Landon & Shay: Part Two (L&S Duet #2)(31)

“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, na?ve, 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.