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

I sat beside him, oddly emboldened. It was probably the liquor at work. My high from downstairs had worn off, but my drunkenness just kept deepening as the night went on.

I liked it. All my fantasies of mingling with the summer boys of the Hamptons involved sparkling wit and flirty banter I was never capable of in real life. But now, suddenly, I was.

“What’s your name?” Theo rolled away from me on the rug, grabbed something from underneath the entertainment center, then rolled back to me. He unscrewed the bottle with his thumb in one perfect spin.

“Aria Jacobs,” I said, watching his Adam’s apple dip when he swallowed. He pushed the bottle into my hands. I drank. “Theo, right? Thank you for inviting me.”

“Did I?” He wiped his mouth on his arm, one long drag that left his lips even pinker than before. “Sorry, I don’t remember.”

“That’s okay. I guess it was really Paige who invited me, anyway.”

For a second, his expression darkened. “You friends with her?”

“Um...kind of.” This felt like some kind of test, and I didn’t know the right answer. “But not really.”

“Good. She runs her mouth a lot. They all do.” He reached for the bottle, wincing when he grabbed it with the wrong hand. I smoothed his bandage back into place.

“Have you always been like that?” I asked. “Scared of blood?”

“Hey, now, I’m not scared of it. My reaction was involuntary.”

Even his slurred, butchered words were adorable.

“Thank you for doctoring me.” He pushed up on his elbows and held out his uninjured hand.

My heart stopped when I took it, then pounded as I pulled him up to a sitting position.

The way his fingers gripped tighter, his weight shifting as he trusted me, lit every last nerve on fire with happiness.

“Why aren’t you downstairs,” I asked, “enjoying your party?”

There it was again: his green eyes going cold.

“It’s not my party,” he said. “It’s theirs.”

“Whose?”

Wordlessly, he rapped his knuckles on the floorboards underneath us.

“You do this a lot,” I said, teasing. Not thinking.

Theo tilted his head and squinted at me.

“Vanish,” I explained, then cringed. God, I was reverting back into weirdo idiot territory. “I mean...just— From what other people say, and what I’ve seen, you throw all these parties, but you don’t really enjoy them yourself.”

My breath snagged. I smiled out of nerves, then quickly covered it with my hand.

Slowly, he reached up and moved it.

“You have a nice smile.”

“Liar.”

“I never lie. Don’t call me a liar.”

“Drunk, then,” I muttered, running my tongue over the worst part of my smile: my front teeth sat like an overlapping V, and my eye teeth protruded from the gums too high. It wasn’t the worst set of teeth I’d seen...but it wasn’t like his. Like any of theirs.

“Your smile is nice because I believe it.” Theo gave me a long stare. I knew, as he scooted back against the foot of the bed and shut his eyes, I wasn’t meant to argue.

And for once...I didn’t want to.

The alcohol fully caught up to me as I joined him against the bed. My brain felt like it was unspooling. Time was too fast and too slow, all at once.

“What’s wrong with Paige?” I asked. “And what do you mean about everyone running their mouths?”

His neck lolled back and forth on the corner of the mattress, a lazy head-shake with an even lazier hand-wave accompanying it. “They’re fake, that’s all.”

“Which ones?”

“Almost everyone I know.”

“Even Paige?” I didn’t really want this answer. Becoming friends with her was almost as exciting as sitting in a bedroom, alone, with the Theo Durham.

He exhaled hard through his nose. “Mixed feelings there. But everyone else...yeah, they can go fuck themselves.”

Time staggered onward, blurred in the slosh of the liquor we kept passing. I liked that I could smell his skin on the mouth of the bottle, every time I lifted it to my lips.

It felt like hours that we sat there and talked, laughing through random anecdotes or humming to familiar songs that poured up through the floor. Sometimes the conversation dipped into serious matters—his father being gone so much, my father being gone permanently; the pressures of socializing in a world where, for one reason or another, you didn’t quite fit.

“I like this.” Theo hefted himself onto the bed and held out his hand. I let him pull me up. “I never do this.”

“What?” I flopped back like tumbling into fresh snow. “Talk to someone?”

“Talk to someone longer than a half hour without feeling so—so done. You know?”

I didn’t know. My mom, her sister, and their mother brought me up in a wonderfully noisy world of half-shouts, wild laughter, and constant interruptions. Silence felt wrong. For us, there was no clearer sign of loneliness.

“Why don’t you feel that way with me, then?” My eyes slid shut. I almost slept—until I felt him sink down beside me, our arms touching.

“You’re so...interesting. I’ve seen you around every summer, and it always seemed like there was way more to you than what I saw.”

His fingers teased their way into mine. Fireworks of joy detonated in my head.

“After meeting you,” he said, “I know I was right.”

“You’ve seen me?” And here I’d assumed I was invisible to him.

He nodded. “And you’re real. Your smile is real.”

“And crooked,” I snorted bitterly.

“So?”

Warmth bloomed in my chest. With my eyes still closed, I smiled. Teeth and all.

“And you’re kind...considerate. Literally anyone else at this party, if they’d found me on the bathroom floor like you did? They would’ve just left me there, or taken a video to give me shit for it later. You didn’t.”

“I like helping