Just Friends (The Agency Book 1) Read online

  And the audience erupts with cheers and a round of applause.

  “What the hell? You psycho-bitch!”

  “Poor Stuart – prematurely wet again,” I say to a chorus of laughter. “That’s for Adele.”

  My audience is laughing so hard now that one guy high-fives me, and a lady in a swishy burgundy evening dress shouts, “You go, girl!”

  And still Stuart is unrepentant. “Yeah, well fuck you! You’re off my account!”

  “Fuck you! And your teensy-tiny pathetic little penis.”

  The last word is mine.

  Embarrassing?

  Hugely, but at least I’m going home with a smile on my face.

  5

  I THOUGHT I’D PACED MYSELF last night, but as I lie face down on what I hope is my bed, my mouth is screaming for water as if I’ve been passed out in a desert for days. I wonder why there’s a camel standing in my bathroom doorway holding a very tempting pitcher of iced water. “Come get it if you’re that thirsty!” it says, then it starts to baa. Do camels baa? Maybe it’s a sheep. Or maybe it’s my cream bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. I clamp my eyes shut and try to focus on my head, which hurts all the way down my back and into the balls of my feet. Is that thudding even in my head? Is it in my ears?

  I flip over and stare at a familiar ceiling. Great news! I’m in my apartment. I don’t know how I got here, but at least I’m here. I can’t remember drinking that much. Perhaps it would be wise if I swore off alcohol as well as men, and I make up a new law to avoid absolutely bloody awful work parties too.

  More thudding. I pull a pillow over my head and try to ignore it. My mouth is as dry as the dust on my mantelpiece, but there’s no way I’m getting up for a drink. I can live with the thirst. Meanwhile, my stomach is on a roller coaster and it’s looping-the-loop while the rest of me has broken down and is waiting for a technician to arrive.

  I close my eyes as I respond to the thudding by wedging part of my pillow into my ear and wrapping the rest of it around my head like a scarf. Then it all comes back to me and I wish I was dead. The ache in my heart and the sinking feeling in my stomach. The relentless nagging in my brain from the memory that’s clawing at me like a vulture pecking at a partly decomposed corpse. After the feelings comes the avalanche of memories. Finding Carly and Ridley together, our argument, Stuart having a fiancée, Ethan having sex with Carly behind the wheelie bins and finally, humiliating Stuart in front of an audience of agency clients and colleagues.

  All in all, not my most favourite of nights.

  Yet more thudding. My senses are jolted and my brain finally connects. The thudding isn’t inside my head; it’s at my door. I might be in my bedroom, but my body is on the moon and I don’t think I have the strength to get up. I push up onto my palms and discover that I’ve been mummified in my sleep. I’m still wearing my party dress, but it’s twisted around me like a bandage and my left boob is wedged through the armhole. Jesus Christ, what a night! I glance at my clock, which is streaked gold with . . . with what? Sunlight? The time reads half past five in the morning.

  I stagger to the door, repositioning left boob as I go, and the thudding gets even louder – each bang feels like nails are getting knocked into my skull with a sledgehammer. My shoulders burn with tension as I wonder who it could be. It’s early . . . far too early.

  I cautiously open the door to reveal Max and Ethan. Or rather, the ghosts of Max and Ethan, because the human beings I see before me bear no resemblance to my best friends.

  Max has his arm draped over Ethan’s shoulder. His legs are loose, but they’re holding him up, and his green eyes are dull and lifeless. He still doesn’t have his jacket, and his shirt is unbuttoned and untucked around his middle. He also – amazingly – has on only one shoe. One flaming shoe, for Christ’s sake. How the hell does a man lose a shoe on a night out?

  “What’s happened? Please, tell me what’s happened.” I can barely speak the words as I take in Ethan’s appearance. His brow is creased with deep lines, and his eyes – his bright blue eyes which are usually sparkling with life – are clouded with sadness.

  I move out of the way as they crash into my apartment and stumble through to the sitting room. Ethan releases Max from his hold and he clatters down onto my sofa, bewildered and speechless. I immediately go to him, resting my hand on his arm, and look over to Ethan, who stands hunched in front of me. His skin is red and blotchy, and his eyes are dragging me down with him into whatever misery is plaguing them both.

  “What’s happened?” I say again. “Guys, please talk to me. You’re really starting to scare me here.”

  Ethan opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He swallows hard and tries again. “It’s Quentin Hibbard. He’s . . . dead.”

  “What? Is this a joke? Please tell me you’re joking, because you’ve crossed the line in bad taste if you are.” I look at Max and wonder if he’s capable of pulling something like this off. I don’t even have to think twice about Ethan because tormenting people is one of his favourite pastimes, but Max?

  “He had a massive heart attack,” says Ethan. “Dropped down dead in front of everybody. He even hit his head as he went down – there was blood everywhere.”

  “Oh my god, that’s awful,” I say. We’d only met Quentin for the first time tonight, but he seemed a lovely man.

  Ethan stands at the back of the room, and my shock fades into horror as I’m confronted by the extent of his anguish. There’s more. I can see it in his eyes.

  “And Carly’s in hospital. I don’t know if she’ll make it. We thought you’d know what to do,” he adds, his voice crushed with panic.

  “What? How? What happened to her?” My heart is beating so fast that my legs begin to shudder, and the involuntary movements make my teeth chatter. I know what catastrophe looks like. I was seventeen when I saw it embedded in the eyes of my parents. Tonight I’m seeing it again.

  Ethan sits down in my armchair. I watch him stretch and rub at the tension knots in his neck. “We don’t know what happened. It was after the paramedics had left with Quentin’s body. Max was upset because he’d lost his house keys and his iPhone, so I offered to help him look for his jacket. We checked all the rooms for it, then we found her . . . I thought she was dead. They took her away, but it doesn’t look good. They think she passed out and then was sick and choked on it. I rang the hospital on the way over here and she’s still unresponsive. They have her in ICU.”

  I desperately try to gather my thoughts as my brain throws up question after question. Quentin is dead and Carly is in hospital. This is sad, and I need to feel something but . . . Jesus, what am I feeling? I can’t describe it. Am I feeling anything? How should I be feeling? I hate this woman. I cursed every bone in her miserable body, but I didn’t make any real effort to get to know her either. What’s the etiquette for this? Someone I hate with passion and potency is fighting for her life. What should I say? How should I feel?

  Fucking hell, this is bad. Did I do this? I spent a long time thinking up ways to get revenge on her, so is this karma?

  No. Just no.

  I don’t believe in karma, for fuck’s sake. There’s no supernatural force evening up random scores. My mind twists itself into knots as I try to find the correct emotional response, but I come up cold.

  Oh god, I’m a horrible person, aren’t I? I’m a sociopath. This officially makes me a sociopath. Is this what being a sociopath means? Or does the fact I’m worrying whether or not I’m a sociopath mean I’m not a sociopath?

  Max is still totally lost to me, so I turn to Ethan with what I hope are the appropriate platitudes. What do you say to a man who’s just shagged someone you hate who’s now in hospital? “I’m sorry . . . This is awful . . . I . . . I don’t know what to say.” It’s all I can manage, but it’s the truth. I really don’t know what to say.

  Ethan studies my reaction, his grief-stricken eyes scrutinising my blank expression. “I thought you hated her.”

  What the he
ll? Is he sensing my inner turmoil and sticking the boot in? “I do hate her, and the feeling is mutual, but that doesn’t mean I wish this upon her.” Shit, I did wish it upon her, didn’t I? I can clearly remember a rush of excitement after I imagined her contracting elephantiasis of the vagina.

  Ethan looks across the room at me, his brow creased and confused. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I need to puke.” Max jumps to his feet and crashes through my sitting room, through my bedroom and into my en-suite bathroom. I’ve never seen him move so fast, and I’m relieved when I hear the toilet seat clunk up before the noise of his body retching up vomit ricochets around my apartment. I hope his aim is as good as his timing.

  “You stay here, I’ll go check on him,” I say.

  I have an overbearing feeling that our world has changed forever, but my brain still can’t articulate my thoughts. I tell myself I need to just focus on one person at a time and Max seems to be in the most urgent need.

  I walk to the bathroom and it’s as if I’m functioning on autopilot. I force my mind to shut down everything but my priority, and my priority is helping him. This is why they came to me – I’m good in a crisis because I can separate emotional responses from logical ones. Last night’s wine-throwing incident aside, of course.

  In the few moments it takes to get from sitting room to bathroom, I have imprisoned my own guilt and I’m focused on the task at hand – keeping Max and Ethan from flying off a cliff edge. Only when I have all the facts can I fix it. It’s how I operate. I focus, I analyse, I formulate and then I fix. I’m a real-life Bob the fucking Builder.

  Max is sitting on the floor in front of my toilet when I get to him. His arms are draped around the bowl and his legs are tangled up in a bath towel. It looks like a scene from Trainspotting, and the jet-black circles under his eyes are testament to the drink and drugs he’s been pumping into himself all evening.

  I fall to my knees. The stench of vomit wafts over my senses as I get close to him, making my stomach lurch. I look him over to see if he splashed when he puked, but he looks clean. Ah, but my toilet isn’t. I lean behind him and flush. When I turn back, I notice his chin is bleeding, and he suddenly looks very old. How has he aged a decade since nine o’clock last night? I place my hand on his face, moving his chin up into the light so I can examine the damage he’s done to himself.

  “I got tangled in your towel . . . I fell . . . hit my stupid face. Does it look like I’ve been punched? I might pretend I’ve been punched. I deserve to be punched.”

  He looks so despondent that all I can think to do is wrap my arms around him, so that’s what I do. And there we stay, holding each other, for about ten minutes. I place a kiss on his cheek – his skin is sweaty but cold. Like he’s been out jogging in a blizzard.

  Max nuzzles into my neck and grabs me tight around my waist, then he sobs into my hair until it’s wet and I can feel it sticking to my ear. His grief brings tears to my own eyes, and I let them fall onto his shoulder. We stay there for a few moments more.

  “I’m sorry. I just . . . I can’t stop seeing her. I wish you’d have been there. I needed you . . . You would have known what to do.”

  I move from sitting on my knees to sitting on my bottom and huddle in closer to him. His clammy skin cools my cheek, and I reach for his hand, locking our fingers together tightly. He’s definitely having some kind of physical response to this. Shock or post-traumatic something-or-other. I have zero first aid knowledge – anything medical bores the living shit out of me – but my uninformed brain tells me he looks like he’s going to pass out at any moment, so I start squeezing his hand tightly in a rhythm to keep him alert.

  “There’s nothing you could have done, Max. It was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t.” His voice cracks as he twists around to look at me, his dull eyes regaining a fraction of their spark. “Don’t you see? I gave her the drugs. It’s all my fault.”

  “What?” My mind screams out and I feel pain. Real pain in my chest and my arms and the pit of my stomach.

  “She gave me twenty quid, and I gave her the best of what I had.”

  “What did you give her?” Please, God, don’t let him have given her anything Class A.

  “Speed. Just two pills,” he replies as he sniffs into his sleeve.

  I grip his hand again, making every inch of my touch as reassuring as I can. “That wouldn’t have done anything, Max. She hadn’t stopped drinking all night, and you don’t know what else she’d been taking. Did you spend any time with her? Did you see her take them?”

  “No, I didn’t speak to her all night. I gave her the pills when we arrived – an hour before the AdAg Awards show started.” He tips his head back against my bathroom wall and closes his eyes. He looks like he’s searching his memory, but he also looks like he’s on the verge of falling asleep. I can see his eyeballs drift in ripples underneath his closed lids.

  “Max, you gave her speed at, what? Seven or seven thirty? That was ten hours ago. You can’t blame yourself for this. You don’t know when, or even if, she took it, and as I said, she was drinking all night.”

  “What if she dies? She looked really bad – they had to resuscitate her with those electric shock things.”

  My pulse races with dread and fear, but I keep my rational head on. “Max, none of this is your fault. See, this is how it works. We have some facts here. Carly bought drugs from you, but she also drank all night long. All of these things were her choices, and she knew what she was doing. She passed out, as people do when they party hard, but what happened next was just bad luck. It was an accident. It doesn’t make any sense for you to blame yourself.”

  We sit in silence for a few moments. I wonder about Ethan. He’s quiet. I hope he’s okay.

  “You always say the right things. How do you do that?”

  “Because I’m your friend and because I love you.”

  His nose glistens with tears and mucous. He sniffs then wipes it on his shirt. I watch as he inspects the wetness on his sleeve, and all of a sudden he seems as fragile as a six-year-old child. He makes a half-hearted attempt to rub the green snot stain away with his thumb.

  “You need to get some sleep, Max. Why don’t you get into my bed for a bit?” His head snaps up and his eyes – his eyes that have been dull all night – are suddenly flashing with life. I do my best not to giggle. “Don’t get too excited, I’m not getting in with you.” I see a faint impression of a smile and I start to relax a bit. He’ll be okay once he sleeps this off. At least, I hope he will.

  I stand up and do my best to help him to his feet, but he’s almost a foot taller than me, so there’s little I can do but hold his hand and lead him through to my bedroom. I lift up the duvet and he flops onto my bed and curls up into a ball. I sit on the edge of the bed and stroke his wild straw-like hair until it’s soft against his head. His eyes start to close.

  “Sweet dreams, my friend,” I whisper before leaving the room.

  6

  I TAKE A DEEP BREATH I walk through the door. I anticipate the worst, but I find a scene I don’t expect: Ethan is sitting in my armchair wolfing down a plate of toast and fried eggs.

  “Make yourself at home,” I say with relief as I sit on my sofa opposite him.

  Ethan’s head snaps up. “I’m sorry, I just needed to eat something. I really wanted bacon, but you don’t have any.”

  “Forgive my kitchen for not doubling as a greasy spoon.”

  My hungover stomach lurches as he shovels blackened eggs into his mouth whilst crunching on buttery toast. His shirt sleeves are rolled up and there’s a streak of melted butter running a shiny golden snail-trail down his arm. I can’t remember buying eggs; I don’t usually eat them. Oh wait, I bought them for that recipe I wanted to try from Saturday Kitchen. As usual my good intentions to try to actually cook something from scratch never came to fruition. I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh, hell, the eggs must have been in my fridge for weeks. He’ll be
lucky if he’s alive by tomorrow morning. Best not tell him. It’s too late to save his life – he’s only got a few mouthfuls left.

  He takes another bite of toast. He isn’t making eye contact, and I wonder how long it’s going to take before we start talking about what he and Carly did last night. I’m not sure I want to have that conversation with him, because I don’t know if I’ll be able to hide my feelings. Hell, I don’t even know if I can explain my feelings. Hurt? Disgust? Betrayal? Anger? Those are feelings I don’t want to be having. Who Ethan chooses to have sex with behind wheelie bins is none of my business.

  And yet, my heart feels like it’s breaking in two.

  “I’m sorry for waking you. I didn’t know what else to do. Max was hysterical.”

  “He’s fine now. He’s sleeping.”

  Ethan nods and finishes his last mouthful of poisonous eggs. “I knew you would know what to say to him. I can handle Max when he’s up for a good night out, but when he’s like this he freaks me out.”

  “It’s just the way he is. He feels things deeply.”

  “I’m feeling things pretty deeply right now too,” he says with his eyes fixed to his empty plate. “I . . . um . . . you see, me and Carly . . . we . . .” His eyes flit to mine for a brief moment before he looks away again. “Shit.”

  I decide to help him out. “I know you were with Carly last night,” I say softly.

  “You knew?” he asks. “I feel so ashamed, Vi. One minute she’s . . . the next, she’s just lying there lifeless. I thought she was dead. She still could—”

  “Hey, stop.” I lean forward and rest my hand on his knee. “Don’t think like that. There’s no point worrying. It won’t change anything.”

  He smiles and nods his head. “I envy you. You’re a machine when it comes to handling a crisis.” I stiffen at his phrase, and he immediately backtracks. “I just mean you can switch off and focus on things logically. Max is all emotion, and I’m not much better.”