Page 60 of Landon & Shay: Part Two

Raine took notice of me eyeing the rest of the magazines. She moved in and turned them all backward in the stands. “These things are trash,” she muttered, making me smile. It was probably a sad looking smile, though.

“Super trash.”

“Are you okay, Shay?” she asked, frowning. It must’ve been clear that I was shaken up from seeing those magazines.

I nodded. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m just happy there wasn’t any photographic proof of my night with Landon. Now I can go on pretending it never happened.”

Unfortunately, I was simply one of the many women in Landon’s life who had been played—again.

When I got home that afternoon, I tried to keep myself busy, even though my mind was looking for a million reasons to think about Landon. I avoided social media for the past forty-eight hours to avoid seeing Landon’s face plastered all over the internet with photographs from the party.

Temptation was the devil. There were so many times in the past forty-eight hours that I wanted to type his name into a Google search, just to read the most recent articles about him.

But I wouldn’t, because that would be opening myself up for more pain and hurt.

I didn’t have time to hurt over that man, I did enough of that in my past.

I busied myself with writing. Creating fictional worlds was my favorite thing in the world to do when my reality felt too heavy. I loved writing love stories, because it took me away from the fact that I didn’t believe in true love anymore. At least in my stories, true love was a real thing. And in those stories? True love always won.

19

Landon

“I need a break,Joey. A sabbatical or something from all of this world,” I told my manager as I paced my penthouse. A few days had passed, and I was supposed to be back in New York, but I hadn’t made the jump to leave Chicago yet.

I’d been overthinking everything that went down with Shay, and I had to find a way to apologize to her for our last interaction. I wanted to talk to her to try to get on the same page, and to tell her how never in a million years did I want her to feel as if she were just another woman I was looking to bang. I saw it in her eyes the minute those two women walked up to us. I knew she thought she was nothing but a side piece.

When in reality, she was everything and more.

I couldn’t stop overanalyzing every second I’d spent with Shay that day. My mind kept replaying the ways I’d screwed up. I shouldn’t have slept with her. Did I want to? Absolutely. Was it a mistake? Guaranteed.

Not because it wasn’t good—because it was. It was better than good. The last time I’d felt something so passionate, raw, and real was when I was with her.

It was no surprise the sex was unbelievable, but truthfully it ended up doing more damage than good. I hurt her. I fucking hurt her again, and I was a damn asshole for doing so.

Dr. Smith would’ve told me to stop thinking about what happened and focus on what came next. The problem was, I didn’t know what came next when it came to Shay.

After seeing all the tabloids that made me look a little too close with certain women at the whiskey party, I was sure Shay wanted nothing to do with me ever again. It blew my mind how those magazines could take a perfectly innocent situation and make it appear as if some kind of scandal was happening. How did those people sleep at night?

Probably on their silk sheets with a smile on their faces.

“What do you mean a sabbatical? We don’t have time for a vacation.”

“I didn’t say I wanted a vacation. I said I needed one.” A key to working on my mental health was realizing my triggers. I’d become pretty good at realizing when my thoughts were beginning to run away from me. Dr. Smith taught me that if I learned to catch those thoughts early on, then it made it easier to slow them down. If I caught them too late it were as if I was running at full speed ahead, and by the time I came to the realization that I was falling apart, it’d be too late and I’d crash.

Joey narrowed his eyes and leaned back against my kitchen island. “Your mind going wonky again?”

“I feel out of sorts. I’ve been going nonstop for a while now, and I don’t want to burn out. If I keep at this pace, burning out is the only option. Which will lead to an even bigger, and scarier break.”

He frowned as he ran his hand over his face. “It’s that bad, huh?”

I nodded. “Heading in that direction. It’s been a while since I’ve done something good for my soul.”

“You just won an Oscar! If that’s not good for your soul, I don’t know what is.”

“No, I mean giving back. Helping in communities. I want to go to a few underprivileged areas and really dig in on helping with the topic of mental health.”

I’d been telling Joey this for years now, and he always rolled it off his back, thinking I was just being dramatic. “Just write a hefty check to some organization, and get back to work,” he’d always tell me. “They need your money, not your appearance.”

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