She fake gasps, “Not with you?”
“Not this time.” I wanted to keep both hands completely free today. While I might have been less than kind in persuading her to come downstairs, now that she’shere, I don’t want to be a psychopath and his fixation.
I just want to be Cormac and Brigit.
“What are all these?” she asks, running her fingers along the tall, wooden barrels.
“Those are for aging the whiskey,” I explain, pointing to the smaller ones toward the far left wall. “Those are for fermenting the mead. As you saw outside, that’s where we gather all the honey, but it gets processed inside.”
“So it’s all whiskey and mead?”
“Yes and no,” I pull her with me to the new processors. “Whiskey and mead both have similar fermenting procedures and mix really well together, so they tend to be what we make the most. But we’ve been experimenting with infusing tequila with honey.”
“Ooh, yum.”
My nose wrinkles, “It’s beenokay. Not as great as it sounds,honestly, but Skyler thinks we just need to find the right honey and type of tequila.”
“Fancy tequila is having its moment right now,” she comments, looking up at the high ceiling.
I smile, “That’s what Skyler said.”
Her brows raise to her forehead, her eyes landing on me in shock, “Really? Maybe I should try my hand at marketing. Then you could have avoided naming your company after an obscure monster.”
I chuckle, pulling her closer and tucking her under my arm. She only resists the tiniest bit before abandoning her efforts, folding her arms over her chest to continue acting like she’s not curious about it all.
“Balor isn’t obscure if you know your mythology,” I correct her. “He was the leader of the Fomorians. The most formidable of them.”
“The Fomorians, huh? You just couldn’t help naming it after yourself?”
I have the instinct to grip her chin and kiss all the crinkles in her nose until that self-satisfied smirk falls off her face.
“My family name came from the mythology, yes,” I concede, “But naming all of this Balor wasn’t aboutmeso much as it was about the history and perseverance of the Irish.”
One side of her lips lifts in a genuine smile, her big, curious eyes searching mine, waiting for me to tell her more.
“The Fomorians were supernatural beings, larger than life, and more than a little bit monstrous,” I repeat the story my grandma told me when she visited from Ireland. “I always loved hearing about them. I was terrified of them, of course, of them somehow returning to reclaim the land that humans had moved into. But as I grew older, I found myself relating to them.”
Leading Brigit into the private tasting room, I close the door behind us gently, not wanting the loud noise to distract from our conversation. “The Fomorians were feared far and wide, known for their chaos and destruction. And for someone who needed to become destructive to survive, I could see myself in their story.”
“Even before…” she gestures to my tattoo on my neck, and I nod.
“Even before this,” I agree, sighing as I debate how much more to share with her. “My dad was a sick fuck. I won’t get too into it because I want us to have a fun day, not a depressing one, but he and his friends found me… entertaining after a few drinks.”
Her lips quiver, a sad line appearing between her brows, but she doesn’t say anything, giving me the space to continue.
“I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal until I was 13 or 14, and at that point, I was skin and bones, growing too tall too fast for any amount of muscle to keep up with,” I smooth the space between her eyebrows with my thumb, watching as the snake on it slithers across her forehead. “But I fought back anyway. And I walked away with little more than a brutal scar on my hand from it colliding with his friend’s fucking teeth.”
“Jesus,” she mutters. “I’m so sorry.”
Those words crawl under my skin, leaving me itching to get rid of them before they can hit their mark and drag up uncomfortable emotions. I’m not the boy I used to be, and the man I became to stand up to them has no need for her pity.
“Anyway,” I breathe, “I felt connected to the monsters because I realized from a very young age that I would need to be one to survive. And so Balor was born of me trying to channel everything into something great. My job was to take rot and change it into something better. It’s an apt metaphor for my transformation, I think.”
Her pretty little frown drags her face further down.
“You aren’t rotten, Cormac.”
“Of course, I’m not,” I place a kiss on her forehead, trying one last time to rid it of the sad line there. “I’m… fermented; Made into something completely new and intoxicating.”
