Read Red Hot Blues for Free Online Page A

us walking up Gay Street, on the
edge of the Cumberland River, looking down at it.
    It drifted to us talking about music,
guitars, playing tunes, me singing in a barn, him strumming. I
know, pathetic. But that’s what it did. I wasn’t thinking these
things on purpose, they just appeared. I couldn’t concentrate on
the music. My mind was just going wild, going to all sorts of
places. I’ve always been a creative type, and my imagination is
hard to put on a leash.
    Layna caught me smiling, and in pure Layna
style, she shoved herself next to me on the seat, and said,
“Darlin, what you still doin here! He ran outside and you let him
go!” Layna’s born and raised in Tennessee. She speaks like a
Southern Belle, and looks like a Hooters waitress.
    I slapped her leg. She was wearing high
shorts, exposing her sexy self. Bitch . “Stop it!” I
said.
    She made her eyes go like saucers and then
flared out her nostrils. Then she came close to my ear (because she
knows me too well to embarrass me in front of the crowd) and said,
“He was totally into you.”
    I giggled once, knee-jerk reaction. I rolled
my eyes and looked away from her. These things I can deal with, you
know: Thinking about the guy who “was totally into me” and always
talking about him as such. This is how I live my life. Dreams. What
Ace and I had was now perfect, consummate, and could never be
improved upon: It was the perfect meeting, the perfect encounter,
and if it had gone further, it would be tainted. If Brett had, say,
moved out of state or joined the military and gone on tour for a
gazillion years just before he’d told me to go jump in a lake, that
would have been an untainted memory. And our time together would
have been perfect.
    It was the moment after that ruined
the perfection.
    So having my best friend tell me this random
dude was totally into me, was cool. I could have it. And I liked
it. I’d go to bed thinking about it. And wake up with a smile.
    The perfect encounter.
    We met, we sang, we left. Perfect.
    That is, until I bumped into him outside.
-15-
    I’d needed some air, so I stepped outside for
a while. He was there. Looking cool, looking bad, looking smooth.
Looking so fucking gorgeous that I had another very female reaction
to it, a physical one, a hormonal one. Uh-huh. You know what I’m
talkin about.
    He was leaning against a wall, underneath a
New Orleans French Quarter Style apartment with a wrought iron
veranda; his metallic red Gibson on the ground, cowboy hat on his
head. (I hadn’t seen that hat anywhere near him earlier...) He was
looking at the entrance to the blues bar, where I’d just come out
of. In other words, he was looking straight at me. I don’t know if
it was the sudden brightness—because this street is bright with a huge parking lot on the left and then the lights of all the
Karaoke Bars and strip joints on the right—but he looked suddenly
larger, taller, more muscular. Overwhelming.
    Either that, or I just felt smaller. And
pudgier.
    “Hey,” I said. What else is there to say?
    He had a foot up against the wall, cowboy
boots. He was... smirking? ...at me. A cigarette dangled from
his lips, unlit. He took his hat off, laid it on a plastic garbage
can that said “Dolly Carton” on it.
    “I was hoping you’d come out soon,” he
said.
    My heart shuddered.
    “Oh?”
    He grinned, evilly, confidently, so goddamn alluringly that my heart thrummed. This guy was
good. Oh yeah, he was good . And he knew what he was
doing.
    He would use me. This much I knew. Because
boys only use girls like me. Only problem is...it was working.
    I stumbled to a chair on my right. Well, it
felt like I stumbled, because my legs were losing strength, and it
felt like my heels were going to snap.
    I caught him, very deliberately, looking at
my stocky legs, down to those red pumps I was wearing, lingering
there, then, slowly, eyeing me up the legs again, lingering you-know-where for a second; looking up, up, up, staying