Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(53)
Author: Jennifer Echols

They ran a few minutes over. By the time they dashed hand in hand to the top of the amphitheater, Owen had already climbed onstage and muscled the mike away from the band’s lead singer. And Vonnie Conner was already headed in Quentin’s direction.

“I called the police, Quentin,” she shrieked. “You get Owen McDonough off my stage!”

“He doesn’t come when I call him,” Quentin said calmly. “Sarah, hon, be a dear and run get Owen off the stage.”

“Do think it would help if I took my top off?” Sarah asked vacuously, batting her eyelashes at him.

“Yes,” he said. “But not right now.” He swatted her ass as she bounced down to the stage.

“Where did you get her?” Vonnie asked him acidly.

“Fairhope,” he said, watching Sarah go. The crowd applauded and hooted and yelled, “O-wen!” as Owen made love to the microphone. He crooned to Erin, who stood at the foot of the stage with Martin’s arm around her shoulders. The song, appropriately, was “Lake Day Love,” with Owen’s lyrics and Erin’s tune.

“Why do you come here every year?” Vonnie complained, near tears. “How long am I going to have to pay for the goddamned tenth grade?”

He faced her and said, “This is the last time.” Of course she didn’t believe him, and she flounced away. But this would be his last visit to Hank on the Banks, at least as a party crasher. He hadn’t been romantically interested in Vonnie Conner since high school. He had taken great pleasure in getting her goat. Well, she could keep her goat from now on. The idea of being with Sarah this time next year was so cool. And impossible. But he knew that after Sarah, it was going to be hard for Vonnie Conner or anyone else to hold his attention.

Sarah leaped easily onto the stage. Her striking appearance elicited a barrage of catcalls from the audience, and she did a little curtsy. Then she rubbed Owen’s upper arm and said something to him. He gave her a big, drunk grin and kept singing. The irate band they’d interrupted, including a couple of big guys, had been holding their own football huddle and began to move in Owen’s direction.

Quentin waved until he got Owen’s attention, then moved his finger in a circle. Owen said into the microphone, “Thank you very much,” in his own Elvis impression, jumped down from the stage, and helped Sarah down. The two of them plus Erin and Martin held hands and maneuvered slowly up the hill between blankets on the grass, singing “Lake Day Love.” The band onstage began playing again but was all but drowned out by “Lake Day Love” as the audience joined in.

Quentin jogged down the grass and took Sarah’s hand at the end of the line. Rather than sing along, he listened to her soft, pretty voice. He’d never heard her sing. She sounded happy. She looked happy. He hoped it had been a good birthday.

As they crested the hill, a police siren chirped. Quentin spotted the blue lights between the pine trees. “Run!” he yelled. Owen threw a squealing Erin over his shoulder. They all barreled down the hill and into the boat, and roared away in the moonlight.

“Sleepy?” Quentin asked as Sarah laid her head on his thigh in the big-ass truck.

“That funnel cake did me in.” She moved her manicured hand to stroke lightly inside his thigh. “Quentin, would it be okay if I spent the night with you from now on? To make Erin mad.”

It was more than okay with Quentin. But he thought there was more to it than Erin, especially because of the timing. Martin was right. Sarah was afraid of Nine Lives.

And he had his own problems. Sooner or later he would wake up to an asthma attack. This didn’t help attract women.

“I sleep in the nude,” he warned her.

“So do I.”

This gave him a hard-on. He wasn’t sure he’d ever driven through Socapatoy with a hard-on. Come to think of it, he’d hardly ever driven, so this was a no-brainer.

It would make a good song. “Driving through Socapatoy with a hard-on.” He could name a new town on Highway 280 for each verse: “Driving through Goodwater with a hard-on,” “Driving through Sylacauga with a hard-on.” He could call the song—how far was it from the lake to Birmingham?—“Eighty-Mile Hard-On.”

He laughed out loud, because the big-ass truck gave him a new lease on life. Sarah shifted her head on his thigh and murmured a cussword at him. This made his erection, which had been calming down some, swell again. He put his hand absently in her soft hair and continued to think through this. The song might not make it onto the third album, but they could put it on a special X-rated album. They probably had enough of Quentin’s discarded songs for one of these right now.

If Sarah stayed around much longer, they could make it a double album.

10

The rough rock scraped under Sarah’s bare feet as she leaped into the air. A hundred colorful boats floated below her on the green lake, each loaded with people waving, holding up their beer cans. The setting sun was warm. The wind rushed up. Her stomach left her—a dizzy, first-date feeling.

Too soon she smacked into the water and plunged deep under, where it was dark and cold. Her skin stung from the impact. Her head felt tight, full of fluid. She swam upward toward the yellow sunbeams filtering through the green darkness.

She had almost reached the surface. She was running out of air. She should have reached the surface by now. She ran out of air. She clawed toward the surface.

Something deep below her grabbed her ankle. She looked down into Nine Lives’ catlike eyes.

She sat up, gasping, bewildered, in the dark room. Then she saw Quentin’s silhouette as he turned on the bathroom light, just before he closed and locked the door. She knew where she was, but not what was happening. Through the door, she heard his coughs, and then a terrible sound, like he couldn’t breathe at all.

She fell out of bed and ran to bang on the door. “Let me in!”

He coughed and coughed.

“Are you okay? Damn it, Quentin, let me in!”

The terrible sound returned.

Now came a knock on Quentin’s bedroom door. Sarah went cold, and realized that she was naked but for the weight of the emerald chain on her collarbone. She’d pulled off her clothes and flung them somewhere when Quentin had set her down in bed earlier in the night, because she’d vaguely recollected that she’d lied to him that she slept in the nude. Now she snatched one of his long-sleeved shirts out of his closet, shrugged it on, and opened the bedroom door for Martin.