My blood started to boil with anger at the sight of him touching her legs. Who the hell did he think he was? I went to barge into a house when a voice stopped me.
“What are you doing here?”
I turned around to see Tracey standing there with her backpack on. She looked surprised to see me.
I took a step away from the front door. “Hey, Tracey.”
“Don’t ‘Hey, Tracey’ me, Landon. What the hell are you doing here?” she barked, her eyes blazing with rage. Her stare moved to the window where Shay and that fucking guy were still chatting it up. “You need to leave, Landon. You need to leave her alone and let her move on from that bullshit you did to her.”
“Tracey—”
“No. I mean it. You don’t know what she’s been through. You don’t know how many nights she’s spent crying herself to sleep because you up and abandoned her. You don’t know how many times Raine and I have had to console her over you. I mean, honestly, Landon. What the actual fuck?! She went through fire and brimstone to take care of you, and this is how you repay her? All these years, she stood behind you and supported you, and you decide it’s okay to crush her like this?”
I grimaced. “I know. I messed up.”
“You more than messed up. You ruined the best thing that happened to you. Now go.”
I glanced one more time toward Shay and that fucking guy, and then lowered my head. “I can’t leave without explaining things to her.”
“She doesn’t need an explanation or your lame excuses. She needs to move on, and that’s what she’s doing.”
“With that guy?” I huffed, annoyed, hurt, sad. Mostly sad. So fucking sad. My scarred heart was bleeding out, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
“Yes. Jason is great for her. They have a lot in common and have been friends for a long time, too.”
“She’s never mentioned a Jason,” I said, jealousy simmering in the pit of my stomach.
“Probably because she was still waiting for you. But look at her now.” Tracey gestured toward the window. “She’s no longer waiting. Let her go. She deserves more than you.”
She wasn’t wrong, but still. After all that we’d been through, I couldn’t walk away without telling Shay how I felt. I couldn’t walk away without letting her know what hell I’d been through.
“Tracey, please. Just let me talk to her.”
“And tell her what? That you’ve been struggling? That you’ve lost your way? That you, once again, let her down? Come on, Landon. This is what you do. You fall apart and expect her to wait around to catch you. And you know she will, but that’s not fair. You really want to make her pick up your broken pieces for the rest of her life? You want her to carry that burden? Give her a chance to lose the dramatics of the two of you. Give her a chance to actually be happy.”
“You think that guy can make her happy?”
“I don’t know,” she honestly answered, “but he sure as hell won’t make her as sad as you have.”
I hated that she was right. I wasn’t stable and hadn’t been stable in a long fucking time. Shay had been waiting for me to come back to her, fully ready to commit to her, to us, yet as always, I ended up leaving her battered and bruised.
I hurt the people I loved.
My father was right, too. I knew he was just from seeing Shay moving on in the living room with that fucking guy. He told me people wouldn’t care about my sob story forever, and it would have an expiration date.
Time’s up.
“Can you tell her that I love her?” I asked, feeling like a damn fool for even thinking I deserved a chance to talk to Shay.
“No, I won’t. That won’t make this easier, Landon. You have to just ghost her. Disappear.”
“Just give her this notebook. Then maybe she can understand what was going on,” I damn near pleaded, holding it out toward Tracey.
She huffed. “No, just drop it.”
She said drop it as if it was the easiest thing in the world to walk away from the love of my life.
I sat across from Dr. Smith, feeling as if I hit the final stage of rock bottom. The part where all you could do was stand and begin again.
I crossed my arms, feeling a bit like a shit for the way I abandoned our sessions a few months back. “I was wondering if we could get things going again so I could get back on my feet. I, uh, I’ve fallen off the path a bit, and I’m not sure how to stand on my own. Plus, I leaned on the wrong people and hurt them along the way, and I don’t even want to do that again. I want to get better and learn to lean on myself.”
She smiled and nodded. “I’m proud of you, you know.”
“For what?”
“Being brave enough to begin again. So where are we starting today? What box do you want to unpack first? I’m certain there have been a lot of things that have happened to you over the past few months. Let’s get a starting point.”
“Well…” I took in a deep breath and shook my head slightly. “We can start with the overdose.”
11
Shay
Once upon a time, I fell in love with a boy.
A beautiful, broken boy who had his own world of struggles.
Years ago, Landon Harrison had promised to come back to me after he found himself. Years ago, he’d said he would find his way back to my heartbeats. The problem with making those kinds of promises in your youth? There isn’t enough adhesive on the love story to make it truly stick.
We were both young, naïve, broken kids. What did we know about love? What did we know about true feelings? What did we know about making things work?
In the storybooks, when a man made a promise to a woman, he always came back. He’d ride in with a grand gesture, and he’d fix whatever mess he’d left her in. He’d confess how the past years of his life had been filled with struggle and hardships, and he’d go on and on about how her love was the only thing that made him able to breathe.
For a while, I thought that was what was going to happen. For the longest time, I sat around waiting for the big gesture, waiting for Landon to come rushing in on a white horse, telling me all the words I wanted to hear. He’d missed me. He’d fixed his broken heartbeats. He was ready for our love story to receive the happily ever after.
But that never happened for me.
Years passed, and Landon never once looked back. I knew he’d found himself, too, because he was all over the internet, on billboards, burning up the big screen. He was no longer Landon Harrison, the boy I once loved, but he became Landon Pace, Hollywood’s golden boy. I saw his smiles on Jimmy Fallon. I watched him grin ear to ear on red carpets. I watched him flourish into the man I always knew he was capable of becoming. He blossomed and bloomed like peonies in the spring, and he completely forgot I’d ever existed.
Landon became a megastar in Hollywood, and I had the privilege of watching him win time and time again from a distance. He was the Brad Pitt of this day and age, and I was the creepy ex-girlfriend stalking his Instagram, following stories on TMZ about who he was sleeping with, what party he was attending, and which yacht he was taking out for his annual birthday bash.
He spent his birthday on a yacht with dozens of supermodels. If that wasn’t a blow to my ego, I wasn’t certain what was. For a little while, those birthdays had been mine. His hands had rested against mine.
He had been mine.
If only for a small moment in time.
Along with watching him succeed from a distance, I also watched how his relationships spread like wildfire. Landon was a serial dater who made Leonardo DiCaprio look like a down-to-earth family man. I was somewhat surprised he hadn’t found his way back to me, because he pretty much found his way to every other single woman on the planet.
I mean, honestly—how could he go on and find himself and forget about ever, oh, I don’t know, thanking the one girl who pushed him to do exactly that? How could he move on so quickly with movie stars like Sarah Sims, and not even offer an apology? How could he go and never look back
?
If not for me, he never would’ve been interested in acting in the first place. If not for me, he never would’ve known what a script looked like. I opened those doors for him, and he walked right in without looking back at me for a split second.
While he was off living in la-la land, I was receiving rejection letters left and right, struggling to figure out a way to make my dreams come true. Then there was sweet ol’ Landon, eating steak with the Rock, probably even calling him Dwayne like they had an actual friendship, while I was trying to figure out how to not eat ramen noodles three times a week.
Life wasn’t fair.
He was living the dream I’d set out to achieve, sleeping around with EGOT winners, and I was struggling to pay back my student loans for a creative arts degree I never used.
Each time he appeared on television, social media, or during the previews at the movie theater, a part of my soul burned with pure rage. I went back to basics with my feelings toward Landon, back to the days before our stupid high school bet ever took root, back to him being Satan, nothing more and nothing less.
I once told a few coworkers at the coffee shop I worked at that Landon and I used to date, and they laughed straight in my face.
“Sure, and I dated Rihanna.” My manager Brady chuckled. “Oh, Shay. You and your humor.”
I never brought it—or him—up again. I’d spent my early years being a complete idiot, thinking there was a chance Landon was going to come back to me. I refused to do the same with my thirties.
My teen years and twenties had been a time for stupid love mistakes.
The rest of my life would be spent discovering self-love.
In the past, I believed in fairytales. I believed in true love conquering all, but now I was old enough to know better. The only love story that mattered was the one I lived with myself. If I was in love with me, it didn’t matter if some man was, too. My love had to be enough to keep me warm at night. So, I started to fall in love again—with me, with my life, with my dreams.
I told myself day in and day out that I’d be ready if the time ever came for Landon and me to cross paths again, but I knew it was impossible to be prepared for such a day. Not after what we’d shared. Not after what we were. Our time together was a single leaf floating away in the breeze with no sense of direction or destination, but our love was real even if it only existed for moments. First loves were different. You never saw the flames coming before it was too late, and you were left scorched.
I didn’t believe you ever fell out of your first love. You simply allowed it to live in a small corner of your heart, taking up prime real estate of your soul.
I knew after loving Landon, I wouldn’t be able to ever fully give my love away again. My heart froze over after he left me.
It would’ve taken a miracle for it to someday defrost, and I was no longer in the realm of believing in miracles.
12
Landon
Thirty-Two years old
“You better wrap up whatever you’re writing, because we’re about to pull up to the building,” Willow said, glancing my way before returning her stare back to her cell phone.
I looked down to my notebook, and grimaced. The words weren’t flowing too easily that afternoon.
Every single day, I wrote one single letter.
Hundreds of words jotted down on lined paper. Different ink colors, different strokes, different ways of expressing the love.
Some of them were short while others went on for pages and pages. I shared parts of me in the ruled notebooks, bleeding every feeling I’d ever felt through the ink of the pen. I’d been writing letters for a few years now. I never thought I’d be the type to write love letters to individuals, but it was something that became a staple of my life.
Each letter dripped in truth, something that was very lacking in my day-to-day life. It was no secret that if not for Shay Gable, I never would’ve picked up a pen to express myself.
Now, it came to me as naturally as showering and brushing my teeth.
I’d never known words could heal until I picked up a pen and bled them out.
“Are you ready?” Willow asked, glancing my way for a split second before looking down at her cell phone and typing away, probably dealing with the disaster that was my inbox. Willow had been my assistant for the past few years, and without her skills, I never would’ve made it to an audition, screening, or interview appointment. All in all, she ran my life from top to bottom.
We were sitting in a black SUV outside The Tonight Show, and I was trying my best to prepare myself for the mayhem when I opened the door and climbed out of the vehicle. I’d been doing this fame thing for over ten years now, and still, I wasn’t used to it. I wasn’t used to walking down the street and hearing people scream my name. I wasn’t used to having people wait for me to arrive at venues just for a chance to get a glimpse of me. I wasn’t used to people caring about my existence.
Well, about my made-up existence, at least.
They cared about my acting persona—Landon Pace, Hollywood’s golden boy.
They couldn’t have cared less about the real Landon Harrison.
Still, I was thankful.
I’d had fans stand out in the most extreme weather conditions throughout the years just to snap a quick photograph with me. If that wasn’t humbling, I didn’t know what was. It didn’t change the fact that I had to work up the nerve to get out of the vehicle every fucking time because once I stepped outside, the show was on. I’d smile, I’d be charming, and I’d be everything they dreamed me to be and more. I’d give my fans my all, and then I’d go home and crash with my dog.
I took a deep breath, closing my notebook. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a cherry Jolly Rancher and popped it into my mouth. “Ready.”
“Okay. I’ll make sure to snap some photographs of you interacting with the fans.” Willow inched her body closer to the door and grabbed the handle. “Let’s go.”
The second she pushed it open, I released my breath and turned on the charm. I stepped out of the SUV to the sound of shrieking and cheers—all for me. It wasn’t that my smile was fake. It was genuine through and through, but I was tired. I’d been tired for so long that I wasn’t certain I’d ever feel awake.
My career both healed me and drained me in so many ways.
Then I looked to my left and saw a little boy wearing a superhero costume, dressed up as one of my characters, and I couldn’t help but feel happy. That was why I kept doing what I did. That was why I showed up day in and day out—for the fans, both old and young, who kept showing up for me.
I snapped as many photographs and signed as many autographs as I could before Willow told everyone I had to leave. She pulled me away into the building, and the moment the door closed behind me, I relaxed my face.
“I don’t get why they’re so obsessed with you,” Willow commented, tapping away on her phone. “It’s like they don’t know you take massive dumps after eating Chinese food.”
I chuckled. “I think they believe I poop out gold.”
“Based on the smells, it’s more likely you’re shitting out manure.” One thing I liked about my assistant was the fact that she never blew smoke up my ass. She was as real as could be, and being in the career I was in, finding genuine people was a gift.
After being led to my dressing room, I found my stylist waiting with my clothing options for the interview that afternoon.
“You haven’t been sleeping,” Mom said, looking up from the cart of clothes she was rummaging through. She walked over to me and pulled at my cheeks, examining my exhaustion. “We can cancel the show tonight if you’re too exhausted.”
I laughed. “We aren’t canceling on Jimmy Fallon, Mom. I’m fine. I’ll sleep tonight.”
“You said that last night,” she argued.
I loved having my mother work for me, truly. Being able to make both of our dreams blend together was beyond a blessing. She was so good at her job, too, so it wasn’t as if I w
as hiring her solely because she was my mother. I believed in her skills and eye for details.
But sometimes, the overbearing mother in her had a heavier hand than the stylist.
“I just worry you’ve been pushing yourself too hard, Land. It’s been months of nonstop travel doing promotions overseas, and then you start filming so soon. I can’t help but worry that you’re going to burn yourself out.”
I was well into my thirties, and my mother was still babying me. I doubted that was going to change any time soon. Plus, she was right. I felt myself coming up to my limit with being overwhelmed. I was at my tipping point and needed to talk to my manager sooner than later about getting a break.
When I went too long without breaks, my mind creeped back into its old habits. My therapist, Dr. Smith, said a key to learning to live with my anxiety and depression, was to pick up on my triggers. If I knew the mechanics of my head, I’d become more able to steer the ship to calmer seas. If I ignored my triggers, I’d end up shipwrecked.
After years of trial and error, I was beginning to learn how to sail, but still, my boat rocked back and forth due to harsh weather conditions every now and again. I was in need of a break, and perhaps soon, I’d be able to get one.
I shrugged off her comments and nodded toward the racks. “What are we thinking for today?” I asked, shifting the conversation.
Mom frowned at me, worry lingering in her eyes, but she allowed me to redirect the focus. “I was thinking these velvet pants with a plain, fitted black top.”
“Velvet? It itches,” I commented.
“It makes the girls cheer,” she corrected. “And since you are promoting a romantic comedy this time around, we are all about making the girls cheer for you. You’re a heartthrob to them, Landon. You need to play up that role. Plus, the pants will make your booty pop.”
Landon & Shay - Part Two: (The L&S Duet Book 2) Page 10