by Sidney Bell
Also available from Sidney Bell
and Carina Press
Bad Judgment
The Woodbury Boys
Loose Cannon
Hard Line
Rough Trade
Also available from Sidney Bell
Your Mileage May Vary
This Is Not the End
Sidney Bell
For Sasha, who deserved a dedication long before now, and who loved Anya even when I was convinced no one else would.
Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from Forgiven by Garrett Leigh
Part One
Anya
“Why haven’t you ever fucked Cal?” Anya asks her husband one afternoon in the kitchen, musing aloud around a mouthful of undressed spinach salad. She’s trying to shuck the last of the post-baby weight now that PJ’s been mostly weaned. She doesn’t have to be as rigorous about her diet anymore—one of the best benefits of being behind the camera instead of in front of it these days—but fashion can be a shallow industry regardless of where you’re standing. Being a woman is a ridiculous endeavor sometimes.
Zac, trying to coerce PJ into taking a few more bites of unappetizing green goop, splutters, turning his body like he needs to protect their son from the question.
It’s not the sex part—they talk filthy all the time around PJ, who is an infant, for crying out loud, and doesn’t understand. No, it’s the Cal part that has Zac flustered, and Anya leans against the counter, amused and intrigued.
He gives her a dirty look. “Why would you ask that?”
She snorts. “Do you think I’m stupid? Or blind?”
“Don’t,” he says warningly.
She softens her voice. “Did something happen?” Maybe Zac made a move and Cal turned him down. Or perhaps Cal is homophobic. She’s seen no evidence of it, but then, despite how present he is in her life, she doesn’t know him well at all. Cal has mastered the art of saying many things while saying nothing at all.
All she has to go on is the way she’s seen Zac and Cal together, and that’s not enough to give the truth away. They’re blurred where their edges touch—bandmates since they were teenagers, riding the wave of global success together. While the hired guns for tour come and go, Zac and Cal are Hyde, will always be the foundation of it, and everything they’ve built in their lives is a result of that. They’re a weird amalgamation of friendship and professionalism and artistry and family and—somehow—strangers, all at the same time. She can’t make sense of them.
She is certain they’ve never had sex, though. Zac is different with someone once he’s fucked them. Casually possessive, certain in his authority. If Cal had ever yielded, even once, even just for five minutes a decade ago, she would see it. It’s one of the things Anya finds most attractive about Zac, the way he orbits around the people he considers his. He unashamedly needs them, demands that they need him back, and sees no weakness in showing it.
Zac doesn’t answer her question. He only busies himself with the baby.
“He can’t be straight.” She frowns. She can’t try to get Cal to put out for Zac’s birthday if he’s straight. Even she’s not that much of a jerk. “Is he? He’s at least bi, right?”
“I don’t know, actually.”
“You don’t know? He’s your best friend and you’ve lived practically in each other’s pockets for almost two decades, and you don’t know?”
“He’s weird about that stuff,” Zac says defensively. “He’s private. Stop picking on me.”
“You’re being very dramatic about this.” She takes another bite of spinach. Ugh. Bland, bland, bland. She eyes her husband’s long, lanky build with no small amount of jealousy. He can eat whatever he wants and never gain a pound, of course.
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, I’m the dramatic one.”
“He is your type, though. You’d fuck him, right?”
He scowls in her direction. “You really think I’m hard up enough to warrant this conversation?”
“I know you’re not,” she says dryly. The carpet burn on her ass still stings from when they’d fucked on the living room floor two nights ago. “I was just thinking that your birthday is coming up. You already have everything else you’ve ever wanted.”
Zac dumps a handful of dry cereal on the tray of PJ’s high chair. “That’s a good thing, in case you couldn’t tell.”
“Besides, I’ll admit I’m a little curious as to why you haven’t done it already. He’s nice to look at.” She gives him a sly smile. “The cheekbones, Zac. Like that dancer in Hong Kong during the Mission tour? In the back room.”
His expression shifts. He’s thinking about it.
“Only Cal’s are better.” She licks her lips, about as subtle as a porn star. He makes a face and turns away, but she can see the dull flush building on the back of his neck. “Cal’s cheekbones are much better. And those shoulders.” She makes an appreciative noise, not unlike the one she’d make if she had cake in front of her right now instead of spinach.
Zac huffs, waves a hand in dismissal. “Stop teasing me. We’re done with that.”
“I know.” She drops the act and gnaws on a lettuce stem. “We’re Serious Grown-Ups.”
“That was your idea,” he reminds her, wiping the baby’s face clean of drool. “I was like, let’s bang more hot people in clubs, marriage doesn’t mean anything has to change, and you were like, I’m going to be a mother.”
“I remember.”
“And I was like, are you going to knit doilies too, you imposter, what have you done with my Anya, you like being filthy too much, and you were like I don’t want my child to ask why his mother’s tits are out in a fan photograph taken in a bar bathroom.”
“I remember,” Anya says sourly.
Zac rolls right over her. “And I was like as long as you’re willing to wear some trashy lingerie now and again, maybe I won’t get tired of married sex—”
“Maybe I’m tired of you, did you think of that?”
He grins, that wide, shit-eating grin that never fails to make her stomach go hot. His laugh is a low rumble, sexy and knowing, and she throws a spinach leaf at him. It doesn’t travel even a foot through the air before it falls to the floor. He keeps grinning at her, the asshole, until she can’t help grinning back.
The silence that follows is easy and she starts thinking about what to make for dinner. Then Zac says quietly, unprompted, “And besides. Even if he was bi and we weren’t being grown-ups and I wasn’t getting everything I need here, he would say no.”
“Would he?” For a moment she’s stuck—she can’t imagine anyone attracted to men not wanting to fuck Zac.
Millions of groupies the world over would roll over at a finger snap, but they don’t count because they only want the great Zacary Trevor, guitarist and singer and charismatic public figure. It’s her Zac that she finds most irresistible, and her Zac is a lanky bastard with a smart mouth, a man of overblown passions, a troublemaker and shit-stirrer since the crib. He’s got some wear and tear now that he’s in his late thirties and a lifetime of partying is starting to catch up, but in the unfair way that time treats men, it’s only made him more attractive.
She doesn’t know how anyone, let alone Cal, who knows him at least as well as she does, could reject this version of Zac—sweet and nurturing with his son, humming as he does laundry, picking out a tune on his acoustic whenever he has five minutes to himself. It’s an alien concept.
But then, Cal is somewhat alien. He’s shifty, even for a musician. She has to think hard about what she knows of Cal, and it’s like pulling scattered ingredients together into a stew—a moment here, an offhand comment there, a long glance to season the pot.
Cal is work, deceptively so for someone with the personality of wet drywall.
Irritated by Cal’s hypothetical rejection of her husband—and by his annoyingly awful existence as a whole—she says, “I suppose if anyone could say no to you, it would be him. Cal Keller.” She huffs a loud breath. “Give me a break.”
“You’re so hard on him.”
“I don’t mean to be. I can’t help it. He’s just so boring.”
Zac laughs, high and surprised. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s not amused by something she’s said. He’s laughing at her. As if she’s missed something obvious.
“What did I say?” she asks, a little offended.
“Cal is not boring.” Zac shakes his head, still laughing, something fond in his voice. Fondness for Cal. If she’s honest, moments like this might be the real root of her mild dislike of Cal—when it’s clear that Zac is thinking about something she doesn’t have access to, these infuriating reminders that Cal was a part of Zac’s life long before she came along. That Cal had Zac first.
“He is. He never says anything interesting or important, and he has no opinions about anything. He never relaxes when we have him over for dinner because of that stick up his ass, and he pretended to like that stroganoff even though I know he doesn’t like green peppers—”
“Did you put those in there to see what he would do?” Zac’s eyebrows draw together, torn between laughter and judgment. “Did you? God, you’re terrible. How can I love you so much when you’re so terrible? He ate that whole bowl to make you happy, you know. You didn’t do that, did you?”
Like she’s going to admit to that right now—what is she, stupid? “And he doesn’t like anything good, and he called me Mrs. Trevor again last week—”
“He’s like that with you because he’s too polite to acknowledge that you’re monster spawn who doesn’t appreciate manners. He calls you Mrs. Trevor because he assumed you changed your name and I never corrected him because I’m a fucking caveman and I like hearing it, all right? And he has opinions. He just doesn’t say them in front of you because he knows you’ll tell him all the ways he’s wrong, and he doesn’t like to argue the way we do. He’s not boring. He’s nice.”
“Same difference.”
“I don’t know how you can think that the man who wrote ‘Bedrock’ is boring.” Zac starts mopping up the high chair mess.
“He didn’t write that,” she says, startled.
“He did so. Do you think I don’t know my own music, woman? I’m not making shit up.” He throws a balled-up napkin of baby drool in her direction. It glances off her foot and rolls under the fridge.
She stares at him for a moment. “I thought you wrote it together.”
“Nope,” Zac says. “I barely touched that one. Hell, even on the songs he does let me contribute to, he does 95% of the work.” He pauses. “Like 90%. 85, tops.”
She can’t stop staring. Why can’t she stop staring? “Nuh-uh. You write your songs together. You both won that Grammy for writing ‘Livid.’ I remember you complaining all the time about how you couldn’t get that riff right—you were humming it so much I was ready to kill you. Don’t tell me you didn’t write that song.”
“I help him write the harder guitar stuff,” Zac says, shrugging. “He doesn’t know the instrument as well as I do, and he can’t always judge what I’m capable of playing. I wrote most of the solo on ‘Livid,’ so I got a writing credit. But the words are always his. The melodies are his. ‘Bedrock’ is entirely his.”
“You go to the studio every day when you’re working on an album.”
“Yeah, because he gets wired and insecure when he’s working and he needs someone to tell him if something actually sucks or if he’s being neurotic. Look, half the time he gives me a melody and a time and a key and sticks me in the corner out of the way and comes back a couple of weeks later to see what I have. Sometimes he likes what I’ve done. Sometimes he scraps it.” He fiddles with the safety strap on the high chair, pressing his thumb against the buckle. “I was more involved when we first started out, but these days he doesn’t need me as much. Half the time I don’t even know what he’s working on until it’s done. Like with ‘Bedrock.’ Because he wrote it.”
“But—” Her brain is whirling. Absently, she kneels to pick up the stray spinach leaf and fish the napkin out from under the fridge. She can’t imagine Cal wired and insecure, let alone capable of writing something like ‘Bedrock.’ “But that song is so fucked up.”
He starts laughing at her again. “Yes, it is.”
“Cal couldn’t write that. I always thought the fucked-up shit came from you.”
“You’re so sweet to me, baby. He still wrote it.”
“But I like that song.”
“Stranger things have happened, I guess, than Anya Alexander liking something that Cal Keller did.”
“It’s so dark, though,” she protests, throwing the napkin and spinach in the trash. “How did he write that?”
“Everybody has a dark side,” he says, laughter subsiding. “And don’t go thinking that just because he’s not boring that you should ask him to crawl into bed with us. He’d still say no, and it would be awkward.”
“Would he?” she says again, thoughtfully, and Zac’s gaze moves away. Tellingly, she thinks. “Zac—”
“Don’t. Not like this.”
“So you’re not averse to playing again. It’s that you think Cal is too polite to fuck his best friend’s wife as a birthday present to him.”
“Don’t,” Zac says again, frowning at her.
“I’m not doing anything. It’s only talking.”
“Just don’t.” He turns back to the baby, whispering to him lowly enough that all she catches is your mother is a devil woman.
She should probably kick him for that, but decides not to. In truth, she finds it flattering.
* * *
The first thing Anya learned about her husband during those long summer nights of casual sex and partying was this: Zac is not a man of subtle emotions, and he was not built for subterfuge. If he feels a thing, the whole world knows it. His joy lights up the room, gives you a contact high. His unhappiness is a pebble in your shoe—impossible to ignore, unpleasant at times and downright painful to endure at others. Everything leaks out in some form or another.
Cal, however, is the opposite. After the talk in the kitchen with Zac, Anya starts watching him more carefully. She isn’t too hard on herself for misreading him, even if it’s gone on for three years. Cal’s got the Good Midwestern Boy act down pat.
She wonders what he’s like when he’s alone. He could be exactly the same. He could be entirely different. The point is that she doesn’t know.
After weeks of watching, Anya has come to only one conclusion: if Zac emits everything, bright like a star, Cal is a black hole from which nothing escapes.
* * *
She means to put it aside. She really does.
They can always go pick someone up in a club for Zac’s birthday. Depending on who it is, Zac will either watch or join. Or maybe they’ll do something else entirely. It’s not like the sex isn’t great when it’s only the two of them. He might want her to fuck him; pegging is a special occasion thing, because it’s kind of a production, but he likes it a lot, and she’d be lying if she said it didn’t turn her on. Zac’s loud and boisterous and pushy in bed except when he has something in his ass, and then he gets quiet and trembles and makes these soft, broken little gasps. She puts her fingers inside him sometimes when she’s blowing him, but nothing tears him down to the foundations like her sliding into him with a strap-on, fuck
ing him as hard as she can.
That’s the one thing he doesn’t let anyone else do, no matter who joins them. The other men might fuck her if she chooses, but they never fuck Zac.
She doesn’t mind it in the least. She likes that there’s something that’s hers only.
But the point is that she’s not, like, invested in the idea of inviting Cal into their bed. She’s not going to push. If anything, it’s a bit of a relief that it won’t be Cal. There’s a weight to the idea of him that no one else has, a weight that intimidates her, though she’ll never admit it.
* * *
On Friday night, Anya makes a veritable vat of her low-calorie beef bourguignon so there will be plenty of leftovers, and the kitchen smells rich and warm by the time the doorbell rings.
Zac is slumped at the breakfast bar fiddling on his phone, but he jumps up at the sound, bouncing like his legs have turned to pogo sticks, as if he didn’t see Cal a few hours ago. They recorded a rough cut of the first song from the new album this week, and it seems like every other word out of his mouth is about work. It’s all Cal this and Cal that, and Can Cal come over for dinner? I have a few things I want to go over with him and this way he won’t be miserable that he has to talk on the phone like a normal person.
She agreed, mostly to make Zac happy, but also a little because she’s curious to observe Cal for a bit, now that she knows he has hidden depths.
Zac kisses Anya on the cheek, telling her, “You smell good,” before turning to go answer the door.
“He used to use his key before I came along, didn’t he?” she asks, before he can leave.
Zac winces. “Yes?”
“More of the patented Cal Keller respect program, I suppose.”
Zac drums his fingers on his belly for a second. “The stew smells delicious.”
“Oh, go away, you jerk.”
He grins at her as he leaves, and a moment later, she can hear them talking in the entryway about something that happened at the studio earlier, their voices deep and soft, and Zac laughs at whatever Cal says.
