“Hey,” he managed, feeling glued to his spot in the sand, though everything inside him was lifting with joy. Mel closed the gap between them, her eyes concealed behind big dark sunglasses, despite the soft, silvered morning light.
She stopped a foot before she reached him and pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. He noticed she’d put on eye makeup. Her skin looked clean and lush; he had the overwhelming urge to touch her round cheek.
“Hey,” she said, all business. “I mean, good morning. So, I was absolutely going to be on time, but then I decided to take a Lyft, and the driver kept driving in circ—”
“You took a Lyft? When there’s no traffic and the parking lot is practically empty?”
“Yeah,” said Mel. “So, what? It’s a fucking miracle that I’m here at all. Let me guess.” She began to speak rapid-fire and Zack realized she was nervous, too. “You never take Lyfts, only Ubers, because you think that poor Uber CEO was unjustly Me-Too’d, so you’re anti-Lyft to demonstrate your support of white male billionaires to—”
Before he could stop himself, his finger flew to Mel’s lips. “Shhhhh.”
Mel took a small step back. “Excuse me? Am I hallucinating from sleep deprivation, or did you actually just shush me?”
Zack put on his best Florida drawl. “You’re not hallucinating, darlin’.”
“I can’t believe I dragged myself out of bed to be shushed.” She crossed her arms over her chest, but he saw the smile playing at the corners of her lips.
“Truly a Herculean feat,” he said, letting his own smile fly. “You are one hardcore woman, Melissa Goldberg, getting out of bed before seven A.M.”
“Oh, shut up.” She lunged forward and punched him softly in the center of his chest.
Reflexively, he caught her fist and held it against him. She did not pull away. For a few long beats, they stood facing each other, her hand clasped inside his, pressed against his chest, listening to the waves. Zack fought to keep his breathing steady under her touch, hoping she could not feel the pace of his heartbeat. Overhead, gulls cawed and screeched.
Finally, Mel spoke. “So, should we start—working out or whatever?”
He detected the faintest tremor in her voice.
“No,” he said, pulling her whole body to his chest and lowering his lips to hers.
She collapsed into him with a mewling sound from the back of her throat that made him woozy with desire as their tongues worked together. She tasted of licorice and mint. He was instantly hard under his gym shorts; his legs went jellied and useless.
“Can we—” Mel murmured. “Is there somewhere we can, oh Jesus, go?”
Zack paused, thinking as he kissed her lips, caught her earlobe ever-so-lightly between his teeth.
She groaned softly. “Like, maybe a hotel or something?”
“That’ll take too long,” he whispered. “I know a place. We don’t even have to leave the beach.”
“I . . . I can’t do anything in public.”
“Of course not, baby,” he said, the baby flying spontaneously from his lips, surprising both of them.
“No baby, please,” said Mel, but weakly.
“Sorry, um . . .” He cupped her chin with his hand and kissed her again. “I meant woman warrior.”
“That’s better.” She giggled and moved her hand to his crotch; he nearly gasped at the feel of her hand closing around him. “Take me somewhere now, ’kay?”
He released her just long enough to grab his gym bag from where he’d dropped it in the sand. Earlier that morning, he’d felt himself blush when he’d packed his softest, thickest beach towel underneath his usual stash of workout props and spare clothes, reluctant to admit to himself why he was packing it.
The reason was now clear.
He grabbed Mel’s hand and pulled her toward the dim tunnel beneath the pier.
LATER, AFTER MEL left the beach (flustered, having cleaned up in a public restroom on the pier, mumbling something about guaranteed MRSA), Zack set his phone alarm, turned on Do Not Disturb, and dozed by the water. The day had turned sunny and warm. He had nothing to do until two thirty, when he needed to be at CT to teach three in a row, followed by some accounting work. Today was a transfer day, which suffused him with the usual dread (especially following Regina’s bizarre phone call the other night, during which she’d sounded both pathetic and deranged), followed by a tinge of relief: Lettie had a spate of past-past-past-due payments lurking this week, mostly from the hospital, plus another $1,200 to her greedy, exploitative chihuahua of an attorney. Lately, Zack had begun imagining Ochoa as a hungry dog with razor-sharp teeth, jumping on Lettie’s legs, sinking her canines into his sister’s flesh.
But he didn’t want to think about Ochoa, or Lettie, or the gym, or his accounting work just yet. He wanted to savor the feeling the morning had brought him, to think of Mel while lying on the towel with the sun on his face—the towel that still smelled of them—and listen to the sounds of the ocean. It was a state of happiness to which he’d grown so unaccustomed, it felt strange and foreign, as if he were dreaming.
Since he’d met Mel, he couldn’t remember when he’d last felt so much hope.
Although, in truth, he considered Happy Zack to be the real him. Mel Goldberg had awakened the pure, joyous child inside him. The one who’d been squelched, somehow, though he was never sure who to blame. There were many candidates. His parents, for starters, had been far from perfect. His dad endlessly critical, equating theater, which had called to Zack since a second-grade performance of Winnie-the-Pooh, with homos and faggotry, a word John-John had invented and of which he seemed particularly proud. Zack’s father relished the double Johns of his name, a childhood nickname that had stuck, and was quick to correct anyone who addressed him in the singular, as if he were inherently superior to the non-hyphenated Johns.
Zack was sure it was not theater but Zack’s Mexican-ness that his father hated. When John-John spoke of Gloria, the mother Zack and Lettie shared, his voice lost its southern ease and filled with sharp edges, as if he’d tasted poison. Zack was the result of the years in John-John’s life when he’d lived at the southeast border of Texas and regularly crossed into Matamoros, Mexico, to work. Zack’s mother, Gloria, had barely been out of her teens then, and according to Gloria, with whom Zack Skyped a few times a year (during which the surprisingly charming woman repeated Muy guapo! again and again), John-John had fallen head-over-heels in love with her.
He couldn’t stay away, Gloria told Zack, her dark brown eyes huge on his monitor, her beauty still discernible beneath her lined face and tired eyes. Year after year, he come back.
John-John, of course, when he deigned to speak of her at all, did so with clenched teeth and rolling eyes, claiming that Gloria had been obsessed with him, tracking him down somehow, showing up at his work, throwing herself at him like a bitch in heat. This was an actual phrase Zack had heard John-John use once, when secretly listening to a fight his father and stepmother were having over John-John’s former Mexican mistress. Kaye was the jealous type, Zack learned at a young age—tiresomely, relentlessly jealous—and the very fact that Zack shared a bloodline with Gloria made Kaye view him as a threat.
Okay, so his dad was a hard-ass and a loudmouth. Maybe something of a redneck. So were a lot of dads in Florida. John-John did love Zack, though, in his own way. After all, he’d chosen to bring Zack across the border and officially claim him as a son, made him an American.
There had been times—not many, but still—when Zack felt connected to his father. Shooting baskets together in the driveway, his father whistling appreciatively or saying Damn, boy, when Zack made swish after swish. Golf was even better, because it gave them time to talk sports and politics, topics on which they tended to agree. During the Obama years, Zack and his dad had especially savored a good joint rant against that president, whom John-John loathed, telling Zack it was up to his generation to save this sinking ship of a country.
Rarely did he touch
Zack. A chuck under the chin, a quick ruffle of hair, and that was it. As for Kaye, well, she seemed determined to avoid touching Zack at all costs. As if his Mexican-ness were contagious. Her disdain for Zack was counterbalanced by her adoration of Vanessa, the daughter she’d had with John-John—Zack’s other half-sister. The white one. Lily-white. From her butter-colored hair to her love of tennis, her debutante ball, her admission to Vanderbilt where she moved into a sorority house, her blue eyes the color of the Los Angeles sky, Vanessa was everything John-John and Kaye wanted in a child.
They touched Vanessa constantly. Zack remembered being little enough to watch John-John throw Vanessa up into the air, listening to her squeal of delight, and longing to be thrown in the air, too. He remembered watching Kaye sidle up behind Vanessa and begin braiding her hair, his stepmother’s gleaming nails flying over the flaxen locks—imagining how it would feel to have his head touched that way, and for so long.
When Zack thought of his family, the image that came to mind was the three of them—John-John, Kaye, and Vanessa—curled around each other like puppies, full of love and contentment. The three of them were a smug little unit, complete and self-contained. There was no room for him. But elsewhere, he learned from a young age, there was plenty of room. Meaning, plenty of women not only willing to touch him but eager to do so. Hairdressers, drama teachers, Vanessa’s friends, even their moms. They cooed over his looping brown curls, his blue-green eyes (his skin was olive-toned, not as dark as Lettie’s, but dark enough so that women noticed his light eyes, straightaway), his height (he shot up at twelve, his shoulders squaring and widening at fourteen when he began lifting weights), the shape of his face (I want your cheekbones, he remembered some friend of Vanessa’s sighing), etcetera.
It happened first when he was thirteen. An older sister of a friend on his basketball team, high from canned wine and a synthetic marijuana called Spice, working herself on top of him in a reptilian fashion. (He liked hoops okay, except that John-John used it as a bargaining chip: Zack could only take theater if he played basketball, too.) It was as if everything he’d been denied his entire childhood suddenly became accessible. The world was rife with available touch. He could not get enough. He was a starving man and women existed to feed him. In Zack’s bedroom (John-John and Kaye right downstairs, oblivious), backstage after play rehearsals, in the single bathroom that locked at the gym after basketball practice. Of course, at parties. Florida, more than other places, it seemed, was teeming with parties, at parentless houses in gated subdivisions, in empty lots on the fringes of town, even in the Ocala National Forest. Cheap liquor with ominous names—Mad Dog, Crazy Horse—and the lowest-grade drugs—Spice, nutmeg rolled with tobacco, bath salts, any pills one could pilfer from a family medicine cabinet. The children of Florida scrambled their brain chemistry and took their clothes off.
Zack fucked and fucked and fucked. It was always an option, always necessary, and never enough.
And then, the TA in his econ class at Central Florida Community College. (Perhaps this he could blame on his father, who forced him to take finance classes to justify paying Zack’s tuition).
Misty Whatever. He’d willfully forgotten her last name, which he’d heard over and over and over in court.
Ms. Whatever alleges. Ms. Whatever attests that on the night Mr. Doheny visited her apartment . . .
Misty Whatever had hair the color of crow feathers, green eyes that slid all over him during seminar. She’d even dropped a flip-flop once and rubbed a bare foot on Zack’s calf. By then, he was twenty and knew all the signs of yes.
Misty radiated the yeses.
And then had the audacity to call it rape.
The court had declared her utterly bogus allegation aggravated criminal sexual assault. Class-A misdemeanor. Punishable by a $2,000 fine, which John-John had paid under the condition that Zack would have to pay for the rest of community college. Plus, one hundred hours of community service. Zack in an orange jumpsuit, spearing garbage off the side of US 27 alongside junkies and larcenists and dudes who’d broken their girlfriends’ bones. It had been the most demoralizing year of his life.
All because he’d had the audacity to fuck Misty Whatever after they’d swilled half a fifth of vodka and smoked up. They’d both been wasted out of their minds. Yes, perhaps Zack had been more lucid when it came down to the moment one body (his) clamped down onto the other (hers), and yes, Misty Whatever may have uttered some mewls of protest, but it was hardly rape. She’d called it that, Zack believed, because he’d had the audacity to not fall in love with her. To ignore her calls and her texts and her knocks on his door.
And then she’d gone and ruined his life. He’d been unable to get back on track. Tuition at Central Florida Community College was dirt cheap, but he’d dropped out anyway. Frittered away a half-dozen years waiting tables, doing seasonal work at H&R Block (turned out even a few semesters of accounting qualified you to help people fill out their 1040s), changing oil at Jiffy Lube, and working out at 24 Hour Fitness. He’d even done a humiliating stint at his father’s real estate company, showing properties at open houses on Tuesdays and Sundays. He had auditioned for community theater and catalogue modeling work, occasionally getting small parts, or a menswear shoot for JCPenney. At night he watched Inside the Actors Studio, Entourage, and Unscripted, and dreamt about moving to LA.
By the time he’d actually gotten the guts to move to California, he was nearly thirty. Thanks to Misty Whatever, his life had been derailed. Most of his twenties, that critical, formative decade, put on hold.
Misty destroyed him the first time.
Casey in the laundry room, a second.
Sometimes, it seemed women delighted in ruining his life.
But not Melissa Goldberg. Mel was exactly the opposite of all those women. With her, he could be the person he was meant to be: happy, virtuous, unafraid.
ZACK’S PHONE ALARM pulsed and he sat up on the beach towel, blinking against the full-blown afternoon sun. The waves had calmed and turned from gray to blue-green, but the beach was still mostly empty. He checked his phone for messages: four missed calls from an unfamiliar 310 number, one new voicemail, one text message.
The text was from Mel: Gr8 workout, thx! (flexed-muscle emoji)
The silly sentence, barely English, filled him with pleasure. Zack grinned at his phone and shot back Glad you enjoyed! LMK if you’d like to train again soon.
Then he listened to his voicemail.
The recorded voice was male and slightly nasal. “Hey, Zack, this is Gordon Wolfe. My wife, Regina, is a devotee of your exercise classes. She told me you offer personal training, and I’m looking to get back in shape. Could we schedule a session at your earliest convenience? I’m also happy to swing by your gym on Main Street for a consultation. I’m really pumped to get started so please get back to me. Ciao for now.”
Zack’s chest clenched—what? He was aware of Gordon Wolfe’s existence, and little else. Regina spoke of her husband so rarely Zack sometimes forgot she was married. The few times she had mentioned him, it was in the context of her own love for exercise, and Gordon’s aversion to it. She’d even used phrases like “anti-exercise” and “barely aware of his own body.”
Okay, maybe the guy was having a change of heart. Maybe Regina had finally convinced him to get up from his desk (he was some sort of writer, extremely dedicated, Zack remembered Regina saying, with an eye roll) and move around. God knew it had to be difficult to be married to Regina, Workout Queen, without getting on board with exercise.
Still, Zack was suspicious. Why would Gordon call him? Surely Zack was the last trainer Regina would recommend to her husband. As far as Zack could tell, since the van incident, Regina hated his guts—and even more so now, after he’d practically hung up on her the other night when she’d drunk-dialed him. Plus, didn’t she have every reason to make sure he and Gordon never met? Zack, after all, was directly involved in helping Regina solve the financial problems she’d strategicall
y hidden from Gordon.
She’d said to Zack, over and over: This is my mess. Gordon would never forgive me. I have to fix it first, and tell him later.
Yes, Gordon’s call was definitely fishy, Zack thought, as he stood and shook the sand from his (and Mel’s) towel, and folded it into his gym bag. Regina must be up to something, although he couldn’t work out what. There was a time when he’d viewed her with a mixture of awe and (embarrassing as it was to admit) fear. Her steely intensity, her supreme confidence, her willingness to push herself to the edge of her physical limits. How badly she wanted to win. All of this, combined with her teenager-like crush on him—he was her kryptonite, he’d thought once, as she’d gone from a wild-eyed beast on the gym floor to a sighing little girl when they hugged good-bye after class—had once made Regina attractive to him. When he’d started training at Color Theory, there had been a few weeks when Zack had enjoyed being around her, and let her linger a little too long against his chest when they embraced, her muscles still trembling from exertion.
But those days were over. Being with Mel had enabled him to see Regina for what she truly was: a master manipulator. All his old warm feelings for her were gone.
All that was left was a mild repulsion, and the fear.
After all, she’d convinced him to transfer (no—Zack forced himself to think the true word: embezzle) tens of thousands of dollars from his employer, so that she could avoid being honest with her family about the mistakes she’d made.
Who knew what else she was capable of?
As Zack jogged barefoot up the beach to his truck, hot sand flying out from under his feet, he thought of how St. Thérèse would advise him.
Do not listen to the demon, laugh at him, and go without fear to receive the Jesus of peace and love . . .
He reached his truck and tossed his gym bag in the bed. Then he climbed into the cab and sent a text to Gordon Wolfe’s number: Hey Gordon, it’s Zack Doheny! Got your VM and want to say I’d be honored to get you started on the path to UNSTOPPABLE! Shoot me a few times you can meet & we’ll LOCK IT IN.
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