Lost King

by Piper Lennox

  “So, what—it doesn’t even matter to you now if he’s lying or not?”

  “On principle it would, I guess.” I eat a Dot. Tasteless as it is, that doesn’t stop the sugar from making my teeth ache. I kind of welcome it. It’s a decent distraction.

  “But not in practice,” Frankie deadpans, rolling her eyes when I shrug again.

  I remind myself not to expect glowing advice from her. Frankie’s a good friend and all, but there’s a reason we stayed pretty much just “summer friends,” then barely spoke when I moved back to Jersey permanently. We see the world too differently.

  For instance: she never saw much of a problem with how Callum treated me. Given the kind of men her family churns out, and the fact generations of women keep mysteriously putting up with it, I can’t blame her.

  But I do pity her. Her life plan consists of staying with her so-so rummy boyfriend until he proposes or gets her pregnant, whichever comes first, and banking on him suddenly transforming into husband material.

  She thought I was crazy for always wanting to break up with Call. “Just wait it out, Ru,” she’d tell me. “He’ll grow up.”

  But I was tired of waiting. Too many of us wait for things to change: for something to click, and for our lives to start, until one day we look up and realize it started without us, all the same.

  “She’s out of bed! It’s a miracle.” Frankie hums a few praise songs while I vanish into my closet. When I step back out in jeans and a sweater, and a determined stare that not even dragging a comb through my bird’s nest of hair can shake, she whistles. “Where you off to, looking like that?”

  “Like what?” I check my reflection. I actually cleaned up pretty well. I still look like I’ve cried in bed for the better part of two days, but at least I’m not sloppy anymore.

  “Like you’re about to go raise hell.”

  I smile while I put in my mother’s pearl earrings. “Who said I’m not?”

  Frankie tails me as I get ready. When I put on my best perfume, she tells me not to be an idiot. When I brush my teeth, she reminds me I can’t trust Theo anymore; I never could.

  Finally, in the front hall, I think she’s had enough.

  “Ruby.” She grabs my arm before I can slip it into my coat. “Seriously. You can’t possibly think he’ll take you back after all that.”

  The mask of determination starts to slip. I get out of her hold and shrug my coat on, feeling the adrenaline fade as I grab my car keys.

  I open the door. The wind howls past; Frankie curses and huddles behind the door, rubbing her bare arms. Tank tops are her uniform of choice, and her coat is still thrown onto the floor of my bedroom.

  “He probably won’t,” I whisper. The winter air twists my lungs into straw wrappers. “But I need to try.”

  “You’re crazy,” she says again.

  Then she laughs inside another sigh, waving me on.

  “I’ll either be here when you get back in—oh, about twenty minutes? Seems like enough time for him to tell you to fuck off—or I’ll lock up and see myself out in thirty minutes, in the unlikely event he’s as crazy as you.”

  Now I’m the one who flips her off, even though I know this is another of Frankie’s feel-better tactics. She keeps your hopes low, ensuring you don’t get your soul crushed.

  I pity her for that, too.

  “Door’s unlocked.”

  I’m so thrilled to hear Theo’s voice through the doorbell speaker, it takes me a minute to realize a small miracle just happened: he invited me inside, instead of telling me which circle of hell to vacation in.

  As I step into the foyer, I bite my tongue about his door being unlocked. I don’t think I’m allowed to care about that, anymore. Maybe I never was.

  He doesn’t get up from the sofa when I walk into the living room. On the television screen, a video game flashes and blares and slaughters my senses, already shot from that two-day crying jag.

  “Um...hi.”

  I get a glance over his shoulder, but nothing else.

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Plenty of space,” he says. I think this is his way of warning me I shouldn’t sit anywhere near him, so I choose the far end and perch myself on the armrest.

  “I’m sorry.” It sounds like I blurt this, but it was actually more carefully rehearsed than he’d ever know. Spitting it out was the only way to do it.

  Theo keeps playing. I study his profile and hate how he looks. It’s not just the dark circles under his eyes, which tell me he hasn’t slept. It’s not even the clench in his jaw, which tells me he’s still furious.

  It’s his posture. He’s slumped, exhausted...defeated. It’s the faraway stare of his eyes, like everything around him has crumbled.

  And that, I admit to myself, is why he let me inside. It’s not because he wants to hear me out. It’s because he doesn’t care about anything, anymore.

  I did it. I broke him.

  “I miss you.” My gaze wanders to my hands. It hurts too much to look at him directly, and see for myself all the damage I did. “I guess I should have some big speech at the ready about why I lied, how and when I changed my mind about doing it, how you should be able to trust me again...but I don’t.”

  A tear falls onto my thumb. I watch it skid down my skin and vanish into the fabric of my sweater.

  “That’s all I got. That I’m sorry, and I miss you. And I know it’s not enough, but....”

  But I hope it will be.

  Theo pauses the game, then idly tosses the controller between his hands while he bites his cheek.

  “Remember I told you about those kids talking shit about me? The people I thought were my friends? It was at that same party. The night you and I met.”

  There’s two layers to his voice. One, the loudest, is deadpan and gravelly.

  The layer underneath is almost breathless. Impossibly pained.

  I nod. “The first day of summer.”

  For a second, he looks confused that I already knew this. Then the lines in his forehead soften. “Right.”

  It kills me: the fact he briefly forgot I was there. That I was her.

  “Meeting Aria,” he goes on, then sighs, “meeting you...it made me feel better.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Ruby,” he says, laughing in such a heartbreaking way, I have to stare at my hands again, “I meant what I told you. You were good, and honest, and so fucking real. I loved that.”

  My heart flutters. I urge it to stop. He’s not talking about me; he’s talking about Aria. And he’s using past tense.

  “In just one night, it felt like I already knew you better than anyone else at that party. It’s what made me realize the problem wasn’t me—it was who I’d been friends with. It was such a relief. All that rejection I felt…it just went away.

  “And yeah,” he adds, “I was wasted; I’ll admit that I barely even remember what you looked like, back then. Truth be told, I can hardly remember our conversations.”

  He pauses, and I know he’s waiting for me to look at him. Eventually, I do.

  “But I never forgot how you made me feel.”

  The sting in my eyes spreads, radiating through my face. I really hoped I was done crying.

  He gets up and tosses the controller onto the table. “I never could get the truth out of Paige, but I knew she did it. She was pissed at me for breaking up with her.”

  Why this information sucker-punches me, I don’t know. I’ve been fighting to fill in the blanks of this situation for two days, wondering what on earth Theo meant when he said Paige wanted revenge. Her being his ex shouldn’t come as a shock.

  “Find Theo.”

  That’s the real punch: how it dawns on me, as I sit in the very same room where Paige and I danced and drank and laughed, that she planned the whole thing.

  “She used me,” I whisper, the truth boiling down into pure nausea.

  Theo watches me carefully. Briefly, I catch sympathy on his face.

  “Yeah,�
�� he exhales. “She did.”

  Sick as I feel, I don’t get any new tears over this epiphany. It might be because Paige and I haven’t spoken in years, so there’s no friendship to implode.

  I think it’s because I have much bigger things to mourn.

  “I tried for years to find Aria again.” Theo paces in a slow semi-circle around the couch, back into my sight. “To find you.”

  The shock clears everything else away. I look up. “You did?”

  “Yes.” He stares at me, breathing hard, and then turns to the buzzing TV.

  His hand drags back and forth over his jaw. He shaved off the beard he was growing, and I wonder why it makes me sadder than anything else.

  “I looked everywhere. I searched online, I asked kids around the beach.... It was all I could think about. Telling Aria I wasn’t the one who filmed us.”

  His stance changes. Instead of exhausted and broken, he looks furious. When he glances back at me, his emerald eyes black as the bay in the winter nightfall, I almost lose my breath.

  “Do you know how badly I wanted to make it up to that girl? I felt like absolute fucking scum that I’d even put her in that position.” He turns away. “And when I couldn’t find her, I tracked down every last kid at that party and paid them off so they’d take their videos down. I called websites, I sent letters—”

  “Wait.” I stand, too. My legs feel like they’ll collapse underneath me, but I need to see his face again. “You had some of those videos taken down?” I’d assumed it was all my lawyer’s doing on the first few, and then word spreading through those kids’ circles. Never in my life did I think someone else went to bat for me. Let alone him.

  “Every last one I could find.” His hands drop to his sides, but the anger doesn’t fade. “I was actually excited about the idea of getting served, Ruby. I spent months waiting on a lawsuit that never came.”

  My head spins. It’s a combination of so much new information, and that black-green stare hitting me again.

  “You’re mad I didn’t sue you?”

  “I’m mad I never saw or heard from you again.” The thunder that rises into his voice is nothing compared to the firmness of his grip when he steps close and grabs my shoulders. “I’m fucking furious you spent all those years thinking of me as some monster.”

  This close, I can see the circles under his eyes are even worse than I thought. His breath is too sweet, like all he’s existed on is soda.

  I can see tears in his eyes, few enough to stay in place, but holding just as much pain as the ones streaming down my chin.

  “I didn’t know.” I shrug his hands off, but only because I want to touch him. He tenses when I hold his face. He tries to pull away.

  I don’t let him. I guide his eyes back to me.

  “Theo, listen to me. I didn’t know.”

  “You could’ve asked. You could’ve sued, Ruby.” He jerks away, pacing to the glass wall. “I mean, fuck, who wouldn’t sue if they thought somebody did that to them?”

  “A scared teenage girl,” I call over the end of his sentence, “who just wanted the whole night to disappear.”

  He trails, panting again. I realize I’m doing it, too.

  It’s strange, the things that take your breath away, even when you’re standing perfectly still.

  “Why did you tell me to leave?”

  The question tastes like dirt and feels like coughing up a knife. I’ve held this one closer than close for years.

  I’ve wondered it more often than why I was the target, out of all the girls in this town. If it was plotted all along, or some spur-of-the-moment cruelty. If there were any regrets, however small.

  “You told me, ‘Get out of here. Go.’” My tears have stopped. There’s too much fire for the water to compete.

  I swing my arm out to the kitchen, to that spot beside the island where it all happened. The pristine cabinets and tile I memorized through the liquor and horror. The stage I was forced to take, surrounded by a jeering audience of glazed-eyed kids and cell phones...but only paying attention to a single face in front of me.

  “If you didn’t film me,” I ask, voice low while my heart kicks up a riot in my chest, “why did you tell me to go?”

  Theo blinks a moment, then laughs again as he steps back. It’s humorless and stretched thin—that kind of laugh when your brain just can’t process what it’s getting.

  “Oh, my God, Ruby.” He pivots back and has me in his grasp again. “Because I saw the cameras. I saw them filming us. Filming you.”

  His eyes travel between mine, making sure I understand. His grip tightens.

  “I didn’t want them catching your face on camera.” He swallows, deflating with one last, long exhale before cursing and pacing away, like he’s upset at himself for getting near me again.

  I know the feeling: drawn in and pinging free, only to roam right back. You become the satellite in someone else’s orbit.

  I’m still swept up in his. He’s fighting so hard to pull free from mine.

  “Theo....” My mouth fumbles with words I don’t have. All I can think to do is reach for him, into that blank space yawning between us. All I can think to say is the simplest truth, words I’ve already sputtered and know won’t change a thing. “I didn’t know.”

  “I know you didn’t.” He locks his hands behind his head and stares through the glass wall, out into the empty bay, his empty deck...his big, empty world.

  “Then...then maybe we can still—”

  My mouth shuts up. Enough words.

  I cross the room and touch his shoulder, turning him to face me. When I stand on my tiptoes and draw his head close, he starts to speak.

  I don’t let him.

  I simply kiss him. I taste that sweetness on his breath and the addictive flavor of his skin. My fingers wind into his hair. My body nearly melts against his when his hands grab my waist and pull me deeper into his orbit, right where I want to be.

  Suddenly, he pulls back and holds me at arm’s length, shaking his head.

  It feels like a bullet to the chest. Still, I nod and step away.

  “Ruby...I know you didn’t know. And honestly, I—I can even kind of understand why you wanted revenge. But it’s done. You didn’t go through with it, but it still happened. I can’t trust you. You can’t trust me. And this thing we had, it won’t—”

  “I do trust you, Theo. Now that I know the rest....”

  My words fail again. Maybe my mouth got so used to lying, it wears out from too many truths in one day. I bite my lip and hope the sting will get just a little more out.

  “And doesn’t that count for anything: the fact I started to trust you even before I knew the rest? That even when I thought you were the one who filmed me—the guy who destroyed my entire world—I still fell for you?”

  He shakes his head again, but I know he’s listening. I pray he’s considering.

  “I’m sorry, Ruby,” he breathes. “If things were different—”

  “They can be.”

  “No. They can’t.” He thumbs his lips. Those eyes drip down my body in the same slow-motion way that used to make my knees weak.

  There’s something different to it now, though: a coldness. It’s hollow. Flat.

  I know this look. It’s the same way I found him on that bathroom floor. The same way he looked when he talked about the other kids at the party—every single friend he’d just learned was lying to his face, all along.

  And now I’m one of them.

  I gather my keys and wallet. As I pass, I fix one crooked picture on the wall, and whisper one last goodbye. He nods in return.

  I think about locking the door behind me, but decide I was right before. It’s not my place.

  And it’s the one tiny piece of his old normal that I can give him: the beginning of his life resetting, back to how it was before Ruby Paulsen lied her way in.

  37

  Two Weeks Later

  “Back to being nocturnal, I see.”

 
I adjust my headset and wait for Van to start the game. “Yeah, so? You’re awake, too.”

  “Got off work late. We had this twenty-top come in, like, thirty minutes to closing, so I’m way too keyed-up to sleep. Let’s fuck up some zombies.”

  We play in near-silence for a while, save for directions and tips and more than a few cursing steaks. My hands are too tense to maneuver right; Van has to revive me constantly.

  “Shit,” he breathes. “I was gonna ask how you’re handling all that Ruby stuff, but now I don’t have to. I’ve never seen you play this bad.”

  I want to tell him he can go screw himself, but I know he’s right. The last couple weeks might’ve felt like the same old life I had before Ruby: video games, insomnia, and boredom so depressing, you start feeling like a ghost watching everyone else live their lives. But nothing’s the same, now.

  Every game I play leaves my senses fucking wrecked. Like now, when I have to shut off the TV and tear off my headset. The lights and sounds burrow into my brain like a fever.

  At night, I’m not awake because I can’t sleep: I don’t want to sleep. I dream about her too much. I wake up forgetting what happened with us, then have to feel that knife twist its way into my back all over again.

  It’s a shame. Exhaustion comes so easily these days, and I can’t make good use of it.

  The boredom’s an entirely new beast. Before, it hung around like a low cloud. I knew it was there; I wanted it gone. But I could live with it.

  Now it’s everywhere. I hate moving and sitting still. I hate being hungry and I hate eating. Walking through this house, I’ve got every detail memorized, but the place feels like it belongs to a stranger.

  My life isn’t boring; I’m bored with life. Turns out there is a difference, and it’s way goddamn worse.

  At seven-thirty, while I’m watching the gray sunrise over the harbor, my phone pings. I check my disappointment that it isn’t from her. I should be glad.