by Sidney Bell
After some reconsideration, Cal called Zac at seven a.m. the next morning and invited him to an audition. He figured if Zac was willing to drag himself out of bed and across town with a bad hangover that early, it meant he took the opportunity seriously. Zac showed up at Cal’s buddy’s place an hour later on a bicycle in a dirty T-shirt, his hipbones peeking out above low-slung jeans. He’d gotten off his bike, walked past Cal into the house, found the bathroom, puked loudly, pawed through the medicine cabinet for mouthwash, and then returned to the garage where, without a further word of greeting, he started singing. He didn’t have a tape or music or anything; he just started a cappella with Tool’s “Eulogy.” Despite the circumstances, he was flawlessly on pitch—including the ten-second hold at the end, tricky for a guy with Zac’s range. He growled his way through Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, managed to make Coil’s “Love’s Secret Domain” sound even filthier than it already is, and then finished up with a haunting rendition of Nine Inch Nails’s “Something I Can Never Have.”
Cal didn’t cry, but he was tempted to, especially during that last one. Even rough and untutored, that dark baritone sent chills up his back. This one, Cal’s instincts whispered. He’s the one.
Hyde started like most bands do—in a garage. Zac was nineteen then, and living with his parents in the house he’d grown up in. Cal was about eleven months younger (although several decades more mature). They recorded their first demo with their sound waves reflecting off a concrete floor.
Cal had roommates at first, like pretty much every young, starving artist in LA. Then, a handful of months after they decided to make a go of it together, Zac’s relationship with his mother imploded and Zac showed up on Cal’s porch at three in the morning.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said, trembling and red-eyed, his lashes damp and spiky. Cal gave him the couch and a key, already questioning whether the forced proximity would cause enough friction to kill the band before it really started. Instead, through some amorphous magic Cal hadn’t known could exist in the world, they became irrevocably connected under the skin.
Cal was attracted to him from the beginning, but Zac’s sloppy brand of living made that easy to ignore. Cal’s other feelings for Zac were harder to put aside. He didn’t always like Zac, who was too chaotic, too loud, too argumentative to mesh well with how reserved and driven Cal was when he first arrived in California. But Zac was also full of sly humor, easy generosity and vehement loyalty, and those good traits slowly grew to outweigh the bad. It helped that Zac didn’t behave as though the attraction was returned; that one drunk, messy kiss was never repeated.
When one of the roommates moved on, Zac officially moved in, and Cal woke up one day with the knowledge that he’d acquired not only a creative partner, but a friend.
Around that time, Hyde began to get paid half-decent wages for local gigs and started selling rough cuts of their songs on tapes after their shows. Eventually the income was enough of a supplement to their day-job salaries that they could afford to leave Cal’s other roommates behind. They rented a tiny, dilapidated house solely because the garage was in good shape and one side of the house abutted an empty lot. Cal figured that half as many neighbors meant half as many calls to the cops for noise complaints.
That was the beginning of the end for Cal. Living alone with Zac stripped their relationship of all insulation and distraction, and underneath, Cal found something pure and wild and inescapably good. He fell hard and he fell permanently.
It feels like those early days again, rolling into work in jeans and bare feet, still chomping on breakfast while they tune their instruments, and if it isn’t quite as exciting as it was in the beginning, they’ve replaced that newness with a kind of certainty. They know what they can do now. They know what they are to each other.
Musically, anyway.
They’re still not making much progress with the album—Cal’s every bit as locked up in Zac’s presence as he was before—but Cal doesn’t mind so much anymore. There are worse things than spinning his wheels with Zac peering over his shoulder and complaining.
* * *
Cal worries that he’ll overstay his welcome in the big gray house at first, but Zac seems thrilled to have him there. He’s constantly on Cal’s heels, running his mouth about a dozen stupid things, about some movie he saw that he hated, or about a guitar lick that he doesn’t like, or about how he’s worried that PJ’s going to take his first steps while Anya’s not home, because she’ll never forgive herself, even if Zac keeps reminding her that they decided it was important for PJ to see both of his parents prioritizing her career so that he’ll grow up to be the kind of man who’ll value the work of women.
For her part, Anya seems every bit as happy to have him stay. She lifts her face for kisses and pushes Cal’s head between her thighs and sighs his name and tells him how pretty his mouth is and that he should go get PJ when he cries. She strokes his hair when he’s on the couch beside her and puts her feet in his lap to demand foot rubs and never once says a word to make him think she’s ready for some space.
Which isn’t to suggest that it’s all easy. It’s hard to fit a third adult into a preexisting family life, whether that third adult’s presence is temporary or not, and everyone already has their own routines and preferences. In the places where they don’t dovetail, they negotiate. The process is made easier by Anya’s forthrightness—she’s good at making sure everyone’s being honest about what they want or need. Zac’s familiarity with Cal’s preferences helps too, because half the time he can guess what Cal needs before Cal’s forced to voice it. Between the two of them, they smooth over most of the bumps in the road for him, and he can’t help liking it. He likes it a lot.
But there are a few land mines that neither Zac nor Anya anticipate.
One night while they’re out at a restaurant, Anya points to a good-looking guy and elbows Zac as if to say check him out, and Cal almost chokes on his tongue. He doesn’t say anything, wouldn’t know how even if he had the right, but he can’t control his face. Zac’s oblivious at first, but Anya catches on. She studies him and he tries not to fidget and Zac glances between the two of them as the tension builds, lost as to the reason, until Anya says softly, “I suppose that feels like cheating to you.”
Cal licks his lips. He knows what he should say. He can only imagine how much more quickly this will get stale for them if they aren’t allowed to—assuming they would even agree—but she’s not wrong. It makes his stomach sick, the very idea of them looking elsewhere. He’s not Zac. He can’t share her with a stranger. He can’t share Zac with a stranger either.
He focuses on where his hands have turned into fists in his lap beneath the table. The haze of background conversation from the other diners seems to fade. Even PJ’s babble feels far away. Cal doesn’t want to be this insecure, jealous asshole, but he can’t help it. He can’t help how it feels to know he’s not enough. Will never be enough.
Zac and Anya are having one of those conversations made up entirely from facial expressions. They’re so married, so capable of silent communication, and it’s hard not to feel excluded. Not only excluded from what they’re saying, but from the way they say it. He has something like it with Zac in a friendship sense, but not to this degree.
“We’re serious,” Zac says finally, tentatively. “Sorry, man. It’s just...”
“Habit,” Anya chips in. “I apologize, Cal.”
“It’s fine,” he manages to bite out.
“It’s not.” She puts her hand on the table, making grabby fingers until he relents and takes it in his own, lets her soothe him with a gentle thumb stroking over his knuckles. “We didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I can’t ask you to be different people,” he says, miserable down to his boot soles. “I know you’ll notice other men. It’s not fair to ask you to pretend you don’t.”
“You’re not asking us to
pretend,” she says. “You’re asking us to remember what will hurt you and to respect it. Well, actually you’re not asking, you’re burying it and deflecting, but still. I can do that. Zac?”
“Yeah, me too.”
“It’s not—” Cal starts, but Anya squeezes his fingers hard enough to make him wince.
“Did you know I used to smoke? Since I was seventeen. I liked smoking. A lot, actually. But it drove Zac nuts. So I quit. Because it was a reasonable request and I wanted to be with him more than I wanted to smoke. This will be easier to quit than nicotine, Cal. Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh my God, it was so gross,” Zac says. “You were like a fucking chimney back then.”
She sneers in his direction. “Look, smart-ass, it’s an appetite suppressant and I was a model. Don’t begrudge the amount of work it takes to manage your diet to that degree all the damn time. I was lucky to get away without an eating disorder.”
“Your face is a disorder,” he says, and the subject of Anya and Zac politely agreeing not to look at other men in Cal’s presence gets sidelined in favor of bickering.
Cal slowly exhales. He hates that he’s putting them through this, hates that he’s bringing upheaval and compromise to their lives simply because he needs help staying away from the bottle. Still, the pleasure of being here, of being able to borrow this...this family...helps make up for any amount of guilt or discomfort.
But for the most part, the little temporary adjustments aren’t that fraught.
They figure out what everyone likes to eat and how everyone likes to sleep. They debate food tastes and Anya stops putting green peppers in things. They spend an awkward afternoon getting tested for STDs so Cal can ditch the condoms. He’s never had sex without a condom before, and he develops a real appreciation for IUDs. Whatever they are. Anya only makes it about ten seconds into an explanation before she breaks off to laugh at whatever face he’s making.
It’s all surprisingly normal. And nice.
So then he just...doesn’t leave.
* * *
“We should set the whole album on fire,” Cal tells Zac one day, past all patience with the damn thing. “Start over. Or do something else entirely. We could quit being musicians and go do something else. Explore the world. Climb a mountain. Feed ourselves through the strength of our bodies alone.”
“I’m not going to be a Sherpa to save you from revision.” Zac throws a pen at Cal’s head. “Stop whining and get back to work.”
With a sigh and a half-hidden smile, Cal stops whining and gets back to work.
* * *
The one drawback is that Zac and Cal aren’t—they’re not—they’re not.
Okay, yes, the dam has partially broken. Zac kisses him all the time, and Cal kisses back. Sometimes they’ll kiss until their mouths are sore, until they’re rubbing their hips together while one of them pushes the other against the fridge or the wall or down onto the couch.
But that’s as far as it goes. Neither of them makes the other come—they might be aching in their jeans, sweaty and needy and disheveled, but they always wait for Anya. They don’t talk about why. There’s some fundamental step in this staircase missing if she’s not there, one they don’t know how to skip over without her.
When they do all end up in the big bed together, it’s inevitably Cal and Anya first and then Zac and Anya afterward. Cal and Zac kiss constantly in bed, and they bump bare legs and bare shoulders, but that’s it. It’s bizarrely placed, this line between them, and it formed without words, and Cal can’t help thinking it’s a sign of something ugly brewing underneath, but that doesn’t mean he has the guts to bring it up.
So while Cal and Anya are lovers, and Zac and Anya are husband and wife, Cal and Zac are something else. It feels sort of like being a teenager again, when you’re in a relationship where neither of you is ready to “do it” yet, and so you spend all your time making out. It’s just that Cal and Zac are fumbling teenagers who both happen to be grown men who are fucking the same gorgeous woman every night. They’re each fucking Anya separately too—she destroys Cal on the guest room bed across from the laundry room while Zac is with PJ at the grocery store, and once when Cal comes back from a meeting with his agent about an endorsement contact, he finds them both freshly fucked out on the living room floor, grinning and holding hands.
He doesn’t feel jealous, not the way he did in the restaurant while they looked at another man. They’re so damn happy to be together. He wants that happiness for them. Cal has an element of it with Anya, just the two of them. He wishes he could find it with Zac too.
Yes, bizarre is the word for it.
He keeps waiting for them to tell him to go. He begins to hold his breath in the evenings as he’s doing the dishes, worried that they’re about to ask, wondering if he should offer. But inevitably, before he can open his mouth, Anya’s there to take his hand in hers and draw him to the couch to put on a movie or Zac asks if Cal needs to do laundry because they have half of a load ready to go, and Cal exhales into the next twenty-four hours.
Zac and Anya aren’t homebodies the way Cal is. They aren’t partying every night anymore, not since PJ came, but they like restaurants and the park and going to specialty food stores on their days off, the baby wrapped up in black T-shirts with devil horns on them, big-eyed in his stroller.
They go to Elysian Park early one Saturday morning, driving all the way up to Angels Point. Cal’s never been up here before, and the view is stunning, the whole city spread out before them. There’s a playground nearby, and he and Zac pass a satisfying two hours bullshitting and guiding PJ over the equipment while Anya takes pictures of high rises and Dodger Stadium before the sun washes all the softness from the sky.
On another weekend, Zac drags them all to the museum. He’s a big fan of interactive science exhibits, but what he really loves are the dinosaurs. He can stand and stare for hours, more patient than he is in any other place or time. If Zac hadn’t been gifted with that voice, Cal suspects he would’ve been a paleontologist. Cal also suspects Zac secretly grieves that he’ll never have a velociraptor for a pet.
They ease into a third week, and a fourth, and then a weekend comes when there’s absolutely nothing scheduled. Cal thinks they must be about to tell him to go home for five damn minutes at least, but then Anya mentions antiquing, which is something Cal has never done. When he says so, she freaks out, and it turns out that what he must do has nothing to do with going home and everything to do with picking through other people’s decrepit, smelly, abandoned old furniture.
He’s not incredibly tempted by the idea. Anya makes it sound interesting, though, bringing up the history implicit in the pieces they already own, and he likes that part well enough. On that Saturday, she bundles everyone into the car with travel mugs of hot coffee (or sippy cups full of milk, to each his own) and packs PJ’s bag. Zac drives, easy behind the wheel, aiming smiles into the back seat where his wife and son are sitting, and halfway to Mid-City, he gestures at something outside and then puts his hand down on Cal’s thigh. It makes him jolt, but he doesn’t say anything, because Zac’s thumb is stroking, so he—obviously, he knows. He hasn’t accidentally groped his best friend. It’s—it’s the way he touches Anya. A relationship touch. Casually possessive, like it’s second nature to him to assume he can, that he won’t be rebuffed. He’s not wrong.
Cal wouldn’t say no. Couldn’t.
He can feel himself turning red. He has to clear his throat. He likes it so much, so very much that he doesn’t know how to accept it. Zac keeps taking sly glances at him, and his gaze is equal parts tender and amused at Cal’s discomfort. But he’s kind enough to talk to Anya about the sideboard she’s determined to hunt down for the foyer, and that gives Cal time to pull himself together.
They stop at two stores before they find a place that meets Anya’s standards. It’s a big place, but so crammed full of towers of
stuff that it seems small. Cal would’ve thought half this junk belonged at a flea market—or a dump, if he’s honest.
Zac and Anya pick through piles as if they’re trying to unearth buried treasure. Zac wants a rusted tin sign with a hand-drawn illustration of a woman posing in a skimpy red bikini with the nonsensical slogan Buy American beneath her feet. The empty space above the words has a few gunshot holes in it, and it’s the weirdest thing Cal’s ever seen in a store, but it’s only four dollars, so it goes in the cart. Anya doesn’t find a sideboard, but she does find a rocking chair that makes her face go soft when she sits in it with PJ in her arms, and Zac tells the shop owner that they’ll take it before Anya has a chance to open her mouth. They push Cal into finding something he wants too. He doesn’t know how to say that he’s already got everything he wants, everything, except for the part where it’s temporary, and he can’t buy permanence in an antique shop.
He wanders away from them while they’re debating which antique shop to visit next, and finds a mahogany dresser in the back of the store. On top is a small, burnished golden tray littered with empty perfume bottles—short and tall, narrow and squat, some with little bulbs on or button tops. A pretty filigree one in the back has got something vaguely of the 1920s about it, making it a hundred years old if he’s right, and it’s graceful and sexy and fascinating. It’s months yet until her birthday, but it screams Anya so he palms it and takes it to the counter without thinking about what he’s doing. He puts a finger to his mouth to keep the shop owner quiet and buys it quickly for too much money because he doesn’t have time to haggle. By the time Anya and Zac are done arguing, the little bottle is wrapped in foam and tucked into a box inside a small bag.