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

“Fair enough.” He holds up his palms, then motions back to the kitchen. “Ready to eat?”

A chance to dam up my babbling, stupid mouth? Just try and stop me.

While we eat, mostly silent, I notice something strange: even though I chose not to tell Theo I used to be heavy, it feels like I’m waiting for him to comment on it, just the same. Like I should have told him.

Like some small piece of me wants to, the way I’d tell a boyfriend everything about my past.

I clear my throat, but when he looks at me...I can’t get the sentence out. Admitting even that small detail feels comparable to the dread I feel at the thought of telling him everything else.

“The soup is really good.” Lame conversation, but at least it’s true. That part feels great. “What’s in it?”

“Whatever I felt like throwing in.” Theo tears some crust off his bread and dips it into the broth. “Curry paste, coconut milk, tomatoes, chicken, garlic…. And I got some fresh limes earlier, which were not easy to find.”

“I bet.” It’s not like the Hamptons are a total ghost town when summer ends, but it’s definitely not the same. It feels a bit like backstage after a play, when all the big stars are gone and it’s just the crew members left, scrambling to reset everything for the next performance. “Thank you, though. You really didn’t have to go to all this trouble. I would’ve been fine with, like, pizza or something.”

“No trouble. I like cooking.”

“Piano, cooking...any other secret skills I should know about?” I burn my mouth on my next bite. Good. I deserve it. “You seem like the kind of guy who’s a little talented at everything.”

“Definitely not,” he laughs as he wipes his mouth. He gets up and pours some wine, handing mine to me with a silent cheers. “Music is my only natural ability.”

“But not your only ability, period.” I nod at the food. “Clearly.”

“Everything else I’m even halfway decent at only happened because I picked it up while bored and decided, if I was going to do it at all, I might as well try and be really fucking good at it. Even if that meant studying it, practicing nonstop…trying to make it click, the way music did.”

I point my spoon at him. “There’s your real talent: ambition.”

“Are bored, rich housewives known for being particularly ambitious?”

“We’ve already established that, syndrome aside, you aren’t actually a bored, rich housewife.”

“Clearly,” he says, pantomiming the breasts he doesn’t have.

I sip my wine. “You’re Gatsby, remember?”

“If I recall my high school English correctly, Gatsby showed symptoms of the syndrome, too.”

“Are you kidding? Gatsby was as driven and ambitious as they come. Rags to riches.”

“Yeah,” he snorts, “with crime.”

I’d actually forgotten that detail. Instead of backpedaling, I wave my hand and move on. “Well, whatever. He was still ambitious—willing to do whatever it took to get what he wanted.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“Yes, actually.” I finish my glass quickly, not caring about aeration or palates or anything else. I just want the buzz. “You’re driven to go after what you want. You just don’t know what that is, yet.”

He pauses, tongue resting against his cheek. “True. But I’d argue Gatsby didn’t, either.”

“Disagree. The man pulled himself up from nothing, doing whatever he had to, until he had it all. That’s what he wanted: everything.”

“And yet,” Theo points out, pretending to snootily swirl his glass, “it still wasn’t enough.” His eyes slide to mine. “He did it all for Daisy. And he couldn’t have her. Not the version he wanted.”

“Which was…?”

“The one he built up in his head all those years they were apart.” He swirls his glass again, watching the legs glide down. “So the man who had everything, really had nothing.”

“Huh.” I sit back and nod, even though I’d forgotten that part, too.

I’ve forgotten most of the book by now, actually. I remember the lantern on Daisy’s dock, and something about eyes. I remember Gatsby, literary prince of parties.

Theo stares at me patiently, waiting for insight I don’t have. The novel’s as faded in my memory as To Kill a Mockingbird or Fahrenheit 451, by now. But I do remember one last detail.

“I always thought Daisy was such a bitch,” I mutter.

Theo laughs so hard, he spills his next sip.

22

“You can’t be serious. Who works on Thanksgiving?”

“Healthcare workers, caterers...every poor damn soul in retail—”

Theo closes my ticking fingers up inside his hands, simultaneously warming me up and shutting me up. “Not maids,” he says firmly.

I huff and reposition myself on the chaise. We’re lying on his deck, stretched out under the starlight. That is one good thing about winter at the beach: the sky loses that perpetual-twilight glow, but gains a crisp, infinite kind of depth to it. A blackness so intense, it reminds you how small you really are.

It’s mildly terrifying when you’re looking at it alone. With someone else, it’s a comfort.

“Maybe not maids for middle-class clients,” I tell him, “but when you’re cleaning houses for multi-millionaires? You work whenever they tell you to.”

“Who the fuck’s even out here for Thanksgiving?” Theo motions down the beach at all the empty homes. “What do they need their houses cleaned for?”

“Some people come out here to work in privacy,” I tell him, “or rent their houses for off-season weddings and stuff. But most just want them cleaned because of vanity, I guess. Keeping a useless house spotless is a status symbol.”

I finish my second glass of wine, shaking my head when he offers a refill.