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

She gives another hidden smile, tongue shifting inside her mouth as she clears the sugar from her teeth. I wish that was my full-time job. My tongue, fingers, and cock want permanent parking passes inside and on her.

“What I’m asking,” I finish, “is if you like me.”

When I let go of her hand and stand straight, she picks at her food a moment longer before she looks up.

“Of course I do.”

“Then let it happen.”

She tilts her head. “Let what happen?”

“Us.”

Ruby leans back, holding the edge of the stool between her legs. “And what does that entail, exactly? Being exclusive? Making things official?”

Now that I’m being forced to define it, I’d feel stupid saying “boyfriend-girlfriend” so soon. And as well as I already feel like I know her, there’s way more under this scratched surface.

“Exclusivity,” I answer, finally. It’s the less crazy-sounding option. I mean, that’s fair to ask of someone after a few dates and sleeping together, right?

Not that I’d know. Being exclusive is as foreign to me as being half of a real couple. Everything I learned about dating, I learned from my cousins—and they didn’t do dates. They did hookups, flings, and one-night-only deals.

In other words: I learned jack shit about dating.

But I did learn a whole hell of a lot about what not to do, watching them. It’s a big reason I stopped being such a shit to girls who liked me. Stringing people along is easy to brush off as no big deal, but each one leaves you feeling a little worse about how decent you are as a person. It’s like a thin film. And over time, they add up. I didn’t like who I was when I finally stepped back to look.

From afar, the typical Durham game of being an asshole too cool to care about anything—and anyone—looked perfect. If you don’t invest anything real, you can’t lose anything real.

Up-close, I realized, it was just another name for keeping ourselves lonely.

Ruby messes with the strings of her hoodie. It’s actually a bathing suit cover. I can’t remember who owned it, but I know without a doubt that Ruby is wearing it better.

“Yeah,” she says, after what feels like hours. “There’s nobody else I want to date, so...why not be exclusive?” A blush starts under her skin as she adds, softly, “I do like you, Theo. A lot. I think I’m just skittish because—because it all seems so fast.”

“It doesn’t feel fast to me. It feels like I’ve been waiting for you a lot longer than I even realized.”

Ruby looks shocked by my confession, but I refuse to take it back or modify it somehow.

Yeah, I don’t want to sound crazy or scare her—but I want her to know how right this feels on my end.

“We can let things go at their own pace,” I assure her. “Exclusivity right now, then we just...see where things go.”

With another smile, she narrows her eyes. “Promise you won’t rush things?”

“No.” I reach across the island and take half of her Pop-Tart, winking. Anything to see her blush again. “But I promise I’ll try.”

Finally, I make it home.

I did call out of work, but decided, after “just one more quickie” with Theo turned into two hours in the home theater, that I needed some peace and quiet. Someplace to be alone and clear my head.

Why on earth I thought my own fucking townhouse could provide that, I’ll never know.

“Go home, Callum.” I’m so tired of saying that. Maybe it’d be a worthwhile investment to get it tattooed on my arm.

My arm. I know I’m imagining it, but the bruises he left when he grabbed me yesterday throb at the sight of him. Theo asked about them when I was getting dressed to leave, but I concocted a pretty convincing story about knocking some dictionaries off a shelf at a client’s house.

I feel sick at how easy it is for me to lie, these days.

While I unlock the door, Callum stays seated in the dormant flower bed under the kitchen window, staring up at me like a lost dog.

“Do you have my key?” he asks quietly.

“Why?” I shove the door open and wait for him to follow; I know he’s going to. “Did you lose it?”

“Hale said I was here last night, so I figured....” His eyes, clear but flat-looking, eye the deadbolt before I swing the door shut behind us. “Just thought maybe it’d be here, that’s all.”

I’m determined to show him that this whole hat-in-hand bit is the last thing I want. That all I want from him, in fact, is nothing.

No, actually: I want him to go home. And I want him to stay there.

He watches as I busy myself with chores: emptying receipts from my purse into the trash, soaking some dishes I forgot about, and opening junk mail by the microwave.

“You went to Gret’s?”

I spin on my heel, in the middle of reading a letter from Aunt Thalia. It’s pretty much a summary of our nightly text exchanges. Mom’s holding steady, work is slow, and could I maybe possibly send a check soon, no rush?

“What?” I ask with a dry mouth.

Callum holds up a receipt from the trash. The bruises ache again.

I shrug and pretend to go back to the letter. “It was a friend’s birthday. No one to celebrate with, so...I treated them to pie.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know them. Someone from work.” Jesus, why did I let him in here?

But see...I know exactly why. Callum has this move down perfectly: after any blowup, he magically turns into someone resembling the person he used to be. My best friend.

The guy who picked me up in that driveway, dusted me