Drunk Dial(42)

“Around the time I turned twenty-two, I had gotten a job working as a waiter for a company that catered to the rich and famous. One of my assignments was to work a private party in Beverly Hills. It was at Bud Holliday’s house.”

I gasped. “Oh, my God.”

Landon suddenly got up and headed toward the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”

“Getting you a drink. You’re gonna need it. Getting myself one, too.”

He returned with two cold bottles of Miller Lite and handed me one.

“Thank you.” I chugged some of it down, coughing from the rush of cold liquid barreling down my throat.

Landon took a long sip and placed the bottle on the coffee table before continuing his story. “So, obviously, as you can imagine, I was kind of freaking out that I was going to be in the house of the man who I basically considered the catalyst for my birth mother’s drug problem. I was filled with anger. I didn’t know whether I wanted to physically harm him, give him food poisoning, or what. I just knew that I couldn’t waste the opportunity to fuck him up in some way. It felt like fate brought me to that house.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, the chance to get back at him—so I thought—was sort of placed in my lap...and I didn’t even need to use my fist.”

“How?”

Landon took another long swig of his beer. “After the event winded down, I ended up hitting it off with this woman in the kitchen. She was about ten years older than me and made no secret of the fact that she wanted me.”

“What was her name?”

“Jamie-Lynne Holliday.”

“Holliday…his daughter?”

He shook his head slowly. “His wife.”

My jaw dropped. “Oh…”

“I had no clue at first that she was married to Bud. She was a lot younger than him. Of course, once I found out, it was all the more incentive to go along with her advances.”

“You slept with her?”

“I ended up having an ongoing affair with her, yeah.”

“Is this what you’ve been hiding from me—what you were ashamed to tell me?”

A long, slow breath escaped him. “I wish.”

I swallowed, dreading his continuing the story as much as I needed him to continue. “Go on…”

“Bud ended up catching me at his house one night. He’d come home early from a trip. It was exactly what I’d wanted—for him to find me with her. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as far as I was concerned.”

“What did he do?”

“That’s the sad part. Get this…he didn’t even really care. Apparently, they had an open marriage. She just never let me know that. I think she wanted to pretend that our thing was something more forbidden than it was. It made her feel like she was doing something sordid and maybe that got her off even more. Meanwhile, all I’d wanted was to enact revenge on this guy. So, I was feeling like my mission had failed.”

“Did you tell him who you were?”

“Yeah, I pretty much lost it. I ended up going off on him—admitted who my mother was. Jamie-Lynne was shocked because she had no clue I was using her to get to him.” He let out an angry laugh as he looked up at the ceiling. “Would you believe he didn’t even seem to care about that, either? Barely remembered my mother’s name. That fucking killed me more than anything.”

“What happened after that night?”

“I was just in such a bad place. I didn’t give a shit about anything. Jamie-Lynne wanted to keep seeing me, and I continued with it because I’d gotten accustomed to the lifestyle and felt like I had nowhere else to fucking go. But she wasn’t out for my best interests. I was using her, and she was using me. That was all there was to it.”

My palms were getting sweaty. I still didn’t understand what this had to do with the woman in the restaurant tonight, but I was apparently about to find out.

He continued, “One night she brought this friend of hers named April around. April started joking about how she wished she could ‘borrow’ me. I didn’t think anything of it until later that night when Jamie-Lynne told me that her friend had been serious, that April would pay me big money to keep her company. She was basically trying to talk me into it.”

“She wanted to pawn you off to her friend? What kind of a person does that?”

“I was so floored and angry that I made a rash decision to take April up on her offer, just to spite my so-called girlfriend. By that time, I was pretty sure Jamie-Lynne had moved on to some even younger, fresher meat. I had no real feelings for her anyway—never did. So, I started—quote, unquote—seeing April.”