Lost King by Piper Lennox (moboreader txt) 📗

I brush my teeth, she reminds me I can’t trust Theo anymore; I never could.

Finally, in the front hall, I think she’s had enough.

“Ruby.” She grabs my arm before I can slip it into my coat. “Seriously. You can’t possibly think he’ll take you back after all that.”

The mask of determination starts to slip. I get out of her hold and shrug my coat on, feeling the adrenaline fade as I grab my car keys.

I open the door. The wind howls past; Frankie curses and huddles behind the door, rubbing her bare arms. Tank tops are her uniform of choice, and her coat is still thrown onto the floor of my bedroom.

“He probably won’t,” I whisper. The winter air twists my lungs into straw wrappers. “But I need to try.”

“You’re crazy,” she says again.

Then she laughs inside another sigh, waving me on.

“I’ll either be here when you get back in—oh, about twenty minutes? Seems like enough time for him to tell you to fuck off—or I’ll lock up and see myself out in thirty minutes, in the unlikely event he’s as crazy as you.”

Now I’m the one who flips her off, even though I know this is another of Frankie’s feel-better tactics. She keeps your hopes low, ensuring you don’t get your soul crushed.

I pity her for that, too.

“Door’s unlocked.”

I’m so thrilled to hear Theo’s voice through the doorbell speaker, it takes me a minute to realize a small miracle just happened: he invited me inside, instead of telling me which circle of hell to vacation in.

As I step into the foyer, I bite my tongue about his door being unlocked. I don’t think I’m allowed to care about that, anymore. Maybe I never was.

He doesn’t get up from the sofa when I walk into the living room. On the television screen, a video game flashes and blares and slaughters my senses, already shot from that two-day crying jag.

“Um...hi.”

I get a glance over his shoulder, but nothing else.

“Can I sit down?”

“Plenty of space,” he says. I think this is his way of warning me I shouldn’t sit anywhere near him, so I choose the far end and perch myself on the armrest.

“I’m sorry.” It sounds like I blurt this, but it was actually more carefully rehearsed than he’d ever know. Spitting it out was the only way to do it.

Theo keeps playing. I study his profile and hate how he looks. It’s not just the dark circles under his eyes, which tell me he hasn’t slept. It’s not even the clench in his jaw, which tells me he’s still furious.

It’s his posture. He’s slumped, exhausted...defeated. It’s the faraway stare of his eyes, like everything around him has crumbled.

And that, I admit to myself, is why he let me inside. It’s not because he wants to hear me out. It’s because he doesn’t care about anything, anymore.

I did it. I broke him.

“I miss you.” My gaze wanders to my hands. It hurts too much to look at him directly, and see for myself all the damage I did. “I guess I should have some big speech at the ready about why I lied, how and when I changed my mind about doing it, how you should be able to trust me again...but I don’t.”

A tear falls onto my thumb. I watch it skid down my skin and vanish into the fabric of my sweater.

“That’s all I got. That I’m sorry, and I miss you. And I know it’s not enough, but....”

But I hope it will be.

Theo pauses the game, then idly tosses the controller between his hands while he bites his cheek.

“Remember I told you about those kids talking shit about me? The people I thought were my friends? It was at that same party. The night you and I met.”

There’s two layers to his voice. One, the loudest, is deadpan and gravelly.

The layer underneath is almost breathless. Impossibly pained.

I nod. “The first day of summer.”

For a second, he looks confused that I already knew this. Then the lines in his forehead soften. “Right.”

It kills me: the fact he briefly forgot I was there. That I was her.

“Meeting Aria,” he goes on, then sighs, “meeting you...it made me feel better.”

“Why?”

“Because, Ruby,” he says, laughing in such a heartbreaking way, I have to stare at my hands again, “I meant what I told you. You were good, and honest, and so fucking real. I loved that.”

My heart flutters. I urge it to stop. He’s not talking about me; he’s talking about Aria. And he’s using past tense.

“In just one night, it felt like I already knew you better than anyone else at that party. It’s what made me realize the problem wasn’t me—it was who I’d been friends with. It was such a relief. All that rejection I felt…it just went away.

“And yeah,” he adds, “I was wasted; I’ll admit that I barely even remember what you looked like, back then. Truth be told, I can hardly remember our conversations.”

He pauses, and I know he’s waiting for me to look at him. Eventually, I do.

“But I never forgot how you made me feel.”

The sting in my eyes spreads, radiating through my face. I really hoped I was done crying.

He gets up and tosses the controller onto the table. “I never could get the truth out of Paige, but I knew she did it. She was pissed at me for breaking up with her.”

Why this information sucker-punches me, I don’t know. I’ve been fighting to fill in the blanks of this situation for two days, wondering what on earth Theo meant when he said Paige wanted revenge. Her being his ex shouldn’t come as a shock.

“Find Theo.”

That’s