“I haven’t seen you all year!” Clayton reused his line from earlier and Jamie rolled her eyes.
Crest Toothpaste Smile reached out his hand. “I’m Jake.”
She looked into his wide-set brown eyes and shook his hand. “Jamie. It’s nice to meet you.” She glanced at his bare ring finger.
Jackpot.
“Over here!” Canary Hair shouted, nudging people out of the way with her wrinkly elbows. “You’re . . .”
“I am,” Jake said, smiling as he signed his name next to Clayton’s.
Jamie felt foolish for not recognizing him and wished Shazam could identify faces as it did with songs. She wanted to snap a picture of him to make Derrick jealous—this guy was so good looking that straight men were staring.
“Why don’t you come up later and sing with me?” Jake offered the rock star, resting his hand on the back of her chair.
Clayton piped up, “She knows nothing about country music.”
“That’s okay.” Jake tapped his beer bottle against her glass. “I know all kinds of genres.”
“I’ll go up, man.” Clayton clinked his whiskey glass against Jake’s bottle.
Cockblocker.
Jake glanced at him sideways then winked at Jamie. “You never want to sing with me, man. Why the sudden change of heart?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to try out some new stuff.”
A few hours later Jamie was wrapped in a liquor blanket, warm from the inside out. Beau kept pouring so she kept drinking, stubbornly trying to keep pace with Clayton despite their obvious weight difference. She recognized a few of the songwriters who had performed—faces she vaguely knew but names she only learned when they introduced themselves. She had to admit: the songs were good. Too good. They made her feel things beyond just being drunk—which, at this point, she was, thanks in no small part to the increasingly handsome bartender.
Hosting the evening was a bald, heavyset fellow wearing a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts with a sailboat pattern. She could tell from his tan that he’d recently been somewhere tropical and hadn’t adjusted to the Tennessee weather.
“I’d like to invite Jake to the stage,” the host said, and Canary Hair clapped her hands off.
Jake sat next to Hawaiian Shirt and played a few songs, but she didn’t recognize them. Most of the tunes were too twangy for her, but she liked “Drink All Day” and wanted to cover it at her next performance. Drinking songs were always crowd favorites, but it was nearly impossible to write a good one, something original.
“Clayton, are you ready to come up, buddy?” Jake’s voice echoed from the microphone, his teeth nearly blinding her with their brightness.
Everyone clapped and the country singer nodded at Jamie. “Watch and learn something, darlin’.”
She laughed, nearly choking on her vodka soda.
Clayton maneuvered through the crowd with his guitar slung over his shoulder, then shook Jake’s hand and sat beside him, his long legs folding beneath him.
“How about we start with an old one?” Jake suggested, picking at his guitar.
“This is a song I wrote called ‘More Bad Days Than Good.’” Clayton strummed a chord and the audience responded with a series of “oohs” and “aahs.”
“He wrote that song about Tammy,” Canary Hair blurted, and Jamie raised her finger to shush her.
Clayton sang every word with the kind of heartache only the unlucky in love could understand. His voice carried the weight of loss and regret—emotions she knew all too well. She’d had more bad days than good, spent too many nights drowning in the certainty that she shouldn’t have existed at all. And one drunken night AJ had confirmed it, slurring the words she’d already believed: she was a mistake.
At least she was right.
She signaled to Beau to refill her drink as she listened to the song. Something was soothing about his voice, like the tide rolling in and out then crashing against the riprap and dispersing. Perhaps there was another side to Clayton Langley . . .
But it didn’t excuse him for cheating on his wife.
“I want to play something new for y’all,” Clayton said softly into the microphone. “If you’ll indulge me.”
