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

“Would have jumped in a lot sooner, if she hadn’t made me work so hard to win her over.”

I stare at him and whisper, “I didn’t make you work that hard.”

“Shh. I’m on the phone.”

Back to stupid smiles, I put my hands behind my head and shut my eyes, so happy I could stay right here the rest of the trip.

“...look so familiar,” Mom is saying, when I eventually tune back in. “You said you met at the hardware store? In the Hamptons? Is that where you live?”

I open my eyes and sit up. “Let me talk to her.”

“No, I kind of...live all over,” Theo explains, then waves me off, assuring me, “I’ve got it.” To my mom, he adds, “I’ve been staying at my father’s vacation house since June, though.”

“Theo,” I hiss, but he can’t hear me. Mom is on her own mission: to find out, at any cost, how she knows him.

“What’s your father’s name?”

“Gilmour Durham, ma’am. He’s in real estate.” To him, this is any other question. I’m sure he gets asked it constantly in other circles.

But in my mom’s circles....

“Durham! I knew it.” I hear Mom chatter to Aunt Thalia, muffled, before turning her attention back on Theo. “The really modern house on Naskapi, right?”

I get up and take the phone. “Mom, we have to go. People are waiting for us inside.”

“Fine, fine,” she sighs, waving at Theo behind my head. “It was lovely meeting you, Theo.”

“You, too.”

Aunt Thalia steals the phone back from my mother, the camera cover sliding halfway shut. Her eclipse announces, quite loudly, that she “likes this one much better than Callum.”

“Noted,” I grit out. My blood pressure is off the charts right now. “Gotta go, love you, Happy Thanksgiving,” I call over their shouts; they’re now locked in some competition to embarrass me as much as possible before the clock runs out.

The second I hit the End Call button, I deflate into the nearest chair.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he says after a moment, sitting against the armrest.

“For you, maybe.”

He laughs in his throat and folds his arms. “They like me.”

“They do,” I nod.

“More than Callum, apparently.”

Pretending to fix my phone case, I shrug. “Not hard to be more likable than him, honestly.”

Theo turns on the armrest and slides down into my lap, plunking his full weight on my thighs until I laugh and try, unsuccessfully, to shove him off. “The reverse would work much better, you know. You weigh a ton.”

He grins and repositions so that the armrests bear most of his weight, then gets serious as he studies me. I feel my smile fade, too.

“Ex-boyfriend?” he asks.

“Yeah. We were together a long time, on and off. It’s...complicated.” I make a face at myself. It’s actually very uncomplicated. It just wasn’t easy. There’s a difference.

“We grew up together, used to be friends, ended up together as teenagers because I thought he was good for me, blah, blah, blah.” I quiet. For just one split-second, talking about it hurts. Remembering Callum the way he used to be, picking me up and dusting me off in Theo’s driveway, hurts.

“Maybe he was good for me because he wasn’t,” I finish.

“That’s a smart way to look at it,” he offers, but I shake my head. I’ve been a lot of things during and because of my relationship with Callum, but “smart” was never one of them.

Cautiously, he hooks my chin in his fingers and makes me look at him.

“Was he the one who broke your heart?”

I weigh my answer carefully. Sure, I could say “yes” and justify it to hell and back as being true, but it isn’t. Callum didn’t break my heart, because he never fully had it. He just made me overwhelmingly sad and furious, watching a friend self-destruct like that.

And I never want to lie to Theo again. Not now that things are official.

Not after what he told me last night, and this morning, even if he didn’t really say it.

“No. That was someone else.”

He takes a breath to ask more, but a small Thanksgiving miracle occurs: the crowd inside calling his name begins to spill out the front door, demanding he take his place at the piano, stat.

The entire living room was rearranged in our absence. Couches are shoved against the massive window in two rows, audience-style, with the piano from the back room set up in the center, the rug bunched under its casters. Wes sits on a kitchen stool beside it. He’s tuning a guitar and looking moderately miserable.

“Why are we doing this?” Theo groans as he takes a seat on the bench.

“Don’t know about you,” Wes says, “but Clara promised me some pretty damn good compensation.”

“Ah.” Theo positions his hands on the keys and does some scales, then a full crescendo that makes everyone else whoop. “Think I can cut a similar deal with you, Ruby?”

“Think you’d like being a musical prostitute?” I retort, which makes Wes laugh so hard he drops his pick between his strings.

“Technical difficulties,” Theo calls to the group, then spins back to face me with that melt-me-into-a-puddle wink and smile, all over again.

“And yes,” he says, “I think I’d like that a whole fucking lot.”

28

Through the afternoon, the boys play a pretty impressive array of showtunes and pop covers. The group sings along at first, but soon everyone’s quiet, just listening.

Wes has a surprisingly nice voice, when he’s not attempting some metal-emo-rock mashup, but the real shock for me is Theo.

“You didn’t tell me you could play piano and sing.” I put my arms around his neck from behind, crossing my wrists over his chest. “You’re good.”

“I’m okay,” he says as he closes the piano. “I can carry a tune or whatever.