Page 72 of After Felix
“Yes, you were,” he says. “It was only when you were gone that I realised it.” He shakes his head. “Come on. I fancy a brandy.”
Back in the cabin, I let him pour me a brandy from the bottle on a side table. I eye him as he sips his own small snifter.
“You’re not drinking much,” I say idly, settling into the small chair while he takes the lower bunk. “You hardly drank at dinner.”
He shrugs. “I don’t drink much anymore.”
“Why?”
“It was getting to the stage where I’d have had a problem on my hands if I carried on.”
The words make sense, but I have the strongest sense of duplicity. I guess I’ve never lost my strange ability to read Max Travers. I try to think of something sensible to say. Something empathetic. “Bollocks,” I say instead.
He chokes on his drink, and I watch with satisfaction. When he’s finished coughing up a lung, he asks, “How do you always know?”
“I just know when you’re stretching the truth, Max.”
“You’re the only one who knows me,” he says steadfastly.
I laugh. “I can’t be. There must be another man who can do the same. I’m a twenty-something twink from London, not a fucking unicorn.”
“You might as well be a unicorn to me,” he says.
“What?”
He puts his drink down. “Ask me when I packed up the booze.” He pauses. “Ask me when I packed up the random men.”
I swallow hard, panicking. “No.”
“You must know when,” he says loudly. “Come on, Felix, think. It was June the eighteenth at a barbeque.”
I look at him in consternation. “But that was… That was the day Carl and I finished.”
He sits back in his chair, his face harsh with an emotion that looks like disappointment. “You remember him finishing it that well?”
“Not for that reason,” I scoff.
Max’s shoulders become less rigid.
“He threw a hotdog in my face, Max,” I explain. “It’s not something I’d forget. Especially as I got mustard in my eye. That stuff stings.”
I do remember it. Not because of Carl, but because Max had brought some bloke with him. A thin redhead who had hung on his arm and laughed at everything he said. It had been like nails down a blackboard, and I’d almost welcomed Carl’s final temper tantrum which had come when he accused me of only watching Max all day.
He watches me, his dark, clever eyes busy. “I remember,” he says. “And when he finished it, I went home and poured all my booze away and deleted the Grindr app.”
“Why did you do that?” I ask in a small voice.
“I had to stop because I realised one thing that day.”
“What?”
“That I wasn’t getting you back by drowning myself in booze and men.”
“Oh my God, Max.” I push my hands through my hair and hang them on the back of my neck. “You can’t say things like that.”
“I haven’t been able to before, but I have to now.”
“Why? Because I’m your prisoner,” I burst out. My heart is pounding heavily, and I’m almost lightheaded with the desire to go to him, to let him sweep me back into his world.
