“Absolutely nothing—so long as I’m not playing in the same band as they are.”

“But—”

“Oh, I know. What could be more perfect? Working and playing and loving together. Except, my somewhat drunk and certainly randy friend, when it all comes apart, then you’re still stuck playing together. Or more likely, one of you has to leave, and I want neither to start a new band nor to break in yet another guitarist.”

“It didn’t take that long for me to come up to speed with your repertoire.”

“Exactly. You’re a great guitarist, so I don’t want to lose you.”

“Maybe this rejection will hurt so much that I’ll have to leave.”

She’d smiled. “And maybe when you sober up in the morning, you’ll realize that this is a great gig you have with us and isn’t it lucky you didn’t let your libido screw it up.”

That conversation had taken place last weekend when they were in Champion, north of Tyson and on the other side of the mountains. Sweetwater, being as close to home as it was—only an hour and a half if you went by the back roads as she’d been doing—made it much easier to come up with some excuse about having stuff to do in the city tomorrow morning and get in the car, rather than have to go through it all again with him.

Except now she was stuck in the middle of nowhere at—she checked her watch—three A.M. She’d probably have to sleep in the car, because there certainly didn’t seem to be anybody else on the road, which might actually be a good thing, considering. But she’d be more nervous breaking down on her own in some parts of the city than she was here. Country folk could get as rambunctious and rowdy as their more cosmopolitan cousins—more so, if some of the gigs they played were any barometer—but they usually didn’t have the meanness you could sometimes find in urban centers. She felt safer watching a bar fight from the relative safety of the stage in a country bar than walking alone at night down, say, any of the streets running off Palm back in the city.