Landon & Shay - Part One: (The L&S Duet Book 1)

by Brittainy Cherry

  “He won’t,” I cut in. “I won’t let him.”

  “But what if he does? What if you fall for him and he breaks your heart?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. I didn’t have a clue what I’d do if Landon caused cracks that would slice into my soul. Each day that passed, I worried a little more and more about that possibility.

  “Just be careful.” Eleanor yawned before rolling onto her side and hugging her pillow. “I don’t want to kick a popular guy’s ass, but I will if I have to.”

  What would happen if Landon did manage to make me fall in love with him? What would happen if he then broke my heart?

  I played with those thoughts for a while before coming up with my final thoughts on the subject.

  My lips parted slightly, and I felt the tremble of my body as I spoke my newest truth. “If he breaks my heart, I hope the cracks tell a good story.”

  Eleanor was half asleep as she responded, muttering so low, “If he breaks your heart, I’ll break his spine.”

  Eleanor Gable, my savior, my hero.

  She fell asleep before me, her snores low and gentle.

  I stayed up, thinking about Landon and how he so effortlessly kept crossing my mind. I stayed up, thinking about my dad, wondering if he’d fallen off the wagon again. I stayed up thinking about two men who shouldn’t have been keeping me up at night.

  Around midnight, my phone dinged, and I opened it to see a text message from an unknown number.

  Unknown: We should rehearse the kiss.

  I read the words over and over again, confused. Just as I was about to put my phone down, it dinged again.

  Unknown: Isn’t that a big part of this stuff? Romeo kissing Juliet.

  Landon. Of course.

  Me: How did you get my number?

  Landon: I have ways of finding out things I want to know.

  Raine.

  Obviously.

  Landon: So what do you say? The kiss? You skip over it every day at rehearsal, so if you want to practice on our own, I’m fine with that.

  Me: I’m good, actually.

  Landon: You can show me just how good you are. With your tongue, your lips, your hips, your lips…

  Me: You said lips twice.

  Landon: Two different sets of lips, Chick.

  Jesus, take the wheel.

  My stomach flipped and turned as I read his words over and over again. A slight tingle found its way between my thighs, and I tried my best to ignore it.

  Me: You’re so vulgar.

  Landon: And you’re so perfectly neat.

  Me: Shouldn’t you be sleeping?

  Landon: Shouldn’t you?

  Touché.

  Landon: I can come pick you up now if you want. We can practice at my place.

  Me: Probably not a good idea.

  Landon: Some of the best ideas are the bad ones. Obviously, neither of us can sleep tonight. What do you have to lose?

  Me: My mind apparently.

  Landon: We don’t even have to rehearse. I was only half kidding about the kissing thing, anyway, trying to get under your skin. We can just talk. Or not. We could just sit in the same room, not saying shit at all.

  I glanced over to my sleeping cousin and swallowed hard. WWED—what would Eleanor do? Well, for starters, she’d tell me to go to sleep. She’d say a tired brain isn’t a good brain to make decisions with. She’d talk about how terrible Landon was and his history of being an awful person.

  She’d tell me I was too good for him. She’d tell me to not give in to the advances. She’d tell me to stand strong and tell him no. But wise Eleanor wasn’t available in that moment. She was sound asleep with not a care in the world. She didn’t have the ability to tell me anything, so I listened to my heart instead of my head.

  My stupid, sensitive heart.

  I texted him the address, and then I held my breath.

  18

  Landon

  I’d read the love language book twice already.

  Even highlighted some crap in it.

  Ever since, I’d been doing my best to look at Shay in a way I hadn’t before, and to my surprise, I was seeing parts of her that reminded me a bit of myself.

  I’d have to thank Raine for sliding me Shay’s number, even though she’d said she hadn’t meant to text me the seven digits. Raine couldn’t help herself from wanting to play the fairy godmother to the beauty and the beast.

  Shay was timid when I picked her up from the address she’d texted me. I hadn’t ever seen her as quiet as she was when she climbed into my car. We drove ten minutes without her saying a word. Normally, within seconds, she was throwing some kind of insult my way, but that night, she was mute.

  I wanted to ask her if she was all right, but based on the fact that she was sitting in a car with a boy she could hardly stand well after midnight, it was clear that she wasn’t.

  I wondered what the storm inside her head looked like. I wondered if her thunder rumbled as loud as mine, if her lightning struck her soul repeatedly, if she drowned in her own thoughts.

  As I pulled up to my house, I put the car in park and went to open the driver’s door.

  “No,” she whispered, her voice low.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to get out. I don’t want to go into your house.”

  Now I was confused. I didn’t know much about how girls’ minds worked, but I knew it was a shitshow inside their heads, so confusion was always going to be likely.

  “Then, why did you…” I started.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts tonight, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” I raised an eyebrow. “You can be not alone inside my house.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking about kissing you.”

  I smirked a little. “Oh?”

  “Don’t let it go to your head, dork. I just mean, at some point, we have to kiss for the show, and it’s just been on my mind a lot. Just for show purposes, of course. If I go inside your house, I’ll keep thinking about kissing you because I’ll think you’re thinking about kissing me, and I can’t be thinking about kissing you inside of your house, because in that house is your bedroom, which contains your bed, and I don’t want to be just another girl you’re kissing in your bed, even if it is solely for bettering our performances.”

  Well, that was an earful.

  She lowered her head. “You can take me back if you want to. I know this isn’t what you signed up for tonight.”

  “It’s fine,” I muttered. “I didn’t really feel like being alone tonight, either.”

  “What are we doing, Landon? This bet, this stupid challenge between us, this back-and-forth pettiness—what is this? Why are we even bothering with something so dumb? A challenge that was forged by Reggie, who probably hasn’t even thought about it since the drunken night he brought it up…what is this?” She sighed, begging for an answer to her question.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. Truthfully, I didn’t know what to think about us. All I knew was that when I thought about her, my thoughts didn’t feel so heavy. “It’s weird, right?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “It’s just…” I sat back in my seat and clutched the steering wheel in my hands as I closed my eyes. “If I’m thinking about you and this stupid bet, it gives me less time to think about me and the shitstorm that is my life.”

  “Same,” she confessed. When I opened my eyes, her head was tilted my way. Those deep brown eyes burned holes into my soul with such ease. Her eyes were my favorite part of her, too. They told full-length stories without any words.

  That was my favorite part of watching her perform on stage. Her eyes always showed the truest forms of her emotions, and that night, they were saying something so heartbreaking.

  “You’re sad tonight,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  I combed a fallen piece of hair behind her ear. I w
asn’t certain I was even allowed to touch her, but I did, and she let it happen. I placed my head against the headrest and kept my stare locked with hers.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she asked.

  “I won’t stop you.”

  “Why do you hate me? Why have you hated me all these years?”

  “Easy—because you always seemed so happy, and I envied you. I envied how people loved you, and how your life is this picture-perfect thing. My life has been hard for longer than I remember, and you walk in and you’re all rainbows and crap. I’d kill for that.”

  She snickered a bit. “That’s it? That’s why you hate me?”

  “Pretty much. You have everything I’ve ever wanted…a stable life.”

  She laughed even harder. “If only you knew why that was so funny.”

  “You can tell me. I like to laugh.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since now.”

  She bit her bottom lip and shrugged. “No one has a perfect life. Some people are just better at keeping their secrets hidden. You said I’m all rainbows, but you do know you can’t get the rainbow without the rain, right? My life isn’t easy—far from it, really. I’ve just been really good at wearing a mask at school.”

  I smiled. “And you say you’re not a good actor. You’ve had me fooled.”

  “Well, good. I think…I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could let people in so my mind didn’t have to spin all by itself. Just to have someone to say, ‘That sucks and I’m sorry. Here’s a hug.’ You know what I mean? I don’t need anyone to try to fix me or anything—I’m strong enough to fix myself. I just wish I had someone to get comfort from every now and then. But I’m okay. Really, I’m good. Overall, my life is good.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I promised.

  “Do what?”

  “Say you’re okay when you’re not.”

  Her head lowered and shook back and forth. “People don’t like me when I’m sad.”

  “How do you know? You never let them close enough to see your tears.”

  Her lips parted, but no words came out. For the first time in my life, I saw Shay. I saw the girl behind the mask, the one who felt so much and hid those feelings from the world because she felt as if they were too much of a burden to impose on others. I saw her cracks, and they were so beautiful that it almost made my frozen heart beat again.

  I’d never known sadness could be so hauntingly beautiful.

  “Tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine,” I whispered her way, the words rolling from my tongue and piercing her ears. She shut her eyes for a second, and when she reopened them, they were flooded with emotions, but she didn’t dare let a tear fall down her cheek.

  It was still too much to let someone in that close.

  “My dad’s a liar. He’s been that way as long as I can remember, and tonight my grandmother called him out on his lies again. I went home after rehearsal and heard the shouting in my house, so I left and went to my cousin’s. That’s where you picked me up from.”

  “That sucks. I’m really sorry.” I hoped she believed me, too.

  “My mom will just keep allowing his lies, too. She loves him too much. He could tell her the sun is purple and she wouldn’t even ask him for any proof. She’d just blindly believe him.”

  “Maybe this time will be different.”

  “Maybe. Probably not.” She glanced down at the car’s manual stick and trailed her finger up and down it in a slow motion. Then she made small circles, round and round against the metal rod. “You ever feel like you’re running in circles? You have your past behind you, and you’re trying to beat it, to be better than it, but then situations keep coming and tossing you backward. Every step you take forward, you fall two steps back. It feels like no matter how much you fight for your future, your past keeps pulling you under.”

  “I know that feeling all too well.”

  “I want my parents to do something different, even if it’s just for a day. I want them to stop this cycle. I want Dad to quit with the lies for good. I want Mom to leave him if he doesn’t change his ways. I want her to know her worth. I want something to stick. I want the change to really matter. I want to stop living in a house that suffocates me and leaves me jaded.” She didn’t give me time to respond to her comment. She palmed the hair out of her face as she sat up and crossed her legs in the passenger seat. “So, tell me your secret,” she said, and I didn’t even try to keep it to myself. I wanted to know all of her secrets, and I wanted to tell her all of mine. Why though? Why did I feel such a pull to a girl I’d spent so much time hating?

  “You know how you have down days like today?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s every day for me.”

  I’d never told anyone that before. I’d never confessed how heavy my heart sat in my chest, how hard it was to breathe every single day, but she had opened up to me in the middle of the night, and I figured why the hell not open up to her, too. That night we were on an even playing field. She was sad, and I was, too.

  I was suffering partly from insomnia, partly from too much loneliness, and mostly from keeping it all to myself. I’d never thought Shay would be the one I’d be opening up to, yet there I was—opening up to her and asking her not to judge.

  She didn’t, though. You could see when a person was judging you, could see their disapproving stares, but Shay was there with only honesty in her eyes. I hadn’t known how much I craved her honesty until she gave it so willingly.

  “What makes you feel down?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed, and the words echoed in my head. I sounded a lot more like my uncle than I wanted to. So often I thought some of his dark shadows had embedded themselves inside of me. Maybe it ran in my genes—the sad trait.

  Either way, I felt as if I was fighting a daily battle against depression.

  Depression.

  Why did that word feel so heavy?

  Why did it make me feel like such a failure?

  I was fighting to avoid being swallowed alive by my own mind, and it was an exhausting task to face. I wished they taught us about depression in school. I wished we were given tips and tricks to avoid falling too deep into the dark. Instead, we learned algebra equations. I couldn’t wait for that to come in handy in my life.

  “Are you depressed?” she asked. She asked the question as if it wasn’t a loaded gun pointing straight at my face.

  “No,” I lied. I’d always lie about that, too. People looked at you different if they thought you were depressed, especially when your life looked a certain way, when it seemed you didn’t have anything to be sad about at all. I knew after I found out about Lance’s depression, I looked at him different. It wasn’t even on purpose, but when a person you love is broken, you see the cracks every time they are around you, and you just wish you had the tools to fix those breaks.

  “You always lie about that?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “Never had to lie about it because no one ever asked.”

  “You’re going to get sick of being around me. I ask a lot of straightforward questions. I don’t sugarcoat things.”

  “Good. I don’t want to get diabetes. Plus, I don’t sugarcoat anything either. I don’t have the energy to do so.”

  She stared at me for a while, tilting her head back and forth, taking mental notes on me. Then, she parted her lips. “I should get back to my cousin’s house before they notice I’m gone.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  I wanted her to stay a little bit longer. We wouldn’t even have to talk. We could just sit in silence and it would be good enough for me. But, she wasn’t mine to keep.

  She was still sad, worrying about her dad, and she had every right to be sad, too. Lance had struggled with a drinking problem and it was the ultimate cause of his death, so I knew how serious it could be.

  I didn’t try to tell her to stop being sad. I just allowed her to feel what she had to feel.
>
  On the drive, we passed a park, and Shay called out quickly. “Can we stop here real quick?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “I want to see something.”

  I pulled the car over and parked, and we both climbed out. Now it was my turn to trust where she led me. We walked through the woods, down the pathway, and it seemed like Shay was on a mission to find a certain thing.

  When we came to an opening where two huge willow trees sat, she walked over to it, running her fingers along the bark. The two trees were connected, twisted into each other as if they were meant to be together as one. The closer I grew to the tree, the more I noticed the carvings in its bark.

  “It’s called the lovers tree,” Shay said, still searching. “The story is that if a couple comes here and carves their names into the trunk of the tree, their love story will last forever. My family has been doing it for decades and decades.”

  “That’s corny,” I muttered. But kind of cool, too.

  “I love it,” she replied. “Well, loved it.” She stopped when she found a set of initials.

  CAM & KJG

  Before I could ask about the pairing, Shay reached into her pocket, pulled out a set of keys, and started scratching at the letters.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down,” I shouted, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her back, but even though she was small, she was strong. She ripped out of my hold and went back to slashing at the bark.

  I grabbed her again, this time tighter, and spun her around to face away from the tree. “What the hell are you doing, Chick? You can’t be out here destroying people’s happily ever afters.”

  “No, I have to. The legend says the initials mean their love will last forever, not that they will be happy, and my parents aren’t happy. They’re trapped in this messed-up loop, and I have to stop it.”

  My cold heart broke for her. She was shaking repeatedly as she tried to get back to the tree, but I wouldn’t let her go. I couldn’t. She was falling apart in my grip, tears washing down her cheeks as she lost herself in me.

  “This tree isn’t a gift, it’s a curse, and my mom will never be able to let go of my dad if she’s still attached to this thing. Just like my grandmother was attached to my grandfather, just like my great-grandparents. This tree is cursed. I need to get their names off it,” she cried.