Of Masques and Martyrs Read Online Free PDF Page A

cloud of smoke that clogged her lungs. For the silence of the audience while she poured her heart out to them, and the roar of approval when she was through. Her sets moved from bluesy pop standards like Bob Seger’s “Main Street” to the absolute core of the blues. It was stripped-down, soul-baring music she’d come to love as a child, trying desperately to fall asleep as her mother sat and drank herself into a stupor listening to Blind Willie McTell and Elmore James and Big Mama Thornton and T-Bone Walker. So many songs. So much pain.
    Until the day she died, Nikki’s mother, Etta, had still listened to music on vinyl. With a record player. The memory was bittersweet, like nearly all her thoughts of her mother were.
    She put the sadness into her voice, into the song, and gave it to the audience as a kind of offering. Maybe they’d all feel a little better when she was done. At least that’s how she’d always thought of it.
    When she was through, she barely allowed the audience a moment to applaud before launching into Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Love Me Like a Man.” It always made her feel sexy to sing such a raw, inviting song. She let her eyes drift over the shadowed faces of the audience, where they sat around tables and tipped back Lone Stars and Dixies and glasses of whiskey. Suddenly the men stopped drinking.
    They always stopped drinking during this song. Their eyes riveted on Nikki, on the way her body moved against her guitar. She invited it, moved with it. That’s what the song was all about. She slapped the front of the guitar in time with her picking and strumming, and she smiled with mischief toward the faces in the dark.
    “I need someone to love me, I know you can,” she sang throatily. “Believe me when I tell you, you can love me like a man.”
    Her eyes continued to trawl across the audience. Then stopped, frozen on one face. A handsome, chiseled, intense face, belonging to a man who’d come to see her four nights running. He had short, raggedly cut hair and a goatee, and when her gaze stopped on him, he held it with his own. His mouth blossomed into a lopsided grin, and Nikki felt the whiskey-warmth in her belly spread further through her.
    The words to the song almost eluded her, but she caught herself and went on, unable to look away from the dark-haired man leaning against the bar. There was an intimacy to their exchange now, and she began to blush with the sexuality of the song.
    What’s wrong with you? she chided herself, and shook it off. She looked away, continued the song. Remembered the man. His easy smile, the confidence in his bearing. Not a freak, certainly. Charming as a stalker. But that didn’t mean he was one. Just a fan, then. A really, truly, good-looking fan.
    When her gaze swept past him again, it was Nikki’s turn to smile. She ran through the rest of her first set feeling a kind of tingly excitement she wasn’t at all used to. Unexpected as this feeling was, she knew it was also unwarranted. There was no reason for her to expect the guy at the bar to be anyone she’d want to get to know.
    But when she laid her guitar down and stepped offstage, Nikki waded through the smoke and the applause, brushing past chairs on a direct path for the man at the bar whose darling grin and smiling eyes drew her on.
    She was perhaps twenty feet away from him when a broad stone wall of a man blocked her way, a leer stretching his lips and a Dixie in either hand. He held one of the beers out to her, stepped in closer, and she felt suddenly, oddly, cold.
    “I like the way you sing,” he said suggestively, his southern drawl more pronounced than that of the locals. “Like you’re lonely and wet and can’t help yourself.”
    Nikki felt her stomach churn. Her upper lip curled back in an involuntary sneer.
    “You’re a fucking poet,” she shot at him, and stepped to one side, intending to go around.
    She heard the dropped beer bottle shatter on the floor in the same instant