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

by Brittainy Cherry

  “What’s your problem with me, Monica? What have I ever done to you?”

  “That’s easy—you took something that was mine, and I want it back.”

  “Landon isn’t yours.”

  She huffed. “He’s more mine than he’ll ever be yours. I get it, Shay. You want to believe Landon isn’t the same shithead he was last year, want to think he has a new lease on life, but face the facts. He’s a monster, just like his uncle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up six feet under, too.”

  “You’re disgusting,” I told her.

  “Yeah.” She flipped her hair again. “I guess I am, but at least I’m not pretending to be something I’m not like Landon is. It’s all an act, Chick, and soon enough, the game you two are playing will come crashing to an end. Enjoy him while you can. Soon enough he’ll come back to me. He always does.”

  I hated that she called me Chick, as if she had a right to use the nickname Landon had created for me. I hated that she felt as if she had a right to something that was so clearly mine and Landon’s. I hated that she pushed it off her tongue like venom to sting me.

  I hated her.

  Even though I had my opinions about Landon, I knew I’d never truly hated him, not to my core. I knew there was something genuine there, something somewhat flirtatious, but the truth behind the hate was pretty loose. A strong dislike, perhaps.

  But Monica?

  Oh my gosh, I hated her. I hated her in a real, deep-rooted way, more so than I’d ever hated anyone before—other than my own father. Monica wasn’t just cruel; she was pure evil. She did things to hurt people simply for her enjoyment. She went after people just because she could. She destroyed lives because she was bored. I hated the smugness of her personality, too, and how she seemed so confident she could get away with just about anything because of who she was and the money and status she came from. It bothered me to my core that she was so confident in her ability to wreck lives, in her ability to break people.

  But she wasn’t going to get away with threatening me or trying to scare me.

  For the longest time, I’d stayed out of her way and hadn’t pushed back because I knew how she was. I knew the ugliness that lived beneath her manicured nails and fake eyelashes. I knew the beast in her soul and how it attacked.

  Now, I wasn’t afraid to unleash her beast, because it turned out I had a monster inside me, too, at least I did when it came to the things I cared about the most, and Landon was now one of those things.

  “Aren’t you a little old to be messing with people? Landon doesn’t want you anymore, Monica, and I know you don’t want him either. I’m not even sure you ever did. Why don’t you just leave him alone? Leave us alone. You’re going off to college next year anyway. Why can’t you just let people be? We’re not bothering you, so why do you have to bother us?”

  “Because I don’t like you, Gable. Okay? I don’t like your goody-two-shoes personality, and for the longest time, Landon hated it too. Besides, just because I don’t want him, doesn’t mean I’d let some mutt have my leftovers. So I’m going to give you this fair warning: stay away from Landon, Shay, or you will regret it.”

  “You don’t scare me. There’s nothing you can do to me. I’m not some kind of puppet in your world that you can manipulate, Monica. If I want to talk to Landon, I will. There is nothing you can do to hurt me.”

  “Oh, Chick,” she hissed, leaning in close. “You have no clue how bad I could burn you. Don’t push me. I will destroy your whole life in one fell swoop.”

  “Why are you like this, Monica?”

  “Because I can be,” she stated. She arched a brow. “Maybe you and I should make a bet of our own. What do you think about that? I bet you I can ruin your life before opening night of your stupid show.”

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  “Game on, Shay. Don’t expect me to play like Landon where I show you sympathy because he thinks more with his dick than his brain. Your life is officially in my hands. The countdown is on. Get ready to burn.”

  She walked off, and I dashed to my locker, opened it up, and searched for whatever it was Monica had been trying to find…but it seemed nothing was missing. Everything was in its place, and I was left dazed and confused.

  I jumped out of my skin when I felt a hand land on my lower back.

  “Hey,” Landon said, tossing his hands up in surrender. “You’re a bit jumpy.”

  “Sorry. Just tired.”

  “Did you get in a lot of trouble over the weekend with your parents?”

  “Oh, you have no clue, but it was worth it. No regrets.”

  He smiled, and oh gosh, I loved when he did that. Then he glanced down the hallway and raised an eyebrow. “What were you talking about with Monica?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, closing my locker and securing it. “Nothing of importance anyway.” He looked at me with concern, but I shrugged it off. “Walk me to class?”

  “Of course.”

  As we walked together, he made me laugh, and just like that, Monica was nothing but a fleeting thought in my mind.

  25

  Landon

  “What is this?” I asked Monica as she stood on my front porch with notebooks in her grip.

  “It’s everything you need to know about your pretty, pretty princess. Or, more like everything she knows about you.”

  She held them out toward me, and I began flipping through them, reading words that were obviously written by Shay.

  Words about me…words that were very negative about me. She called me closed-off, mean, a monster. She said I pushed people away, and I kept things to myself. She called me fake and said I lived a life of lies.

  She said she hated me.

  She wrote that a lot.

  I hate Landon Harrison.

  Underlined, highlighted, and written dozens of time.

  But everything was dated before the bet happened. She was writing about me before I let her in, and I didn’t have a problem with that. From Shay’s point of view at that time, everything was spot on.

  I was a monster. I was mean. I was fake. I did live a life of lies.

  Yet all of that changed after we made the bet. That was before she opened my eyes, and melted my heart. Everything she’d written in those notebooks had shifted, because Shay allowed me to be real for the first time ever in my life.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I flipped to the end of one of the notebooks and showed the edge, remainders of the pages that had been ripped out. “Where are the rest of the pages?”

  She shifted in place. “What does it matter? Didn’t you read the shit she said about you? She thinks you’re awful.”

  “Thought,” I corrected. “She thought I was awful, and she was right. What was the lie in her words?”

  Monica parted her lips to speak but nothing came out.

  I cleared my throat and shrugged my left shoulder. “We need to stop this, Monica. Whatever this is, it needs to end. We’re never going back to what we were before, okay? And please, leave Shay alone. If anything, she’s making my life better.”

  “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?” Monica asked. “You’re really going to choose Shay?”

  “I’ll choose her if she chooses me.”

  In that moment, I saw something in Monica I hadn’t seen in a long time. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t vicious. She was sad—maybe even sadder than me.

  Her lips parted as a whisper escaped her. “Then who’s going to choose me?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that.

  I didn’t know what to do to make her happy. Truth was, people had to find their own way to happiness. It was an independent journey, and I was still trying to figure it out for myself.

  “I think you need to start choosing yourself.”

  She wrapped her arms around her body, and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Just remember when I crash, it’s your fault because you refused to catch me.
You’re going to ruin her,” she promised. “Just like you ruined me.”

  “I didn’t ruin you, Monica. Life broke you, not me. A bit of advice?” I offered.

  “Advice from Landon Harrison. This should be comical.”

  I crossed my arms and nodded once. “Talk to someone about what happened to you. Someone who can help you. A therapist, a counselor, hell, even Mrs. Levi. She helped me more than she knows. Just stop keeping all this shit locked up in your head. That’s how it morphs into something even heavier. Talk about it. Find someone you trust, and let them in. It just can’t be me anymore. We’re no good for each other, but you deserve help. You deserve more than this bullshit life.”

  Her lips parted, but no words came out. She wiped her eyes, turned on her heels, and walked away.

  She left that afternoon, and for the first time, I finally felt as if the two of us were finished with our final chapter. It was clear to her that I wasn’t going to revisit the past toxic life that we used to share.

  When you stopped allowing toxins into your system, it meant getting rid of certain types of people in your life, too. Addictions didn’t only come in the form of alcohol or narcotics. Some of the worst addictions in one’s life could be the people allowed into it. I’d learned to be very selective about who I allowed into my world. It turned out, you didn’t need a big circle of people to be content. You simply needed the right people.

  The days passed by fast, and before I knew it, we were a few weeks out from the end of the year, which meant, it was almost showtime for Romeo and Juliet. The week before the play’s opening weekend, we had a parents’ night event where they came out to watch the performance. We used our parents as a test run before putting on the show. I didn’t even bother telling my parents to come. I was still butt-hurt about them both missing my birthday, and seeing how they’d been lately, I doubted they would’ve shown up.

  Needless to say, everyone else was extremely excited about having an audience. I supposed I was happy about it too. We’d been performing for Mr. Thymes for so long now that it felt a bit stale. I headed to the theater to get ready for the performance as everyone else was chatting and excited backstage.

  Shay hurried over to me, and she had the biggest smile on her face. “Hey! How are you?”

  “Nervous as ever,” I replied.

  She grinned even bigger. “Good. My parents are up front, and my dad wanted to meet Romeo before the show if you’re up for it.” She grimaced a little. “He knows about you being in my bedroom but don’t be scared. He’s nothing more than a liar, and we don’t really care what he thinks anymore.”

  “Yeah, for sure.”

  We walked up to the front of the auditorium, and when we made it to Shay’s parents, my heart completely sank in my chest.

  “Mom, Dad, this is Landon,” Shay said, introducing us.

  I was going to vomit. I was going to vomit all over the freaking theater.

  My eyes stayed on them, and I couldn’t have looked away if I wanted to. Well, I could have looked away from Camila, but not Shay’s father.

  Her father’s name was Kurt.

  KJ for short, I assumed.

  I saw it in his eyes, the panic that fell over him, the sweat that beaded along his forehead. I would have bet his hands were clammy and a million thoughts were shooting through his head the same way they were flying through mine.

  No, really.

  What the actual fuck?

  He cleared his throat. “Landon, right?” He held his hand out toward me—his sweaty, nasty, guilty hand. “I’m Kurt, Shay’s father.”

  No fucking shit, asshole.

  I gripped his hand tightly and shook it.

  “I hope you two have a great show tonight.” He stepped back and crossed his arms. “I hear you’ve been working really hard.”

  I didn’t say a word because my mind was on speed. I thought of every conversation I’d ever had with the man in front of me, tracing back every single word of his dialogue, and one fact stood out strongly to me.

  It was the one thing he spoke about almost every time I saw him with my friends.

  His daughters.

  Daughters—plural. More than one.

  As far as Shay was concerned, she was his one and only, and now there I stood, knowing the fact that her father, the man she looked up to more than anything, was a lying scumbag living a double life.

  I felt nauseous. I wanted to shout from the rooftop what I knew. I wanted to express how messed up the whole situation that was unfolding in front of me was. I wanted to rip KJ’s eyes out for ruining the kind of good thing so many people would’ve killed for, for ruining his family.

  Family.

  I would’ve fucking killed for a family unit.

  Shay smiled and stepped forward. “We should probably get backstage and get ready for the show,” she suggested, nodding in my direction.

  My eyes were still glued on KJ, who was smiling brightly as if he hadn’t just been caught in the biggest lie of the century.

  “Landon?” Shay said softly, lightly shaking my shoulder, knocking me out of my trance.

  I shook my head. “Yeah?”

  “We should go get ready?” She said it like a question, tilting her head with concern in her eyes. Concern…Shay was always concerned for everyone around her, always so caring, always so giving…

  How had she, the kindest, most giving person in the world, come from such a monster?

  I scratched the back of my neck and took a step backward. “Yeah, sure. Okay.”

  I mumbled a goodbye to Shay’s parents and wandered off toward the dressing rooms. Shay hurried behind me and grabbed my arm.

  “Hey, you okay?” She said it with those sincere eyes that always shone in her face.

  “Yeah, sorry, just a little out of it.”

  “Is it because you just met my dad? I know he can be a bit intimidating, but—”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not that. Just first performance nerves.”

  She stretched her lips into a grin. “Oh my gosh, of course. I’m so stupid. It’s your first time performing in front of an audience. I get that nervous energy, but you have to use it to fuel your show. Okay? Use that energy to launch your first scene. Feed into it and let it help you put on your best show possible.” She leaned in and kissed my cheek before grabbing my hand and squeezing. “You got this, Landon. You’re going to be amazing. I have to go get ready, but break a leg tonight.”

  “You too. Go ahead…” I smirked a little and nodded. “Break two.” I winked, and her cheeks went rosy.

  She walked away, taking her light with her as she left, leaving me sitting in the dark with information I didn’t have a clue how to deal with. I didn’t know how to process what I’d seen, what I knew.

  KJ, the asshole who fed teenagers drugs, was Shay’s father.

  KJ, the asshole who had another daughter, which meant Shay had a sister she had no idea existed.

  Even if Shay didn’t know it, her worst nightmare had come to life, and I was the only one who possessed that information.

  The show went on, as shows always did. I delivered all my lines, hit my cues, and when it came time for me to kiss Shay, my lips fell against hers. The parents howled and applauded at the end of the performance and brought flowers for their kids to celebrate the show. All I could think was how I needed to get out of there. How I needed to skip past greeting anyone and head home where I could collect my thoughts.

  When Shay stopped my hasty exit by grabbing my arm in the hallway, I knew I couldn’t keep running.

  “Hey, you were amazing tonight.” She smiled and stepped forward. “Mima came to the show, and we are going to get ice cream. You’re more than welcome to come if you want.”

  I scratched the back of my neck and took a step backward. “Nah, I think I’m going to call it a night. I want to brush up on some of the scenes before opening night.”

  “Are you kidding?” Shay laughed. “You can’t get much better than that. It
was a perfect performance.”

  I shrugged. “You know what they say about artists—”

  “We are our worst critics,” KJ finished, walking up behind his daughter.

  I wanted to punch him square in the face.

  “Yeah. Well, it was nice seeing you all.” Except for you, asshole. “Shay, I’ll see you back at school on Monday.” I walked off quickly before she could reply. I didn’t look back until I was a few feet away from my car. I stared at Shay and her family walking out of the auditorium with the brightest smiles on their faces. Shay was very chatty, and her father was taking in all of her words like he wasn’t this double-life-living scum.

  I thought my father was bad news, but compared to KJ, Ralph Harrison was looking like a damn saint.

  “Landon.” A voice called my way, and I tensed up as I heard it. I turned around to see Mom standing there with a bouquet of flowers in her hands. I wasn’t certain I could’ve been any more confused about life that day, but there I was, confused about fucking life.

  “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Rome or something?” I snapped, still obviously hurt by her abandonment at my birthday.

  “I landed earlier today, and Mrs. Levi told me about parent’s night. The show…you…” Her eyes watered as her hands grew shaky. She looked broken-down. Sad, even. And even though I was working really hard to hate her, I still wanted to walk over and wrap her in my arms to make sure she was okay.

  Damn.

  I wondered when that would go away. I wondered when I’d stop being a mama’s boy and be strong enough to hate her.

  Never.

  I’d never hate my mother.

  “You were amazing,” she said. “You were absolutely astonishing on that stage, Land. What you did was beyond words. I didn’t know you had that in you, but then again it makes sense. I always knew you’d be good at whatever you decided to do. I’m so proud of you.”

  I didn’t say anything because my mind was still spinning. I still wanted to hug her like the fool I was, I still wanted to hate her, but currently I was so happy to hear that she was proud of me.