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

Theo and I aren’t too broken to fix. We weren’t whole in the first place.

We were doomed the second I gave into that bitterness, the anger...that dark, tempting current that promised to take me wherever I wanted, but just tore me from shore instead.

Eventually, I cry myself empty and fall asleep.

It’s a small but welcome gift. Anything is better than lying here hating myself, mourning the losses of things I’m not sure I ever really had: emerald eyes and a knee-weakening smile, nights so passionate I already know I’m ruined for whoever stumbles into my life next.

Gods of thunder under waterfalls, and green glows...and the beautiful terror when you start to fall.

When I left Ruby’s, I didn’t go home.

I drove straight to the city.

“Shit,” Wes said, when he opened his door to find me standing there, probably looking like a zombie, “who died?”

“I need to get wasted. Come with me.”

The worry in his face snapped to annoyance. “Are you serious, dude? You knock on my door at”—he leaned backwards, holding onto the doorframe, to check the time on his DVR—“midnight for that? You scared the hell out of me. I thought it was an emergency.”

“It is.” I hitched my thumb behind me, simultaneously pointing at nowhere in particular, and every nasty dive bar I planned to visit until I’d slaughtered every emotion in my body. “I’m getting drunk, and you’re coming with me.”

Eyes narrowed, Wes stepped aside and motioned for me to enter. “Because...?”

“Because we both know Durhams shouldn’t drink alone.” That’s when fights happen. And arrests. And things we can’t explain to this day, like the time Van woke up with his head shaved and a traffic cone in his bathtub.

“I meant, why are you looking to get drunk this late, after—I assume—driving all the way from the fucking Hamptons?”

While he shut the door and brought me some water (he probably thought I was already drunk), I sank into his couch and shrugged. “Do I need a reason?”

“Guess not.”

We both knew he’d keep pressing for one, but not much. It’s why I drove here in the first place. My cousins and I are always there for each other, few to no questions asked. At least not right away.

He sighed, stretching his arms until his back cracked. “Let me leave a note for Clara in case she wakes up, then we’ll find a place.”

We were silent in the elevator. Wes stood against the doors, openly staring at me until they opened. Instead of dumping him on his ass, they let him flow through with a smoothness he didn’t deserve.

“I’m texting Van,” he said at the intersection. I nodded, not really caring if he was inviting him because it was automatic, or because he wanted two sitters for my impending streak of poor choices.

Definitely the latter. When I glanced at his phone, the message he sent read, “Baby Theo wants a bottle. Says he’s getting wrecked. Must be serious.”

Van wrote back, “Are we getting him drunk or talking him down?”

I turned away and pretended to retie my shoes. Just try and talk me down, I thought. When they finally pried the reason out of me, I had a feeling their advice would run dry while the sympathy shots poured like water.

Which is probably how I ended up here: face-down on Wes’s bathroom floor, someone’s boot digging into my ribs.

“Yo. You alive?”

I groan. Wes chuckles and calls into the hallway, “Well, he’s breathing.”

“That’s great. Now can you please get him out of the bathroom?”

Wes hefts me up. “Fuck, man, get your feet underneath you. I can’t deadlift you like this all the way to the couch.”

I stumble, rearranging limbs at random like a Rubik’s cube, just hoping to get something right. It works: my shoes get a grip on the floor, and I shift some of my weight so Wes only has to guide, not carry, me into the living room.

“Sorry for the wakeup call,” he says, “but you were commandeering our only bathroom, and Clara has to piss like a racehorse.”

“That’s not what I said,” she shouts, punctuating it with an audible door lock.

I lure Bowie off the sofa with a tennis ball, curling up pathetically in his place. My head feels like a fucking war zone. I don’t know how much is the hangover, and how much is...well, shit. Everything else about my life right now.

My eyes come into focus slowly. Van is stretched out on a blanket in front of the TV, playing video games, and looks tired but fine. Wes seems in pretty good shape, too.

“Did you guys drink?”

“Not like you did,” Van laughs. “How much do you remember?”

I take the coffee, water bottle, and acetaminophen Wes hands me, lining my arsenal up on the end table and taking them in reverse order of how I got them. As soon as I’ve got some caffeine in my system, the fuzzy shreds of my memory look a little better. Clear enough to give an answer, anyway.

“I remember the first bar,” I say slowly, shutting my eyes against the gray sunlight no one else seems to find half as blinding, “and that guy that tried to start shit before we left.” It’s hard to remember why, but I think I stumbled into him a few too many times for his liking. My face isn’t smashed to pieces, though, so I’m thinking we got away. “Then the cab ride, getting fries at that diner...” I wince; my headache surges to the back of my skull like an ice pick. “...and that’s it.”

“So, like...nothing, basically.” Wes laughs from the kitchen. He’s frying bacon. The smell makes me ravenous and nauseous as hell. “You left out the second and third bars,