This Is Not the End

by Sidney Bell

  Zac rests his head against Cal’s other shoulder. His hand strokes over Anya’s cheek before dropping to circle Cal’s wrist. He squeezes once gently.

  Anya kisses Cal, kisses him hard enough and long enough that he loses track of everything else. It’s so dim in the club that when he closes his eyes, it’s all black. It’s easy to believe they’re hidden away, just the three of them, alone in all the world. There’s only the music throbbing through him and Anya warm and eager in his arms, biting at him, rocking against him, moaning in his ear, and when he feels Zac’s hand slip in between them to open Cal’s pants, any protests he might’ve framed in a saner moment can’t get past the pulse of need in his throat. He can’t believe this is happening, that he’s doing this in public, but she’s desperate against him, needing this, needing him, and he can’t say no. If he’s honest, he doesn’t want to say no.

  Anya shifts, lifting up, and if she was ever wearing underwear, it’s certainly gone now. Cal has a distant thought that he really hopes Zac’s keeping an eye out for their waiter, and then he’s inside her. He can’t breathe, she’s so slick and hot and tight and he’s going to come in about ten seconds, but she’s smiling at him, a smile that he would’ve said was very un-Anya six months ago, back when he didn’t know her. He hadn’t known she could be this soft, this sweet, and he believes her now, with all his body and his heart. He’s not the nameless man on the dance floor, not to her. She cares about him. She might even care enough to call it love.

  He loses himself in her, in his best friend’s wife, and tells himself to be satisfied.

  * * *

  After the night at the club, Cal half expects them to be tired of his drama. To want some time without him there so they can regroup as a family. Instead, he gets the sense that they’re waiting too. Like they think he’s going to end it. He wishes he was as good with words as Anya is. He would find a way to explain that it’s not going to be him. It’s never going to be him.

  Over the next week, when Cal doesn’t say anything about going home, they slowly relax. They go back to where they were before their tempestuous natures required soothing—Anya and Zac shoving their baby at him for cuddles, putting off the inevitable separation with hot sex and cozy evening plans. They never make him choose the movie.

  It’s not entirely comfortable ground, but it’s familiar, and as Anya said, it’s enough.

  * * *

  One night they pick up huge bowls of Vietnamese soup from Zac’s favorite food truck, three different kinds that they all share: bún bò Huế, and pho bo and bún riêu. Later they move to the couch to put the television on low in the background, although nobody’s watching it. Cal’s feeling relaxed and sleepy. Anya has her feet in his lap, and as long as she’s making those happy noises when he digs his thumbs into her arches, he knows she’s not going to make him leave. So he keeps rubbing.

  “What’s the plan for this week?” Anya asks, half-mumbling. “Marina needs Tuesday off. The school is closed or something and she needs to be home for her granddaughter. Who gets PJ?”

  “We can keep him here with us,” Zac says, without so much as a glance at Cal, and the comment feels like an execution-day reprieve. “We’ll be in the studio, but God knows we’re barely making progress as it is, so what’s the addition of a bouncing baby boy?”

  Anya frowns. “Seriously? Still no progress? You two have been locked up in there for weeks. What the hell is going so wrong?”

  Zac makes a face—eyebrows raised, judgment implicit—that means it’s not his fault. And yes, Cal knows this is on him, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He searches for words and comes up with nothing at all.

  “What’s it about?” Anya asks. “Zac said that you’re working on a concept album, and God knows I’ve heard him singing enough lyrics over the last few months, but it’s all sort of disjointed in my head.”

  “Oh. It’s about...well. It’s about my, uh...” Cal still can’t help feeling embarrassed talking about it. “It’s about my alcoholism.”

  Zac blinks. “No, it’s not.”

  Cal blinks back. “Yes, it is.”

  Zac’s quiet a moment, thinking, and then he says, more strongly, “No, it’s not. You asshole. Quit fucking with me.”

  “I’m not. It’s about my drinking,” Cal repeats, because—well. It is.

  “It’s about suicide. That line in track eleven. ‘Giving up who you used to see, grieving for what used to be, every day, every way, putting a bullet in me’...it’s about suicide, dude. The whole album is about trauma and struggle, and how it’s futile to fight it. He wants to kill himself, and then even when he decides not to, he dies anyway. It’s about how all the good shit ends and you can’t fix it and there’s no point in trying.”

  “That’s—” Cal starts, and then he stops so short it’s like he ran into a train. That’s what it feels like, he almost said, but that would freak them out. It’s a concept album. A fictional narrative. It’s not a perfect parallel. It’s not meant to be. Obviously he’s not suicidal or anything, and it’s at least as much about killing his addiction as it is about the futility of living through struggle. He knows his sobriety is important, and he values it, but it’s exhausting and sometimes—like when he nearly relapses after eight years—it does feel pretty damn futile. It’s hard not to feel like killing alcohol is an impossible task, like all his effort to stay sober might end with him losing in the end anyway.

  He can’t say that though, because he doesn’t want to spend an hour convincing them that it’s—that it was inspired by what it feels like, not what it is.

  “It sounds rather bleak,” Anya says, when Cal falls silent.

  “That’s because it is,” Zac tells her. “It’s the most depressing thing he’s ever written. There’s a reason neither one of us can stand to work on it. Well, him. I’m mostly tired of his whining.”

  “I’m not whining,” Cal says, habitual by now, because he spends a lot of time whining in the studio and then having to deny it when Zac calls him out for it.

  “This seems like the sort of thing you two probably should’ve talked about before now,” Anya says, because she doesn’t have a whole lot of patience for people being stupid. It makes Cal feel sheepish, but not so much so that he can’t put Zac’s fair share of the weight on him.

  “Probably Zac should pay more attention to what I’m writing instead of just trying to figure out how to sing it,” Cal says.

  “I pay attention, asshole. It’s about suicide.”

  Cal sighs. “Zac—”

  Zac recites, “‘Carving you out of my skin, again and again, can’t bear to see, bury this sin under the red river tree, carve it out under this red bleeding tree, oh my bottle is a blade, in this shadow, in this shade...’”

  Cal wants to tell him to shut up. He’s embarrassed to have Anya hear such terrible lyrics. They sound especially bad without the music to bolster them.

  Zac pauses, squints. “Are you talking to your alcoholism there? You’re, like, burying your addiction?”

  Cal laughs quietly. “That was the general idea.”

  “Shit. I really don’t pay attention to what you’re doing.” Zac shakes his head, mouth moving though he doesn’t speak anymore, obviously running the lyrics over again in his mind, assuming that the you in the song is alcohol this time.

  “The lyrics are bad,” Cal admits. “I should start over on that last—”

  Zac stabs a finger at him. “I will kill you. Seriously. I will leave your body in a ditch. We’re not changing them again. They’re good enough.”

  Cal holds his hands up defensively, a little irritated. “Fine. I’ll leave them alone. All right? We’ll let it be confusing and depressing and garbage. Does that work for you?”

  “Ha fucking ha,” Zac mutters.

  Anya pulls her foot away, sits up straight, and then pats her thigh. “Your turn.”


  He frowns. “For what?”

  Zac snorts, but Anya reaches over and grabs Cal’s jeans leg, tugging until he lifts it. He’s not expecting it when Anya digs her thumbs into his arch. He’s surprised enough that at first he assumes it hurts, and he jerks away before the sensations actually reach his brain and register as pleasure. A bone-melting, warm pleasure, and thankfully Anya rolls her eyes and pulls his foot back and resumes rubbing.

  Cal sighs and slumps back on the sofa. Her hands. Her hands. She rubs for a long while, humming to herself, teasing out every ache that’s ever existed in his foot and eradicating them ruthlessly with strong, relaxing touches. Zac turns the TV off and then doesn’t speak again, and it’s so quiet in the room except for her soft, tuneless humming, so soft and nice, that Cal starts to feel seriously sleepy. He almost doesn’t register her words when she asks, “Cal, can I ask why the album ends on such a dark note?”

  He tries to make his brain work. It’s seriously impossible. His...his everything has turned into molten goo. “Uh. Because. That’s how it ends.”

  “But why?”

  He can’t think. “Because that’s what it feels like, I guess.”

  Zac makes a small noise behind him, and Cal starts to surface, but Anya’s hands double down and he finds himself moaning instead. He’d be embarrassed, but he can’t find the energy. Anya makes a gentle shushing sound, but he’s not sure if it’s to him or Zac and he’s too relaxed to figure it out.

  “So it’s like the old man is trying to kill his alcoholism, but in the end he loses, because that’s how life works?”

  He starts to lift his head, but she goes back to humming, her fingers strong on his heel, and her tone is super casual, so he burrows a bit into the pillow instead. “I mean. Sort of?”

  “Oh?” she asks, distractedly, almost like the conversation they’re having isn’t as important as whatever else she’s thinking of.

  “Well. It’s just...it never stops, you know?” The pleasure in his foot doesn’t stop either, but it does retreat from his attention for a moment. He’s never really admitted it to himself out loud, but on some level, he’s always known. This struggle against alcohol is going to last the rest of his life. It’s not a battle that has a clear end point. It’s a war. It’s a war of a hundred years, and he’s never going to be able to put his weapons down and rest. There’s no going back, no peace. And yeah, okay, maybe it’s depressing as fuck to think of it that way, and maybe it’s a hard idea to wrap his brain around, but it feels true, anyway. He sighs. “I get tired, I guess. That’s all.”

  “Tired of what?”

  “Not knowing, I guess. That my sobriety is mine. That I get to be sure of it, that I get to keep it. It’s really hard to not know what you’ll wake up to in the morning. Whether that’s the day you’ll lose.”

  She makes a soft humming sound. “Other foot.”

  He obeys quickly, and his brain goes liquid again. He hadn’t known it was possible for one foot to be jealous of the other, but apparently it is.

  “No other ending’s possible?” she asks, when he’s settled and practically moaning into his pillow again.

  “Huh?” he asks.

  “To the story on the album, I mean. The story about the drinking. You can’t think of another way for it to end?”

  “But that’s how it does end.” He’s not sure what she wants, and he starts to open his eyes. But she pulls on his toes, and holy cow, that’s a wonderful thing, how is that such a wonderful thing? He melts again.

  “You’re the writer of the story, though,” she says softly. “The end can be whatever you want. Can’t it?”

  He makes a grumbling noise, because his rising tension is threatening to interrupt his foot rub. She laughs a little, and that makes him relax again. She’s not mad or frustrated with him, even though he doesn’t know how to give her a different answer.

  “I don’t know,” he says eventually.

  “They say life imitates art. Maybe that’s a thing you could use.”

  “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re talking about.” He’s on the verge of either falling asleep or getting upset, and he’s not sure which it’ll be until he feels something soft and heavy settle on him. He blearily opens his eyes and Zac’s standing over him, draping a blanket over him. The living room light is off, and Anya’s hands steal the rigidity out of him. He closes his eyes, only opening them again when she slides out from under his feet long minutes later.

  She leans over and kisses his cheek, two, three times, extraordinarily gentle, breathing warm against his temple. “Maybe your story’s not over yet,” she suggests softly, and the words settle into his brain with a weight that resonates, even as he drifts off.

  * * *

  He wakes up with a crick in his neck and a sore back because even though the couch is excellent, it’s still a couch, and he’s thirty-eight years old. Most of the soreness vanishes during his run, and he doesn’t think about the conversation he had with Anya the night before until he’s sitting at the table in his grungy workout sweats while she puts his daily shot in front of him.

  Maybe your story’s not over yet. It would be that simple for her, maybe. She and Zac are the kind of people who will the world into compliance. They usually get what they want. And when they don’t, they know how to shrug and say I never really wanted that anyway and to move on and find something better. It’s a resilience Cal doesn’t have. He’s static in a way they aren’t—if he finds something he wants, he craves it forever, whether that’s music or alcohol or people. He’s been in love with Zac for almost twenty years. And now he’s added Anya to the mix, and losing both of them, losing PJ, losing this family—he can’t even wrap his brain around it.

  She settles next to him with PJ in her arms. “Sleep okay?”

  He gives her a half-sincere dirty look in response. “You’re underhanded and tricky and I know what you did last night.” Awake and aware, he knows he never would’ve given up half the details he had if she hadn’t undermined his defenses with that foot rub.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she says, every bit as innocent as a nun, and he sighs and gets up. He pours the shot down the sink.

  “Herradura,” she moans, doing an admirable impression of Zac, and Cal grins even as he kisses her temple. He turns her face up to his for a kiss on the mouth, only then realizing that she looks tired. Actually, judging from the shadows under her eyes, she’s exhausted.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look—”

  “Never tell a woman she looks tired, dummy. It’s a great way to lose a testicle.”

  He smiles wryly. “Fair enough. But you’re okay?”

  She hesitates for a split second. “Had to get up with PJ a few times. It’s all good.”

  “Huh. I didn’t hear him.”

  “You were downstairs.”

  “Right.” He studies her. She submits to it for only a few seconds before she waves a hand in his face to make him back off. He laughs. “All right, okay, I’ll leave you alone. I’m gonna go take a shower.”

  “Good, you stink,” she says, making him laugh again, and then she starts talking to the baby about having peachy mush for breakfast.

  Upstairs, he can hear the shower running. Zac’s singing to himself, only barely audible over the pounding of the water. He’s left the door half open, an old habit.

  It was a thing while they were roommates. Cal, irritated by the temptation of that skinny, mouthy bastard soaping up only feet away behind a thin curtain, complaining about the open door. Zac, irritated by the mugginess of a closed-up bathroom, complaining about Cal’s complaining. Cal learned to avoid that part of the house entirely at that time of day so he wouldn’t go nuts.

  But this time, he hovers in the doorway.

  It’s not creepy, he tells himself. He�
�s seen Zac naked loads of times by now, his long, lean body stretched taut under or behind or on top of Anya. Or slumped in the chair by the bed while Cal’s under or behind or on top of Anya. Zac lets him touch all the time when they’re having sex with Anya together. Zac doesn’t mind.

  So Cal lingers. Listening to Zac’s singing. Letting himself sink, maybe pathetically, into the pull in his chest, the pull that has always, always, always led him to Zac.

  He’s not about to push for more than the kissing and occasional bits of groping and making out. Not about to risk this thing ending before it has to. Sooner or later, Zac will get tired of sharing his wife with another man. Or at least, with the same man over and over. Anya said it herself at Zac’s birthday party when Cal questioned the way they took other men to their bed: no matter who they play with or how, at the end of the night, it’s Anya and Zac going home together to their son, the three of them a family. That’s the point they always return to.

  What’s that saying? About guests overstaying their welcome being like stinky fish? And Cal’s sobriety is stable again. It’s never going to be easy to pour the tequila down the drain, but it’s as easy as it ever gets.

  There’s no reasonable justification anymore, that’s all. He knows it’s coming. But for now, for this minute, he’s going to wait.

  The water cuts off. A moment later the curtain’s yanked open. Zac sees him there and grins, but it’s a tired one, a little cranky. “Hey, man. You should’ve said you were here. I’d have left it running for you.”

  “It’s fine.” Cal’s trying to look without seeming like he’s looking. It helps that Zac’s occupied with toweling his hair. He’s not a perfect-looking man by any stretch. His attractiveness has never been based in symmetrical features or beauty. It’s always been deeper, a chemical in the air around him, something in his personality and the way he moves, some unnamable chemistry that draws people in, bees to honey. Cal doesn’t care that Zac’s face isn’t classically handsome, or that he’s got bony elbows and knees. He’s still got those lovely hipbones, and his arms and legs are so long and lean, and his stomach is flat, his belly button sweet and small. He’s got that sinful mouth and those blue, blue eyes and that messy sweep of hair and Cal has to swallow hard around the lump in his throat. Zac’s not a beautiful man by any accounting, except for how Cal really, really thinks he is.