Page 55 of Fated

Then I say quietly, voicing my fear, “I’m terrified to lose your friendship. I don’t feel what you do. I don’t know that I can. I don’t want to start this if it will only hurt you.”

Max smiles, a closed-lip, self-aware look. “Let me worry about my hurts.”

“Max.”

“What’s life without risk? It isn’t life. It isn’t living.”

“But if I lose you?—”

“Fi.” He presses a hand to my arm, solid and sure. “No matter what, I will always be your friend.”

I give him a dry look. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He laughs then, grinning at me. “You can’t get rid of me. I’m sorry. That boat has sailed.”

We smile at each other, living in the memory of a Saturday night eight years ago. His family had been gone for six months. His dad, his mom, his older brother, dead in an avalanche while on a ski holiday. Max was raging his way through Geneva, wrecking his life, his reputation, and his family’s business.

I barged into his house to find him surrounded by half-empty bottles of liquor—brandy and cognac—a mountain of cheap, half-smoked cigars, two weeks’ worth of beard growth, dirty-clothed, and hollow eyed. It lit an ember of rage in me to see him that way.

I grabbed the closest bottle of cognac and the stainless steel lighter lying near the cigars. And then I marched to his back garden. He followed. I dumped the wine into an ostentatious marble birdbath. Then I flicked the lighter and set the whole thing on fire.

It burned like a torch, raging and twisting.

“That was my dad’s favorite cognac,” he said, hollow-voiced.

“I don’t give a shit,” I said viciously.

He blinked. “The brandy was my mom’s favorite.”

I nodded, stormed back into the house, grabbed all the cognac and brandy I could find, and then brought them clanking in my arms to the garden.

“Do it.”

Max studied me for a moment, life slowly edging its way back into his eyes. Then he grabbed two bottles. The flame in the birdbath had already died, the alcohol burned away. He poured the contents of the bottles into the marble bath, the ruby and amber liquid catching in the dull gray half-light of dusk.

Then he set it on fire.

And I brought him bottle after bottle, and he fed the flames and let the spirits burn.

When he was done, a pile of bottles lay like bones picked clean in the grass. The air smelled sweet like smoke and incense. The veins of the white marble birdbath were blackened. A low blue flame still burned. The sky was dark.

Max turned to me, his cheeks red, eyes alight. A spark of life was back inside him.

He stared at me for a moment, then, “They’re gone.”

“I know.”

“I hate them.” His voice cracked and the night closed in while the flame in the birdbath burned low.

“Do you hate them a little less now?”

“They were a terrible family. I never would’ve chosen them. Sometimes, when I was young, I’d lie awake wishing?—”

He cut himself off, unable to say it.

“I know.”

His dad was a vicious man, known for his rages. Max’s brother was just the same. His mom was hard and unhappy. Max’s childhood had a terrible beginning and a terrible ending. Because he stayed and he never escaped them.

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