Chapter 14
Landon
I’d read the love language book twice already.
Even highlighted some crap in it.
Ever since, I’d been doing my best to look at Shay in a way I hadn’t before, and to my surprise, I was seeing parts of her that reminded me of myself.
I’d have to thank Raine for sliding me Shay’s number, even though she said she hadn’t meant to text me the seven digits. Raine couldn’t help herself from wanting to play matchmaker to the beauty and the beast.
Shay was timid when I picked her up from the address she’d texted me. I hadn’t ever seen her as quiet as she was when she climbed into my car. We drove ten minutes without her saying a word. Normally, within seconds, she was throwing some kind of insult my way, but that night, she was mute.
I wanted to ask her if she was all right, but since she was sitting in a car with a boy she could hardly stand well after midnight, it was clear that she wasn’t.
I wondered what the storm inside her head looked like.
I wondered if her thunder rumbled as loud as mine, if her lightning struck her soul repeatedly, if she drowned in her own thoughts.
As I pulled up to my house, I put the car in park and went to open my door.
“No,” she whispered, her voice low.
“What?”
“I don’t want to get out. I don’t want to go into your house.”
Now I was confused. I didn’t know much about how girls’ minds worked, but I knew it was a shitshow in there. Therefore, confusion was always going to be likely.
“Then why did you . . . ?” I started.
She shrugged. “I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts tonight, that’s all.”
“Oh.” I raised an eyebrow. “You can be not alone inside my house.”
“No. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about kissing you.”
I smirked a little. “Oh?”
“Don’t let it go to your head. I just mean, at some point, we have to kiss for the show, and it’s just been on my mind a lot.
Just for show purposes, of course. If I go inside your house, I’ll keep thinking about kissing you because I’ll think you’re thinking about kissing me, and I can’t be thinking about kissing you inside of your house, because in that house is your bedroom, which contains your bed, and I don’t want to be just another girl you’re kissing in your bed, even if it is solely for bettering our performances. ”
Well, that was an earful.
She lowered her head. “You can take me back if you want to. I know this isn’t what you signed up for tonight.”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “I didn’t really feel like being alone tonight, either.”
“What are we doing, Landon? This bet, this stupid challenge between us, this back-and-forth pettiness—what is this? Why are we even bothering with something so dumb? A challenge that was forged by Reggie, who probably hasn’t even thought about it since the night he brought it up .
. . what is this?” She sighed, begging for an answer to her loaded question.
“I don’t know,” I told her truthfully. I didn’t know what to think about us. All I knew was that when I thought about Shay, my thoughts didn’t feel so heavy. “It’s weird, right?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“It’s just . . .” I sat back in my seat. “If I’m thinking about you and this stupid bet, it gives me less time to think about me and the shitstorm that is my life.”
“Same,” she confessed, turning her stare to mine.
Those deep-brown eyes burned holes into my soul with such ease.
Her eyes were my favorite part of her, too.
They told full-length stories without any words.
Her eyes always showed the truest forms of her emotions, and that night, they were saying something so heartbreaking.
“You’re sad tonight,” I whispered.
“Yes,” she replied.
I combed a fallen piece of hair behind her ear. I wasn’t certain I was even allowed to touch her, but I did, and she let it happen. I placed my head against the headrest and kept my stare locked with hers.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked, leaning back against her headrest, too.
“Shoot.”
“Why have you hated me all these years?”
“You always seemed so happy.”
She laughed. “And that’s a bad thing?”
“Yes. I envied you. I envied how people loved you, and how your life is this picture-perfect thing. My life has been hard for longer than I remember, and you walk in and you’re all rainbows and crap. I’d kill for that.”
She snickered. “That’s it? That’s why you hate me?”
“Pretty much. You have everything I’ve ever wanted . . . a stable life.”
She laughed even harder. “If only you knew why that was so funny.”
“What’s so funny about it?”
“You hated a fictional version of me that you made up in your head.” She bit her bottom lip for a split second.
I noticed. I noticed all her seconds. “No one has a perfect life. Some people are better at keeping their secrets hidden. My life isn’t easy—far from it, really.
I’ve just been really good at wearing a mask at school. ”
“And you say you’re not a good actor. You’ve had me fooled.”
“Well, good. I think . . . I don’t know.
Sometimes I wish I could let people in so my mind didn’t have to spin all by itself.
You know what I mean? I don’t need anyone to try to fix me or anything—I’m strong enough to fix myself.
I just wish I had someone to get comfort from every now and then.
But I’m OK. Really, I’m good. Overall, my life is good. ”
“You don’t have to do that,” I promised.
“Do what?”
“Say you’re OK when you’re not.”
Her head lowered. “People don’t like me when I’m sad.”
“How do you know? You never let them close enough to see your tears.”
Her lips parted, but no words came out. For the first time in my life, I saw Shay.
I saw the girl behind the mask, the one who felt so much and hid those feelings from the world because she felt like a burden.
I saw her cracks, and they were so beautiful that it almost made my frozen heart beat again.
I’d never known sadness could be so hauntingly beautiful.
“Tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine,” I whispered her way, the words rolling from my tongue. She shut her eyes for a second, and when she reopened them, they were flooded with emotions, but she didn’t dare let a tear fall down her cheek.
It was still too much to let someone in that close.
“My dad’s a liar. He’s been that way as long as I can remember, and tonight my grandmother called him out on his lies again. I went home after rehearsal and heard the shouting in my house, so I left and went to my cousin’s. That’s where you picked me up from.”
“That sucks. I’m really sorry.” I really was sorry about that. Greyson went through the same kind of shit with his parents. My parents didn’t get along great, but luckily, they were hardly home, so I never had to hear them fight.
“My mom will keep allowing his lies, too. She loves him too much. He could tell her the sun is purple and she wouldn’t even ask him for any proof. She’d just blindly believe him.”
“Maybe this time will be different.”
“Doubtful.” She glanced down at the car’s manual stick and trailed her finger up and down it in a slow motion.
Then she made small circles, round and round against the metal rod.
“You ever feel like you’re running in circles?
You have your past behind you, and you’re trying to beat it, to be better than it, but then situations keep coming and tossing you backward.
Every step you take forward, you fall two steps back.
It feels like no matter how much you fight for your future, your past keeps pulling you under. You ever feel like that?”
“More than you know.”
“I want my parents to do something different, even if it’s just for a day.
I want them to stop this cycle. I want Dad to quit with the lies for good.
I want Mom to leave him if he doesn’t change his ways.
I want her to know her worth. I want something to stick.
I want the change to really matter. I want to stop living in a house that suffocates me and leaves me jaded.
” She didn’t give me time to respond to her comment.
She palmed the hair out of her face as she sat up and crossed her legs in the passenger seat. “So, tell me your secret,” she said.
I didn’t even try to keep it to myself. I wanted to know all of her secrets, and I wanted to tell her all of mine. Why, though? Why did I feel such a pull toward a girl I’d spent so much time hating?
“You know how you have down days like today?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s every day for me.”
I’d never told anyone that before. I’d never confessed how heavy my heart sat in my chest, how hard it was to breathe every single day, but she had opened up to me in the middle of the night, and I figured why the hell not open up to her, too.
We were on an even playing field. She was sad, and I was hurting, too.
I was suffering partly from insomnia, partly from too much loneliness, and mostly from keeping it all to myself. I’d never thought Shay would be the one I’d be opening up to, yet there I was—unraveling before her and hoping she wouldn’t judge.
She didn’t judge me.
You could see when a person was judging you, could see their disapproving stares, but Shay was there with only honesty in her eyes. I didn’t know how much I craved her honesty until she gave it so willingly.
“What makes you feel down?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. The words echoed in my head.
I sounded a lot more like my uncle than I wanted to.
So often I thought some of his dark shadows had embedded themselves inside of me.
Maybe it ran in my genes—the sad trait. Either way, I felt as if I was fighting a daily battle against depression, and I wasn’t winning.
Depression.
Why did that word feel so heavy?
Why did it make me feel like such a failure?