Previously…
– Spencer convinced Elly that the two of them should travel to California to confront her former lover, Anatoli.
– Samantha and Spencer invited Tori out in hopes of convincing her not to marry Zane, but the night went sideways when her nemesis, Fee C., arrived and picked a fight with Tori.
– Landon showed up at the bar and told Tori in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t think it’s safe for her to be with Zane. She lashed out at him and stormed out of the bar. 

“Flight 1462 with service to San Jose will begin boarding in just a few minutes. As a reminder, we are looking for volunteers to gate-check their bags at no additional cost…”

The gate agent’s voice competes with the other noises filling the boarding area. Elly Vanderbilt sits in a metal-framed chair at the end of a row, with her roller suitcase standing between her knees; other passengers have already begun to crowd the gate, despite the fact that boarding has not yet commenced. She is checking her phone once more when a voice catches her off-guard.

“Guess I made it on time,” Spencer Ragan announces as he steps up to her side. He clutches a leather Louis Vuitton weekend bag in one hand and is dressed in fitted black joggers and a white hoodie. A black baseball cap is pulled low over his eyes.

“Barely,” Elly says, looking up at him. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

“I literally texted you that I was on my way.” 

“Well, you cut it close.”

“Sorry,” he says with a slight roll of his green eyes. “I had a tough time getting out of bed.”

Elly scoffs. “What, your wife couldn’t take her hands off you?”

“No,” he snaps, a little too defensively. “I got in late last night. I had to go out–“

“Had to? What, go out drinking?” She studies his face beneath the cap. He does look a little puffier, his eyes a little redder, than usual. 

“It was a family thing.”

“Tim and Claire demanded you go drinking? I’ve known them for a long time, and that doesn’t sound like them — or do you mean Loretta insisted you knock back a few shots of Fireball?”

“Shut up. No. It was Samantha.” He sees Elly’s expression softly — just a little bit — at the mention of her former roommate. “She asked me to meet up with her and Tori to try and talk Tori out of marrying that asshole Zane.”

“Oh. Did it work?”

He shakes his head. “Not as far as I know.”

“I don’t know the whole story, but it sounds like she’s really been digging in her heels on that guy.”

“Beyond. But we barely even got a chance to bring it up with her.”

“That sounds… not good,” Elly says.

“No way,” Spencer replies. “The whole night actually went off the rails — and then some.”

—–

When Tori Gray cracks open her eyes, the first thing she becomes aware of is the beam of sunlight shooting through the missing slat in the vertical blinds covering her bedroom window. She winces against its violation and turns over to face away from it. It is now that she sees her fiancé sleeping soundly beside her in the queen bed. Zane has his back to her — and the offending window — but she can see his exposed shoulder rising and falling softly. 

The disparate threads in her mind begin to weave together into coherent patterns. She recalls the vague sensation of the mattress shifting sometime in the middle of the night, of Zane slipping into bed beside her. She has no idea what time that was, but she expected him to be home late because of his shift at KBAY — and, most importantly, she was in bed long before he arrived home, so she won’t have to bother explaining that she went out to meet her cousins even though she’d told him she would be spending the night at home while he worked. 

And then the rest of it comes back to her: being at The Wild Lady, having a drink thrown on her by Fee C., and arguing with Landon. His words are preserved with frustrating clarity in her mind, just as they were when she crawled into bed and was desperately trying to block out the world by falling asleep:

“You’re determined to marry this dude who would’ve killed me if Mrs. Chase hadn’t shown up. A guy who blackmailed your mom, who didn’t give a crap if your aunt went to prison for murder… But I guess you didn’t learn anything from when you were chasing after Philip Ragan like a puppy dog. How’d that work out?”

Her chest swells with rage and embarrassment. She can’t believe he went there, throwing the trauma of what Philip did to her in her face. Even worse, she can’t believe that he might’ve had a point.

She can hear her own retort just as vividly:

“Stay out of my life. Do you hear me? Fuck off and stay out of my life, Landon.”

Feeling sick to her stomach — and she knows she didn’t have much to drink at all last night — she rolls back over to pick up her phone from the nightstand. But the only alerts are an Instagram notification about a new follower, whose username makes it pretty clear that they must be spam or a bot, and a text message from Samantha. She recalls exchanging a quick series of texts with her cousin last night before going to bed, and when she checks the message, it simply says, Get some sleep. I’ll check in tomorrow.

But when she clicks over to her text thread with Landon, there is nothing. Just her final message hanging there, unanswered:

Sorry I was a bitch can we talk

With a sigh, she lowers the phone to her side but continues clutching it in her hand. She lies there like that for a minute, or a few minutes — it all runs together. She even closes her eyes again, but it is clear that sleep is not going to overtake her again. After another few minutes of silent debate with herself, she slides out of bed as quietly as she can and pulls on the sweats she was wearing before bed. Confirming that Zane is still asleep, she tiptoes out of the bedroom, opening the door slowly to minimize its usual creaking and closing it just as carefully. 

Out in the main living area, she goes to the galley kitchen and pops a Keurig pod into the machine. As she waits for the coffee to brew, she cannot shake the unsettled feeling in her stomach. It seems to radiate through her body as she listens to the loud hiss and then the pouring of the coffee machine. Again she checks her phone. Still nothing.

By the time the coffee is ready, steam still climbing off its surface, she has made up her mind. She pours it into a travel mug, places the ceramic mug in the sink, and grabs a nearby sheet of note paper and a pen. She quickly writes a message:

Running a few errands! Hope you slept well. See you in a little bit. xo – Tori

Placing the note on the counter, she takes her travel mug, slips on some tennis shoes, and leaves the apartment.

—–

All Landon Esco knows when he comes to is that his head feels sticky. He attempts to ascertain anything about himself or his life — where he is, why he feels this way, what happened last night — and his brain just keeps looping back around to how much it hurts. And when he opens his mouth, he realizes that is sticky, too.

“Ugh,” he groans, and the noise sounds brittle and dehydrated. 

“Water,” he says to no one in particular, although speaking the need aloud at least allows him to remember this very simple mission. He sits up in bed and becomes aware that he is wearing boxer shorts and the Celine Dion t-shirt that he semi-ironically purchased in Las Vegas years ago. 

At least I changed out of my clothes when I got home, he thinks.

His head is still swirling as he reaches for the half-crushed water bottle on the nightstand. He picks it up and takes a hearty swig — and his wobbly stomach turns over as soon as the water is inside his body.

The memory of slamming back a shot hits him like a semi-truck. He barely chokes down the water and the accompanying wave of nausea.

Aware of a distant noise but too sickened and hazy to place it, he sticks his face back into his pillow. And that’s when he hears it, from the recesses of his cloudy memory:

“Stay out of my life. Do you hear me? Fuck off and stay out of my life, Landon.”

He can’t remember if he talked to Tori after that. Maybe she left. Yes — he can vaguely remember the sight of her leaving through the bar’s saloon doors, him standing there watching them swinging in her wake.

“You need to stop worrying about her. She doesn’t act like she cares about you.”

This time, the voice is female, but it isn’t Tori’s. As he remembers it, he remembers another shot, too. Tequila?

His stomach instinctively spasms at the visceral recollection.

That must have been Samantha I was talking to, he thinks, but the entire night is little more than a tornado of sounds and tastes, almost all of which make him gag.

“Why did I do this to myself?” he mutters as he takes slow, steadying breaths, his face still planted in the pillow.

—–

“He was wasted,” Spencer tells Elly as they stand in the line to board their flight. “But Kathleen told him he could leave his car in the parking lot, so whatever.”

“As long as he didn’t drive home,” Elly agrees.

“Anyway, I hung around for a little while to keep an eye on Landon after Sam left to try and check on Tori,” he continues, “but by the time he got up on the mechanical bull, it was time for me to pull the ripcord.”

“So you left him there?” she asks.

“I’m not his babysitter. I’m not even his friend!”

“Still…”

“Landon’s a grown-ass man. He can take care of himself. And I knew he wasn’t going to drive home, so it was all good.”

The line shuffles forward slightly. He shifts the leather weekender from one hand to the other and fishes out his phone in order to pull up his boarding pass.

“Are you ready to do this?” he asks.

The way Elly purses her lips is all the answer he needs.

“I’ll be with you the whole time, okay?” Spencer says. “I know it’s probably tripping you out to think about seeing Anatoli again–“

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“–but think about it this way: if this goes well, you could be out from under Loretta’s thumb for good.”

“I can barely even let myself think about that,” she says.

“One thing at a time, then.” 

The line advances toward the gate again.

“I really hope this doesn’t blow up in my face,” Elly says quietly as she watches passengers ahead of them boarding the aircraft.

—–

When Zane begins to stir, he turns over in the bed. A retina-searing beam of light coming through the blinds bombards him — but what he also notices is that the bed beside him is empty. He checks the time on his phone and then languishes in bed for a few more minutes, still groggy after working the late shift at the station.

At last, he climbs out of bed, pulls on a pair of gym shorts and a gray KBAY t-shirt from a giveaway, and ambles out to the living room. Immediately he realizes that Tori is not there. It is too quiet, too still, and a visual sweep of the place confirms that she is not present. It is then that he sees the note on the counter.

He reads it and then leaves it sitting there as he makes a coffee. She probably needed to pick up a few things before we take off, he thinks as the coffee brews.

He flips on the TV for background noise and takes a few sips of his coffee. As he does so, the fog in his head begins to lift. He sits down on the couch and begins to type a text message to Tori.

Before finishing it, however, he decides to check something else. And what he sees makes his blood boil. He slams his coffee down on the table.

“What the hell kind of ‘errand’ would you be doing there?” he says as he stares at the app linked to the tracker that he placed on Tori’s car.

—–

Tori knocks on the door and then takes a step back, as if expecting it to lash out at her. But there is no immediate sound of footsteps approaching, no sign of life from inside the apartment. She cautiously leans closer and thinks she might hear the shower running, but her train of thought is interrupted by the clicking of a lock. 

“Hi,” she says when the door opens to reveal Landon, in a Celine Dion t-shirt and boxers. Her gaze strays ever-so-briefly down to his bare legs, but she forces herself to look up and meet his eyes.

“Did you get my text?” she asks.

“I, uh…” He looks around blearily. “I just woke up.”

“You sound… not great.”

“I feel worse.” He folds his arms. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought we could talk,” she says. “I feel terrible about the way I snapped at you last night.”

“Yeah, well, you said some things that have obviously been on your mind for a while.”

“And so did you! It was low to throw Philip in my face–“

“I was trying to make a point, Tori,” he says, his shoulders falling. “I’m sorry, okay? But someone had to say it.” 

“I don’t want to fight about Zane anymore.”

“And I’m too hungover to try and fight this battle, okay? It fucking sucked what you said to me. Fuck off and stay out of my life? If that’s how you really feel–“

“It’s not.” She sticks out her hand to keep him from closing the door on her. “I came to apologize.”

There is a glimmer of life in Landon’s face, even through the gray pall of his hangover.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah. Let me… uh…”

He steps aside, but then Tori freezes. She is unable to believe what she is seeing.

“You coming in or no?” Landon asks.

“What the hell, Landon?!” Tori shrieks.

Perplexed and still muddy-headed, he rotates to see what could have caused this sudden shift in Tori’s demeanor — and that’s when the rest of the pieces fall into place. That female voice — it wasn’t Samantha’s…

“Oh god,” he says in horror.

“Morning, Tori,” Fee C. says, smirking as she stands there wrapped in a towel, fresh out of the shower.

END OF EPISODE 1119

Are things about to get even worse between Tori and Landon?
What will Zane do now that he has tracked Tori’s location?
Will Elly and Spencer’s mission to California be a success?
Talk about all this and more in the comments below!

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