Page 22 of Trusting Blake
“Hey, Miss Mila, what has happened to you?” he jokes as he sets me back down.
My cheeks blazing –thathasn’t changed – and my heart thundering, I try to relax the smile on my face so that I don’t appear so frenzied, but it’s impossible. “I’m sorry – I don’t know why I just did that.”
“It’s cute. I like the confident Mila,” Blake reassures me, then he winks. “But I like the nervous one too.”
“Okay, I’m leaving now,” I tell him, embarrassed, and walk away before I have another lapse in self-control. I heave myself over the truck’s tailgate, climb onto the roof, and hoist myself up onto the wall. Blake watches me in admiration, as though he expected me to need his help again, but I’m riding a total high right now. “Bye, boyfriend!” I call and blow him a final playful kiss.
Blake blows me one back, then rolls his eyes at our shared cheesiness. “Goodnight, Mila.”
On the other side of the wall, the ladder from earlier is still there, thankfully. I lower myself down, the ragged stone scraping my hands, and find my footing on the highest rung. And then I descend into the darkness of the Harding Estate as a girl with new memories, new hair, and a new boyfriend.
I should be more worried than I am, but as I tramp through the field toward the house, I’m practically skipping. I can’t wipe the grin from my face. Any punishment be damned. What are my parents going to do this time? Ship me halfway across the country in a different direction? Ha.
The motion-sensing security cameras must have detected me already, because the front door bursts open before I’ve even reached the porch. I freeze mid-step and draw my shoulders in tight, peering through half-closed eyes at the fuzzy sight of Mom and Dad while I await the tirade of yelling.
But they can’t raise their voices out here, not with all those paps outside the gate.
“Mila Harding,” Mom snaps in the sternest voice I haveeverheard her use with me. It’s potent enough to make my stomach drop.
Dad stomps out onto the porch and leans over the wooden railing, pointing his thumb behind him to the door where Mom waits. “Inside,” he orders. “I mean it, Mila.”
Keeping my head down, I slink up the steps, past Dad, and through the front door. Dad promptly shuts it behind us all, and that’s when I spot Sheri hovering a few feet away. It’s also now, under the bright light, that my parents notice something different about me.
“What have you—” Mom gasps as she leans forward to take a section of my hair in her hand and weaves the strands through her fingers. “What have youdone?”
“Just a bit of a refresh.” I shrug. “Don’t you like it?”
“I do,” Sheri comments with an impressed nod, and Dad fires her a look that could incinerate her on the spot.
“Never mind your hair. Where the hell have you been?” he demands furiously, stepping into line next to Mom, who is still blinking at my new look in a dazed sort of way. It’s the wrong time to think it, but I don’t mind being yelled at by my parents if they’re doing it together. This feels nicer than having the two of them discuss whether or not Dad’s sordid little affair will ruin our family forever.
“I went out with my friends,” I answer with another nonchalant shrug.
“Which friends? I’ll need their names,” I hear Ruben snap from the entry to the kitchen, and I turn to look at him the way I always do – with sheer disdain that his voice has found its way into the conversation.
“You aren’t supposed to go out with anyone!” Dad yells, but I know that his high levels of frustration are a buildup of everything else going on right now; those deep lines of stress in his forehead aren’t just from worrying about me. “Did you talk to anyone at the gate? Did you sayanything?”
“I didn’t go near the gate.”
Dad steps back. “What?”
“Well,” Sheri says, carefully tiptoeing her way into the conversation. “Thereareother ways to get out of here if someone really wants to. And I’m sure Mila was discreet about it. Right, Mila?”
“Right,” I agree with a confident nod. Thank God I have Sheri – I don’t know what I would do around here without her on my side.
“She took off!” Dad cries, narrowing his eyes at Sheri. “I don’t care howshe did it. The point is that shedid.”
Mom finally absorbs the shock of my new hairdo and comes back to life. “You couldn’t have answered your phone? You couldn’t have at least let us knowwhereyou were?”
“It’s been turned off,” I say, calm as ever. Inside, I suppress the desire to do a little happy dance right here in the hall. I wonder how Blake is feeling right now as he drives home. Is he singing along to his music a little louder than usual? Is he smiling even when stuck at a red light?
“New rule,” Ruben cuts in. “Your phone does not get turned off from now on.”
I roll my eyes, much to the anger of my father.
“Mila,” he snaps. “This is serious. You can’t just disappear on your own in a city you don’t know at a time like this. What if you’d been spotted?”
Mom flicks a barely concealed hostile glance at Dad before her eyes dip to the floor and her expression dulls. For a second, she looks far away, like she’d love to be any place but here. I wonder what I’ve missed while I’ve been gone – what conversations have been had, what apologies have been made, what forgiveness, if any, has been given. By the look on Mom’s face at Dad’s reminder of the family crisis at hand, I get the sense that not much progress has been made. The air is still thick with friction, but at least they can seemingly still work together when it comes to being parents. Even if they’re both nothing more than equally exasperated with me.
