Lost King Piper Lennox (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📖

lot of it. My head swam, feeling like a chunk of ice rising to the top of a lemonade pitcher every time I turned too fast or laughed too hard.

It felt like it took years to reach the top. “Where can I take you?” I asked. She probably had this house memorized. I’d only memorized the outside.

“Find Theo.” Paige rubbed underneath her eyes, like a sleepy kid.

“Okay.” Thank God she was too drunk to notice how stupidly happy this mission made me.

I told myself it wasn’t anything to get excited over. Just a business transaction. Paige needed a bed; Theo had the authority to clear one off. At most, we’d speak ten collective words to each other.

But God…they’d be a great ten words.

“Where is he?”

She motioned behind me with a shrug. “Somewhere.”

I propped her against the wall outside a bedroom and knocked. A girl shouted at me to go the fuck away.

I sighed and glanced up and down the hall. So many doors.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Paige. She gave a faraway smile in response.

I knocked on the next door, and the next, always greeted by someone telling me it was occupied. Usually, all I got were crude moans.

Then I got to the last door.

Unlike the other rooms, the light was on inside; I stared at it pooling near my feet while I knocked.

“Uh...come in?”

It took several seconds to register with me that I wasn’t being told to go the fuck away or get the hell out. I touched the doorknob like it would burn me.

The bedroom I stepped into was enormous. Plush white rugs crawled across the hardwood, muffling my staggering footfall as I took in the low-profile bed. It was topped with bedding I knew, somehow, cost more than my mother earned in a month. My fingers brushed the dusty glass shelves of an entertainment center, drawing back quickly when I saw the skulls.

There were dozens of them, varying in size and shape. Their empty sockets gaped at me, lipless smiles taunting me for getting scared.

Animals, I realized. They were animal skulls, arranged by type on every shelf. Most were birds, but as I ducked my head and explored, I saw larger ones that made me imagine bobcats or grizzlies.

There was a bright light coming from the open bathroom. I squinted like I was entering the Pearly Gates.

At the threshold, I stopped short.

There was blood on the tile in front of me. Several large drops, glistening like wet rose petals.

Just beyond that, slumped against the wall near the toilet, was Theo Durham.

“Oh, God, are you all right?” I tiptoe-hopped around the blood trail leading to him. He looked up briefly, then tipped his head back against the wall.

His hand was wrapped in toilet paper. Blood seeped through every layer.

“Cut my palm,” he winced, as I took his hand in mine and tore the paper off. “Blood, uh.... I don’t....”

I looked up from his wound, which actually wasn’t very deep at all. Truth be told, as shocking as the blood was when I saw it, there wasn’t much. Not enough to cause alarm.

But Theo’s face was whiter than those fancy rugs out there, and his breathing was shallow. I glanced in the toilet and saw vomit.

“You don’t do well with blood?” I asked, hiding my smile.

It wasn’t that I found it funny. Just unbearably cute.

“How’d it happen?” I asked, while I searched the cabinets and linen closet. I found a box of knee bandages and some slightly expired peroxide. Good enough.

“Someone broke a glass in my room,” he panted, squeezing his eyes shut tighter while I worked. “Should’ve just swept it up. But I’m drunk, so.”

My laugh fluttered his Polo collar.

Up-close, he was even more handsome than I saw on the shore. I’d thought the most beautiful thing his teeth could do was smile, but I was wrong. Watching them sink into his own lip got my heart pounding ten times harder.

Imagining them sinking into my lip? A hundred.

“Almost done,” I told him, then made him keep his eyes closed until I’d scrubbed every trace of blood from the floor. “Let’s get you somewhere you can lie down.”

Lie down.

Shit: Paige. I’d left her in the hall.

After Theo insisted he was fine to walk to the bed on his own, I excused myself and ran down the hall. Paige wasn’t where I’d left her. I called her name, but it was useless: you couldn’t hear anything if there wasn’t at least one solid door between you and the rest of the party.

I reasoned with myself that she must be fine. Everyone here seemed to know and love Paige. Surely someone had helped her up, by now.

For all I knew, she rallied and went back downstairs. Her energy while drunk was even wilder than when she was sober. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find her at the island again, dancing and pouring a round of shots for whoever asked.

Back in the room, Theo had migrated from the bathroom to one of the rugs, arms crossed over his face. I shut the door as softly as I could behind me, then tiptoed closer.

“You don’t have to be quiet,” he said. “I’m not asleep.”

“Actually, I was wondering if you fainted after all.”

Theo cracked up. The rumble of his chest skittered across me, competing with the bass of the stereo downstairs. No contest.

“Couldn’t make it to the bed without me, huh?”

“Maybe.” Through the gap in his arms, he peeked at me. “Or maybe I’m faking, so you’ll take me there now.”

“Uh-huh. And then what—you’ll stumble and ‘accidentally’ pull me down with you?”

“Maybe I will.”

“And maybe I’m too smart to fall for that old trick.”

This time, his laughter went