Page 47 of Landon & Shay: Part Two

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 waiteduntil 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.

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