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

“I’ll stay,” I say reluctantly, but of course I don’t show it. I make myself sound and look like this is the ideal way to spend an evening.

In reality, standing inside this house again is fucking me up. Big-time.

I keep seeing this same entryway packed with bodies. That sterile, modern kitchen, spinning around me as cell phones shot into the air.

The sweaty pulse of music and people, liquor burning down my throat...the sweet solitude of that bathroom when I found him.

How unbelievably stupid I was, thinking that night would give me everything I’d always wanted.

“Come here.” He smiles and beckons me the rest of the way down the stairs, then to a huge door and second set of stairs. While we walk, I trail my hands down the polished banister and inhale the scents of this new room, glad I never set foot in it before. There are no memories to attack me.

It’s a wine cellar. Heavy wooden crisscrosses house hundreds of bottles. Some have dust; almost all are covered in fingerprints.

“I found this one a few years ago.” Theo grabs a step stool and climbs. Carefully, he slides an emerald-colored bottle from the highest rack and passes it to me.

Ruby, the label reads.

“I always wanted to try it,” he adds, hopping down. Bottles clink gently in his wake. “But I never did.”

“Why not?”

“It seemed...special.”

I turn the bottle in my hands. “It doesn’t look very expensive.” No more so than any other grocery store Wine of the Week, at least.

“Not special like that.” Theo takes it from me and walks over to a table near the center of the cellar. While he opens it, I find a rack and slide out two glasses by their delicate stems. “My friends will drink anything. They barely even taste it. Something like this, I wanted to share with another person. One-on-one.”

“I still don’t see what’s special about it. Unless you’re implying the name somehow spoke to you.”

“As a matter of fact, it did.”

“Yeah? Did it give you premonitions about saving my life in a hardware store?”

He bumps my shoulder with his. “Such a smartass. I like that.”

I find myself blushing, and not a fake one. The fact he likes Real Ruby’s smartass comments more than Fake Ruby’s sweetness makes me absurdly happy.

It also makes me think, Well, fuck. My plan keeps veering off-course.

But is that really so bad? As long as I hide the fact I knew him when we were younger, what’s the harm of letting the rest of my script slide?

All that matters is that I get Theo to like me. Then to love me.

However it happens—no matter which version of me he falls for—the goal is still the same.

“The name spoke to me,” he says, “because every other wine my dad gets has some uppity, stuffy-sounding name. But this one is just ‘Ruby.’”

Theo pours some into each glass, higher than he did in the restaurant. My snark reflex wants to ask if we’re giving up aeration for tonight.

When he pauses to lick a drop off his thumb, I get a flash flood of unbridled horniness. I think my nipples actually harden.

Blame the T-shirt. It’s so stiff, it still feels new.

“It is kind of red,” I point out. “Not exactly a clever name.”

“Look at the label again.”

He turns the bottle to face me. I lean close.

“Grapefruit wine?” I laugh in disbelief. “Is that possible?”

“It’s technically a blend, but yeah. You can make wine out of pretty much any fruit. Just needs the right conditions.” Theo swirls his gently, nearly spilling. “But anyway, that’s why I like it. They picked the simplest name. No trying too hard, no pretense. Everything you need to know is right there.”

He holds up his glass. I clink mine to his.

“To the real Ruby,” he says, before taking a long drink, eyes never leaving mine.

11

I almost choke. While he wipes my chin with the back of his hand, I try to tame my pulse. “Real?” I cough.

“Sweet,” he says, tilting his head with a suspicious smile, “but sour, too. I knew our first date was just you trying to make a good impression.”

“You’re saying I can’t be sweet?”

“Oh, extremely.” The flash in his eyes tells me he’s thinking of the pool. “But I like this version better. You seem more...yourself, today.”

“You barely know me,” I mutter into my glass. I dump about seventy percent of it down my throat, and he gives me a refill immediately. Probably just trying to get me tipsy so I will, in fact, reciprocate.

“I know you well enough to realize who I saw before was only part of who you are. Who I’m seeing today? That’s the real deal.”

Prepare to feel very foolish in a few weeks, I think.

I don’t like the little flare of guilt that comes with it. Theo deserves the heartache I’ll bring.

I drink more. The wine is good, but strange. It sits on my tongue like a spoonful of sugar before sizzling up the sides of my mouth, tangy and knifelike.

“All right.” I wave away his next refill. Being tipsy around Theo is fine, but history pummeled the lesson into me that drunkenness is a line not to be crossed. “Tell me.”

He squints over his glass at me, confused.

I tug at the hem of the Juilliard shirt to fan out the logo. “What’d you study?”

“Oh.” He drains his glass, recorks the bottle, and nestles it in a wine fridge before starting back upstairs, grabbing me by the wrist as he goes.

We step through the glass doors of the porch again, and my guard goes up as soon as I see