I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
My cousin, Eleanor, had recently invited me to join her at Greyson’s autumn whiskey launch. It was supposed to be a huge event with red carpets, celebrities and ex-boyfriends.
I thought back to the moment Eleanor informed me Landon was going to be at the event. I tried my best to play it cool and pretend the butterfly of nerves weren’t swirling in my stomach. “That was a long time ago. Ancient history,” I told her.
Eleanor laughed a little. “I remember saying the same thing about Greyson when I took this job.”
“So, are you finally admitting you have feelings for Grey?”
“No,” she quickly recanted. “All I’m saying is, even if it’s ancient history, it’s still history nonetheless. I wanted to make sure you were okay with going if Landon was there.”
“Of course.” I nodded. “It’s fine. All my feelings for Landon died ages ago. Plus, we are both adults. I think I can handle being in the same room as him. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m great. So good. Fine.” I said fine one too many times, sounding like Ross from Friends when he found out Joey and Rachel were dating.
I’m fiiiine.
Still, I’d been thinking about the party ever since I was invited. Thinking about Landon and what I’d say to him—if I’d say anything. Maybe Mima was right. Maybe I should’ve taken Sam with me and used him as a bit of a shield. I was just trying to understand why that idea made me so uneasy.
After dinner, I arrived at my apartment building with a desperate need for a bottle of wine, and a bubble bath soak. After leaving the battlefield of love at Mima’s, I always ended up needing to decompress. It began raining after I left and of course there was no umbrella to be found in my car.
As I hopped out of my car, I grabbed my purse and keys, then held my coat over my head as the rain hammered down on me. I hopped from puddle to puddle, getting soaked as my body became chilled from the deluge. As I rounded the corner of the building toward the front steps, I paused a moment when I saw a poor, pathetic man sitting there getting soaked from head to toe with his head bent down as he tried to shield himself from the rain with his hands. A terrible attempt at a shield, if I did say so myself. His blond hair lay plastered to his forehead as he shivered in the cold.
He looked…pathetic.
Pathetically rich, that is.
I looked to his feet and saw designer Gucci shoes. Holding his pants in place was a sparkle of gold from his matching Gucci belt. What could I say? I had an eye for expensive things I could never afford.
“Did you get locked out?” I asked, feeling bad for the well-dressed schmuck who was probably seconds away from catching pneumonia. “Or do you need me to knock on someone’s apartment door once I get inside? Our buzzing machine has been on the fritz all week long and—”
My words died away as the strange, soaking wet man lifted his head to look at me. The world became dizzying as those eyes locked with mine.
Those eyes.
Those devilishly delicious blue eyes.
My heartbeats came to a crashing halt as I stared into the eyes of the first and only man I’d ever loved. Landon sat on the steps of my apartment building, soaked from head to toe, sending my mind into a tailspin of emotions.
What is he doing here? Why is he here? How does he even know where here is?
Every inch of me began to shake—not from the harsh rainfall, but from the fact of his presence. My lips parted and no words fell from my tongue.
Why did I feel sick? Why did I want to run? Why couldn’t I stop my heart from losing its mind? After all the years that had passed, after all the work I’d done to break free of that man existing in my mind, he still somehow controlled my heartbeats.
What’s happening right now?
He stood to his feet and stuffed his hands into his obviously tailored pants, which were sticking to his thighs like stockings.
His lips parted and his voice shook as only two words fell from between his lips. “Hey, Chick.”
Hey, Chick.
That was me—at least the me I used to be whenever he was near. I was his Chick, he was my Satan, and we used to be so hopelessly in love with one another. Just like that, I was sent back in time. I was seventeen again and completely confused about every facet of my life. I’d remembered the first time we kissed. I’d remembered the first time we’d made love. I’d remembered the way our bodies entwined. I’d remembered it all, and it came rushing back to me, knocking the air from my lungs.
I spoke the only word I could muster as I wiped the raindrops from my face. “No.”
No.
No, no, no, no.
That was the only word I’d managed to say to Landon as he sat there on the outside steps of the entryway to my apartment.
My heart sat in my chest after the very short-lived interaction. My mind was still spinning from the idea that he’d been sitting on those steps in the pouring rain. How long had he sat there waiting before I had arrived, and why did I feel like my sweet, sweet friend Raine had something to do with him learning where I lived?
Shay: You are officially on my shit list.
Raine: I was waiting for this text message to come through, but you can’t blame it on me. I’m hormonal and eight months pregnant. When Landon asked about you, I couldn’t control my tongue.
Not shocking. Raine had never been able to control her tongue. Ever since we were kids, she’d been sticking her nose in other people’s business. One of her most used phrases was, “I don’t want to get involved, but—”
I knew her and her husband, Hank, had kept in touch with Landon throughout the years. It wasn’t an unknown secret that he kept just about all of his friendships except me. But, Raine hardly ever brought him up because she knew how hard it was for me to hear about Landon.
I supposed she didn’t think it would be a big deal to, oh I don’t know, give him my address so he could stalk me a little bit on a rainy Sunday.
Raine: Forgive me, please.
Raine: If it makes it any better, you should know that I peed myself in line at Target today after I bent over to pick up a Snickers bar. That’s right. I pissed myself in the checkout line of Target, and then I broke down into tears, causing even more of a scene. Have pity on your awful friend.
I smiled at the text message. Oddly enough that did make me feel a little better.
Raine: Let me make it up to you—Brunch this Sunday, on me. Endless mimosas for you, and I’ll just have to sit and watch you drink my favorite drink in the world. I’ll allow you to get shitfaced as I try not to wet myself in another public place.
Shay: Deal.
I hurried into my bedroom and began running a bath, one I was planning on staying in until the water ran cold and my fingers turned into prunes.
My phone dinged once more.
Raine: But he looked good, right? I thought he looked so good. Healthy. Happy. Sexy as all get out.
Shay: I’m deleting your number until Sunday, and I fully expect you to name your child after me after this incident.
Raine: But I’m having a boy.
Shay: Right. Make him suffer the way you’ve made me suffer.
I climbed into the steaming hot pool of water with a bottle of red wine, because when your celebrity ex-boyfriend showed up to your door after a decade of silence, one had no need for a wineglass. Straight from the bottle it was, like the classy lady I’d grown up to become.
After a few very large chugs from the bottle, I sat it down on the tiled bathroom floor. I leaned back in the tub and tried my best to shake the thought of Landon away, but it seemed almost impossible to do so.
Because Raine wasn’t wrong—Landon did look good. Too good. Sure, in the moment he hadn’t looked like the happiest guy in the world sitting in the rain, but he had looked healthy. Sigh. And handsome. He looked so painfully handsome standing there dripping wet with me on his mind.
What I hated most about him was how he aged so well, like the finest of wines. I
’d wished he would go from a swan to an ugly duckling over time, but, alas, Landon was beautiful. I hadn’t known men could be beautiful until I watched him grow up from a young preteen with acne to the striking adult he’d become. He became so damn handsome it was nauseating. Once when Eleanor and I were wine drunk and watching Hallmark Christmas movies in July, we looked up the most expensive bottles of wine in the world, and dammit if Landon wasn’t a 2010 Barolo Monfortino Riserva Conterno.
I was truly hoping he’d become a $2.99 gas station bottle of Moscato.
It wasn’t one characteristic that made him beautiful, either. It was every single thing. He had so many well-defined facial features, from his bright blue eyes, to the carved-out dimples in his cheeks, his chiseled jawline, and his lips.
Oh, those full, kissable lips.
I began recalling the number of times those lips had been all over my body, how many times they’d tasted me, explored me, owned me in every single way. How those lips and that man had taken the two things from me that I could’ve never given to another man—my virginity and my heart.
Plus, his body was well built, too. My gosh, his body was ripped—probably a big thanks to the action movie he’d finished filming a few months back. I hadn’t seen the movie. I hadn’t watched any of his movies since we’d gone our separate ways, but you couldn’t be on social media without seeing Landon and his nineteen million abs from that movie. His abs broke the internet more than Kim Kardashian’s champagne ass toast.
Landon’s skin glowed, too, even when it was dripping from the rain. When we were kids, the sun used to attack him and turn him into a ripe tomato, but nowadays, Landon seemed more sun-kissed than burned. He had a coppery tone to him that probably made millions of women go mad.
And out of the millions of women in the world pining after him, he still ended up on my doorstep.
Don’t read too much into it, Shay.
Geez. How could I not? I was on his mind so much that he tracked me down in search of…what? I still wasn’t sure what he had been looking for when he came to my door that night. A reunion? A flash of emotion pouring out of one another? Me telling him I’d never stopped loving him after all this time?
I didn’t give him any of what he’d wanted—not my time or my attention. I gave him nothing, because nothing was what he deserved. I was no longer the girl who waited around for guys to make time for me to fit into their lives.
I was too old for games outside of Sudoku, and I refused to allow Landon Harrison to play me again.
14
Shay
I waited until the morning of the whiskey launch party to build up enough nerve to ask Sam to come with me. The past few nights, I’d been a bit of a recluse, working on my manuscripts. Sam always said he understood when I went into artist mode and stayed in my writing cave. Truth was, the writing cave was an excuse for me to skip out on reality for a short period of time.
Landon kept crossing my mind like a bad habit. I felt intoxicated by the memory of him standing in the pouring rain on those steps. I couldn’t shake it away, no matter how hard I tried, and I really, really tried.
I still wasn’t one hundred percent certain about asking Sam to attend the party with me, but I figured it was the right thing to do, especially knowing Landon and I would be face to face within a few hours.
I’d have been lying if I’d said listening to Mima go on and on about Sam not being right for me didn’t bother me a bit. What bothered me even more was how I felt more from those few minutes near Landon, than I had in the past nine months with Sam. There was a small hiccup in my throat where those nerves built up, but I tried my best to shake them away.
We were fine, Sam and I, because there wasn’t really any room for drama. That was another problem with passionate romances—the drama it entailed. Just standing near Landon for those few minutes had struck up fireworks inside my soul, and they burned so intensely. He came in scorching hot, leaving me with blisters.
Sam and I weren’t like that. We were easy. What was so wrong with being easy? He’d never end up standing in front of my house in the pouring rain, and that was fine.
Sam wasn’t the bad boy. He was a gentleman. He took me on dates, opened doors, pulled out chairs, and when he texted me, he used complete sentences.
For the first time in years, loneliness caught up to me and I gave Sam a chance.
I needed a good boy, and he seemed to fit that mode for me.
He was basic in all the right ways. There were no real surprises when it came to Sam, and I was thankful for that. He’d never done drugs. He was a casual drinker. He loved his mother and called his grandma every weekend. He had a healthy love for animals, and he’d taken part in the women’s march the previous fall.
Sure, he had his nerdy quirks, but I liked that about him. I liked how he could talk about Star Trek with such a gleam in his eyes. I liked our date nights at gaming bars. Even though I wasn’t a gamer by any means, watching him get excited was enough to make my cold heart slowly beat.
Honestly, he seemed one hundred percent top notch…right up until I walked in on him banging Princess Leia early that morning.
Well, not the actual Princess Leia, seeing how she was a fictional character. Plus, Sam didn’t really have the kind of skills needed to nail an actual princess. The girl he was currently humping and grinding wore a cosplay outfit, and I swore she screamed out, “Sam, you are my daddy,” in some kind of nerdy, high-pitched, orgasmic screech.
Sam. You. Are. My. Daddy.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
“Are you kidding me?” I blurted out, standing in Sam’s bedroom while a woman’s clit sat against his mouth. The way he maneuvered his face to glance toward me made acid rise up my throat, leaving me seconds away from vomiting. He was face-deep in another girl’s vagina and he had the nerve to give me guilty puppy dog eyes.
Puppy dog eyes and glistening lips.
My stomach clenched from the sight of it all. For a split second I considered how I’d look in an orange jumpsuit. Truthfully, orange wasn’t my color. Was it anyone’s color? I couldn’t for the life of me think of the last time I’d said, Oh, Heather! You’re really rocking that orange top, girl!
How many years would I spend in prison for the murder of two human beings?
Would the judge be more forgiving if I told him the Princess Leia story?
The woman’s eyes locked with mine, and I took a few steps backward when realization set in that it was Tina—the woman who came into Ava’s Bakery and Coffee Shop every single day.
I served her coffee every morning, and we laughed and joked about life together. She was adorkable in so many ways. If Sam were a female, he’d be Tina. She was so effortlessly charming as she spoke about nerdy stuff I didn’t understand. When she talked, I could tell she was passionate about it, and there was nothing I loved more than finding people who were passionate about things as opposed to being passionate about people.
When she’d mentioned she ran a Dungeon and Dragons game night every week, I informed her that my boyfriend—correction: ex-boyfriend—had been looking to join a group activity of that sort. I almost begged her to let Sam join her group, only because I was getting sick of him trying to explain to me that Dungeon and Dragons had nothing to do with whips and red rooms.
In a way, I had set them up.
Oh God.
This is my doing.
Sam is tickling her wood elf because of me.
I had sent him to her basement on a weekly basis after I made her a caramel latte each day.
I gave her free shortbread cookies more often than not, and she had the nerve to do this to me. Well, you know what they say: If you give a whore a cookie, she’ll probably suck your boyfriend’s dick.
Whipping around on my heels, I barged out of the room as Sam shouted my name.
I didn’t cry.
Crying over guys was something I’d promised myself I’d never do after too many tears in my past, and truthfully, I hardly knew
Sam well enough to give him my emotions. I reserved those for a select few things: my family, my friends, and YouTube videos of corgis swimming.
Sam began to chase after me, so I quickened my pace through his house, barging straight out his front door into the chilled air. Autumn had moved swiftly into Chicago, bringing about rainy days and cooler mornings.
“Shay, wait, please!” Sam called after me.
I spun around to face him and was met with his half-naked self, standing on the street wearing nothing but his glasses and a pair of sweatpants he must’ve swiped on his way out.
What stupid glasses. What a stupid face—a face I’d almost considered falling for at one point. Maybe. With enough time, I could’ve fallen for that face. It was an okay sphere, something I could’ve looked at…forever?
Ugh, why am I lying to myself?
“What is it, Sam?” I hollered, feeling a knot in my stomach. “What excuse could you possibly have for what I just saw?”
“I, err…” He cringed a little, pinching the bridge of his nose. Guilt filled his gaze, but I didn’t care. People only have guilt in their eyes after they do something crappy to another person. The damage was already done. No takebacks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“You didn’t mean to have sex with Tina? Or you didn’t mean to get caught?”
“I, well, it’s—”
“Say complicated and I’ll kick you between the legs,” I told him.
His body recoiled from those words and he took a step back. “I thought you’d be at work today. You should have told me you were on your way over.”
Oh, all right then.
I understood now.
That was the error of my ways—not informing Sam I was heading to his house. If I had, he could’ve kicked Princess Leia out sooner and been seen as the Prince Charming he was only pretending to be.
Opening doors, calling his nonna, making pies for the underprivileged—good ol’ Sam, the saint of all saints who just so happened to have an undomesticated penis.
Landon & Shay - Part Two: (The L&S Duet Book 2) Page 12