Lost King by Piper Lennox (moboreader txt) 📗

the real punch: how it dawns on me, as I sit in the very same room where Paige and I danced and drank and laughed, that she planned the whole thing.

“She used me,” I whisper, the truth boiling down into pure nausea.

Theo watches me carefully. Briefly, I catch sympathy on his face.

“Yeah,” he exhales. “She did.”

Sick as I feel, I don’t get any new tears over this epiphany. It might be because Paige and I haven’t spoken in years, so there’s no friendship to implode.

I think it’s because I have much bigger things to mourn.

“I tried for years to find Aria again.” Theo paces in a slow semi-circle around the couch, back into my sight. “To find you.”

The shock clears everything else away. I look up. “You did?”

“Yes.” He stares at me, breathing hard, and then turns to the buzzing TV.

His hand drags back and forth over his jaw. He shaved off the beard he was growing, and I wonder why it makes me sadder than anything else.

“I looked everywhere. I searched online, I asked kids around the beach.... It was all I could think about. Telling Aria I wasn’t the one who filmed us.”

His stance changes. Instead of exhausted and broken, he looks furious. When he glances back at me, his emerald eyes black as the bay in the winter nightfall, I almost lose my breath.

“Do you know how badly I wanted to make it up to that girl? I felt like absolute fucking scum that I’d even put her in that position.” He turns away. “And when I couldn’t find her, I tracked down every last kid at that party and paid them off so they’d take their videos down. I called websites, I sent letters—”

“Wait.” I stand, too. My legs feel like they’ll collapse underneath me, but I need to see his face again. “You had some of those videos taken down?” I’d assumed it was all my lawyer’s doing on the first few, and then word spreading through those kids’ circles. Never in my life did I think someone else went to bat for me. Let alone him.

“Every last one I could find.” His hands drop to his sides, but the anger doesn’t fade. “I was actually excited about the idea of getting served, Ruby. I spent months waiting on a lawsuit that never came.”

My head spins. It’s a combination of so much new information, and that black-green stare hitting me again.

“You’re mad I didn’t sue you?”

“I’m mad I never saw or heard from you again.” The thunder that rises into his voice is nothing compared to the firmness of his grip when he steps close and grabs my shoulders. “I’m fucking furious you spent all those years thinking of me as some monster.”

This close, I can see the circles under his eyes are even worse than I thought. His breath is too sweet, like all he’s existed on is soda.

I can see tears in his eyes, few enough to stay in place, but holding just as much pain as the ones streaming down my chin.

“I didn’t know.” I shrug his hands off, but only because I want to touch him. He tenses when I hold his face. He tries to pull away.

I don’t let him. I guide his eyes back to me.

“Theo, listen to me. I didn’t know.”

“You could’ve asked. You could’ve sued, Ruby.” He jerks away, pacing to the glass wall. “I mean, fuck, who wouldn’t sue if they thought somebody did that to them?”

“A scared teenage girl,” I call over the end of his sentence, “who just wanted the whole night to disappear.”

He trails, panting again. I realize I’m doing it, too.

It’s strange, the things that take your breath away, even when you’re standing perfectly still.

“Why did you tell me to leave?”

The question tastes like dirt and feels like coughing up a knife. I’ve held this one closer than close for years.

I’ve wondered it more often than why I was the target, out of all the girls in this town. If it was plotted all along, or some spur-of-the-moment cruelty. If there were any regrets, however small.

“You told me, ‘Get out of here. Go.’” My tears have stopped. There’s too much fire for the water to compete.

I swing my arm out to the kitchen, to that spot beside the island where it all happened. The pristine cabinets and tile I memorized through the liquor and horror. The stage I was forced to take, surrounded by a jeering audience of glazed-eyed kids and cell phones...but only paying attention to a single face in front of me.

“If you didn’t film me,” I ask, voice low while my heart kicks up a riot in my chest, “why did you tell me to go?”

Theo blinks a moment, then laughs again as he steps back. It’s humorless and stretched thin—that kind of laugh when your brain just can’t process what it’s getting.

“Oh, my God, Ruby.” He pivots back and has me in his grasp again. “Because I saw the cameras. I saw them filming us. Filming you.”

His eyes travel between mine, making sure I understand. His grip tightens.

“I didn’t want them catching your face on camera.” He swallows, deflating with one last, long exhale before cursing and pacing away, like he’s upset at himself for getting near me again.

I know the feeling: drawn in and pinging free, only to roam right back. You become the satellite in someone else’s orbit.

I’m still swept up in his. He’s fighting so hard to pull free from mine.

“Theo....” My mouth fumbles with words I don’t have. All I can think to do is reach for him, into that blank space yawning between us.