Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) Read Online Free PDF

pointed out, depressing shit. Cajun hippie depressing shit at that.
    She’d been fooling herself; tonight had rubbed in that message loud and clear. Nashville thrived off the hard work and substandard wages of idiots like Ceelie Savoie, willing to do anything for the privilege of sustaining their dreams.
    Her phone vibrated in the bag she’d slung over her shoulder, but she ignored it. Ceelie wasn’t ready to talk to Sonia, who’d probably figured out by now that she was gone. The smartphone had been the one luxury she’d allowed herself, based on the conviction that any day now, the dream agent could call, or the guy who’d been in the back of fill-in-the-blank lounge had been touched by her music and wanted to talk contracts.
    The acknowledgment that those dreams had begun to die brought with it other hard truths. She was bone tired, for one thing. Weary of the constant swim against the current, the struggle for money, the worry about when she’d catch a break, or if she’d break first. Her feet hurt, and not just because the soles of her boots had worn thin. Her heart hurt. When she’d left Louisiana with what little she had left from the sale of her dad’s house, she’d never dreamed that a decade later she might be worse off.
    Feeling more like sixty-eight than twenty-eight, Ceelie huffed to the third-floor studio apartment with her usual prayer—that the locks hadn’t been changed while she was out. She’d already gotten the eviction notice. The key clicked home, however, and the deadbolt turned.
    Inside, slid underneath the door, she found a note in the tall, looping handwriting of the building manager:
     
    Sorry doll, but you gotta be out by Monday morning. You can store stuff with me if you need to. —J
     
    Juanita was a good soul, even if her building was a firetrap and the absentee landlord made her do his dirty work. Like evicting deadbeat tenants.
    Ceelie collapsed onto the only real piece of furniture in the place besides the futon she used as a bed, an overstuffed brown armchair she and Sonia had found at a yard sale for ten bucks and hauled up the steps themselves. Forty-eight hours and she’d officially be homeless.
    Rock. Bottom.
    Her options were limited. Sonia would put her up, but Ceelie’s friend had a studio apartment not much bigger than this one, plus her own set of dreams. She tended bar at the Opry Shed, did odd jobs around town to help pay her way through the local community college, and hoped to earn a transfer scholarship to study art at Vanderbilt.
    They’d joked about their futures: Sonia would buy her own art gallery, and Ceelie would take time off her third world tour to play at its grand opening.
    Sonia would make it, but Ceelie’s gut told her it was time for a do-over on her part. She could write songs, sing, and cook. Period. Since she’d proven incapable of supporting herself with the first two, maybe she could find a job in a restaurant kitchen and work her way up. Music would become a hobby, not a vocation. If she could accept that once and for all, the rest might work itself out.
    Accepting that the thing she loved most was going to fail her, or that she had failed it? Gut-wrenching.
    The phone vibrated again, and Ceelie dug it out of her bag with a sigh. Might as well break the news to Sonia that she would have an uninvited visitor, at least for a few days. She had nowhere else to live until she could find another job or go full time at the pancake house.
    Ceelie frowned at the number on the screen, recognizing the 985 area code all too well. She’d used it her whole life, at least until she’d left Louisiana behind. Her mom had taken off when she was a kid, and her dad died from cancer at age forty-six after too many years working shifts at the gas plant. That was a fact of life and death in South Louisiana, which is why he’d practically ordered her to leave the first chance she got, before she got trapped there like he had been.
    Bottom line: she had nobody