Moving in Reverse (14 page)

April, Jesse and Sophie on one side,
Blake on the other.

“
I didn’t know you were in
town,” Blake broke the silence, his voice measured and
even.

“
Never left,” Sophie
replied, a slight hint of edge in her tone that neither Blake or I
missed.

“
How is everything?”
Blake’s mom chimed in, her question directed to Sophie. I squirmed
in my seat, not wanting to hear the answer, good or bad. If
everything was terrible, Blake had deserted his best friends and
probably sunk their careers. If things were great, then Blake was
replaceable.

“
Good,” Sophie said
noncommittally. “We’ve all been working really hard on the show,”
she looked down at her napkin. “So, that’s been good.” She said it
in the same measured tone that Blake had used, giving away
nothing.

A beat. No one seemed to know what to
say next.

“
Are you working on an
album?” Blake’s mom pressed, and everyone at the table stiffened. I
wasn’t sure if she was clueless or actually goading Sophie, and I
resisted the urge to stomp on her foot under the table. Physical
abuse probably wasn’t the best impression to make during my first
meeting with Blake’s parents, even if it sort of seemed like they
were asking for it.

“
Nope,” the sarcasm in
Sophie’s voice was evident now. “Can’t start till we find a new
guitarist, can we?”

Everyone at the table froze. Blake’s
mom looked down at her napkin again, and I felt my body tremble
involuntarily. Blake’s hand squeezed my knee, and not in a romantic
way.

“
Who’s hungry?” Blake’s
father broke the silence, picking up a platter and passing it
around. “I’d be lying if I didn’t warn you that most of this is
from Dean and Deluca,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood. “But
Elizabeth made one hell of a dessert.”

I blanched. They were planning
dessert? Ticking off the minutes in my head, I tried to calculate
the likelihood that we’d get through ninety minutes without a major
blowup.

And… that would be zero. (Thank you,
AP Calculus.)

“
How’s that going?” Blake
said to Sophie, rising to the taunt. I looked up at him,
surprised.

“
Getting close,” Sophie
said, smiling sweetly in a way that seemed anything else. “How’s
college?” She dug back. “Gain the freshman fifteen yet?”

Blake’s dad chuckled
politely.

“
Casey joined a sorority,”
Blake said, and I shot him a dirty look. Pushing me under the bus
wasn’t the best tactic for either of us.

“
Oh, you did?” Blake’s mom
asked, suddenly excited. “Which one?”

“
Kappa Theta Beta,” I
said, wondering if I was even still in the sorority after the
disaster that Halloween had become. Not sure I even still wanted to
be.

“
What fun,” his mom said,
looking across the table, trying to lighten the mood. “I loved
living in a sorority house. When else do you get all your best
friends in the same place, all the time?”

I watched Blake and Sophie look at
each other. To an outsider, their faces were blank and cool, but I
knew them both too well. Blake’s eyes were dark with holding back
emotion, and Sophie’s were brimming with tears.

“
You don’t,” Sophie said,
her voice soft. “It only happens once.” She peeled her gaze away
from Blake and turned to me. “So enjoy that sorority,
Casey.”

My lip trembled. I thought about
everything we’d had — the three of us, all of us, that summer, and
how quickly it had all just disappeared. The girl across the table
from me wasn’t the Sophie I knew, the girl who’d picked out my
clothes and lent me her cell phone and confessed to me that April
wanted the band to do a reality show but Blake hadn’t
agreed.

The girl I was sitting across from now
was colder, harder, angrier. Angrier at me.

A tear slipped down my cheek, and I
brushed it away with a napkin, hoping no one would
notice.

“
I think we should go,”
Blake said, and only then did I realize that while I’d been
watching him, he’d been watching me.

“
Sophie,” I said, hearing
my voice crack on her name. “I didn’t — we didn’t mean—” I couldn’t
even finish the sentence. I couldn’t get into words all the things
that I wanted to apologize for.

“
Of course you didn’t,”
she cut me off, staring hard into my eyes. “But you
did.”

I took one last look at her, at
Blake’s bewildered father and his disappointed-looking mother,
before Blake took my arm and turned me toward the door, practically
pulling me out of my seat.

“
You have nothing to
apologize for,” he hissed at me as he opened the door to the
house.

“
I do, though,” I felt
tears flowing down my face now, and didn’t bother to hold them
back. “I ruined everything.” I choked back a sob. “You know I
did.”

I’d stopped crying by the time we
pulled into Blake’s driveway, concentrating on taking deep breaths
to hold back the tears. Blake didn’t say a word the whole ride
home, and I wasn’t sure if he was angry at me, at Sophie, at his
parents, or at all of us. He killed the ignition and sat in the
seat, staring straight ahead.

He finally exhaled.

“
I’m sorry,” he said,
still not looking at me.

“
For what?” My voice
sounded smaller than I meant it to.

Blake paused for a long time, and when
he looked at me, his face was completely serious. “You shouldn’t
feel that way,” he said softly. “I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel
like any of this is your fault. Casey, I think this all would have
happened whether or not I ever met you.”

I realized I’d been holding my breath.
“But?”

Blake sighed. “No buts. You play the
hand your dealt, right?”

I smiled. “That sounds like a
lyric.”

Blake smiled back, a little sad.
“Maybe in another life it would have been.”

I opened the door, stepping out onto
Blake’s driveway, the asphalt reflecting street lights and
moonlight.

“
Why do you think your
parents invited Sophie?” I asked, looking back into the
car.

Blake shook his head, fishing his keys
out of his pocket and locking the car behind him. “I have no idea,”
he sighed, putting an arm around my shoulder. “They’ve known Sophie
since we were teenagers. Maybe they just couldn’t see what a train
wreck it was going to be.”

“
Maybe,” I agreed,
thinking about it. A blind person could have seen that this dinner
was a disaster in the making.

Blake opened the door for me, turning
on a light. “Are you hungry?”

I glanced at the clock on his DVR. It
wasn’t even nine o’clock. “Not really,” I said, even though we’d
abandoned dinner before I’d even taken a bite.

I glanced at the stairs. After a
roller coaster of a night, maybe something could still be
salvaged.

“
Maybe we should...” I
said, taking a deep breath and glancing up at Blake, painting on my
most suggestive smile. I stood up on my tiptoes to kiss him. “Go to
bed?”

“
Casey,” Blake’s voice was
hoarse and I felt tension in his shoulders as I slipped my arms
around them, trying to distract him.

He kissed me back for a moment, and
then pulled away.

“
No,” he said firmly,
taking my wrists and unhooking them from around his neck. “Not
tonight, Casey. I’m not in the mood.”

I watched him take a deep breath,
looking at me like there was something else he wanted to say, and
then he walked up the stairs, alone.

I sank down onto Blake’s couch,
feeling tears form for the second time tonight.

Of course he didn’t want to sleep with
me, I thought to myself, letting my head fall into the
cushion.

No matter how much he tried to deny
it, I was the girl who’d ruined his life.

Maybe in another life it
would have been
, he’d said in the car. But
Blake Parker didn’t need another life. He had everything he wanted
in this one.

Or he did.

Before he met me.

Chapter
Nineteen

It was early in California when I woke
up, not adjusted to the jet lag. I blinked, orienting myself for a
second before opening my eyes, taking in the sparse, modern
furniture of Blake’s living room.

I’d fallen asleep on the couch
downstairs, curled up against one of its pillows. After Blake had
gone upstairs, I’d spent some time thinking about the night — about
how angry Sophie seemed to be, about her reasons for it.

Without thinking, I grabbed my phone
and a sweater and headed outside. I wanted to clear my head a
little before Blake woke up, and I figured a walk on the beach was
exactly what I needed.

I went out the gate, thankful there
was no one on the street as I left. The photographers seemed to
mostly leave Blake’s house alone—unlike last summer, when they
were constantly hovering at the edge of the driveway, trying to get
photos of us in sweatpants or without makeup.

I brought my hand up to my face. At
least I still had last night’s makeup on. Somehow that wasn’t much
of a consolation.

I’d slipped on a pair of soft jean
shorts that the store had sent over — they were instantly my
favorite pair that I’d ever owned, and grabbed one of Blake’s tee
shirts from the day before. I kicked off my flip flops the moment
my feet touched the beach, and wandered down to where the waves
started to make the sand smooth and walkable.

Feeling my feet sink in, I drew my
name with my toe into the wet sand, watched it disappear in a wave
a moment later.

The terrible truth: even after last
night, I wanted to call Sophie. I had to believe there was
something I could say to make her understand — that I hadn’t meant
to steal Blake from Moving Neutral, that breaking up the band had
been the last thing I ever wanted. That college was good for Blake
(I hoped). I wanted to tell her how sad I was that my favorite band
would never have another album, that we couldn’t all spend next
summer on their tour bus together.

I stared at her number, still in my
phone from the past summer, trying to think of what I could
say.

And then I did the strangest
thing.

Scrolling past Sophie’s number, I
found another one, one that I’d never used — had never even
imagined there would be a reason to use.

Holding my breath, I hit
send.

I called April.

“
Who is this?” My whole
body tensed when she picked up the phone, three rings later, just
as I’d been sure it was going through to voicemail and I could
safely hang up.

“
Um, April?” I glanced at
the time on the phone — it was seven thirty in the morning. I
wasn’t exactly starting on the right foot. “It’s Casey.” I paused,
feeling like an idiot. “Casey Snow,” I specified.

I heard her take a deep
breath.

“
What do you
want?”

She said it flatly, like she didn’t
care either way. I imagined April waking up in her perfect bed,
silk sheets and her flawless skin and hair. She’d gotten everything
she wanted out of last summer… except Blake.

“
I want to talk to you,” I
paused. “About Blake. About Sophie. About everything.”

She was quiet for a long time. “I
don’t think there’s much to say, Casey. We all went our separate
ways, rather dramatically,” I thought I caught a hint of a smirk in
her voice, and blushed at the memory of me running out of a party
in tears when she’d revealed my secret to Blake.

“
I think there is,” I
said. If I was going to fix this, I had to at least know where we
stood. It felt like trying to put a band-aid on a gunshot wound,
but maybe I could find a way.

“
Well,” I heard a shift in
her voice, and felt myself start to get hopeful. Maybe this would
work out. Maybe there was something I could do. “I could meet you
for lunch,” April said, her tone even and measured. “But I’m
filming today. You’d need to sign a release, get mic-ed, all
that.”

I felt my stomach drop. In all my
thoughts about Blake and the band, the reality show hadn’t even
registered in my mind. I remembered Sophie mentioning it last
night, so it had obviously become a part of their lives.

I didn’t want to be on a reality show.
But if there was something I could do for Blake, and it could get
me there, it was worth it.

“
Fine,” I said, my voice
firm. April was good at intimidating me, but this time I was going
to be ready for it. “Just text me where I need to be and
when.”

I thought I heard a smile in her voice
when she said good bye, which made me shiver. What was I getting
myself into?

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson
about lying to Blake, but I promised myself this was just a white
lie.

“
Can I borrow your car?” I
asked him at 11:30. I was supposed to meet someone from the
production team at noon to ‘set me up’ for lunch at 12:30. I wasn’t
sure how much ‘setting up’ there was to do, but I didn’t want to be
late.