“Aw, come on, man. We know you like to party.”
“Gotta work tomorrow,” he said, pasting a fake smile on his face. Because that was a more socially acceptable answer than ‘I’m a drug addict and this is a bad idea.’
“Nah, it’s Sunday.”
“We’ve got two more tracks to write for the album.”
“Can’t believe I’m mixing for fucking Ares.” Shane shook his head. “That was like, the dream, you know?”
In the past few weeks, Ben’s gut instincts had come back online. Now that his brain was pretty much clear of the influence of drugs—he was sober, for now—he found he could scope things out a lot better than before.
What he couldn’t control was how his eyes kept tracking back to the cocaine, and he knew he was angling himself towards it while they talked shop. He couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t stop looking at it. Couldn’t stop wanting it.
“Kevin!” Shane yelled at a guy who was helping himself to the coke. Ben fidgeted, shifting his weight from side to side, but Shane didn’t notice.
“Ben, this is my mate, Kevin. Kev, this is Ben. From Ares.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ben mumbled.
Kevin grabbed Ben’s hand—though Ben hadn’t offered it—and shook it enthusiastically.
“Oh my God, man, when Shane said he was mixing for you guys, I thought bullshit, you know? But you’re really back in London?”
Ben looked at him then, really looked, and saw the restless enthusiasm of a junkie. He didn’t want to think about how often he’d looked like that. Probably a lot. Probably most of the last three years.
“For now, yeah,” Ben said.
When a girl with her septum pierced and bright pink eyebrows grabbed his arm, Ben went with her. Shane probably thought he was going to hook up and whatever—that definitely wasn’t the worst thing that anyone had ever thought about him. He let her take him as far as the hallway before he shook out of her grasp.
“Where are we going?”
“I thought you wanted to get out of there.”
“I did.” Ben set his awful beer on a shelf. “Look, I don’t want to make any assumptions here, but I’m gay.”
She rolled her eyes. “And I’m a Capricorn.”
He decided he liked her and followed her up the stairs, relieved to be out of the kitchen.
It was more mellow up here, with some classic Ibiza chillout tunes coming from a DJ set up in one of the bedrooms. Ben recognised this situation too. Outside in the hot tub later, there would be a tripped-out orgy… and in here, someone would probably overdose.
“Not everyone wants to do it in front of a crowd, you know?” the girl said, and gestured to a bathroom that was set up with rigs and needles as well as lines of coke on a mirror balanced on the toilet. She raised a pink eyebrow at him and slipped into one of the rooms.
Ben closed the bathroom door behind himself.
He pressed his back to the closed door, breathing too fast and his heart beating too hard in his chest. There were a lot of things he probably should do in this situation, and like many times before, he felt like he was watching himself from above, making one bad decision after another.
Facing down the inevitable, he leaned over and snorted a line.
He sat back and leaned against the bath, heels of his palms pressed against his eyes, and rode the soft tingling that tripped and fell into a blissful high.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck.”
Someone banged on the bathroom door, and Ben yelled for them to come in. A tall, hulking guy loomed in the doorway.
“My turn,” he growled.
Ben pulled himself to his feet and stumbled back downstairs, not entirely sure where he was going or why. It didn’t matter, really. People were watching him, looking at him, and Ben fucking hated it when they did that. He wasn’t a fucking zoo animal.
He was on his way out to call a cab when he spotted the blue lights at the end of the road, screaming up towards him. He turned, planning on walking the other way, head down to look uninvolved, but there were police coming from that way too. He was pretty well trapped.
Shane stumbled out of the house and jogged over to him, looking pissed.
“Where did you get to, man?” He spotted the police coming up the road and turned back to Ben, a furious look in his eyes. “Did you call the fucking cops?”
“No, I didn’t call the fucking cops,” Ben said, shrugging his shoulder to dislodge Shane’s hand. “This isn’t me.”
“It looks like it’s you. You’ll take our drugs but you don’t want to party with us?”
Ben stepped away, not wanting to get into this. Not with the police parking up and calmly walking down the street towards them.
“They say you should never meet your heroes,” Shane said. “They’re only ever a fucking disappointment.”
“I never asked to be your hero,” Ben said. He turned away from Shane again, prepared to walk off and leave this whole night behind him.
“Hey, asshole,” Shane called, and Ben should have ignored it, he knew he should have ignored it, but he turned around.
“What?”
He saw the fist swinging towards his face and he ducked, still more sober than Shane even with a line of coke in him, and retaliated with a punch of his own. His landed, a satisfying smack across Shane’s face.
“Hey!”
Of all the stupid ideas he’d ever had, punching a guy in the face when he knew the police were looking right fucking at him was probably one of the worst.
Ben sat down on the garden wall and closed his eyes, and wished that for once, he’d trusted his fucking instincts.
Chapter Nineteen
Stan was already awake and halfway through his morning yoga workout when his phone started to buzz. He seriously considered ignoring it, but he got over himself pretty quickly and kept moving as he picked it up and answered Tone’s call.
“Hello?”
“You’re awake? Good. I’m on my way over.”
“What’s going on?” Stan said. “Is Ben okay?”
“No, he’s fucking not okay.” Tone sounded furious. “He was fucking arrested last night at a house party in Hackney. And the motherfucking wanker didn’t call any of us.”
“Shit,” Stan said. He rushed back to the bedroom to pull on socks and trainers. He could go out in yoga pants and a sweatshirt—he wasn’t that much of a princess. “How did you find out?”
“Well, it seems like whoever called the cops called the paps too. So there’s pictures all over the fucking tabloids of Ben being escorted away by the boys in blue.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’ll be there in five. Meet you outside.”
Stan threw his hair into a ponytail, grabbed his keys, and ran downstairs to meet him.
The police station in Hackney was quiet at this time on a Sunday morning—apparently there wasn’t much activity going on before eight. The night shift had just handed over and the guy working the desk had a mug of coffee at his elbow.
“We can release him,” he said, nodding, after Tone gave him Ben’s name. “He’s going to be under caution until we’re done with the investigation.”