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  Fake Halo

  Durham Boys, Book 1

  Piper Lennox

  Copyright © 2020 by Piper Lennox

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Photographer: Furious Fotog

  Model: Gus Caleb Smyrnios

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Content Advisory: Readers who would prefer to know the nature of the sensitive material in this novel before reading should visit this page. Note that it contains spoilers.

  For anyone who sees themselves

  in Clara - you are beautiful.

  If you're looking for the demons

  To play well with your own

  Then you should look no further

  Here with me

  You'll never have to be alone

  My eyes see you

  I see you but

  You don't see me….

  Shannon Saunders, “Atlas”

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Also by Piper Lennox

  For More Info

  About the Author

  Prologue

  One Year Ago

  “Don’t rush me.”

  Grains of moon tumbled on the water. The thin, glowing curtains swept into the cabana with the breeze, and I reached my hands overhead to let my fingertips dance underneath them.

  Between my legs, the boy in the mask smiled when I moaned.

  “Too loud,” he reminded me, his voice toneless: he spoke in low growls, drawn from his chest with the same lunar gravity as the ocean.

  “Softer,” he coached. “Don’t want to get caught.”

  His fingers filled me.

  He bent his knuckles, thrashing his fingertips against my walls until he’d bent me to his will. I was melted sugar in his storm, shaken windows in his thunder.

  Liquor filled every groove of my brain until I forgot, briefly, how I’d gotten here.

  A loud party. Music, bodies…drinks placed in my hands from every direction.

  My new Parker Black gown, now trapping the beach in its folds as he pushed it higher on my stomach, had gotten caught underneath his shoe on the deck. That’s why I’d turned.

  That’s how I’d met him.

  In the shadows and buzz of the alcohol, I decided I liked his mouth. It was all I could see besides his hands; he wore a crisp black tux and satin-lined mask.

  But how did we get here, so far from the crowds and hotel, in this curtained cabana on the shore?

  When I orgasmed, he lifted his head and kissed my navel.

  My fingers fumbled around his lapels and dragged him up to my face so I could kiss him again. He tasted like me, and the blue punch in the coconut cups, and that heady flavor of being a stranger, with skin and lips that mine didn’t have memorized.

  “I must be crazy,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think I’m already crazy about you.” He laughed and shook his head.

  Time skipped. I took his erection into my throat and he stumbled, leaning back and grabbing the wooden post to steady himself. “Damn, baby, that’s it.”

  Glitter from my mask rained across him. He laughed again.

  I took him completely, deeper than I’d ever been able to do. The noises he made sent my heart spinning.

  His orgasm hit him hard. I could tell from the way he flattened his spine against the post, tilting his covered face to the moonlight while his knees weakened.

  I swallowed it easily. Another first. My body didn’t resist. I was hungry for him, in every way I could be.

  Time shuddered past again, and I was back on the chaise. Back under those roaming hands and sweet breath, and a kiss getting me drunker by the minute.

  “Stop,” he whispered, when I tried to lift his mask.

  He enclosed my hand in his and slid it down to his mouth, kissing my fingertips.

  “Trust me.” His smile, slick and white as shells, hit me like another familiar note. “You don’t want to know.”

  One

  Send.

  My head’s saturated when I finally sit back in my seat. I don’t know what it is about a long confession that makes you lean all the way forward, tense to your bones.

  Maybe it’s so the words can vomit out of you.

  That’s what I feel like: I’ve just been digitally sick all over my phone screen, typing out every last thing my new therapist could possibly need to know about me.

  This valuable lesson comes from hopping to four therapists in three years. Without that expository dump of an introduction, I’d waste at least two sessions filling them in on the mess they’re about to put their hands on.

  With my word vomit now zooming to Dr. Willow Dune’s inbox, I relax and take a sip of the warm Vitamin Water from my bag.

  I let myself think, Maybe this one can help.

  The subway train stops, opens, and dumps its contents into the station. A refill shuffles inside. Men with umbrellas scatter rain at my feet. A girl with safety pins where earrings would go compliments my Totoro messenger bag, and I thank her with a weightless smile.

  Switching therapists is never fun, but I do like how I feel right after I send those “here’s all my problems; just try and fix me” emails—airy and cleansed. Updated, if not repaired.

  It’s like opening all your bills you’ve let pile up on top of the microwave. Nothing’s fixed, but at least you know the actual damage.

  Georgia texts me to pick up eggs. “Thought you were going vegan again,” I type, hitting Send just as she texts, “And don’t give me shit 4 the vegan thing. Next week.”

  Smiling, I put my phone away and dig my sketchbook from my bag. The young boy across the car notices my glances, but stops fidgeting when I show him the page: I’m drawing his checkered Vans, where he’s filled in every white square with glitter glue.

  For the next few minutes, until his mother pulls him into their station, he holds perfectly still.

  My stop is next: Nassau in Greenpoint.

  Brooklyn wasn’t my first choice. Then again, neither was New York. Georgia took the reins on our relocation, and I caved when I got tired of arguing over responsible rent budgets and necessary square footage. Our one and only compromise was choosing a non-waterfront building. Georgia got her hip neighborhood,
and I got a rent amount I could live with, for a while.

  “You’re pessimistic,” she told me, when I said our income streams could, in theory, dry up at any moment, and we needed to invest more than we spent.

  “I’m not pessimistic,” I countered, “just practical.” Internet fame is a fickle, flickering spotlight. One slip, and you can lose it all.

  It wasn’t just the prices that put me off. Georgia picked one of the trendiest spots possible. Not that trendy is bad…just predictable. In fact, I’m not so sure she didn’t pick our apartment based off other influencers’ location tags.

  Proof: our building has at least two other video bloggers, and the one next door houses four Instagram moms. Granted, they are all friends, and businesses like ours are contagious. But still.

  I know Ari Bakers of the Ari LoveX Channel lives in our neighborhood, because I see her doing her “Woman on the Street” bits (giving strangers free makeovers, right there on the sidewalk) every time I walk to yoga. And then there’s the guys from Winged—also identical twins—and Halley Isles. And for every recognizable name, there are tons of newbies trying to claw to the top, I guess by posting the same tutorials and skylines and CBD-infused coffees as everyone else.

  Not that I can talk. Check out my Instagram and you’ll find sunsets and lattes for days.

  That’s the way it goes, though. We copy each other. Trends emerge without much thought, even where we live. Our profession can be done anywhere on this earth, but turns out most of us want to do it in the same spots.

  Above ground, I shiver under the stinging rain and stick as close to the buildings as I can, making use of awnings until I reach the scaffolding tunnel that careens around the corner and onto my street.

  Days like now, when the city is wet and the gutters look slimy, rainbow streaks of oil bending to the storm grates, I miss Santa Barbara more than ever.

  We didn’t grow up there, but it carries that same kind of significance for me: the place I’ll always think of as home.

  I didn’t want to leave. Georgia looked like she couldn’t hop on a plane fast enough.

  “All our friends are here,” I’d sniffed, nearly every day after we decided to transplant ourselves to the opposite coast.

  “Video chats. Visits.” Georgia wrapped her Funko Pops in the pages we’d torn from last September’s Vogue and gave me a sad smile. I think she was mostly sad for me, being so sentimental. “And we’ll come back for Walt’s wedding. You know: whenever he and Mark finally agree on a venue.”

  This was a shitty consolation prize, considering Walt had asked us to be his groomsmaids. I didn’t want to just be another guest in the crowd. I didn’t want video chats and occasional visits.

  I didn’t want to fade into the background of our friends’ lives until, inevitably, we reached a point where these people we saw every single day could go weeks without thinking of us, simply because we were out of sight.

  Still, I knew Georgia was right. Rue Royale, Inc., preferred we move closer to their offices, and with product launches scheduled for the next year and some change, it didn’t make sense for us to keep that ocean-to-ocean commute.

  Besides: I really do love it here.

  Things move faster. Every little detail is interesting, if you get close enough. You can pass a hundred lives in a matter of minutes, and linger and wonder about whichever ones you want.

  And ignore the ones you don’t.

  Outside my building, I study the chalk drawings weeping off the sidewalk. One is a melted purple cat, probably by the little girl on the second floor. The knees of her leggings always have purple dust.

  There’s a pineapple with sunglasses, most likely by the nanny. I’ve seen her pineapple purse, earrings, and sundress in the elevator enough to know they’re her favorite thing ever. She lights up as soon as you compliment her.

  Last is a giant, mediocre dick drawing right on the steps, definitely done by teenagers from the corner. I saw them scooping up the scraps of chalk in yesterday’s dusk.

  They gave it sunglasses, too. I chuckle, then swipe my foot across the step to help the rain rinse it away.

  In the elevator, my phone chimes. It’s my email notification: Dr. Dune responding with, I’m sure, multiple reassurances that she can help me with every problem I typed out in excruciating detail.

  Briefly, my hand slips underneath my hat.

  I clench my fist and bring it back to my side too hard, punching myself in the leg. My other hand opens the email app.

  It is not a message from my therapist.

  And it’s then that I notice, as the elevator lurches upward and drags my stomach along like a can on the back of a wedding car, that I didn’t send my multi-paragraph, soul-cleansing, word-vomit email to [email protected], after all.

  I sent it to [email protected].

  Wes Durham, Westcott fucking Durham, has just read every private thought in my head. Every broken thing about me.

  Every deep, dark secret I’ve got.

  Hurley:

  Ha. Some of that glitter makeup get in your eyes? Forgot you even had my email.

  Corner Coffee. Eight a.m.

  Looks like we have business to discuss.

  -Durham

  Two

  You know those clickbait articles at the bottom of websites that say shit like, “Melt Fat with One Simple Trick,” or “Doctors are Furious at This Man Because of What He Did with Onions”?

  Yeah, well. Today, I’m in one.

  You’ll Never Guess What Happened to These Child Stars!

  The thumbnail is of me, looking like the goddamn train wreck I used to be.

  Sleep-deprived. Strung out.

  Retaining about twenty pounds of water and thirty of gas station junk food.

  Don’t you dare fucking click it.

  I click it.

  Of course it’s one of those ad-throttled slideshows. The first nine slides are your usual suspects of 70s and 80s child stars.

  Billie Durham fills the screen. First a photo of the blue-eyed Shirley Temple clone she made her name as, on the Dahlia and Charles Show as their go-to for skits requiring children.

  The article gets her career milestones all wrong, stating that she did one sitcom in the 80s as a teenager. She did two, and guest-starred on four others. Picked up a new bad habit on every single one.

  Which is how they end up with their “Now” picture: my mother, her blue eyes flattened and hollow from her own pill problem (and wine problem…and bulimia problem), walking out of a Trader Joe’s eight years ago. She hadn’t done her time in rehab yet, so I’m not surprised they chose this photo. Outdated, yes—but oh, so clickable.

  My slide is much shorter.

  “Wes Durham, once the most promising triple threat to come out of the Walden Corporation’s primetime lineup, spiraled after his role as Charlie Chase on Cut to the Chases.”

  Wrong again. My spiral began right in the middle of that saccharine after-school special. It just wasn’t visible yet.

  It’s funny—everyone’s favorite episode was when my character saved his best friend from alcohol poisoning.

  Little do they know, the very night we wrapped up filming that scene, thirteen-year-old me needed his stomach pumped from all the vodka that same costar gave me at his place, courtesy of an older sibling who also didn’t handle young fame too well.

  Like my mom’s slide, the website didn’t bother getting a recent photo. I’m eighteen in that one, with greasy hair, a too-small Fender T-shirt strangling my gut, and a middle finger aimed right at the pap’s zoom lens.

  I exit the tab and go back to my task at hand, checking the comments on my latest upload.

  Kawaii43 commented: Lay off the wah pedal dude. No need to make your guitar whine more than you do.

  It’s got seven upvotes already, only ten minutes old.

  I usually delete all the shit this user posts. This one’s mild, so I leave it.

  There’s also probably some truth to it. I debated all morn
ing over which version to post: the one with the pedal, or without. Guess I chose wrong.

  The tab with my email chimes. I ignore it and get up to stretch, cracking open another of the energy drinks my roommate-slash-cousin left behind. Bad idea at four in the afternoon, but I’d probably stay up until dawn regardless. Might as well make the hours productive.

  Rain streaks the massive window that angles onto my bedroom ceiling. The minute Van moved out, I shoved my furniture in here and aimed my bed directly at the glass.

  It’s a killer view, right on the water. Van always turned his bed away to combat the glare, which I still can’t understand. Why claim the best room if you won’t use its best feature? What’s the point of having something this damn beautiful, then turning your back on it?

  That’s the thing, though—Van never liked it here much. When I left Cali to crash on his couch in Brooklyn, he called me crazy for giving up perpetual sunshine and palms for this sprawling grid of brick and shadows.

  I told him Hollywood wasn’t half as great as he thought, and he was welcome to switch lives with me if he wanted to see for himself that all that bright sunlight just illuminates how fucking fake the place is. Streets paved in gold? Hate to break it to you, but piss shimmers the exact same way.