Moving in Reverse (15 page)

Blake had been on the phone or
scribbling in his notebook all morning, hardly paying any attention
to me after last night, but he looked up, surprised, when I
asked.

“
Case — do you even know
how to drive?”

I punched him in the arm. “Of course I
do.”

“
Cause I seem to recall
that the night we met, you were basically busted out of jail after,
um, crashing someone else’s car?”

I threw a pillow at him. “That was all
a big misunderstanding. Besides, it was Madison’s fault,” I smiled.
I’d been on the phone with Madison, trying to find an earring she’d
dropped in my car, when I’d run into the side of our garage and
wound up grounded all summer.

Looking back, that car accident was
the best thing that ever happened to me.

“
I’m a great driver, I
promise.” That wasn’t exactly the truth either, but who was keeping
score at this point?

“
Where are you
going?”

“
Shopping,” I lied
smoothly. “Yesterday was great, but if we’re going to be going out,
you’re right, I need some dresses that are a little less
parent-appropriate.”

A smile crept across his face. “I’m
all for that, Case,” he said, wrapping his palm around my knee and
inching his fingers upwards. “Are you sure you don’t want me to
come help you pick them out?” He grinned wickedly.

“
No, sir,” I giggled,
moving just out of his grasp. “They’ll be a surprise.”

He leaned back into the couch, mock
frustrated. “The keys are on the kitchen counter, with my wallet.
You can grab my credit card, but let them know that they might have
to call to authorize the charges.”

I smiled at him wistfully. I didn’t
deserve how amazingly well Blake treated me, how perfect he’d been
from the first minute we’d met.

Leaning down, I planted a long, slow
kiss on his lips, trying to tell him without words how much I loved
him, how grateful I was to have him, and how hard I was going to
try to fix the disaster I’d turned his life into. Blake’s hands
rose to the back of my neck, tangling themselves in my hair, and
when I finally stood up, his eyes were dark with desire.

“
I’ll be back in a few
hours,” I said, winking at him. “I love you,” I called over my
shoulder as I walked out the door, happy to say the
words.

Chapter Twenty

“
Hook this onto your bra,”
said a fairly cute guy in his mid-twenties as soon as I got out of
my car at the restaurant. He handed me a little black box that sort
of resembled a walkie talkie, and then patted down my back to feel
my bra strap.

I took a step back, weirded
out.

“
That’ll work,” he said,
referring to my bra, his words coming out rushed and clipped. “Can
you attach it yourself or do you need help?”

“
I’ll do it myself,” I
answered. Strange men messing around with my underwear wasn’t
exactly at the top of the Things Casey Snow is Comfortable With
list.

A minute or two later, I’d managed to
hook the box inside my shirt, where it protruded visibly from the
back.

“
This is weird,” I said,
to no one in particular.

“
Welcome to Hollywood,” a
girl in her thirties approached me, with long sandy blonde hair and
a tan blazer. “This is your NDA and release of your image, okay?
You can take a few minutes to sign them and then we can get
started.”

I paused for a second. “What’s an
NDA?”

She turned back to me, and I thought I
caught her rolling her eyes. “It’s a non-disclosure agreement. It
basically just says that you can’t talk about what happens while
we’re shooting until after the show airs. Basic stuff. Just take a
quick look and sign.”

I stared down at the clipboard of
legal documents, totaling about fifteen pages of dense contracts,
and felt my confidence fly out the window. Should I send them to my
mom to look over? Should I send them to Blake?

Strike one, strike two. Blake didn’t
even know I was doing this, and (I remembered guiltily) my mom
didn’t even know I was in California.

I looked down at the documents,
getting more freaked out by the second. Half of the pages were
about things I didn’t understand — did I want the law of California
to apply to these? Did I want them to be transferrable
to—

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to
get sued, but it seemed like all I had to do was keep my mouth
shut.

I signed the bottom of the contract
and handed it back to the girl. “I can still tell Blake,
right?”

She glanced at me with a smile I
couldn’t quite read. “Oh, for sure. Tell Blake anything you
want.”

I shivered, hoping I was making the
right decision.

“
Ok,” I breathed deeply
and tried to stand up as straight as I could. “What do we do
now?”

“
We’ll get you seated at a
table, then film April walking in. The rest is up to
you.”

“
Ok,” I said, hoping my
voice didn’t give away my hesitation.

“
Oh,” she said, as if
remembering. “This is obvious, but don’t talk about the show while
you’re being filmed, okay?”

“
Right,” I frowned at her.
How was I supposed to talk with April about everything that had
happened without mentioning the show?

I walked straight through the brightly
lit restaurant, into their back garden, where a table was set for
us. All the other tables around it were empty — I wasn’t sure
whether the production company had rented out the space or whether
nobody else wanted to sign those image releases. I took my seat and
a waiter immediately approached me.

“
Can I get you started
with something to drink?” He asked, handing me a wine list that
looked like it was a hundred pages long.

It’s
noon
, I wanted to say, but bit my tongue.
“Can I have a coffee, please?”

“
Of course,” the waiter
turned and almost collided with a guy holding up a lightbox,
apologizing profusely. Maybe he was an actor, hoping his big break
would come from serving coffee on April’s reality show? Hard to
tell.

And then I heard her voice.

“
Casey—” I stiffened.
April’s sugary-sweet tone meant she either wanted something from
you, or she was about to crush your heart into a thousand
pieces.

For my sake, and for Blake’s, I hoped
she wanted something.

I got up as she approached the table
and we hugged awkwardly, April planting a California-style kiss on
one of my cheeks. When did we become cheek-kissing
friends?

I glanced at the cameras. About thirty
minutes ago, apparently.

“
Hang on,” the girl in the
blazer tottered towards us in heels. “Casey, whatever you do, don’t
look at the cameras. It makes everything you do virtually unusable
for us. Just focus on April and the conversation.”

I smiled weakly. “Right,
sorry.”

“
You’ll get used to it,”
April touched my arm, an almost sympathetic gesture, but the
cameras weren’t rolling anymore. I looked up at her, surprised, and
she shrugged.

“
Let’s start over,” tan
blazer announced, and walked off to somewhere else in the
restaurant out of sight of the cameras.

April turned on her heels and walked
out, and then reentered a moment later at the exact same pace.
“Casey,” she purred in the same voice, planning the same
pseudo-kiss on my cheek.

I tried to manage an authentic
smile.

“
April,” I didn’t kiss her
cheek back, but gave in to the half-hug she offered. “How are
you?”

“
Well, I was surprised to
hear from you,” April said, getting right to the point. “After what
you did to us this summer.”

I blinked. “April, I think there were
a lot of reasons for what happened. I may have been one of them,
but it wasn’t just me. All of us had a part in this.”

“
I mean, Casey, your
boyfriend deserted us. It’s taken us months to even find a new
guitarist — we should have been almost done with our next album by
now.”

I looked at April to see if she was
serious or if she was just being dramatic for the cameras, but I
couldn’t tell. It looked to me like there was real pain in her
eyes, but she could just have been a good actress.

“
I know,” I said. “Trust
me, he knows too. But there were... other considerations.” Again, I
couldn’t figure out how to talk about what happened without talking
about the show, so I pretty much sounded like an idiot.

April rolled her eyes. “Fortunately
for you, we’ve been pretty resourceful. Our new guitarist just
signed on this morning.”

I blinked. Sophie hadn’t mentioned
that last night — had we not given her enough time? Did she even
know?

I couldn’t stop myself. “Who is
it?”

April smiled smugly, and I felt the
hair on my arms stand on end.

“
I think you know him,
actually,” she said, her voice sugary sweet again.

Just then, the waiter appeared with my
coffee, setting it down in front of me. I was grateful for the
distraction. He turned to April, getting tongue-tied immediately —
men tended to do that when she was around. She ordered a
mimosa.

“
April,” I started over.
“I called you because I wanted to see if there was a way we could
all—” My tongue caught in my throat. I wasn’t sure how to say it.
“We could all be friends again.”

She let out a short burst of laughter.
“Be friends again?”

I stammered, trying to figure out
exactly what I was asking. “Look, I know you and I were never
friends, but the rest of you were. He misses you. I think you all
miss each other. How do we get past that?”

I’d said it as best I could. I thought
I saw April’s face soften for a minute, but then she was unreadable
again.

“
Maybe he should have
thought of that last summer,” she said softly, looking into my
eyes. “We all needed him, and he chose you.”

We sat there for a second in silence,
both of us aware of the void between us.

And in that second, something clicked.
I finally realized that no matter what I did, I couldn’t fix this.
Not by myself. Maybe I’d made Blake’s choice possible, but I hadn’t
made it for him. If someone was going to repair his burned bridges,
it had to be him.

I was just about to get up, say
goodbye to April, and leave the restaurant as quickly as I could,
when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“
Snow,” he said it like an
inside joke, coming up behind me and clamping a hand down on my
shoulder. I almost spit my coffee straight across the table. “What
a surprise.”

You could have knocked me over with a
feather as Tanner Cole took his hand off my shoulder, and sat down
at our table for lunch.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Staring at Tanner, it was like my
goldfish had jumped out of its bowl and started mowing the
lawn.

“
What—” I said the first
thing that came to my lips. “What are you doing in
L.A.?”

April snorted with laughter, grinning
across the table at me. “Oh, Casey,” she sighed. “I gave you so
much credit as this mastermind, but you have no idea what you’re
doing, do you? I thought maybe with Columbia and
everything...”

She let it trail off, the
implication hanging in the air.
You sound
like my Lit professor,
I thought to
myself, and clamped my lips shut.

I looked at Tanner pleadingly, and was
surprised to find his eyes concerned and almost
apologetic.

“
Remember when I was
looking for Blake the other day?” he said softly, like I was a bird
on his windowsill that he didn’t want to frighten away. “It was
because...”

Nobody seemed to be able to finish a
sentence today.

“
Because of
what?”

“
Because Tanner,” April
cut in, looking at me gleefully, “is our new guitarist.” She paused
for a second, looked at me suspiciously. “How did you two meet
anyway? Jeez, Casey, you’re like a honing pigeon.”

I blinked, trying to make sense of it
in my mind.

Tanner Cole? The guy who stole my cell
phone at a concert, was taking Blake’s place in Moving
Neutral?

And he’d been at Columbia to do what,
exactly? Get Blake’s permission?

Gloat?

I was suddenly angry. Why had I ever
thought that seeing April was a good idea? Every time she came
within 50 feet of me, my life fell apart. I should’ve taken out a
restraining order, not called her up for help.

Tanner looked at me like he wasn’t
sure what to do next, reaching out to put his hand on my shoulder
again. “Snow,” he said it quietly, like he was trying to get me to
focus.

I snapped away from his
hand, jerking so hard I almost fell out of my chair. “You don’t
know me,” I hissed. “We are
not
friends.
”