Page 35 of Demon Loved
They both promised her they would, and she headed over to the foursome, who called out that they wanted another round.
Once they were all safely occupied, Bill held up his glass. “To your performance.”
Brianna thought maybe it was a little much to be toasting her own singing and playing, but since he was the one who’d brought it up, she figured she might as well go along with his wishes for now. However, she couldn’t help remarking, “If you say so.”
His deep green eyes crinkled with amusement around the corners. “I do say so. And I think it’s even more impressive that you only finished that final song last night. It was amazing.”
She wanted to squirm in her seat like an unprepared child asked a question by her teacher. Since that wouldn’t have looked very adult — and she knew she needed to learn to accept praise, no matter how difficult it might be — she only said, “Thank you.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t been approached to record your music,” he commented next.
Her mouth twisted a little, and she drank some of her petite sirah before saying, “Acoustic folk isn’t exactly hitting the top of the charts these days.”
He sipped from his glass as well. “It isn’t? I don’t pay too much attention.”
Kind of hard for her to believe that when he was from Los Angeles, the heart of the music industry, but then again, just because you were surrounded by something didn’t mean you had to participate in it.
And he had told her just yesterday that he preferred to listen to classical guitar. That genre wasn’t exactly burning up the Top 40, either.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I like playing live, even though it can be nerve-wracking sometimes. I feel like something might get lost when it’s reduced to a bunch of ones and zeroes.”
For just a moment, his forehead puckered, as if he wasn’t quite sure of what she was talking about. But then his brow smoothed and he said, “I suppose I can see your point.”
She wouldn’t mention that a year or so earlier, an agent from Phoenix had heard her playing at Page Springs Winery and had talked about wanting to sign her and record an album. But as enticing as the prospect had sounded at first, she’d known she couldn’t go down that path, not when being a witch was all about lying low. Some might have argued that any kind of public performance wasn’t exactly flying under the radar, either, although in her mind, she thought there was something very different about playing live to a limited number of people versus having recorded music that could be out there on Spotify or Pandora or some other streaming service.
So she’d turned down the offer, even though it had hurt a little, and stuck with what she was already doing.
It wasn’t as if she had a huge amount of alternatives, not when one of the most important directives she had to follow was to make sure she didn’t attract too much attention.
“Well,” Bill said after he took another sip of wine, “I don’t think you’re going to need to worry too much about playing your original work from now on. People seemed to respond to it very positively.”
That they had. Then again, the audience at a folk festival was a little different from the crowd you’d get at a tasting room, people who were there to drink first and listen to music a very distant second. Bree doubted they would want to be presented with something that made them think too hard.
She would worry about all that later, though. For now, it was enough to enjoy some of the lingering endorphins from her performance, and to know she’d gotten through the thing without embarrassing herself.
Far from it, actually.
Bill seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk about her contribution to the folk festival anymore, and he shifted the conversation to the logistics of her performance tomorrow at Alcantara Winery and how he was just fine with meeting her at her apartment so she wouldn’t have to drive up to the Grand Hotel to fetch him.
That seemed like the perfect opening to invite him over there after they were done with their drinks here, but something seemed to hold Brianna’s tongue. She couldn’t say for sure if that was because she knew deep down there was no reason to have things get that serious, or whether it was a simple case of cold feet.
Either way, she told him that sounded great, and they left it there.
See what happens tomorrow, she told herself, and yet she still didn’t know if that would be the right time for them.
Maybe it would never be.
He hadn’t asked her to dinner, and she’d let it go, telling herself that they’d spent most of the day together and she shouldn’t monopolize his time. All the same, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering exactly what he’d done that night after they parted ways at Vino Zona.
When he appeared at her apartment exactly at 2:30 the next afternoon as she’d requested, though, he looked rested and full of energy at the same time, so whatever he’d been up to, it couldn’t have been too taxing.
He helped her load her guitars and amp and cords and the rest of it in the back of her Suburban, and then they rattled their way down the hill. Bree took the upper route through Cottonwood since that wasn’t her destination, then turned onto Highway 260, which would take them down to Alcantara.
As they drove, he sat up a little straighter in the worn leather seat, his gaze seeming to take in everything about the landscape around them. Bree couldn’t say that it looked too different from the country up near Clarkdale, was only more rolling hills covered in yellow grass that had faded since its green heyday during monsoon season, but she supposed the contours of the land were just different enough to hold his interest.
They turned off the highway onto a rough road that eventually switched over to gravel, taking them past a trailer park full of travelers enjoying the last bits of summer before autumn truly arrived, then down a steep incline that led onto the winery property. Acres of grapevines stretched on either side, and the building that housed the tasting room looked like a Tuscan villa set down in the center of the Arizona countryside.
“It’s beautiful,” Bill said, and Bree nodded.
