Page 65 of Always Alchemy

It doesn’t take many shots. We hold the poses while I stroke my wife’s lace-covered cunt with the knuckle of my index finger. I can hear the effort it’s costing her to keep her breathing even.

As soon as Graf has got the shots, I firmly suggestanother vape break for him before he and his team take down the equipment. My wife comes on my fingers almost instantly, and I have the distinct pleasure of flipping her over before pulling her towards me and taking her, hard, fast and brutally, over the table.

When we receive the photographs, they’re exactly as I envisioned, sultry and erotic and spontaneous. Graf’s use of flash makes me look for all the world like a man a private investigator has caught in the act of ravishing his improbably hot secretary on his conference table.

One look at my wife, laid out for me on that table, tells me no one would blame him.

22

FORTY LOVE

RAFE

My MO has always been:if you want something done properly, do it yourself.

Unfortunately, that’s also the MO of my three co-founders and best friends. When it comes to planning our joint fortieth birthday bash, you could say there are a lot of cooks in this kitchen.

Luckily, I love them.

Also, they’re all damn fine cooks.

Deciding on a venue wasn’t an issue. Given the amount of children we all seem to be producing, it was important to us that we find a place that was as family-friendly as it was luxurious (oh, how far we’ve come from the debauched early days of Alchemy). It also had to have incredible food and be within an easy distance of London.

There was one clear choice: Sorrel Farm, a stunning resort, foodie haven and working biodynamic farm in Kent, around twenty miles south-east of London as the crow flies. I’ve watched its rise with interest and admiration. Severalyears ago, a celebrity named Evelyn Macleod took a controlling interest, and she and her husband turned its fortunes around. Shortly after that, the Montague Group took a stake, adding a new jewel in the crown of their global hotel collection.

Since then, its rise has been stratospheric. Good job they only take reservations a year out, and even better job that I pulled my old mate, Theo Montague, aside just over a year ago and asked him for a price to take over the entire resort for a weekend.

And here we are.

This evening, one hundred of our closest friends and relatives will take over Sorrel Farm with fuck knows how many of their children tagging along—I’ve totally lost count. While the resort won’t quite be at full capacity, its staff will have its hands full with entertaining copious amounts of children of every age while keeping the adults fed and watered. (I’m confident we grownups can entertain ourselves.)

This feels like a good window of opportunity to push the boat out. To take a weekend and celebrate our families. Our friendship. While I can’t claim to have engineered this deliberately, Belle is just past the twelve-week mark with our second child. She’s doing better this time—she seems less nauseous than she did with Rosalie—but she’s pretty tired juggling work and an energetic toddler with growing a human being, so a weekend of sunbathing and catching up with the girls seems just what the doctor ordered.

Besides, once this baby arrives, I don’t see us leaving the house for the next, I don’t know, five years? I have no idea how the fuck people juggle more than one.

It’s incredible to think that before Belle Scott floated into my life, all tiger eyes and golden hair and honeyed limbs, Ihad no intention at all of settling down. I was working hard and playing harder. My life was convenience food and convenience fucking.

And now, four short years later, I’m as obsessively and revoltingly in love as a man can be.

I’m a husband.

I’m a father.

I’m that dickhead who actually counts his blessings every night before he goes to bed, because love and gratitude is the perfect attitude, or however the saying goes, and I’m knee-deep in both of them.

My mates are just the same. Gen and Cal I despaired of, if I’m honest. For completely different reasons, I didn’t think either of them would ever find that one person who was capable of making them rethink their single status.

And Zach?

My heart has bled more tears over that guy and his daughters than over any other human beings I know. There was a time when I wasn’t sure he’d make it. None of us were. We were worried sick at the shell of a man he became after we lost Claire: a flesh and blood human hollowed out by grief.

When I look at the man he is today, madly in love and fucking delighted with Jonny, deliriously happy with his incredible wife and beautiful daughters, I could kiss Maddy. She will never know how unutterably grateful we all are to her for bringing our mate back to the most purposeful, vibrant version of life.

So let’s bring it on this weekend.

Let’s raise our glasses and toast the myriad blessings that rain down on us every day.

Let’s drink to our health and our children and our better halves.

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