Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
Back inside The Whiskey, everyone was already dancing away, including all the G.R.I.T.S. Luke brought Mary back to the same end of the bar from where she had watched his gig. Josie was also dancing, but on the inside of the bar, and she had some moves.
‘Hey, you’re back,’ she said, approaching Mary and Luke. ‘Couldn’t stay away, huh?’ She winked at Mary.
‘I think that we’re ready for that shot now, Josie,’ Luke said. ‘And could I please borrow a pen.’ He placed the CD on the bar counter.
‘Shots coming right up.’ Josie grabbed a pen from behind the bar and placed it on the counter, by the CD case.
Luke wrote a dedication, signed it, closed the CD case and handed it to Mary. ‘I really hope you enjoy it.’
‘I’m very sure I will,’ she said, placing a ten-dollar bill on the counter.
‘No, c’mon, Mary, seriously. It’s a gift.’
‘Nope.’ Mary shook her head. ‘You agreed. Don’t tell me you’re one of those who goes back on a deal.’
Touché – to a southern cowboy, questioning if he was a man of his word or not was worse than a punch to the face. Luke lifted his hands in surrender before reluctantly taking the cash. ‘You sure drive a hard bargain.’
‘And here we go,’ Josie came back with three shot glasses and placed them on the counter. ‘Angel’s Envy all round.’
They all reached for a shot and raised them up in the air.
‘To new friends,’ Luke said.
‘To new friends,’ Mary and Josie repeated it in unison. ‘And to your success,’ Mary added, as she touched her glass against Luke’s.
Toast done, they knocked back their shots. As Mary downed hers, her stare returned to the door – no gangster-suit man. Was he gone, or was he waiting for Mary outside like earlier? And was he really waiting for her, or was she being paranoid?
That whole time, since Mary had spotted the stranger outside, her brain had been working flat out to try to match his face against a memory.
She thought back to the many parties that she had attended with Nelson in Woburn.
She thought back to the ones that they used to throw at their house.
She thought back to the holiday trips to the Hamptons, the ones where Nelson’s group of buddies would always turn up, but no, none of it brought back any recollections of the stranger’s face, and that made Mary begin to doubt herself.
Had she really seen him before? Or did he just have one of those overly common faces – the ones that got strangers squinting at them from afar, trying to place them in their cloudy memories.
The more Mary thought about it, the more she convinced herself that had to be it – the man from outside simply had one of those common faces – because Mary couldn’t understand how anyone would’ve recognized her from her previous life. Mary Smith looked absolutely nothing like Samantha Stewart.
Sam used to have long, wavy sandy-blonde hair, ocean-blue eyes, flawless skin, and a figure that could cause traffic accidents. Nelson had told her numerous times that she could easily pass herself as Taylor Swift, if she ever wanted to, as long as she didn’t actually sing.
Mary, on the other hand, had undergone an incredible transformation from her previous self.
The first thing she did before moving to Nashville was to have her hair cut short and dyed raven black.
With the help of vanity contact lenses, her eyes were now almost as dark as her hair, a look that despite all odds, actually suited her.
Her eyebrows were also different – drawn on instead of natural.
To complete her transformation from Samantha to Mary, she had not only stopped exercising, but also fully dropped her usual strict diet – a move that after just a couple of months saw her gaining almost thirty pounds – her face was plumper, her cheeks chubbier, and her waist a lot rounder than it ever was.
All in all, she looked so different that not even her mother would’ve recognized her.
Mary hated her new weight, her chubby cheeks, and the new curves showing all around her body – way too many, if you asked her – but she knew that they were just temporary. When she moved again to somewhere permanent, she’d change her look once more.
‘Mary?’ Luke called.
She blinked twice before her attention finally landed back on him.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked. ‘You spaced out there for a moment.’
‘Sorry. I do that sometimes.’
‘So, do you wanna dance?’
Mary coughed a laugh. ‘Ha… no… I’m really bad at it,’ she lied.
‘It’s OK,’ Luke volleyed back. ‘So am I. And in here, no one will notice.’
‘No, seriously,’ Mary stepped back as Luke tried to grab her hand. ‘Not a good idea.’
‘Oh, c’mon,’ Luke insisted. ‘You know what they say, right? Dance as if no one is watching.’
‘Haha!’ Mary laughed before her tone went back to serious. ‘Yeah, I tried that last time. The problem was – somebody was watching, and they called an ambulance because they thought I was having a stroke.’
That made Luke laugh out loud. ‘We might have very similar dance moves then.’
Gosh, Mary thought. Even his laugh is kind of sexy.
All of a sudden Mary went rigid, her muscles tightening to almost the point of spasms. The stranger’s face…
his eyes. She had been looking in the wrong corners of her mind.
The feeling that she had seen that man before was all too real, but the memory didn’t come from a party or from a holiday somewhere, it came from court.
He was there on the day that she testified, sitting somewhere towards the back.
That day, while giving her account to the court, her gaze had landed on him at least a couple of times – those same black-hole eyes staring straight at her, sizing her up.
And he was there again on the day of the verdict. As she stood up to leave, once the court had been adjourned by Judge Reeves, Mary saw him again, standing at the back of the courtroom, hands tucked into his trouser pockets, head low, as if he was trying hard not to be noticed.
Standing at the bar inside The Whiskey Bent Saloon, Mary felt her core rattle for the third time that evening.
That man – the same man that she had seen in court almost seven months earlier – didn’t just happen to be in Nashville, he didn’t just happen to bump into her while strolling down the Broadway.
This wasn’t some freaky coincidence, it couldn’t be.
That man, whoever he was, had been looking for her…
and somehow, despite all of Mary’s efforts, he had managed to find her.