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

this boy I thought was so, so different from the others.

“Get out of here,” he slurred at me. He shoved himself off from the fridge and turned me roughly by the shoulder. “Go.”

“Don’t fucking touch me,” I seethed, but I wasn’t even sure who it was meant for: Theo, shoving me to the foyer; Paige, dragging me to the open glass wall that led to the deck; or the seemingly hundreds of hands on me, each pawing and pinching and attached to a laughing face.

Somehow, I managed to run, even though the crowd was back to being a brick wall. I plowed through them all, shoving whoever I had to, until a blast of cold air hit my face.

I was back on the front porch.

Footsteps echoed in the foyer. I ran until I was out of view behind some bushes.

“Let’s go,” I heard someone laugh. “She’s long gone.”

“Shouldn’t we find her, get her a cab?” a girl asked. “She was pretty wasted.”

“She’ll be fine.”

The voices faded. Bodies milled back into the house, and the party went on.

“She’ll be fine.”

I stumbled to the driveway and pressed myself close to the house. Deeper into the shadows. Right where I belonged.

My muscles ached. Every ounce of alcohol I’d consumed was now in my head, and I couldn’t stay upright anymore.

I was far from fine.

The next thing I knew, Callum was there.

“Why do you do this to yourself, Ruby?” He sounded angry. He looked murderous.

His heartbeat was wild underneath his shirt, ready to fuel revenge.

But his touch, the brush of his thumbs wiping away tears I hadn’t even felt, was kind. Impossibly sweet.

The only thing in this world I could trust.

“We can report it. We have to fucking report it.”

Callum paced back and forth in my tiny bedroom of the rancher Mom and I rented with two other maids every year. I stared at his feet, wondering how long it would take to wear a trail in the pale blue carpet.

He was livid. I was numb.

“These sites won’t take it down just because we email them.” I looked at the tabs open on his computer.

Chubby Girl Takes Cumshot to Eye

Fat Slut Takes a Load to the Face

Big Girl Gets Surprise Facial

And these were just the ones Paige sent me, explaining in her email that Theo had posted videos of her to the same sites, once upon a time.

“Good news is, none are linked to your name,” she wrote. “Bad news is…Lord only knows how many more copies exist. Or where.”

Oddly, the only one I cared about at that moment was Theo’s. It felt like a head vampire thing—like if I could destroy the source, the copies would turn to dust.

“Video quality is shit.” Callum hit Play on the open tab again, looking like he wanted to sharpen his laptop to a point and stab Theo in the gut. “That’s good, at least. No one can tell it’s you.”

I nodded. My face only appeared once or twice, and it was way too pixelated and fleeting to identify me. Even Theo’s was pretty blurry, thanks to a crappy camera and crappier placement.

“If we fight it,” I told Callum, “that’ll reveal too much info. But if we ignore it—”

“Then that bastard gets away with this,” he fumed, and threw one of my library books across the room, straight into my mirror.

I settled my stomach with a long drink of Gatorade, warm from the trunk of his car. “But so will I.”

Callum’s eyes snapped to my face. He looked at me the same way he had last night, the entire drive back here: with a burning, furious protectiveness.

“If we let this go,” I finished, “it’ll go away.” Slowly, I reached out and shut the laptop. “No one has to know that’s me.”

His bottom teeth dragged across his lip as he shut his eyes.

Eventually, he nodded.

It turned out not to matter that my face wasn’t in the video Theo posted, though. It was in every last video from his friends’ cell phones. Shell-shocked chubby girl, cum dripping down her face, Theo nowhere in sight.

Those made their rounds on social media, shared until they were untraceable, and swiftly attracted the attention of my mother’s clients.

A week later, she was fired by every last one of them. The company she’d been with for decades, that she’d helped build from nothing, sent her packing the following Monday.

I lost my place at the private school she’d worked like hell to get me into. Not that it saddened me much; kids there were as shitty as anywhere else. At least I’d be able to blend in at public school. But on principle, it still hurt. My education was the main reason my mother slaved away like she did.

We couldn’t make our rent on the house in the Bays, or the one in Hightstown. We lived in our car for two nights until my aunt, working as a server on a cruise line, could FedEx us a spare key to her condo in Edison.

Through it all, my mother never blamed me.

Like Callum, she was furious for me.

I told her I didn’t know the boy in the video. That I didn’t even remember his face, or where I’d been that night. I said I was hopping parties, all over town. It would’ve been laughable in any other context: oh, yes, I was just swimming in invitations.

Court was the last thing I wanted. Parading details in front of strangers was bad enough, but I also knew it wouldn’t matter against the team of mega-lawyers the Durhams would hire.

If I fought him in court, I would lose. It was that simple. People like us didn’t get justice against people like them.

Still, I figured we should lawyer up, if only to get