Lost King

by Piper Lennox

  I limp through the house, shutting off lights and electronics. There’s an app on my phone that can do it all in one digital swoop, but I like taking stock of the place: beer bottles and Solo cups I’ve ignored, clothes people left behind, and general disarray ranging from the crooked skulls on my father’s shelves, to a whole-ass chair at the bottom of the infinity pool. How I’ll clean this entire 4,000-square-foot monster myself by Thanksgiving, I have no idea.

  Hammer first, I tell myself, as I lock the last door and head to the garage. My new Jeep, driven only four times all summer and three this fall, actually has dust on the hood. Somebody drew tits into it. I’d bet all my money on my cousin Van, if it was my money to bet.

  The hardware store is a good half-hour drive, not that I mind. It’s something to do.

  A cold wind whips across me on my way inside, so I double-back and search the rear seats for a sweatshirt. I find two: a girl’s thin gray cover-up, and a Kenzo hoodie emblazoned with a tiger. Someone probably fucked back here.

  Scratch that. They definitely did, because I find a condom wrapper on the floor mat. Seven goddamn bedrooms in that house, but people have to bang it out in my vehicle.

  And on my kitchen island.

  And in the pool.

  And—according to the cop one of my neighbors anonymously summoned—at the top of the plank stairs to the shoreline, in broad daylight.

  I kick the wrapper onto the pavement and inspect the sweatshirt. Apart from some resin on one of the drawstrings, it’s clean. Hopefully. I pull it on and go inside.

  “Handyman” is miles off my résumé. I think the last time I stepped foot in a hardware store was when Mom dragged me to pick new tiles for the Jersey house.

  I was nine. She put the camera right in my face and narrated every second. After a while, I just shut up. Clearly, I wasn’t her partner in this errand; it wasn’t an errand at all. It was another blog post. And I was a prop.

  An employee asks if I need assistance, but I shake my head and keep moving like I know where the hell I’m going. Something about requiring help to find the most basic household tool feels pathetic.

  One benefit to wandering these aisles like a lost child is that I get to enjoy the smell. Fresh lumber mingles with something light and chemical, like adhesive or floor cleaner. I’ve spent all summer smelling so much weed, suntan lotion, and espresso, I went numb to it all.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  At an aisle marked “Household Basics,” I stop. A girl is standing on the bottom shelf, tugging at a five-gallon bucket on the shelf above. Her fingers stretch as far as they can, but just barely brush the plastic.

  “Here,” I call, jogging to her, “let me get that for you.”

  “Oh.” She starts, then hops off the shelf and flexes her wrist. “Thanks. I’ve been at this for, like, four solid minutes. I was starting to feel like an idiot.”

  “Not your fault. They shouldn’t put these up so high.” Even worse, the buckets are stacked in columns that make it impossible to pull down just one. When I finally get a hold of one, I’ve got to balance a tower of seven others and lower it without smacking either of us in the face.

  “Wow.” She smiles, wrapping her arms around the top bucket and wiggling it off. “Strong.”

  “It’s not heavy. Just awkward.” I slide the tower back into place. When I look at her, she hugs the bucket against herself and blushes.

  She’s beautiful: endless curves, freckles across her nose, rich brown eyes, and loose curls that wind around her face like a roadmap, always leading me back to that smile.

  Something about her almost seems familiar, but that’s true of a lot of locals. Which she must be, if she’s still here in the autumn.

  “Theo Durham.” I stick out my hand.

  She stares a moment, then swings the bucket to her feet with one hand, the other wiping on her jeans before she extends it. “Hi, Theo. I—”

  Above us, something shifts. By the time the girl follows my stare to the leaning buckets, I’ve already set myself in motion.

  I grab her and spin her out of the way a split-second before the plastic avalanche begins. Not many fall—ten, by my count—but the sound is unbearable in this yawning space, every thunk bouncing off the concrete and echoing all the way to the rafters.

  “Shit,” I whisper, then look at her to make sure she’s all right.

  Her eyes are wide, but she quickly bursts into breathless laughter. It’s a gorgeous sound.

  “Anyway,” I laugh, “you were saying?”

  She swallows, gaze wandering up from my mouth until she reaches my eyes.

  “Ruby,” she says. “My name’s Ruby. Uh, Paulsen.”

  Through her white cabled sweater, I see her chest rise and fall rapidly. A rush of color crawls over her face.

  It’s then that I realize I grabbed her hips.

  I’m still holding her by them, in fact, and have her pressed to a column of the metal shelf, barely an inch between us.

  “Ruby,” I repeat quietly, before sliding my hands off her and stepping back.

  A staff member emerges at the end of the aisle, asking if we’re all right. I tell him we’re fine and help clean what fell. One bucket cracked, but he refuses my offer to pay for it.

  “These shouldn’t be up here,” he explains, then nods farther down the aisle. Several identical buckets are stacked on a bottom shelf. “That’s where they go.”

  I glance at Ruby, who blushes again, cringing as she swings her bucket on one finger. “Live and learn, huh?”

  While I amble slowly to a hammer display I just noticed, making sure she knows I intend for her to follow, she adds, “Emphasis on ‘live,’ in particular. Thank you for saving me.”

  “Ah, you would’ve been fine. Just a bump on the head.”

  “Or a concussion,” she says, “if the buckets had knocked me down, and then I hit my head on the concrete floor.”

  I heft one of the hammers. “Do you always jump to worst-case scenarios like that?”

  “Have enough worst cases happen to you, and it becomes a habit.” Ruby nods at the hammer. “Is that all you’re here for?”

  “Yep. Got some stairs to fix.” That, and my own relentless boredom.

  Wordlessly, she plucks the hammer from my fingers and sticks it in her bucket like a trick-or-treat pail, swinging it around herself from one hand to the other as she walks ahead. “It’s on me.”

  I follow and don’t protest. This is a golden excuse to keep talking. “So what’s the bucket for?”

  “Work.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Not so sure you won’t judge, Mr. Kenzo.”

  “Huh?” I follow her stare to the logo on my hoodie. “Oh—this isn’t mine. And I won’t judge, I promise. Work is work.”

  “Then tell me what you do, first.”

  Not a damn thing, I think. But that’d be the king of pathetic confessions.

  “I’m kind of...between jobs, right now.” Technically true, if you count my brief stint as a caddy for my uncle Sterling one summer. It was only one tournament, but he did pay me. Work is work.

  Ruby studies my face a moment, then draws a breath as she slides the hammer around inside the bucket. “I’m a maid.”

  “Oh.” I jam my hands into the sweatshirt pocket and rattle my keys, so I won’t do something stupid. Like pick out that lint that’s trapped in her hair, or brush her hand and pretend it’s accidental. “That’s...cool.”

  “Don’t lie,” she giggles.

  “No, I mean it. It just sounds like you don’t like it.”

  “The job is fine,” she shrugs, thanking me when I take the bucket. “But I’ve had some trouble landing new clients for the company. Everyone in this town has either employed the same maids for decades, or they call up Clean Xpress or one of the other big franchises.”

  “We don’t have either.”

  “You’d be the exception, then.” Eyeing me again, she asks skeptically, “Do you really clean your h
ouse yourself?”

  “Try to. I’m probably not half as thorough as your company is.”

  “In that case....” She produces a business card: Bayside Home and Commercial Cleaning. It’s softened and creased. I like the idea that it’s traveled with her, waiting for whenever we’d meet. “Keep us in mind.”

  “Wow, party clean-up? Now that, I desperately need.”

  “Do you throw a lot of parties?”

  “Used to, back in high school. Now it’s more like one long get-together, every summer. The results are similar, though. Trash everywhere, shoe scuffs on the floors—and fuck, so much sand. I don’t know where it comes from. We’ve got mostly pebbles on our shore.”

  She swats my wallet-yielding hand down at the register. I let her pay, if only because doing so lets me keep all my attention on her, instead of a card reader.

  Outside, she spins slowly on the sidewalk to face me, once again hugging the bucket to herself. “Well,” she says, inhaling.

  I nod. “Well.”

  We’re silent. She seems nervous. I’m just memorizing her.

  The second her feet move, I blurt, “Thank you for the hammer.”

  “It’s nothing. I mean, you worst-case saved my life. A hammer is the least I could do to repay you.”

  With one last smile, she nods goodbye and starts away.

  The back is just as beautiful as the front. My palms still tingle, remembering how it felt to hold her hips and steer her up against something.

  “I can think of one more thing,” I call.

  Ruby spins back, stepping onto a curb as a truck crawls between us. She waits.

  “Get dinner with me.”

  She tilts her head. “You save my life, and I’m supposed to repay you by letting you buy me dinner?”

  “Yes.” Another truck goes past. In its wake, a cloud of exhaust almost hides the nervous smile she gives. “It’s been a while.”

  “What, since you’ve eaten?”

  “Since I’ve shared a meal with someone even half as beautiful as you.”

  Her cheeks turn bright pink; her laugh forms a cloud of steam. “Does that line actually work?”

  “You tell me.”

  Ruby bites her smile and glances off into the distance.

  “All right,” she says. “But just one dinner. And it’s not a date.”

  “That’ll make it awkward when I kiss you at the end of the night, but sure. Not a date. Whatever you want.”

  She laughs again. It echoes inside the bucket.

  “Call the number on the card,” she says, starting away. “Just leave a message of where I should meet you. I’ll get it before I clock out.”

  My eyes don’t waver until she’s all the way back at her car, driving off with one last blush, smile, and the smallest, sweetest wave I’ve ever seen.

  2

  “Broken up means broken up, Call. You can’t just barge into my house like that anymore.”

  Callum leans in the doorway of my bedroom and ignores me, shoveling another piece of jerky into his mouth. I sigh, get up from my vanity, and take the bag.

  “And,” I add sharply, “you can’t just raid my fridge whenever you want, either.”

  “So I can’t use my house key—which, by the way, you’ve never asked me to give back—and I can’t eat your food,” he says as he watches us in the mirror, “but I’m still supposed to drop everything I’m doing as soon as you get lonely?”

  “Do I look lonely to you?” Rummaging through my jewelry box, I fish out my mother’s pearl teardrop earrings. Callum’s leer melts my reflection as I put them on.

  “Seemed pretty lonely last week.” His peppery teriyaki breath washes down my neck, then my cleavage, as he hooks his chin over my shoulder. “What was it you said? ‘I need to get fucked until I cry’?” He presses his lips below my ear. “And, as I recall, I gave you exactly what you needed.”

  He’s wrong on both counts. What I actually texted him last Tuesday was, “Come over. Reduce me to tears. Just one more time.”

  Leave it to Callum to not only forget my sweeter, more poetic version, but to also completely miss that last part.

  And he definitely didn’t give me what I needed, but that’s nothing new. Dear teenage me: raging hormones do not equate to chemistry.

  He did, however, make me cry. I couldn’t believe my own stupidity, getting into bed with him again.

  “Callum…please.” Gently, I shrug him off. “I meant what I said. We’re over.”

  For a moment, his amber eyes burn into mine. His nostrils flare. Even though he’s a foot away from the mirror, I swear I almost see the glass streak.

  “Fine,” he says at last, rolling his fiery gaze to the ceiling. His body follows. He straightens, lifts his arms overhead, then falls back on my bed with a groan.

  “You said yourself,” I remind him, as I grab my faux pearl necklace from the box, “we’re better as friends.”

  “No, I said friends with benefits.”

  “Benefits can’t last forever.”

  “Then stop inviting me over.”

  My comeback rests against my teeth, then evaporates. That’s more than fair. Daytime, sober Ruby has no problem putting up boundaries.

  It’s nighttime Ruby—especially the Drunk and Lonely Edition—that sends him texts I know I shouldn’t.

  Truthfully, we aren’t even good friends. Just old ones. Callum was there for me when no one else was. There to pick me up when I fell. And damn, did I fall hard.

  He wanted me when I was still Cross-Eyes. Snaggle-Tooth. Hopeless, pathetic little Ruby, with too much weight on my frame and not enough sense in my skull.

  He wanted me when no one else did.

  It was no wonder teenage me couldn’t resist him, the night he found me outside the Durham house. I felt his calloused thumbs wiping every tear off my face. His strong, fevered heartbeat bleeding through his wife beater as he pulled me into him.

  His deep, angry voice whispering, “Why do you do this to yourself, Ruby?” as he stroked my hair.

  I didn’t have an answer for him. I never did.

  But I decided, right then and there, that I was done doing it.

  The next few years transformed me. I saved up every paycheck from every job I had until I could afford Invisalign. I practically stalked the surgeon I found online until he agreed to fix my eye, once and for all, the way his website claimed he could do for anyone.

  I experimented with a hundred diets until I lost weight, and a hundred cleansers until my skin cleared up. I learned how to do my hair and makeup, how to dress, how to talk...how to be exactly who I’d wanted to be, all along.

  The difference was, I did all this for myself. Not so some rich assholes on a rocky shoreline would give me the time of day.

  And I sure as hell didn’t do it for a man, much less one like Theo Durham.

  Through it all, Callum’s feelings for me remained unchanged. He found me just as attractive and worthy as he did before. Every time I pressed him, insisting he must find the new me prettier—because, seriously: how could he not?—he said if anything, it was my happiness he found more attractive. “If this is what you had to do to like yourself, then...sure. I guess I do prefer it. But only because you do.”

  Lest I paint him as some saintly sweetheart (and myself as some stuck-up “I’m hot now, so screw you” bitch), I should highlight the fact Callum is as possessive as they come, with a silent grudge counter built into the back of his head. Every breakup makes him hold onto me a little bit tighter the next time around.

  Which is why it’s so important for this time to stick.

  “Get off my bed,” I tell him, as I push out from the vanity and vanish into my closet. “No exes allowed.”

  “Ruby. Babe. Don’t do this.”

  In the darkness of the closet, surrounded by swishing fabric and mementos, I shut my eyes. I can’t cry in front of him. He’ll take it to mean I regret this breakup, when really it’s something much sadder: I hate treating
a friend like this.

  I hate knowing that, one of these days, I’ll probably have to lose Friend Callum if I want to lose Boyfriend Callum for good.

  We fell into this weird pattern of ours fast, always one petty fight from Off...and one vulnerable phone call away from On Again.

  We bicker nonstop, as friends and as a couple. Our sex for the last two years has been nothing but the make-up variety, capping some truly awful fights that have gotten more than a few cops on my welcome mat.

  The only exception would be the times like last week: when I’m wasted, horny, and just want someone else in my bed. And nine times out of ten, I want him out as soon as we’re finished.

  Well. As soon as he’s finished. I can’t remember the last time I checked that box.

  Still—I can’t just cut contact. Callum was there when I needed him. If this revolving door system of ours is what it takes to ease the pain for him, I’ll grit my teeth and do it. Like peeling off a Band-Aid, instead of ripping.

  “You said you had a date with that girl from the candle shop.” I dig through my dresses, even though I already know what I’m wearing tonight. “How’s that going?”

  “Fucked her.” He swings his legs over the foot of the bed and stares at the closet door. I watch him through the slats. “Both holes. No condom. Came in her ass.”

  “Huh. I bet that was fun for you.”

  His boots slam to the floor. Every knickknack on my shelves rattles.

  “Goddamn it, Ruby! Cut this shit out. It’s not funny.”

  Slowly, I open the door and peer at him. “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to be a supportive friend. You know, help you move on?”

  He digs his ever-present tin of Skoal from his pocket and tucks a pouch against his inner lip. There’s scar tissue there, a white patch that never goes away. I got tired of asking him to see a doctor about it.

  It makes my stomach turn, just imagining the carcinogens seeping into his veins through that patch right now.

  “I don’t want to move on,” he says. “I want you.”

  “Not what you said during the fight,” I point out, because that was a huge turning point for us. It didn’t even hurt my feelings. I was relieved. Finally, his heart was hardening against me. The Band-Aid was loose. “You told me there were lots of girls in this town who wanted you, and you were starting to wonder why you kept yourself on my back burner. Remember?”