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.