So We Can Glow - Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith Page 0,17
On my weak nights, it would hurt my feelings and I’d turn me and Emmylou around right before Shay walked out. Emmylou and I would take the long way back to the bus—catch the sky right as it was changing from late-ombré evening to full-on night black. Every single star shining bright as God.
Tucker wasn’t an easy flirt. I had to earn it. Like the time I put on a turquoise feather skirt and went next door to his hotel room to pick up Emmylou before the show. He opened up the door and I sang the chorus of “Amarillo by Morning” to him and wasn’t the tiniest bit shy about it because I’d been practicing in the shower. That part was easy to sing once you listened to the song all the way through just once. I’d listened to it about five hundred times. That was where we were headed after the show in Oklahoma City. Amarillo. Tucker looked me up and down and did a cartoony wolf whistle and he never did stuff like that, so you got to hear me out when I tell you it was really something. Emmylou was toddling around in her overalls, babbling behind him. Tucker was saying look at you. To me.
“Damn right about Amarillo by morning. I’m ready to get back to Texas,” he said.
I wanted him to say more about my skirt, but didn’t want to make it too obvious or desperate. I bent over and got on my knees, opened my arms for Emmylou to run into them. I got Emmylou’s bag and Tuck closed the door behind us. Emmylou and I were going down the hallway, walking hand in hand in front of him and I had a feeling that little skirt looked best from behind. I thought about him thinking about me, thinking about me differently than just Emmylou’s nanny. Thinking about me the same way he thought about Shay. Thinking about my body and my legs and what was under my little skirt. And I was thinking about his arms in his shirt, how I cut off the sleeves for him those nights he was on stage sweating and singing. His perfect, cute-fat ass. And those nights when I’d put Emmylou to sleep at his place and he’d be downstairs writing music and wearing those gray sweatpants that made me want to fall out and die. Those nights, this life when I’d give any damn thing for him to take me to his bed. For him to take hold of my hips and pull me to him hard and fast without saying a word.
Like one night, it was storming so bad I stayed over. Tuck told me if Emmylou had been a boy he was going to name her Buffalo; his brown buffalo hat was right there next to him on the couch and I picked it up, put it on my head. He asked me my favorite Dwight Yoakam song. I said “Fast as You” so easy like it was my middle name because for me there ain’t no other Dwight Yoakam song. Told him it was sexy, lonesome. And Tucker started playing it right there for me and singing the chorus and he was singing it like Dwight. I covered my hot face with my hands. I didn’t get paid to think about Tucker putting that guitar down and slowly slipping his tongue into my mouth and taking off his gray sweatpants, but I was thinking about it anyway. I wanted to feel how Thelma felt about J.D. in Thelma & Louise, minus the awful parts. Just that part where she goes to the diner the morning after and gets all wide-mouth laughing at Louise before hell breaks loose again. When she pulls her collar out and points at the hickey on her neck—that part, jittering on the VHS screen of my heart.
So I was walking in front of Tucker, swaying my hips, but not too much. That turquoise feather skirt looking like the sun had lit it up, the blue holding the bright. Tuck was singing under his breath and we were almost to the elevator. He was slow poking, taking his time like he always did.
“I see you up there looking beautiful,” he said with his scritch-scratch voice from so much singing and growling under rising summer moons night after night, all over. He said it kind of low. Kind of like I wouldn’t hear him, but I did. I was listening