Lost King by Piper Lennox (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

“Your boyfriend’s waiting, Cinderella,” someone cackled. Vivi. Her tone made it obvious she was holding a camera, too.

How many of them were out there? Did the whole party traipse upstairs to crash my moment with Theo?

Was my entire invitation part of some horrible joke?

At that moment, I heard someone shouting beyond the door, dispersing the crowd. “You stupid fucks, get out of here! All of you should be ashamed. Jesus Christ. And really, Joanna? You too? I’d think you of all people would know better than this shit, considering what happened with you and that surfer last summer. Come on, get out.”

Jeers and grumbles slithered under the door, growing fainter as a slow, shuffling stampede commenced.

Eventually, I heard a door shut. The bedroom grew silent.

“Aria?” Paige pressed her mouth close to the wood. “They’re gone, sweetie. I’ve got your stuff.”

Swallowing the tears and bile in my throat, I opened the door. Paige rushed inside and shut it behind her, then gathered me in the tightest hug I’d ever gotten.

“I’m so sorry.” Her blubbering echoed through the bathroom worse than my own. “I should’ve warned you.”

I blinked. “Warned me?” Did she know they’d do this?

“About Theo.” Paige drew back and swiped the tears from her eyes. Even her smudged eyeliner looked beautiful, like a superhero mask inked into her skin. “He gets like this when he’s drinking.”

Through the fading panic and increasing heartache, I got dressed. At the sink, I splashed hot water into my eyes until the skin around them turned red. But at least I was clean.

“Gets like this?” I repeated, when I brought my head up and stared at my reflection, then past it to hers.

“You know...horny. Mean. You’re not the first he’s....”

“He wasn’t mean.” Answers were clicking together in my head that I didn’t want assembled, truths I wasn’t ready to believe—but this was one fact that I wanted on-record. Theo was unbelievably kind to me.

Paige, as though reading my thoughts, gave me a pitying smile and slid down against the door, locking it as she sank. “All part of his routine,” she whispered.

I caught my lip in my teeth and couldn’t decide if I loved or despised that it still tasted like him.

“He does this kind of thing with girls at parties.” She looked like she might cry again, but steeled herself with a breath and beckoned me closer so she could fix my hair. While I knelt, letting her work, she said, “It’s a game for him.”

“A game?”

“Hooking up with girls. I should’ve warned you. I just didn’t think....”

I hesitated. “Didn’t think...he’d want me?”

There it flashed again: a smile so warped with pity it drove a tiny knife through my heart.

“Didn’t think you’d want him,” she finished. Her fingertips were cool on my forehead, brushing my long bangs back where they belonged. “If I knew you were into him, I never would’ve brought you within, like...twenty yards.”

“I thought you guys were friends.” Weren’t they?

Then again, Theo did say that thing about Paige running her mouth. That they all did.

“Real talk?” she asked, sighing. “I’m only friends with Theo because the rest of our group is. And even they don’t really like him.”

Her hands slid slowly from my hair and down to her legs with a slap, then motioned to the bathroom around us.

“This is what they like. His nice house, his parties...his money. And the fact his dad gives him free rein with pretty much all of it.”

“It’s not my party. It’s theirs.”

“But everyone else...yeah, they can go fuck themselves.”

His words spun through my head, getting chopped to pieces like a food processor.

He said I was interesting.

He said he’d never met anyone like me.

His kiss, his touch...that smile. All given to me within—what? Only a couple hours of meeting?

Of course it was all pretend.

Nothing but a game.

I spun and vomited into the toilet, the alcohol barely burning as it left my body. All the venom was in my bloodstream.

Paige rubbed my back and held my hair off my neck. She whispered that I’d be all right.

“And, hey—my uncle is a lawyer. We can figure something out.”

“Lawyer?” I coughed. Finally, my stomach was empty.

While I rinsed my mouth, she said, “Yeah, you know: for the videos.”

Oh. Right. All the camera flashes from before danced across my eyes again.

“The only one we’ll have trouble taking down,” she went on, inhaling sharply as she hoisted herself onto the countertop beside me, “is Theo’s. He’s got this, like, system. Some way of tagging it so it’s virtually impossible to find every link. But if anyone can do it, my uncle can.”

I drank handfuls of water until my heart stopped pounding, but her words made it start up again. I straightened and stared at her. “What?”

Now, instead of pity, her face flooded with devastation.

“Come here,” she said, and took my hand.

Paige pulled me back into the bedroom. I didn’t want to be here. I wished I could teleport back to my rented bedroom, or Callum’s car, or a nondescript ditch.

Still, I let her drag me over to the shelves. The skulls stared through me.

She lifted each one, cursing when she came up empty. “Fuck! That asshole took it with him. Come on.”

“Took what?” I asked, but we were already in the hallway, music choking me as she shoved past bodies, cursed people out on my behalf, and even slapped one particularly crude guy right in his mouth. Suddenly, we were downstairs.

Theo stood on the kitchen counter. “Get. The fuck. Out.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and stumbled, his foot going into the sink. He barely