Have A Little Faith In Me Read Online Free PDF

having let it out now, for having acknowledged its existence.  Singing drained the poison from the wound, if only for a minute.  But a minute was something.
    As he concluded the song, the crowd went wild.  He couldn’t help but take a look at Rocky’s side of the stage.  Rocky looked at him for a moment, and nodded.  One artist to another.  Dex nodded back, and stepped back, to let his opponent take center stage.
     
    Rocky was floored.  He’d expected Dex to twang his way through the lyrics, slather on some cornpone and let the words carry him without…going there.  But Rocky had seen it, heard it, felt it.  Dex had sung from his heart.  And when he stole a glance at Rocky, like a nervous teenager, Rocky had seized the moment, had nodded his respect. 
    I know that feeling , he thought.  I can do this.  I know what it’s like to look, and not find.
    He strapped on an electric guitar.  He’d spent the afternoon practicing, mimicking the steel guitar line on his Fender.  The Boulders didn’t have a steel guitar player, so there was no other way to do it. 
    The song started, and he opened the door in his head.  The door he kept closed, beyond which were all the stupid, useless, futile longings, yearnings, desires that would just clutter up his life if he didn’t keep them stored there, out of sight, out of mind.  The door behind which he’d installed Frank James, and Nico Paulus, the men he’d loved without being loved in return. 
    Rocky sang about walking after midnight, searching for you.  And here, on stage, he let a little something out of that locked room.  He let himself think about a long dark road, a hill rising ahead, the full moon lighting his path.  He let himself think about Dex, walking unseen on the other side of that hill, walking toward him, looking as he looked for just one other person on that road.  He let the song carry him up the hill, towards the top, where he might find what he was looking for on the other side.
    But the song ends, of course, before you get to the top.  Before you find out if there’s someone on the other side, or not.
    It was Rocky’s turn to look at Dex.  But Dex wouldn’t look at him, this time.   Dex raised a hand, his head down, a musical salute.  But he wouldn’t make eye contact.
    Rocky nodded.  No, there wasn’t anyone on the other side of the hill, after all.  That’s what makes the song so sad.
     
    Then it was rockin’ time.  The Boulders sailed into “Jailhouse Rock,” but Rocky knew this wasn’t their style.  He went through the motions, but somehow he just couldn’t make the emotional transfer.  The feelings the Patsy Cline song had inspired were still lingering around him. 
    Dex didn’t seem to have any problem with that.  “I don’t know about you guys,” he addressed the crowd, “but I’ve spent a night or two in jail myself.”  The crowd roared its approval, and Rocky knew this round was going to Dex.
    Sure enough, he tore it up, working the microphone stand as if it was his swing dance partner.  Rocky could only watch with awe, and unabashed lust, as Dex danced and swiveled his hips as lasciviously as Elvis himself, pouring all his sexual energy into seducing the audience.  And the audience was wet for him, Rocky could see plain as day.  There was nothing more erotic than a man dancing well, and Rocky couldn’t take his eyes off Dex.
    If Patsy had resulted in a tie, there was no doubt in Rocky’s mind that round two had gone to Dex.
     
    Dex raised his hat to the crowd and wiped the sweat off his brow.  All the frustration, all the pent up energies that “Walking” had stirred up, had been released via Elvis.  Nothing like vigorous exercise to clear the mind, he thought with a grin.  Rocky’s awkwardness with the song had been apparent. 
    Self-defense mechanisms can be cruel, and Dex thought with black satisfaction that Rocky wasn’t much, was he, just a privileged little shit who’d obviously