by Grace James
“It’s not like you’re thinking. He’s just a friend now –”
“Ohhhh,” he nodded with mock solemnity. “That’s okay, then.”
“Blake, I promise that’s all he is.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t you tell me you were gonna meet him?”
“Because…because of where we were going,” I said hesitantly. “And because I knew you probably wouldn’t get the fact that Finn’s just my friend and nothing more, given our history and all…” I felt my face heat as I trailed off, because when I said those things aloud it really didn’t sound like I gave Blake much credit.
He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again they were hard. Unfeeling. He looked at me like I was a stranger. “Fuck this,” he muttered as he pushed himself up off the couch and started for the door.
“Blake, wait!” I shot after him, reaching out to grab his arm, but he shook me off like I was nothing. I wasn’t about to let him walk out, though, not until I’d explained. I somehow managed to get to the door before him and stood with my back to it, barring his way.
He stopped a couple of feet away. The look on his face was deadly. “Move,” he growled.
I raised my chin. “No, not until you listen to me.”
“Listen to you do what? Cry and tell me you’re ‘so sorry’,” his voice rose mockingly as he imitated me. “You feed me a bunch of bullshit – as fuckin’ usual – but that motherfucker? He gets your honesty?!”
“Blake, it was one stupid lie –”
“It doesn’t fuckin’ matter! Don’t you get that?! One lie or ten – it doesn’t make a difference! The point is I can’t trust a single thing that comes out of your mouth!”
“That’s not fair! I didn’t want to upset you! That’s the only reason I didn’t tell you about tonight.”
He snorted derisively and shook his head.
“Okay then, what would you have done if I’d told you where I was going tonight? Would you have come with me?”
For a moment, there was silence.
Then Blake took a single, slow step towards me, bringing his head down so that we were eye to eye. “You’ll never fucking know, will you?”
My first tear escaped, tracing a path down my cheek.
He followed it with his eyes before he snarled, “Now move. Out of. My way.”
Something in me snapped. It’s human nature, I think. There are only so many times you can roll over and play dead before you savage the beast that bit you.
“Finn was HERE!” I cried desperately. “I’ve been doing this for three years! Where were you every other time?! You were gone, Blake! And I didn’t know if you’d ever come back. So excuse me for trusting someone else – for leaning on someone else – but he was here when you weren’t.”
No one has ever looked at me the way Blake looked at me then. I can barely describe it. There was so much anger, so much malice, but underneath it all I could see a bloody wound. Wide and gaping and deep. And I knew I’d put it there.
All the fight went out of me.
I stepped aside, closing my eyes to stop them from overflowing.
I didn’t open them again until I heard the door slam shut behind him. Less than a minute later, the roar of the Mustang’s engine travelled through the wood, followed by the squeal of tires as he tore off into the night.
56
The next morning, I drove across the city to Hayley and Derren’s place with my stomach in knots.
After Blake stormed out of my apartment the night before, I had spent all night tossing and turning in bed. I finally gave up on sleep around 5AM and started to stress-clean my apartment. That only took about an hour, so then I busied myself doing some work on my laptop before eventually jumping in the shower and getting ready.
That still left a good forty-five minutes to pace back and forth across my apartment, chewing on my lip.
One minute I felt so guilty about what I’d done that I wanted to slap myself. No matter how innocent it was, if Blake had done something like that to me – with Eva Merchant, for example – I think I would’ve put on my most killer heels and gone to town on his balls.
But the next moment I thought about all the aggressive cheap-shots he’d thrown at me while we were arguing, and I felt so angry that the killer heel idea actually sounded like a reasonable course of action.
When I pulled into the wide driveway leading up to Hayley and Derren’s house, the knot of anxiety inside of me pulled tighter. My mind was in overdrive: Will Blake be here? What if he doesn’t show? Hayley will be so mad! Are we just in a fight? Is it more than that? Is he so mad that he’ll end it? Will he leave? Did he leave already?
As I slotted my Honda in alongside Hayley’s sleek, red Ferrari, I could see no sign of Blake’s Mustang.
I let out a heavy sigh as I got out of my car, dreading having to explain everything to Hayley and Derren when Blake didn’t show.
I was just pulling my overnight bag from the trunk when I heard the familiar grumble of an engine. Turning, I saw Blake’s black Mustang coming up the driveway.
The relief I felt almost made my legs weak.
“Um, hey,” I ventured, when he’d parked up and got out.
I got an intelligible grunt in return.
But, damn, even looking surly as hell, with his sunglasses on hiding his eyes and his mouth set in a grim line, my stomach still dipped at the sight of him. But it was offset by the sinking feeling that came from being so close to him and not having his arms around me. The easy touches and kisses that had been so natural the day before were glaringly absent.
“…you’re here,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Yeah,” he agreed gruffly, grabbing his own bag out of the backseat. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Um…last night…?”
“Last night has nothing to do with Hayley. This shoot is a big deal to her. Of course I’m here.”
That actually shocked me a little. Don’t get me wrong, I knew he cared about Hayley, but I hadn’t thought that he was really aware of how important this whole thing was to her. And then there was the whole, Blake does what he wants and screw everyone else mentality that we were all so used to.
“What?” He practically barked – and I realized that I’d just been staring at him.
“Nothing, it’s just…do you think we could talk later? I hate how we left things.”
Blake looked away, toward the house. His voice was low and tired when he said, “I don’t know. I just need a little time to think.” With that, he turned his back on me and walked up to knock on Hayley and Derren’s front door.
I bit my lip to keep it from trembling.
Because maybe our fight was more than just a fight…maybe it was our last fight.
57
Blake and I shared the backseat of Derren’s SUV all the way to the Grand Canyon.
That was fun.
Almost five hours of sitting within a couple of feet of each other as the tension between us got thicker and thicker.
The car was spacious, but Blake was a big guy and, more than that, his presence seemed to fill the vehicle. Then there was his masculine scent…and his arms, the way his muscles strained against the fabric of his shirt whenever he moved…and the fact that I just missed him so much, even though he was right there…
It was torture.
For the first couple of hours, Blake just sat there with his eyes hidden behind those damn aviators, looking at his phone, his thumbs tapping the screen almost constantly. It infuriated me. The whole time, I was thinking things like, You can sit there sending messages or tweeting or whatever until your thumbs bleed, but you can’t even TALK to me?!
I mean, I knew I had caused our fight, but I had apologized damn it – didn’t that count for something?
“You guys are quiet back there,” Derren said after a while. “Everything okay?”
I glanced across at Blake; he didn’t even look up from his cell when he said, “All good, man. Just tired.”
I was relieved he didn’t say anything about what was going on with us, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking, Ohh! So lying is okay when it’s YOU that’s doing it?
Derren let out a huge sigh. “Right, you guys are still keepin’ each other up all night. God, I remember those days,” he said wistfully.
Hayley smacked him on the arm. “Shut up, jackass, I still keep you up plenty.”
“Yeah…but if you ever wanna do it more, don’t hold back.”
I practically heard Hayley roll her eyes. “Noted.”
We pulled into a rest stop for lunch and sat on the picnic tables with our fast food. Blake and I didn’t say two words to each other the whole time. As we walked back to the car, Hayley kept shooting me questioning glances and I kept trying to silently tell her to leave it alone. She managed to keep quiet for a whole five minutes. As soon as we pulled back onto the freeway she turned in the passenger seat and demanded, “Okay, someone tell me what the hell is up with you two.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Blake beat me to it. “Nothing.”
Looking across at him, I saw that he was still focused on his stupid phone.
“Nothing?” Hayley’s voice was full of doubt. “Yeah, right.” She looked at me. “What did he do?”
That made Blake’s head snap up.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “He didn’t do anything.”
“Then what’s with this?” She waved her hand back and forth between us. “I thought you guys would be dry humping back there by now!”
Blake snorted and shook his head before looking down again.
Thankfully, before Hayley could say any more, my cell started to ring in my lap. I looked down to see Harvey calling. To be honest, I was expecting to have heard from him sooner. There was a big show scheduled for that night and, on top of that, we had a director coming in to check out The Academy to see if it would be a suitable locale in a music video he was shooting.
“Sorry, I have to get this,” I said as I brought my phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Amy! Where do we keep the fairy lights?” Harvey’s voice held an edge of impatience.
“Um, why do you need fairy lights?”
“Because I’m going to take some atmospheric shots of Barbed Whiplash playing tonight – for our social media,” he explained. Then he added, a little scathingly, “You haven’t done anything like that in a while.”
“Oh…” I thought, for a second. “Okay. They’re in the second storeroom. Top shelf, I think – but you should talk to Gary before you put them across the stage. You know those guys like to jump around when they –”
“Yeah, yeah, I got this. Later.” He hung up – only to call back a moment later with, “Amy, I can’t find the lights.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Keep looking, Harvey, they’re up there.”
“They’re REALLY not…oh no, wait, I’ve got them...”
Then about ten minutes after that: “Amy, what’s our capacity? Like, legally? It’s for the video.”
And a little later: “I’ve got a guy on hold here, he’s saying something about an invoice…?”
After he called for the sixth time in the space of an hour, Blake actually spoke to me – well, more like growled at me. “This guy for real?”
“Yep,” I sighed.
“He wasn’t this bad when you took a couple nights off with me a few weeks ago,” he pointed out.
“No,” I agreed. “But he did somehow manage to order double what we usually ask for when he ‘handled’ the delivery order – now we’re up to our eyes in stock we can barely store. And he forgot to show up for a meeting with a promoter and then triple booked a show, so I guess his confidence got knocked.”
Hayley stifled a giggle. “He’s hopeless! I love him!”
When my phone started ringing again a second later, she let out a peal of laughter.
“What’s up, Harvey?” I asked.
“Do you think we could get The Used to play here?”
“…what?”
“The USED, Amy,” he said, impatiently. “You know who I mean – we were all talking about them last week and Candice was saying about how their singer got hot, remember?”
“Yeah, I know. I just don’t get why you’re calling me about this now. And, no, we’re too small.”
“Well, that’s what I thought at first, but a month ago I would never have believed we’d have Sons of Sinners play here eithe–”
I didn’t hear any more. Blake had pulled the phone out of my hand. I glared at him as he put my cell to his ear. “Harvey? . . . Yeah, it’s me . . . Yeah, man, I’m good. How ‘bout you? . . . Yeah? . . . But do you need to talk to her about it right now? . . . You don’t think it could wait? . . . Well, she’s not at work now, man . . .”
“Blake, give me the phone,” I hissed angrily.
He ignored me completely. I saw him grit his teeth as he listened to whatever Harvey was saying – then he seemed to reach his limit. “Alright, look, Amy’s not there. So you’re gonna have to suck it up and make a couple decisions for yourself, or you’re gonna have to make a list of all the shit that you can’t handle and give it to her when she gets back, but what you’re not gonna do is keep calling her. You understand me? Unless that place is burning to the fucking ground, you don’t call – in fact, forget that, don’t call her even then. You own the damn place, you deal with it.”
He hung up and handed the phone back to me.
I snatched it angrily. “You – you can’t just steal my phone and talk to my boss like that!”
“Why? What’s he gonna do?”
“Maybe FIRE me?!”
He snorted. “Don’t be dramatic. He won’t fire you.”
“How do you know?!”
“‘Cause he’d be fucked without you and he knows it.”
“Even if that’s true, it’s not really anything to do with you!”
His lips twitched into a caustic smirk. “Seems like there’s plenty in your life that’s nothing to do with me, Princess.”
I just gaped at him. How the hell had he managed to turn him interfering with my job back around on me?
“I’m glad we did this,” Derren piped up dryly from the front seat. “Really. This is gonna be so much fun.”
58
The wedding venue that Hayley and Derren had chosen was like something from ancient Rome. It was located out in the middle of nowhere, close to the edge of the Grand Canyon. There was a perimeter wall with battlements and towers, set in a square formation. Each tower was complete with turrets and wide balconies set with golden lanterns. In the center of the enormous, compound-like structure, there were pools, waterfalls, bridges, walkways, secret nooks and even a maze.
As we walked through the huge, arching doorway to the reception area – which was deserted apart from the extremely polished woman and two immaculately dressed bellhops behind the front desk – I felt like I was walking into another world. ‘Exclusive’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“Hayley, this is incredible,” I whispered.
“I know,” she agreed. “As soon as I saw it, my mind was made up.”
“I can see why.”
She had shown me pictures of the place before but they didn’t come close to showing how amazing it really was. The thought of how much per night it must cost to stay there made me break out in a cool sweat. Blake had booked our room…would he now expect me to stay in a different one? Did I even have enough money in my checking account to cover the cost of my own room? At least I’d brought my credit card, so if it came to it I could charge a room to that and worry about it later…for a long time, while I paid it off…
I was chewing on my lip as the receptionist handed us our key cards and welcomed us to The Jewel.
Hayley and Derren’s room was in a different tower to ours. As they headed off, following their bellhop, Hayley mouthed to me, “You okay?”
I nodded as reassuringly as I could, knowing how excite
d she had been about this trip and feeling awful for potentially ruining it with my Blake drama.
Derren called over his shoulder that we should all meet back in the lobby in an hour to head out for the shoot.
As Blake and I walked silently in the opposite direction, following our own bellhop, I asked, “Should I maybe see if they have another room?”
For the first time all day, Blake pulled off his sunglasses and looked at me. I noticed right away that he looked tired, like he hadn’t slept either. “That what you want?”
“No, it’s not,” I said, because the thought of not being with him that night was horrible. “I just figured you probably wouldn’t want me to stay with you.”
He faced forward again as we walked the next few paces in silence, then he muttered, “You’re staying with me.”
The bellhop stopped outside of a golden door – there was a lot of gold in that place – and let us inside. Blake slapped some bills into his hand before he departed.
I was aware that the room was incredible – light, airy and decadent, and that there was more gold: drapes, bed, even parts of the floor – but mostly, I was focused on Blake.
We were standing facing each other, just a few feet apart, and the air between us suddenly felt charged, like we were standing in a plasma ball.
“I’m sorry for –” I started, at the same instant that he said, “Look, I said some –”
We both stopped.
“Do you want to go first?” I asked.
He nodded once and cleared his throat. “I just wanted to say that I know I said some shit last night that was way out of line, and I’m sorry. I was mad, but that’s no excuse.”
I blinked.
Uh…wow…
I hadn’t expected him to apologize – especially not like that, like he was genuinely sorry.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
He nodded again.
“Okay, my turn.” I took a breath and swallowed my pride. “I wanted to say that I’m sorry for going behind your back to meet Finn. That wasn’t fair at all and I know I shouldn’t have done it – but I promise you, we’re just friends.”
