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

it around herself from one hand to the other as she walks ahead. “It’s on me.”

I follow and don’t protest. This is a golden excuse to keep talking. “So what’s the bucket for?”

“Work.”

“What do you do?”

“Not so sure you won’t judge, Mr. Kenzo.”

“Huh?” I follow her stare to the logo on my hoodie. “Oh—this isn’t mine. And I won’t judge, I promise. Work is work.”

“Then tell me what you do, first.”

Not a damn thing, I think. But that’d be the king of pathetic confessions.

“I’m kind of...between jobs, right now.” Technically true, if you count my brief stint as a caddy for my uncle Sterling one summer. It was only one tournament, but he did pay me. Work is work.

Ruby studies my face a moment, then draws a breath as she slides the hammer around inside the bucket. “I’m a maid.”

“Oh.” I jam my hands into the sweatshirt pocket and rattle my keys, so I won’t do something stupid. Like pick out that lint that’s trapped in her hair, or brush her hand and pretend it’s accidental. “That’s...cool.”

“Don’t lie,” she giggles.

“No, I mean it. It just sounds like you don’t like it.”

“The job is fine,” she shrugs, thanking me when I take the bucket. “But I’ve had some trouble landing new clients for the company. Everyone in this town has either employed the same maids for decades, or they call up Clean Xpress or one of the other big franchises.”

“We don’t have either.”

“You’d be the exception, then.” Eyeing me again, she asks skeptically, “Do you really clean your house yourself?”

“Try to. I’m probably not half as thorough as your company is.”

“In that case....” She produces a business card: Bayside Home and Commercial Cleaning. It’s softened and creased. I like the idea that it’s traveled with her, waiting for whenever we’d meet. “Keep us in mind.”

“Wow, party clean-up? Now that, I desperately need.”

“Do you throw a lot of parties?”

“Used to, back in high school. Now it’s more like one long get-together, every summer. The results are similar, though. Trash everywhere, shoe scuffs on the floors—and fuck, so much sand. I don’t know where it comes from. We’ve got mostly pebbles on our shore.”

She swats my wallet-yielding hand down at the register. I let her pay, if only because doing so lets me keep all my attention on her, instead of a card reader.

Outside, she spins slowly on the sidewalk to face me, once again hugging the bucket to herself. “Well,” she says, inhaling.

I nod. “Well.”

We’re silent. She seems nervous. I’m just memorizing her.

The second her feet move, I blurt, “Thank you for the hammer.”

“It’s nothing. I mean, you worst-case saved my life. A hammer is the least I could do to repay you.”

With one last smile, she nods goodbye and starts away.

The back is just as beautiful as the front. My palms still tingle, remembering how it felt to hold her hips and steer her up against something.

“I can think of one more thing,” I call.

Ruby spins back, stepping onto a curb as a truck crawls between us. She waits.

“Get dinner with me.”

She tilts her head. “You save my life, and I’m supposed to repay you by letting you buy me dinner?”

“Yes.” Another truck goes past. In its wake, a cloud of exhaust almost hides the nervous smile she gives. “It’s been a while.”

“What, since you’ve eaten?”

“Since I’ve shared a meal with someone even half as beautiful as you.”

Her cheeks turn bright pink; her laugh forms a cloud of steam. “Does that line actually work?”

“You tell me.”

Ruby bites her smile and glances off into the distance.

“All right,” she says. “But just one dinner. And it’s not a date.”

“That’ll make it awkward when I kiss you at the end of the night, but sure. Not a date. Whatever you want.”

She laughs again. It echoes inside the bucket.

“Call the number on the card,” she says, starting away. “Just leave a message of where I should meet you. I’ll get it before I clock out.”

My eyes don’t waver until she’s all the way back at her car, driving off with one last blush, smile, and the smallest, sweetest wave I’ve ever seen.

2

“Broken up means broken up, Call. You can’t just barge into my house like that anymore.”

Callum leans in the doorway of my bedroom and ignores me, shoveling another piece of jerky into his mouth. I sigh, get up from my vanity, and take the bag.

“And,” I add sharply, “you can’t just raid my fridge whenever you want, either.”

“So I can’t use my house key—which, by the way, you’ve never asked me to give back—and I can’t eat your food,” he says as he watches us in the mirror, “but I’m still supposed to drop everything I’m doing as soon as you get lonely?”

“Do I look lonely to you?” Rummaging through my jewelry box, I fish out my mother’s pearl teardrop earrings. Callum’s leer melts my reflection as I put them on.

“Seemed pretty lonely last week.” His peppery teriyaki breath washes down my neck, then my cleavage, as he hooks his chin over my shoulder. “What was it you said? ‘I need to get fucked until I cry’?” He presses his lips below my ear. “And, as I recall, I gave you exactly what you needed.”

He’s wrong on both counts. What I actually texted him last Tuesday was, “Come over. Reduce me to tears. Just one more time.”

Leave it to Callum to not only forget my sweeter, more poetic version, but to also completely miss that last part.

And he definitely didn’t give me what I needed, but that’s nothing new. Dear teenage me: raging hormones do not equate