and turned around and I knew it was about to get bad.
“Hey,” he called, loud enough to pull in attention from other patrons. He held his glass up in the direction the waitress had disappeared to. “This one was weak.”
The patrons whose attention he had captured turned to look at us.
“Vince, wait until she comes back,” Naomi said gently when Vince shoved his chair back to stand. Nicole and Tori’s conversation halted as they stared at him.
“I’m just gonna go find her,” Vince said. “Get a new drink.”
“Vince, just sit,” Chad said, getting up and wrapping his arm around Vince’s shoulders. He attempted to lead him back to the table, but Vince shoved him away with a loud ‘no’. Chad stumbled a few steps but luckily regained his footing so he didn’t fall.
“Fuck,” Seth said under his breath. “We need to get him out of here before he makes a fool of himself.”
“We’ll have to strong-arm him,” I said, dreading it already. Pulling my wallet out, I slipped a few large bills on the table and caught the eye of a manager who was exiting the kitchen, probably headed in our direction. I motioned to the money and stood, moving to Vince.
It took us three tries, but Seth and I had eventually gotten ahold of Vince long enough to nearly carry him out of the restaurant. In the process I lost sight of Tori, but she was right behind us as we brought him out onto the sidewalk.
“Are you going to hit one of us?” Seth asked calmly.
“Fuck off,” Vince said, shrugging out of our hold. He stumbled a few feet and braced himself on the brick wall. “I just wanted another drink for Christ's sakes.”
“You’ve had enough,” Seth said. “More than enough, actually.”
Vince’s stormy eyes turned hard. “What does that mean?”
“You know what it means,” I interjected. “You obviously have a problem. And we’ve been bad friends for letting it go on this long.”
Vince’s jaw went slack. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
Chad joined us a moment later, standing between me and Vince as if he anticipated a fist thrown. The sky was black around us, causing shadows to darken Vince’s face as he turned to each one of us, one by one.
“I don’t have a problem—”
“But you do,” Chad interrupted. “You do.”
“Oh, so I have the problem.” Vince was shuffling, shifting weight from one foot to the other like he had endless unspent energy in his limbs. “You,” he said as he pointed at Seth, “move as far away as you can get and make a life on the other side of the country. You,” he said, turning to Chad, “get married and have a couple kids and then suddenly you’re never fucking around and you…” he paused as he stared at me, “you blow off our friend. He didn’t ask me to go on that trip with him—he asked you and you fucking bailed on him. And then he fucking died. He died, you guys.” Vince’s finger was still in my face. “And you say I have the problem.”
Seth glanced sideways at me. There was so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted to counter. But before I could, Vince continued.
“I would have gone on that trip with him, but he didn’t want me. He wanted you, Liam, and you just didn’t go. He wouldn’t be dead if you had just fucking gone. I would’ve made sure of it.”
“You don’t know that,” Tori said, piping up from behind me. “You can’t say that.”
“Tori,” I began, but she blazed past me, standing in front of Vince.
“He could have died any number of ways. But the reality is that Will invited Liam to do a sport Liam had never done before. And Will died doing it. That’s not Liam’s fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
“If I had gone—”
“No.” Tori held up a hand. “You don’t know. You could have died. Liam could have died.”
“I wish he had.”
There it was. The crux of Vince’s problems with me. I didn’t know if it was a sad thing that Seth and Chad didn’t try to persuade Vince that he didn’t really believe that.
Tori stood speechless and Vince took that opportunity to continue.
“He doesn’t have a family, he doesn’t have anything but his house and his job and if he had died, none of us would be here arguing on a street.”
Seth stepped forward, encroaching on Vince’s space. “That’s enough.”
But I let Vince’s words roll over me. I knew how he