Always Alchemy: The Ever After Book (Alchemy #6)

13. An Eye for an Eye

13

AN EYE FOR AN EYE

ADAM

I glance at the horrifying array of shot glasses on the table of this extremely fancy gentlemen’s club and then back at my so-called “best man”.

‘You’re such a dick,’ I slur.

He smirks. ‘Come on. You can do it.’

‘I can, but I don’t want to.’ I just want to go home and see my beautiful fiancée. Maybe pull a few moves. She loves my stripteases.

Oh fuck. I hope I didn’t say that out loud. He’d probably hit me across the room.

‘You barely drink when you’re with my sister. Come on. It’ll do you good to get arseholed and make a tit of yourself. Loosen up a bit. The sky won’t fall because Adam Wright got a bit pissed.’

‘I’d rather fall off the wagon for another bottle of that seriously good claret. Not this crap.’

‘Live a little. ’

I sigh and go to take one. At some point on your stag weekend you have to make the decision to throw caution—and dignity—to the wind and just go for it.

‘Wait,’ Anton says from beside me. ‘Have you worked out what they are yet?’

I frown. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Look closely,’ Stephen says. He’s still smirking. I definitely chose my best man badly.

I squint at the array of shot glasses. The middle one is in an opaque black glass, so dark I can’t see what colour the actual liquid is. Around it is a circle of what looks and smells like Blue Curacao—devil’s piss. And around that stands a circle of glasses filled with milky-white liquid, some kind of cream-based liqueur that will have me hurling, no doubt, seconds after I down the first one.

‘What?’ I ask, still puzzled.

Stephen puts an arm around my shoulder and leans in. ‘We’ve christened it the Old Testament Flight.’

Something is scratching at the edge of my booze-addled consciousness. A realisation, I think.

I’ll regret this. ‘Why?’

He puts his mouth close to my ear and whispers.

‘An eye for an eye.’

The penny drops.

My body freezes.

He is fucking with me. He’s got to be.

All evidence, however, is to the contrary, and by all evidence I mean the creepy AF cocktail eyeball staring up at me from the table, the overly robust slap Stephen administers between my shoulder blades, and the verti—verity— veritable explosion of laughs from my so-called mates.

I straighten up and attempt to refocus my gaze to the muppets surrounding me. ‘Were you all in on this? ’

‘Come on, mate,’ my former friend Gabe says, wiping away what appears to be a tear with the back of his hand. ‘There was no way you could make Stephen your best man and not set yourself up for something like this.’

I glare at him as best I can. ‘You were a fucking priest. What happened to turn the other cheek?’

He shrugs. ‘Nah. The Old Testament is way more fun. Anyway, this strikes me as a very light penance, given your past sins. Suck it up, motherfucker.’

I tut—so unchristian—and turn back to my future brother-in-law. ‘I thought we were cool,’ I say desperately.

He smiles broadly. ‘We are. Just give me this one moment of triumph, you smug gobshite, and we’ll leave it all behind us. I promise.’

I stare at him. He has a very nice face, though I think the reason I’m so fond of it is because it reminds me of Nat’s. The Bennett gene is strong.

‘Right you are, jackass,’ I say. ‘What am I starting with?’

‘Start with the pupil,’ Zach interjects. He’s watching avidly, arms crossed over his chest, jacket long gone and tie loosened.

‘Which is?’

‘Cassis.’ Ouch. Cassis is fucking grim.

‘Okay.’ I lift the black shot glass in a careful pincer grip from its position--my motor skills feel a little sketchy—and throw it down my throat. It’s absolutely revolting, and my stomach protests instantly.

‘I don’t have to drink all of them, do I?’ I ask. I’m trying to count them, but I keep losing track. I think there are six blue ones and ten—no, twelve—no, ten—white ones.

‘Yep,’ everyone choruses.

Anton claps me on the shoulder. ‘Pace yourself.’

‘What’s the white one?’ I ask with misgiving .

‘Half Malibu, half Baileys,’ Stephen tells me, and I swear I throw up a little in my mouth as a full-body shiver rolls through me. That is just wrong.

‘Okay.’ I inhale deeply in an attempt to psych myself up.

It doesn’t work.

I pick up a blue shot and neck it. Jeeeeesus fuck, that’s revolting. A white one comes next. Then another blue. Then another white.

The second Malibu-Baileys concoction barely makes it down my oesophagus before my stomach declares Game Over.

I didn’t even make it into a stall. The urinal in the black marble bathroom of this centuries-old establishment is now splattered with my vomit. I sit on the floor next to it, head back against the cool marble wall, trying to catch my breath as Stephen gamely mops up the overspill with one of the fluffy white washcloths they give you instead of paper towels in places like this.

‘Thanks, mate,’ I say, then: ‘I think you scored a bit of an own goal.’

He sniggers. ‘I’m beginning to work that out.’

‘I’m not drinking the rest.’

‘Fair play. I don’t want to play nanny all night. Think you’ve got it all out of your system?’

‘The worst of it, yeah.’ I blow out a breath. God, that was revolting. ‘Now I remember why I rarely drink.’

‘You did well, considering.’

I close my eyes for a second. When I reopen them, he’s rinsing a new cloth under the tap and mopping the urinal clean. ‘You’re a very good guy, you know that? ’

‘Not fair to leave it for the cleaners,’ he mumbles.

‘Totally agree. Sorry I’m not pulling my weight.’

‘You get a free pass. Besides, I’ve cleaned up so much of Chloe’s vomit this past couple of years that I think I’m getting immune to it.’ A pause. ‘You’re a lot less cute than she is afterwards, though.’

‘Facts,’ I agree. ‘Anyway, I think we brought some life and soul to this place.’

‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘All these posh wankers know how to party. I don’t get why they have this whole charade around respectability when they’re more badly behaved behind closed doors than your average punter down the pub on a Friday night.’

‘It’s total bullshit,’ I agree. ‘It doesn’t do anything for me.’ It’s been fun, having a night out here. So many of my mates are members. Apparently Anton, Rafe, Zach and Cal have all been members since they turned twenty-one, and their fathers are members, too. While I’ve worked my arse off to be taken seriously, to be seen as respectable, I could take or leave this kind of elite establishment. It’s far too “silver spoon” for my liking.

‘You fit in better than me,’ he argues.

‘Nah. Not really. And look at Aide. He fucking hates it.’

My mate Aide, a self-made man like me and Stephen’s boss at Totum, absolutely despises places like this. He lasted through dinner before pleading off on the basis that his daughter had a very early ballet lesson. Sounded tenuous, to say the least.

Stephen found out at some point that I was great friends with Aide and may have played a part in his landing a job at Totum. I’ll never know if it was Nat or her mum who let it slip or whether Stephen worked it out for himself, but I’ve always maintained the truth: that he got that job solely on his own merits. He’d forgiven me by then, so making the connection between his beloved boss and his childhood attacker didn’t hit him as hard as it could have.

At least, I thought he’d forgiven me.

‘Are we good?’ I ask him now.

He stares. ‘Yeah, mate, ‘’course we are.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper. I’ve said the words to him a million times over the past year, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop saying them.

He sighs and straightens up before squatting down in front of me. ‘I know you are. And it’s okay. It really is. We’re all happy.’

‘I know, but… it was such a terrible thing I did to you.’ I sniff. ‘I took your eye from you, for fuck’s sake. Gabe was right back there. I got away lightly.’

‘Adam,’ he begins, and then pauses. ‘Look. I don’t even know how to say it, really, okay? But what’s done is done. It happened. And it changed the course of our lives, and you met my sister, and you’re going to spend every single day caring for her and making her happier than any of us could have dreamed of for her, and that’s what counts.’

‘Yeah, but?—’

‘You did what you did. But that wasn’t you , mate. That was a terrified, grieving, neglected kid who went crazy because he needed to. The shit your family went through— fuck . That was worse than anything you put me through. Honestly. You need to let go of that shit. You have enough on your shoulders.’

He’s said these words to me before, but there’s something about this drunken state that allows me to really feel it all, to lean into the guilt and the shame and the regret, but also his compassion. His generosity of spirit .

‘Honestly,’ he continues. ‘The universe is fucking weird. Mum has worried about Nat her whole life. Having a bad hypo, or going DKA, or any of that stuff. In the most fucked-up way, you’ve been in training your whole life to take care of my sister. Did you ever think about that? There’s no one in whose hands she’d be safer. I would never, ever have wished what happened to Ellen on anyone, just as I probably wouldn’t have wished what you did to me on anyone, but you know what? We all survived. We’re fine—more than fine. We’re thriving. And the future is bright, my friend.’

I nod my understanding as I blink away the tears. My heart is so full of love for his sister it’s frankly ridiculous. I’m an addict, and the honey-sweet happiness she pumps into my veins every moment that I’m with her is my crack.

I risk a look straight into the eye I took from him. ‘The prosthetic is amazing,’ I mumble. It really is. I’d never know it wasn’t real.

He grins. ‘It’s fucking cool, isn’t it? Not like the old one.’

I grimace and stay wisely silent. The old one was almost as creepy as that cocktail eyeball out on the table.

‘You can say it,’ he prompts.

‘It was a bit Bond villain ,’ I confess, and he throws back his head and laughs.

‘Wow. Tell it like it is.’

I hesitate. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘No, Ads. It doesn’t hurt physically. It doesn’t hurt emotionally. I’m all good.’ He bows his head for a moment before looking back up at me. ‘I hope you remember this in the morning, because I think you need to hear it. Only good things have come to all of us from having you back in our lives, mate. Only good things. And I’m not talking about that fucking mansion you’re building for Mum and Dad, okay? You’ve made my sister’s dreams come true. You’ve helped her fly. Remember that. We’re all so grateful. So when you and I are standing at the top of that aisle next week, just remember how thrilled the Bennett family is that you’re a part of it. Understand?’