by Sidney Bell
* * *
Which is when Cal virtually disappears.
Zac calls to thank him for the pocket square and gets no answer. He calls a few more times, leaving messages when there’s still no answer. Cal doesn’t call back. Cal cancels a band meeting and session time, then cancels more session time, leaving only a vague explanation with Larry, the band’s manager, something about a family thing he needs to take care of.
That’s enough to have Zac on the verge of panic. “Cal’s a coward when it comes to feelings and his discomfort, but he’s never bailed on work, on the band, on us, for fuck’s sake, what the hell happened at my party?”
Anya didn’t leave anything out when she told him. She can only shrug.
Over the next week, Zac seems bent permanently over his phone. He sends countless texts, some annoying, some amusing, some that he gives to Anya to read in advance in case they cross the line into being creepy—they all do, she makes him delete each of those—and even devolving into threats to come over and bug Cal in person. That’s when he finally gets one back: Everything’s fine, I’m busy, go kiss your baby and stop being a stalker.
Unsatisfied with that response, Zac amps the stalking up a dozenfold, sending a gif blitz of adorable baby animals falling off things to teach Cal a lesson, interspersed with texts of Are you done yet? Are you done yet? How about now? Are you done?
“You don’t really think this is going to make things better, do you?” Anya asks him at one point during the barrage, only half invested because her husband is insane, and besides, she’s busy cooing at PJ, encouraging him to walk without holding on to the coffee table. He hasn’t taken an unassisted step yet, but it’s going to be soon, she can tell.
“I know what I’m doing,” Zac mutters, hitting Send again with a vengeful stab of his thumb.
“I told him we wouldn’t push,” she tells the baby in a high, silly voice. PJ giggles.
“I’m not pushing for sex,” Zac says, disgusted. “I’m pushing for my friend. I want my friend back. He’s ignoring me.”
“Of course you’re not pushing for sex. But you are pushing. Actually, you’re being kind of an asshole. I wouldn’t call you back either at this point. I know you’re feeling ignored, and I know how much you hate that, since you’re an enormous, Christmas-day ham, but he’s not going to keep it up forever if you back off.”
“You think so? Really?”
“Yes. He loves you. He gave you a pocket square, dummy. He’s going to come back. He loves you the same way you love him.”
She’s not sure how much that last one is true, now that she’s said it. She’s beginning to think that Zac’s feelings for Cal have gotten much more complicated over the years than simple friendship, and she’s pretty sure it’s the same on Cal’s end, but it’s not like they’re ever going to pry the truth out of the stubborn dumbass.
“Because you know Cal so well?” The sentence would be hostile from anyone else, but Zac’s brows are pushed together in worry. He’s asking for hope.
“Trust me. The first lesson teenage girls learn about relationships is that if you get clingy with a boy you like, he’s going to vanish. They hate that.”
He opens his mouth, closes it, and then says, “I don’t—I’m not meaning to—cling.”
She smiles up at him. “I’m not worried. I know I’m your favorite.”
He smiles back. “You really are.” He scoots off the couch and joins her on the floor in encouraging PJ to stand up on his own like the child genius they both know him to be.
The peace lasts for all of an hour before Zac gets a new response from Cal, one that simply says, I need time. Please.
Zac throws his phone down onto the couch and vanishes into his home studio. She can’t hear anything—the room is soundproofed—but she knows he’s playing guitar, probably his electric, probably the angriest stuff he can manage.
She leaves him to it because she finally has to admit that Zac’s not the only one struggling. She’s been doing that crisis-management thing—keeping her shit together because everyone around her is falling apart and it’s either a case of her stepping up or the ship going down.
But this last text kicks her too.
She was low-boil angry for the first few days after Zac’s party, frustrated with Cal’s judgmental reaction, but while she’s a champion grudge-holder, this time it all slipped through her fingers. She thinks of Cal swooping in to save her by babysitting and Cal not once teasing her for saying duck tape and Cal refusing to team up with Zac to bully her with teasing, and Cal dancing with her to make her happy, and the way he felt against her, so strong and warm and quietly in control, so different from the tempest that is her life with Zac. She remembers Cal getting angry when he thought she was cheating, the way all that strength and loyalty and honor stepped forward in defense of someone he loves.
She wishes she could stay angry. Anger is an easy emotion. Instead, she’s sitting here feeling small and hurt at the idea that she’s lost the burgeoning friendship she’s been developing with Cal.
She thought she didn’t like him. Maybe, for a long time, she didn’t. But that time is clearly over.
It’s a good thing Zac is in his home studio. He would feel guilty on top of everything else if he saw her tears.
* * *
For the following week, Zac is moody and snappish. It makes sense to her at first, because Zac is about as naturally moody as it’s possible for a man to be, and she learned a long time ago not to take it personally. Rather than exhaust herself trying to cheer him up when he prefers to pout, she usually makes herself scarce until he gets it out of his system, at which point he’ll wander up to her and push his face into her hair and mutter apologies.
But this bad mood sticks around for days, and it’s accompanied by pensive silences and long, irritated glances at his phone and his obvious and fierce desire to pretend that the entire world doesn’t exist. Maybe it would be different if she wasn’t also sad and missing Cal, maybe she could be the rock that Zac’s stormy ocean breaks against, but she’s feeling too worn down to stomach it.
It doesn’t help that Zac’s giving what few smiles he has to PJ, and none to her.
They reach a breaking point two weeks to the day after his birthday.
It’s Saturday evening, and Zac’s spent most of the day pacing the house like a caged tiger, complaining about how there’s not enough food in the fridge, the air conditioner isn’t keeping up with the summer heat, the baseball game is delayed. He doesn’t even watch baseball.
“Why don’t we go out for dinner?” Anya suggests finally.
“And get swamped by fans every five minutes? I hate going out.”
“You do not. You like seeing your fans.” It’s why she suggested it. Hoping that some uncomplicated adulation from someone who isn’t tired of his petulance might cheer him up.
“I hate going out. We can have whatever you want, I don’t want to deal with it tonight. I’m not hungry yet anyway.”
“Fine,” she says, knowing he’s got to be lying because it’s already after their usual mealtime—they usually eat around six or six-thirty, giving themselves plenty of time to get PJ fed and bathed before he goes to bed by eight. She watches him stalk out of the room like a sulky child. “Well, I’ll do everything myself, then, that’s fine too.”
PJ has a crease between his baby-fine eyebrows at the tension in the room. She soothes him with kisses and murmurs, “Everything is fine, little man, your daddy’s just being a whiner, ignore him, it’s fine.” She nuzzles him, making him giggle. “Let’s get some dinner into you.”
So she feeds PJ alone in the kitchen, and then plops him in the plastic baby bathtub. He takes the opportunity to remind her that he is his father’s son, despite his usually sunny demeanor. He always gets so squirrely and whiny when she bathes him and she doesn’t know why. She does exactly the same things
that Zac does. She’s watched him, trying to learn Zac’s secrets, and gotten a giant zero for the effort—it’s simply a fact by this point. It’s worse than usual today. He might be picking up on her stress, and she tries to relax, but nothing seems to help. PJ’s crying hard by the time she’s done putting on his lotion, and she’s not far off from it either. She knows babies get upset, that no one is permanently damaged by getting cranky about bath time, but she can’t help feeling guilty, like she’s doing something wrong.
It takes forever to get him to sleep.
By the time she does, it’s almost nine and she’s hangry beyond belief.
Unfortunately, Zac was right about the fridge being bare. She has no intention of going out to the store on a Saturday night when she’s already frazzled and in her house clothes, because she would probably end up throwing a fit in one of the aisles and all she needs is some random person putting video of it up on the internet. She decides to make Alfredo—box pasta and jar sauce. It’ll trash her diet, but Zac likes it so maybe that’ll help him calm down.
She snacks on cheese sticks while she prepares things, hoping that’ll help calm her down.
Then he wanders in while she’s heating the sauce, coming to stand beside her, and says, “I don’t like Alfredo.”
And that is it.
She gives him the nastiest face she has in her repertoire. “Look, I know you’re pissed off and hurt that Cal’s being a child and avoiding you instead of putting out, but that’s not my fault, so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop taking it out on me and grow the fuck up.”
Never let it be said that Anya Elizabeth Alexander doesn’t know how to sum up a complex idea into one cutting sentence.
For a moment, Zac just stares at her. Then he says, “It is your fault.”
She taps the stirring spoon on the edge of the pot, a little harder than she needs to. “How the hell do you figure?”
“You brought it up!” Zac shouts.
“Seriously?” Anya asks. “Because asking a grown man a few questions about his relationship with his best friend is the same thing as taking all responsibility for every following thought and feeling that occurs in his brain?”
He glares at her. “I wasn’t thinking about him that way until you brought it up. I was fine.”
“You could have said no at any point,” she snaps, leaving alone his outrageous lie that he hadn’t thought about Cal that way. “And don’t act like I’m the only one who pushed this forward. I’m not the one who talked about Cal going down on me while we fucked. You said okay. I asked you several times if you wanted this. You said okay.”
Zac flushes a dull red. “You opened the box! That never would’ve happened if you hadn’t asked me about it in the first place. Now I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s driving me nuts, and I didn’t even know I wanted it until you did this, but I do and I can’t have it, and it’s all your fault, why the hell did you have to be so—”
In a low voice, she says, “Red light, Zac.”
His mouth slams closed, and he turns to stare furiously at the wall. Red light is their conversational safe word, their code for this is about to hurt me or anger me to the point where damage is done, so think. Pause and think. It’s part of their oldest rule, the one they came up with in Paris, when they were both fucked out and sore and afraid of what they’d unleashed on each other, what they’d brought out of each other. We’re both hotheaded, Zac said, back in that trashed hotel bed. We need a way to defuse each other before we get to this. He gestured at the room around them, and then at their own sweaty bodies.
Are we bombs now? she asked, and he said very seriously, Yes, I think so. Maybe that’s the price for getting to have something this powerful.
Several long, terrible minutes go by, and then Zac says, choked, “It’s like this fucking hole inside me.” He pounds a fist against his chest, and her own chest aches in echo. She knows that feeling. The hole in her heart is smaller than his, lacking the history that Zac has with Cal, but it’s there all the same. “It hurts. I can’t stop thinking about it. It was enough, before, what I had, but now I don’t have anything, and I can’t stop thinking about...” He trails off, and then he jerks his head up at the sound of a footstep.
“Thinking about what?” Cal asks, from where he’s hovering in the doorway, expression tense, his big body vibrating like a deer on the verge of bolting out of a clearing. His hand is fiddling with his keys, and he gives the room a tentative smile, not really looking at either of them. “I—uh. Sorry. Zac told me I was being stupid not using my key, so... Everything okay?”
For a heartbeat, Anya and Zac only stare at him.
“Fine,” Anya says eventually, and the deep well of relief at the sight of him lasts for about ten seconds before it transforms into anger that he pulled this vanishing act in the first place. But she doesn’t know how to be mad at Cal without making him leave again, and that pisses her off perhaps more than anything else. “We’re fine. He’s being an idiot.”
“Look who’s talking,” Zac mutters.
Cal wavers in the doorway for another few seconds, then takes a deep breath and steps into the kitchen. He puts his keys on the counter and clears his throat. “This smells good. Sorry I’m so late—I was in Anaheim to look at an amp and the traffic coming back was terrible. Thanks, Anya. For inviting me for dinner.”
She didn’t. Zac must’ve, at some point over the last two weeks, and forgotten to mention it. One more thing Zac can’t be bothered to be considerate about. Not that Cal’s being any more considerate. They usually eat at six and it’s after nine. Why has Cal even shown up instead of calling to beg off when he knew he’d be this late? What was he expecting to get besides leftovers and five minutes of conversation before going home?
Unless that’s the whole point. He isn’t intending to stay.
“You’re welcome,” she mumbles. She turns back to the stove and tries to get control of her temper. She really wants to yell, but there are two different fights to be had here, one with Cal for being terrible at communication and one with Zac for being a moody, pouty ass, and Zac’s impromptu confession has vanished into the wind, maybe never to return, and she’s not sure what else to do. The tension is making her teeth clench, and she doesn’t know what to say.
Zac’s staring at the tile beneath his bare feet, so maybe he feels the same.
Cal glances between the two of them. Then he quietly asks, “Should I go?”
“No,” they say in unison, and Cal nods.
There’s another interminable silence. Zac’s shooting these careful, darting glances at Cal, who’s alternating between staring blankly at the floor and staring blankly at the wall, and Anya is dying, she’s maybe actually dying, and so she says, “Look, we’re sorry we tried to fuck you, Cal. You don’t have to avoid us, you really shouldn’t avoid us, because it’s cheap and petty and all you had to do was say no. We’ll never bring it up again. Zac’s been going nuts thinking you’re mad at him, he’s making me insane, and he doesn’t want your dick enough to put either one of you through this, he just wants to play your music and sing your lyrics and feed you my terrible pasta because he loves you enough to make you a best friend necklace—”
“Jesus Christ, woman!” Zac yells, and she finally manages to shut up.
“Cheap and petty,” Cal repeats, his tone hurt.
Zac gives her a dirty look. “Great. Look what you did. You made him sound all—like that.”
“What is he, eight? All we needed was one adult conversation about this, the three of us, the day after your birthday, but instead Cal ran and now it’s all drama and hurt feelings and this—this exact uncommunicative bullshit—is what leads to relationships ending.” Anya waves a hand at both of them. “Unless you want to act like you’re not both freaking out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” Zac mutters.
“The hell you�
�re not.” Anya turns off the burner with an angry flick of her wrist before she loses track of the sauce and burns the house down. “You’ve been cranky and pouting and—”
“Better that than thinking I know everything.”
“I don’t know everything. I just know more than you.”
“I told you I needed time,” Cal says. “That’s not petty. I can’t have an adult conversation when I don’t know what to say.”
“You said you needed time after a week of ignoring me.” Zac rounds on him. “That’s cheap and petty. You knew I was freaking out. You were punishing me.”
“Us,” Anya adds.
“I was thinking.” Cal hunches his shoulders.
“Bullshit,” Anya and Zac say in unison.
“I was! I was upset. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Upset?” Zac scoffs. “I know what you do when you’re upset. You get clingy and needy and you want to watch cheesy horror movies! You don’t do this—this vanishing thing. That’s your mad bullshit. You were mad, say it!”
“Fine, all right, I was mad. You’re both so damn casual about making a mess. You have a whim, and then you’re rucking everything up, and I can’t—What the hell was I supposed to do? I was finally getting better, and then—”
“Better at what?” Zac and Anya interrupt, again in unison.
“I just—I thought—” Cal sinks into one of the chairs. His breath shudders out. The silence grows and grows, seemingly endless, and Anya is dying all over again, waiting. Finally Cal shakes his head a few times, and lifts his head. He says to Zac, “I thought you weren’t the serious kind. I thought you’d never want—it was okay, you know? I wasn’t pining or anything. I wasn’t. I thought we were too different, that’s all. I can only do serious, and you couldn’t do serious at all, and that was okay, but then you were married. You were married and I thought—” Cal’s hands clench into fists, then spasm open. “I thought—it wasn’t that you didn’t want something serious, it was that you didn’t want me, and that was fine, that was—”
