CHAPTER 3
CAT
She didn't expect to see Nick Bradley ever again, or maybe she was hoping she wouldn't. God, every time she allowed her mind to wander back to that night she cringed at herself for being so stupid and weird.
Matt and Amanda didn't ask about the double date fiasco when Cat came over the following morning to pick up Luke, likely warned by Hannah beforehand not to say a word. Hannah didn't try to set her up on another date over the next month either, and so February eased into March with very little perturbation.
Well, very little perturbation unless you count a sudden onslaught of homework from all of her professors, a lot of drama at the music store where she worked, and an ex-boyfriend that still wasn't doing anything to show he had an ounce of fatherly juice within him.
"You look like crap," Amanda said when she came into the store on Saturday afternoon.
It was a relatively slow day – as were most days in a music store in the age of iTunes and YouTube – so Cat was hunched over the counter trying to get through some homework that was due on Monday morning.
She looked up and held her tongue out at her friend.
"So do you," she commented.
To be fair, Amanda looked far from crappy with her tiny baby bump and the natural glow of pregnancy lighting up her bronze complexion. She was about Cat's height, but kept insisting whenever the subject was brought up that she was half an inch taller. She had long brown hair falling in perfect waves down her back, and they were currently pulled up in a very successful messy bun, the kind Cat could never quite manage to duplicate no matter how many YouTube tutorials she copied off of. Her eyes were closer to gold than brown and while she usually wore contacts, today she'd resorted to her hipster glasses.
"Bitch, I'm fabulous," Amanda said, flipping her purple scarf over her shoulder and sending Cat a very dramatic and completely false glower.
Cat rolled her eyes.
"You're a dork," she commented.
"So are you," Amanda grinned. "So what's up? You here all by yourself again?" she wondered, moving over to examine the CDs in the display rack next to the cash register.
"Yeah, Holly didn't show up for her shift again and Paul couldn't come in to fill in for her, so Curt asked if I could handle the shift on my own. I told him it wouldn't be a problem, so he'll just be popping in a little later to help set up for open mic night... we've only gotten like, five customers all morning so I've been dealing," Cat sighed, pushing her homework away for her Exploring Poetry class with Professor Goldstein, deciding she'd done enough analyzing for the next little while.
"That sucks," Amanda frowned.
"Yeah," Cat agreed.
"So is Hannah babysitting the little guy?" Amanda continued, making her way over to examine the glass display case at the other end of the counter.
"Yeah, until ten tonight so I can stick around with Curt and watch the performers," Cat replied.
"Are you performing too?" Amanda asked. She already had a very good idea of the answer, but she liked to tease Cat whenever she could so she took a shot anyway. She gave her friend an exaggerated look, accompanied by a knowing smirk.
"I— um... no," Cat shrugged, fussing aimlessly with the plastic container of guitar picks that happened to be conveniently in reach.
"Someday my dear, you're gonna get over that stage fright of yours and people will hear your awesome chops," Amanda said in a very prophetic tone. "Now I need your bathroom, so I'll be right back," she added quickly and ran quickly towards the back, despite the sign on the door signaling that only staff was allowed through.
Open mic night was a very new idea of Curtis's, Cat's boss, to try and bring attention to the store and encourage people to do some shopping while they listened to local talent. Tonight was the first night they'd be putting the idea into motion, and if things worked out Curtis was planning to make it a weekly thing – every Saturday from four to nine o'clock.
Curtis arrived at two to set up the little stage area at the front of the store while Cat continued to man the counter. They had a very surprising influx of customers so that Cat barely even saw the time pass. Before she knew it, it was four o'clock and a few people were trickling in, some with guitar cases on their backs.
One of these people, and Cat's stomach gave a very uncomfortable jolt when she realized this, was none other than Nick Bradley. As he was making his way down the signup line to get his slot number, he was talking to a heavily tattooed man with dark brown hair and glasses.
Cat ducked her head and used her auburn hair as a curtain to hide her face from view before realizing she didn't have to.
He couldn't see her.
She tucked her hair behind her ear again and sneaked another glance.
"Cat, come here for a sec," Curtis said over his shoulder at her. He was at the signup table sorting out when everybody would be performing. Cat could've sworn her heart stopped beating for a second when he called her name, her eyes darting back to Nick and his tattooed friend.
Cat darted around the counter and crept up to the signup table.
"Take over for me for a couple minutes, will you? I've got to take a piss," Curtis said.
He was a rather stalky man in his mid-thirties with long, unkempt hair and a straggly beard. He wore a t-shirt of some obscure 70s rock band that Cat only knew of because he played their records a lot in the store.
"Okay," Cat nodded and proceeded to take over the signups, hoping all the while that Curtis would get back before Nick's turn came along.
Of course Curtis took his goddamn time, and Cat had the vague suspicion that her boss was on more than just a pee break. She just hoped he wouldn't come back smelling like pot.
Nick and his friend were next in line now, with only a nervous-looking teenage girl and her shabby guitar case separating them from the table.
After working for him for almost a year, Cat knew Curtis well by now. He was this eternal bachelor with a bed-them-and-street-them sort of view on relationships. He was the last person to play matchmaker, but if she hadn't known better she would've thought he'd taken a page from Hannah's book and done this on purpose.
"They traded in the stoner guy for a hot girl... ginger, blue eyes," Nick's tattooed friend said in a hushed voice that was loud enough for Cat to hear. "And she's blushing, I think I spoke too loud," he added, nudging Nick playfully in the side and winking at Cat.
"Um, hi," Cat said shyly when the teenager left the line and Nick came strolling forward with his guide dog on his right ride, that same, goofy grin on his chiseled face. He'd grown a little more scruff in the time between their and date now, and Cat kind of liked the way it looked on him.
His brow rose quickly in surprise, and Cat knew he'd recognized her voice as easily as she'd recognized his face.
"Well, well, we meet again," he grinned.
His tattooed friend rolled his eyes dramatically up toward the fluorescent lights.
"Of course you'd know the hot one... You always know the hot ones. It's like you're a magnet for the hot ones. You're killing me Smalls," he grumbled, but he was grinning and Nick was grinning too, neither one of them seeming at all annoyed.
Cat was just standing there idiotically, blushing, as usual.
"That's my buddy Leon, he's a pain in the ass," Nick said, swatting at Leon's ankles with his long cane, which he was holding in his left hand. "But he's got good guitar fingers so I'm keeping him around for that," he shrugged.
"My fingers are good for more than just picking at a guitar, I'll have you know," Leon smirked at Cat.
"Put your dick back in your pants," Nick chuckled.
"Are you two a group?" Cat replied dumbly, trying not to sound like she was slowly turning into a pile of mush on the floor.
"Nah, two solo acts," Nick answered.
"Nicholas here couldn't keep up with me if he tried," Leon said, wrapping a lazy arm around his much taller friend's shoulders, which made Leon look oddly lopsided.
"So, we've got stuff to fill out, yeah?" Nick asked, shrugging Leon off. He seemed to be the only one to have noticed that the rest of the queue was getting a little restless.
Cat was distracted all evening by the knowledge that Nick Bradley was in the same room as her again and that throughout their rather one-sided conversation at the signup table, he'd seemed almost flirty with her despite their disaster of a date last month.
Every once in a while, as Curtis went down the signup sheet and announced the names of the next performers to get their chance to go on stage, she'd catch herself staring at him seated just a row and a few chairs away with Leon. Worse still, sometimes Curtis would catch her staring. He'd snap his fingers in front of her face and make fun of her relentlessly for a few minutes afterward, telling her to enjoy the performances and stop looking at the pretty boys.
"I wasn't!" Cat hissed the second time he accused her of this.
"Which one are you into anyway? The tattooed one isn't much your type... looks too exciting and adventurous... so the scruffy dude with the blind dog then?" Curtis said lazily, leaning back in his chair so that the two front legs were hovering dangerously above the ground.
"The dog isn't blind," Cat said, shaking her head.
"You know what I meant," Curtis shrugged.
"It's a guide dog, or a service dog. You can't just go calling them blind dogs, I think that's, like, politically incorrect or something," Cat stated in a hushed voice so that she wouldn't disrupt the singer's acoustic performance of a song that was always playing on Top 40 radio nowadays. "Can we not talk about him anymore?" she added in an urgent hiss.
"Right, well I've got to go up there and introduce the next guy anyway," Curtis shrugged, sat his chair back on four legs and quickly made his way towards the platform that was acting as a makeshift stage. He leaped onto it when the last performer had walked off and grinned at the crowd.
"Next up, we've got Nick Bradley with an original song," he introduced. When Nick stood up, Curtis' face lit up knowingly. Cat knew he was about to embarrass her before he'd even opened his mouth. "Good luck buddy, doubt you'll need much of it, you've already got a girl in the crowd that can't stop gawking at you... right Cat?" he said in the microphone so that everybody in the store could hear.
Cat sunk low in her chair as she felt about a dozen pairs of eyes trail onto her. She was blushing so bad, she was pretty sure her whole face and neck were a deeper shade of red than her hair.
Nick's goofy, lopsided grin was all over his face as he found the wooden stool and sat down with his acoustic guitar in the middle of the platform. He looked at home there on the stage, chatting to the crowd for a moment and causing them all to laugh.
"Alright, let's do this," he said softly, lowering his head and beginning to play a soft tune on his guitar. His fingers moved so effortlessly across the strings, and the sound that came of that was the most beautiful Cat had ever heard – or well, that was until she heard him begin to sing.
The moment he opened his mouth, Cat's breath caught in her throat.
He had a rich, bluesy kind of voice that was so smooth and easy to listen to. It was easy to deduce he was a natural tenor, but around the chorus he demonstrated just how easily he could transition into a falsetto to hit the higher notes. His guitar riffs were also incredible, beyond anything Cat could do, and she'd been taking lessons since the age of six!
She only started breathing again when he finished his song, halfway wishing she wouldn't have been in such a trance so that she could've at least paid attention to the lyrics.
"Get your jaw off the floor and go talk to him or something," Curtis said with an exasperated sigh. "Or do I have to do that for you too?" he added with a disbelieving shake of his head.
"Oh you've done enough," Cat said to him with a half-smile.
Before she had a chance to find a reason not to, Cat got to her feet and ignored the fact that they felt a lot like jelly right now. Nick got off stage with his guitar back in its case and Curtis climbed on.
Cat met up with Nick before he had a chance to head back over to his seat.
"Hi," she smiled at him.
"Ah, if it isn't the hot one, hey, come to tell me how much I suck?" Nick chuckled.
"No! You were... I... um... you were incredible, really, I loved it," Cat spluttered, her words coming out so quickly she wasn't quite sure he'd made them all out.
"Well thank you," he grinned, looking quite pleased. "That's one of my newer ones... never played it in front of actual people before, so I was a little nervous about it," he added, looking a lot more sheepish now.
"No, I swear, it was great. You're great. I... um... I may have been swooning a little bit in my chair," Cat said daringly, but at soon as the words had left her lips she began blushing crimson again.
"Well I'm glad to hear that," Nick grinned, looking very amused with the whole situation. "Leon's performing after this girl, do you wanna sit with me?" he inquired, offering his arm to Cat for her to take.
"Oh, um, yeah, sure, of course I will," she grinned, taking his arm.
"Just don't go swooning over him too or else I might get jealous," Nick said, leaning low so that Cat could feel his breath against the top of her ear.
He was going to drive her crazy, he really was.