Good Gone Bad (The Fallen Men 3)

Old Sam laughed then winced as his knees creaked when he straightened. “You make an old man feel young, shinin’ such beauty in my store each week.”

“It’s my favourite day, Sundays,” I told him.

“Right on, girl, mine too. Now, where’s your dad at, huh?”

I shrugged even though it was weird that Dad would miss a Sunday with us, at least without calling to tell us why first.

He pursed his lips and darted his eyes over at his cell phone lying on top of a stack of records, but when he looked back at me, he was smiling. “Right, pick a paw then, princess.”

I watched him stick his hands in his pockets then offer them to me with fists tight before slapping my little hand over one of his big ones. “Left!”

He tipped his hand over and opened his palm, revealing a package of strawberry watermelon Hubba Bubba gum.

“Yes!” I shrieked with a fist pump. “My fav!”

Old Sam winked at me. “Don’t I know it? Now, I pulled some Johnny Cash fer ya, today. Why don’tcha go take a look while I deal with somethin’?”

I wrinkled my nose even as I popped a thick piece of bubble gum in my mouth and started to chew. “That’s country music! I hate that shit.”

“Girl, you don’t know shit about that shit. Don’t spew what yer daddy told ya without listen’ fer yourself. You got a mind of your own in that pretty head?”

I fisted my hands and plunked them on my hips. “And don’t forget it!”

“That’s what I thought. So, go the hell over to your spot and play what I pulled fer ya, think you might like this brand’a country.”

I chewed my lip. Country music sucked, my dad had told me that all music outside of rock was for the musically uneducated. But I trusted Old Sam. He pulled records for me every Sunday and he never disappointed. So, even though I could’ve thrown a mini tantrum and it would’ve been fun to argue with Old Sam about it, I took his advice and made my way through the disorganized stacks to my little corner with the record player.

There was a man in black on the worn sleeve and “At Folsom Prison.”

Reverently, I slipped the record from the cover and placed it on the turntable. I held my breath as the first few strains of his rendition of Blue Suede Shoes rumbled into the room with me.

I wasn’t a musician. In the last year, I’d tried the guitar, the piano, and singing (don’t even get me started on that failure,) so I couldn’t produce beauty with sound, but since I was a baby, so they said, I loved it. I was a woman with a deep well of emotions raised by a bitch mother and a brotherhood of men who mostly didn’t know their emotional ass from their elbow. So, I had a lot to feel and not a lot of ways to say it.

Music was that voice for me, and even at six years old sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mega Music, I knew that it would play a vital soundtrack to my life.

Johnny Cash’s “Give My Love To Rose” was playing when I noticed him.

First, it was just an extra twang of notes, a thrum of chords added to the scratch and smooth of recorded music that pricked my ears and made me turn to look over my left shoulder.

And there he was.

Sitting on a turned over crate, one Timberland booted foot up against it, the other pressed to a mess of sheet music on the floor so his thick thighs were spread apart and taught against the worn denim of his jeans. His muted gold hair fell over his face as bent over a blue guitar, obscuring everything but the fine cut of a strong nose and the edge of a lush mouth that moved silently with the lyrics of the song. The way he cradled that guitar hit my six-year-old gut in a funny way. He had big hands that seemed too strong for his long, gangly limbs but they held the instrument tenderly, coaxing sound from the neck with his firm fingers, teasing it out of the body with a feathering touch.

He held that guitar like it was the love of his life, so it was no wonder that the swell of music he made with it made my nose itch with tears.

Both he and the music were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen in my short life.

I must have let out a quiet gasp because suddenly, he was looking at me.

He had green eyes.

God, they were the greenest living thing I’d ever seen. Greener than freshly watered grass, than the light filtering through a thicket of fir trees onto a patch of pacific northwest moss, and the green of an overripe lime. Looking into that color surrounded by a full fringe of short, spiky brown eyelashes under thick, slanting brows, I stopped breathing.