Page 52 of Landon & Shay: Part One

I’d smelled it.

The whiskey on his breath.

My heart dropped in an instant, and I took a few steps back. I gave him a big smile and tried to push away the tears that wanted to fall from my eyes. “I’m gonna let you get back to your work, but I just wanted to tell you the good news.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you on stage again. You’re going to nail it.”

Whiskey. Whiskey. Whiskey.

Had I made up the smell? Was I delusional? Had he gone back to his old ways?

“Thanks. Okay, good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I hurried up to my bedroom, closed the door, and shut off the lights. I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over my head, and the tears began to flow all on their own.

Dad was tapping into his old habits again… I’d smelled it, at least I thought I had. Soon enough, Mom and Mima would notice. Soon enough, there would be fighting. There would be yelling. There would be hatred.

There would be tears. There would be drama. There would be pain.

So. Much. Pain.

I was so tired of how history kept repeating itself every few months. I was so tired of being tired. I hated that a part of me believed Dad would change his ways after being locked up, but it seemed he wasn’t a different man after prison. Maybe people didn’t change. Maybe that was a truth that only existed in fairytales.

I lay in bed and mourned my father who was still alive. I mourned the man I was hoping he could someday be. I mourned my dreams of who he could’ve become. I mourned the loss of my trust in him. Maybe someday, Mom would start mourning him, too.

* * *

The following days,I convinced myself I hadn’t smelled what I’d thought I smelled. Mom and Mima hadn’t said anything about it, and there hadn’t been as much arguing at the house lately, so I didn’t want to bring on drama that didn’t need to exist.

Maybe I was wrong, too. Maybe I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t actually seen him drinking, after all. I hadn’t seen the toxins going into his body. There wasn’t a bottle sitting on his desk, he wasn’t slurring his words, and he had been coherent when I’d spoken to him. Those were all really good signs.

So, instead of focusing on what I had no control over, I focused on what I did:Romeo and Julietand Landon Harrison.

Each day we rehearsed, Landon’s talent became even more apparent. It floored me how effortless he made it all look, too, and how dedicated he was. At first, I’d thought he would drop out of the show the moment he saw how much work it actually took to bring a performance together, but Landon didn’t shy away from the challenge—he embraced it.

When he wasn’t on stage, he was sitting in the auditorium, combing through the script of the play he’d already nailed down. He had his lines memorized by week one. By week two, the blocking was nailed down completely. But still, he studied as if there was something he could learn, something he could unlock from his chamber of talent.

Part of me hated how easily it came to him.

A bigger part was secretly turned on by his skills.

I was a girl who appreciated seeing raw talent. Raw talent—like my father’s—always amazed me. It didn’t work that way for me, though. I had to fight tooth and nail for every ounce of skill I had.

No one knew the hours I’d stayed up trying to perfect my audition piece. No one knew how I moved furniture around in my bedroom to recreate the setup of the stage so I could rehearse my blocking and movements. No one knew the number of hours I stood in front of a mirror and honed facial expressions.

No one knew the number of nights I cried because I felt like I was failing when I was giving it my all and it still wasn’t good enough.

We rehearsed for two hours after school each day of the week, and Landon made sure to always sit close by me. When he wasn’t near, I could feel his perfect stare gazing my way. If he wasn’t studying his script, he was studying me—his second favorite hobby. He knew he got under my skin, but sometimes, I’d catch him looking at me with such a gentleness in his stare that I almost thought he’d forgotten we were playing a game.

Good.

As long as we were going to be forced to be around each other, I might as well win the bet, too.

I had to remind myself daily that none of the butterflies that found me whenever Landon was around were real. I had to have pep talks about how the fluttering of my heart was just heartburn. I had to convince myself that anything I felt was just passing hormones.

I knew deep down that I could never fall for Landon.

He wasn’t the kind of guy who would catch the girl.

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