Page 33 of Alik

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not insulting you.”

When I look up, Alik doesn’t look angry like I expect. Or cold. He looks at me with fiery interest blazing in his eyes.

He takes a drink of his water then clears his throat as he sets the glass down.

“Eight years ago, a few friends and I did a job that went sour.” He leans back and rests his hands on the arms of the chair while staring at me like he’s paying as much attention to me as I am to him, even though he’s the one telling the story.

“We were captured by some people who put us in different rooms and tortured us.” He shrugs with no emotion crossing his face. “I don’t know what exactly they used on me. I just remember the device made a shrill sound that I heard in my ears for the next three months, and the pain was bad enough that I begged them to pluck my eye out instead.”

I pull my hands from underneath me as a shiver runs over my spine. He doesn’t look shaken or traumatized. He doesn’t look like he wants or needs a hug.

But he’s damaged. So much more than in any of the imagined backstories I made for him.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

His face doesn’t change, but I know he heard me.

“But y-you escaped?”

“Something like that.”

“What do you mean?”

He lets several seconds pass like he’s choosing his words carefully. “The friend who found us the job was an important person to a lot of people. They came for him.”

“But not you?” I ask, leaning his way.

His lips lift at the corners as he looks at me with amusement, like I’m missing something. “I’m not that important.”

Ouch.

His life is so extreme, but still, I can’t help but relate to it. I know what it’s like to be the unimportant one. To be rescued and unwanted all at once.

“Sounds like you have even shittier taste in friends than I do.” I chuckle, trying to come off as lighthearted.

“You have no idea.”

No idea.

Hehas no idea.

The more he talks about important people and jobs and being in a network… It sounds familiar. He’s in a brotherhood just like Creeper is, just like Damian was. Not one affiliated with the Irish, but something else. To me, they’re all the same.

Except, I envied the bond Creeper and Damian formed within their family. Alik doesn’t seem bonded to anyone.

“Are your friends the reason you started doing drugs?” Alik asks. Unlike the topic of his eye, people aren’t afraid to ask me this question. And I always give the same response.

When I was sixteen, I got into a relationship that put me in with a bad crowd. I went from weed to pills and struggled with that addiction until I was twenty-two when I met Damian. He introduced me to heroin, and I was full blown into my addiction the two years we were together. His tragic death is what it took for me to get clean, and I’ve never felt better than I have in the past year.

None of that is factually inaccurate. But it’s bullshit.

“No,” I say, peering out his kitchen window, the same one I’ve watched him through dozens of times. If I were in the laundromat, I’d be able to see him standing. I’m too low. “I started smoking weed because the medication I was on gave me body aches and nausea, and a guy I was seeing told me smoking might help. It did. And then…”

And then…

So many and thens…