active, I would make my partner use a condom to protect us both from STDs because that’s not what the pill was for.

I got a little annoyed with the whole lecture. She was acting like I’d learned nothing from watching television. I didn’t snap at her, though, because I wanted her to give this speech to other girls. To Julie. I had given it to Julie, though the way my parents watched her, she’d probably be a virgin until she was thirty. Regardless, I wanted the doctor to give her the speech again.

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