by Sidney Bell
“No. I could never be bored of Zac. It’s not boredom. That’s not why we do it. Do you really think we value each other so little?”
He doesn’t answer, just slides a glance back through the crowd over his shoulder, looking for the man in question. His fingers continue to pick at the mortar, crumbling bits loose and flicking them into the grass. There’s a restrained violence about the action that makes her uneasy.
She keeps her voice quiet. “Cal, you don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
She hears, with a ringing clarity, Zac’s voice in her head. He would say no. Obviously that’s what’s happening. She can’t push this further and she doesn’t even want to at the moment. She didn’t anticipate that someone could have such a strong negative reaction to being invited to a threesome. Not someone who knows and is friends with Zac, anyway. Sure, Cal’s an old-fashioned kind of guy, but he’s chosen to be best friends with a man whose partners must number in the hundreds, who married a woman he was dating for barely three months, who knocked up that very woman well before they were planning to have children. Zac likes parties and drinking and Anya knows for a fact that he had threesomes with other women before she ever came along, threesomes that Cal must have known about. Zac’s always been wild. It seems strange to her that Cal would be so accepting of it in other circumstances only to be so bothered by it now.
She didn’t know someone could love Zac and still be so judgmental about the things he does, the things he likes. Yes, she’s read Cal wrong, but she doesn’t think it was such an outlandish conclusion to have drawn that he would be unable to at least hear the offer with an open mind.
Regardless, all she can do now is ensure that the bump in their friendship is a brief one. She promised Zac.
“We’re different,” she says, forcing her words to come out light. “The way we live in our relationships is different. That’s all right. We don’t have to want the same things to be friends. To care about one another. I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t mean to offend you. It was meant to be a fun thing. A casual thing. Not an insult. I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you.”
He exhales, his hand dropping back to his side. He doesn’t say anything.
Starting to get worried, she adds, “He cares about you a great deal. He values your friendship so much, Cal.” Even though it stings her pride considerably, even though it burns, she adds, “This is my fault, all right? Be angry with me if you like, but don’t blame him. I was the one who started this. This isn’t on either of you. It’s only me.”
“No, it’s really not,” he says, biting the words off as soon as they’ve left his mouth.
She just said that Zac isn’t responsible for any of this. Why won’t he listen? “It is. He told me you wouldn’t be interested.” She would take his hand, except that she’s worried that he’ll pull back, and that would only make things worse. “I was the one who brought it up in the first place. I shouldn’t have—”
“Forget it. You’re right. I don’t have to understand. Do whatever you want. It’s fine.”
“Oh, sure, you seem fine, everything’s fine.” She kind of wants to kick him for making this so confusing. All he had to do was say no. He’s entitled to say no. He’s entitled to be upset, even. He’s not entitled to make her feel like there’s something wrong with the way she lives, with the way she and Zac conduct their marriage. The way he says it: I don’t have to understand, and the implied message underneath: what you’re doing is wrong.
She’s abruptly furious. And because she knows how vengeful her temper can be, because Zac would never forgive her for hurting Cal, she needs to finish this conversation and get some distance from him. She says quietly, “I apologize for making you uncomfortable. We won’t push. We’ll never mention it again, all right?”
She can feel harsher words straining to escape. He’s watching her now, watching her like she’s a wild animal, and that pisses her off too. She lowers herself carefully from the wall. “Good night,” she says, and she can’t help that her tone says that she’d rather he be eaten by a pack of rabid dogs than have a good night.
“Anya,” he says, and catches her wrist as she goes by.
“Don’t,” she snarls, and wrenches at her arm. She hates it when men do that, when they use their bodies—inevitably bigger, inevitably stronger—to keep her from putting needed space between her and them. It feels threatening. To his credit, he instantly lets go and lifts both hands peaceably, taking a step back and giving her all the space she could want, every inch of him delivering an unspoken message—I won’t hurt you. His expression is twisted, tense and unhappy. He doesn’t seem able to find any words.
She takes a deep breath, tries to control herself. It’s been a long time since she’s gotten this angry with anyone but Zac. Zac knows better than to touch her when she’s angry. He stopped doing that after their first real fight, the one that ended with the two of them fucking their brains out in a hotel room in Paris, but not before they almost lost everything because they were too stupid to use their words.
They started out yelling about something. She can’t even remember what. Something stupid, she’s sure of that, a cover for the anxiety they both felt, because her plane ticket back to the States was sitting on the dresser and the date was looming. She hadn’t wanted to leave and she already knew he didn’t want her to either, but she had too much pride to ask permission to follow him around on tour, and he was too afraid of the possible rejection to ask. So they fought about something else until she realized that they weren’t getting anywhere and decided to storm out, planning to add a melodramatic flounce to emphasize her point.
She didn’t know then that Zac’s mother had a history of punishing him for setting boundaries by disappearing for long stretches, or that seeing Anya stalk away from him brought up a million memories of manipulative abandonment. She couldn’t anticipate that what felt like a gratifying display of drama and frustration to her felt like life or death to him. She couldn’t know that it was inevitable that he would follow, that he would grab her wrist as part of an attempt to convince her to stay.
She only knew that someone bigger than her, stronger than her, was suddenly keeping her where she didn’t want to be, and she whirled on him without thinking, leading with her fist, wrenching herself free. Funny that she can’t remember what they were fighting about but she remembers the look on Zac’s face clear as crystal: his wide, stunned eyes, hurt and shock blooming in them, the bleeding line on his jaw from where her ring cut him, the way he dropped her wrist as if it were on fire. Unfortunately, that look on his face didn’t register until after her other fist connected too, and by then he’d woken up enough to try to defend himself, grabbing her wrists again. That only re-lit her fuse, and they ended up against the wall, Anya shrieking her fury and fear, Zac terrified and trying not to let either of them get hurt further, unsure how to defuse it. It took forever for his pleas to sink into her ears: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t leave me, please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, please don’t leave.”
His panic stole her fear. His devotion stole her fury. She went from wrathful to needy in a matter of seconds, the sudden dispersal of emotion leaving her jittery and shaken, wanting nothing more than to be held, and she couldn’t blame him for being nonplussed when she threw herself into his arms. She could only be grateful that he clutched her close. Only after long minutes of whispered apologies from both of them had their mouths met.
It wasn’t great sex, exactly—neither of them had an easy time coming, too stressed out and fragile—but it was generous sex. Each of them trying so hard to please the other, trying to show with their bodies what they hadn’t been brave enough to put into words.
They talked it out in bed after, saying all the things they should’ve said before, offering up explanations and promises like they were roses and chocolates. They stayed up well past dawn,
learning needs and secrets, each of them admitting that because they were hot-tempered and impulsive, fights were inevitable and so they’d better figure out how to do it right. They built a plan for a new life while eating stale chocolate-dipped croissants and drinking flat champagne naked, leaving crumbs in the tangled sheets before they made love again. Two days later, they were drinking champagne in a different hotel room, wedding rings on their hands.
She supposes that by some definitions, there is something wrong with them.
But she can’t bring herself to care much, because they’re happy. It might not be the happiness that other people have, or that other people think is safe or right or normal, but she won’t do that, won’t be that, an automaton who values the preferences of others over what feels right for her. She and Zac have their own rules, rules that make them feel happy and safe. That day in Paris they made their first of many—he doesn’t try to touch her when she’s angry, and she says if she feels physically threatened rather than striking at him. It’s a rule that’s worked for them, and they’re both comfortable with it, and fuck anyone who doesn’t like it.
Fuck Cal.
“You’re welcome to stay, but I don’t want to ruin his birthday,” she says, as politely as she can. “If you’re upset, please save it until tomorrow.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and then he swallows. “All right,” he says quietly, his expression hard to read. “I should probably go.”
He turns toward the entrance, and she turns toward the courtyard.
Zac’s drunk when she makes her way through the crowd to him, and he nuzzles her throat messily. “Hi, beautiful,” he says—or slobbers—and she has an absurd urge to cry, because his arms make everything better, and even his terrible drunk nuzzling feels sweet and clean.
“Hi,” she manages, and buries her face in his hair until the need for tears subsides. He smells like liquor and his fancy cologne and sweat and she wants to stay here with him forever.
“Where’d Cal go?” he asks.
“Home.” She clutches him closer. “He needed time to think.”
“Ah.” His arms are steel bands around her and she closes her eyes. “Yeah, that figures. He’s such an old man sometimes. Was that him you were dancing with earlier? I didn’t know he could dance like that.”
She makes a noncommittal mmm noise, and he pulls back to look at her. “Everything okay?”
“Sure.”
“He’s not mad?”
She tries to think of a way to phrase it that won’t rile things up. “He was...thrown, I think. I told him the ball was in his court. You can’t bring it up, though. I told him we wouldn’t push.”
“Sure. Right. I wouldn’t push anyway. Hey, you okay?”
“Yes.” She takes a deep breath. “Happy birthday. You ready to open the presents?”
“Uh, yeah?” He’s grinning when he pulls away, and she has a smile ready for him by then. “Bring it on.”
The gifts are expensive, as befits the assembled group: a fancy guitar from the studio, a blender from one of the session musicians that Hyde uses fairly regularly—part of an in-joke that she doesn’t get—assorted random things from other musicians and pals that will likely end up at Goodwill in a year or two when they renovate or move. There’s the new grill from Anya, one that has more dials and special settings and is supposedly less likely to catch their house on fire. Zac gets excited about it to a satisfying degree. He does love dials.
And from Cal, there’s a scrap of red fabric in a tiny box.
For a moment, Zac stares at it. She thinks he’s perplexed at first—Lord knows she is—but then she realizes that he’s fighting back tears.
“I can’t believe he remembered,” Zac whispers.
“What is it?”
“Jesus. Has it been that long?” He lifts the small square of fabric out, holds it in one hand, thumb stroking. She touches one end. It feels like silk, liquid in her fingertips.
“Zac, baby. What is it?”
He turns to her, shutting out the photographer and other partygoers with his body. “Later,” he promises, clearing his throat. “Not here. I’ll lose it. I can’t—”
“All right,” she murmurs. “All right.” She turns to the assemblage and claps her hands, putting on a British accent like their manager’s got. “Who’s ready for cake, you daft bastards?”
A cheer goes up, and Zac squeezes her hip in gratitude for the distraction, and she thinks again fuck Cal, because she and Zac are two halves to a whole, and she won’t let his doubts get inside her head.
* * *
In bed that night, Zac tells her: “Back when we were getting started, we got drunk one night together on this shitty whiskey. We couldn’t have been more than—” He turns his head so that his mouth brushes her temple, chuckles a little. “It wasn’t my birthday, but it would’ve been roughly twenty years ago. I would’ve been nineteen, maybe almost twenty. He was a bit younger. We’d been scrambling to play these terrible shows for almost a year at that point, and it was kind of rocky going. I think I told you that we weren’t close in the beginning, that I didn’t know him until he came to a mutual friend’s gig looking for a singer. I didn’t think we’d get along at first—he was even more uptight back then, and I was even more...well, me.”
“That says it all.”
“Anyway, we’d just gotten fired from one of the few clubs that would reliably hire us, and we were both depressed and pissed off and halfway to hammered. We were talking about our chances of ever breaking out. Like, how big was big enough, and when would we know we’d done it. If we’d ever do it at all, you know? I said something stupid, like, well, in twenty years, if we haven’t made it, we’ll give up. He got kind of upset then. He’s so hard on himself. He hates the idea of failure. I wanted to cheer him up, so when he asked what I’d do after, if I’d go travel around the world on my own, I was like, fuck no, pathetic fools who don’t make it big all have to go work at, I don’t know, fucking Dairy Queen or something. I don’t remember the place I said, but I remember that he didn’t laugh. I’d meant it to be funny, but he didn’t laugh. He just asked if he had to go work there too and I was like, fuck yeah, if I have to go, you have to go. Which—I don’t know why that finally cheered him up, but whatever.”
Anya has her suspicions. Suspicions that have a heavy unease rolling over in her stomach.
“He asked how we’d know if we’d made it, and I said, duh, obviously, it meant we’d be rich. And he—well, you know how he is, and he wanted, like, a value. I think he even said something about inflation dollars because all of his jokes are dad jokes, so I said we’d be able to afford whatever bullshit we wanted, even if the dollar crashed and people were using it as toilet paper. I said the most lavish damn thing I could think of. The most useless, extravagant, stupid thing anyone could ever spend a fuckton of money on. I said that we’d know we made it if we could buy silk pocket squares. It was random, you know? I didn’t want one. I still don’t. I guess I thought only really rich and successful people had them. We were eating ramen and mac and cheese for every meal. Silk pocket squares seemed like a wasteful thing to spend a lot of money on. But it would mean we made it. And he remembered.”
Zac’s eyes are wide and soft and stunned, and he’s crying. A few small tears, tracing down the faint crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. She’s only seen him cry a handful of times before—on the beach where he swore he would love her forever, when she showed him the pregnancy test with the little plus on it, when she handed him his son.
After he’s asleep, she lies there thinking about the argument she had with Cal, the way he said but you’re married, the way he said fuck you for thinking I’d ever do this to him, the way Cal remembered, even twenty years later, a teenage boy’s promise that if their dream collapsed, they’d still be together.
“Fuck,” she whispers into the da
rk.
* * *
“He’s never given me shit for having threesomes before,” Zac says the next morning over eggs.
Anya doesn’t lie to her husband. He asked what happened between her and Cal and she repeated every single word she could remember. Now his shoulders are tight, his expression perplexed.
“I don’t know that it was the threesome thing. I think it’s more the threesome-while-we’re-married thing.”
“But—how is that—I mean.” He stares down at his fork, bewildered. “I mean, that part’s not even his business.”
“You’re telling me,” she mutters. PJ starts fussing in his chair, finished with his own meal, and she wipes his face before she unstraps him. “There you go, little man. Free as a bird.”
“I thought he’d say no, but—” Zac taps his fork against his eggs, sending tiny spatters of salsa all over the table. “I didn’t think he’d be judgmental about it. He’s—he’s never cared before. Seriously, I once fucked two girls in the same room as him—I mean, he got up after a few minutes and left, after he was done being all shocked and Nebraskan, but he wasn’t mad after. He just shook his head and gave me a beer and reminded me to use condoms so I wouldn’t get the clap.” Zac glances at Anya, and hastily adds, “I already was. I swear.”
“I know you don’t have the clap. And I already know you’re a slut, shut up.”
He smiles, but it’s weak and falls off his face quickly. “I just—I figured he’d say no, but I never would’ve let you ask him if I thought he’d be offended. I don’t want him to feel bad.”
“I know, baby.” She thinks of the pocket square, thinks about asking if Zac has ever had reason to suspect that Cal has feelings for him. Decides not to. It’ll only make everything even more complicated. “I know. But when you call to thank him for the present, be cool. Make it clear that you’re not going to ask or push. It’ll be fine. Cal’s a reasonable guy. He’ll come around.”