She wishes she could stay angry. Anger is an easy emotion. Instead, she’s sitting here feeling small and hurt at the idea that she’s lost the burgeoning friendship she’s been developing with Cal.
She thought she didn’t like him. Maybe, for a long time, she didn’t. But that time is clearly over.
It’s a good thing Zac is in his home studio. He would feel guilty on top of everything else if he saw her tears.
* * *
For the following week, Zac is moody and snappish. It makes sense to her at first, because Zac is about as naturally moody as it’s possible for a man to be, and she learned a long time ago not to take it personally. Rather than exhaust herself trying to cheer him up when he prefers to pout, she usually makes herself scarce until he gets it out of his system, at which point he’ll wander up to her and push his face into her hair and mutter apologies.
But this bad mood sticks around for days, and it’s accompanied by pensive silences and long, irritated glances at his phone and his obvious and fierce desire to pretend that the entire world doesn’t exist. Maybe it would be different if she wasn’t also sad and missing Cal, maybe she could be the rock that Zac’s stormy ocean breaks against, but she’s feeling too worn down to stomach it.
It doesn’t help that Zac’s giving what few smiles he has to PJ, and none to her.
They reach a breaking point two weeks to the day after his birthday.
It’s Saturday evening, and Zac’s spent most of the day pacing the house like a caged tiger, complaining about how there’s not enough food in the fridge, the air conditioner isn’t keeping up with the summer heat, the baseball game is delayed. He doesn’t even watch baseball.
“Why don’t we go out for dinner?” Anya suggests finally.
“And get swamped by fans every five minutes? I hate going out.”
“You do not. You like seeing your fans.” It’s why she suggested it. Hoping that some uncomplicated adulation from someone who isn’t tired of his petulance might cheer him up.
“I hate going out. We can have whatever you want, I don’t want to deal with it tonight. I’m not hungry yet anyway.”
“Fine,” she says, knowing he’s got to be lying because it’s already after their usual mealtime—they usually eat around six or six-thirty, giving themselves plenty of time to get PJ fed and bathed before he goes to bed by eight. She watches him stalk out of the room like a sulky child. “Well, I’ll do everything myself, then, that’s fine too.”
PJ has a crease between his baby-fine eyebrows at the tension in the room. She soothes him with kisses and murmurs, “Everything is fine, little man, your daddy’s just being a whiner, ignore him, it’s fine.” She nuzzles him, making him giggle. “Let’s get some dinner into you.”
So she feeds PJ alone in the kitchen, and then plops him in the plastic baby bathtub. He takes the opportunity to remind her that he is his father’s son, despite his usually sunny demeanor. He always gets so squirrely and whiny when she bathes him and she doesn’t know why. She does exactly the same things that Zac does. She’s watched him, trying to learn Zac’s secrets, and gotten a giant zero for the effort—it’s simply a fact by this point. It’s worse than usual today. He might be picking up on her stress, and she tries to relax, but nothing seems to help. PJ’s crying hard by the time she’s done putting on his lotion, and she’s not far off from it either. She knows babies get upset, that no one is permanently damaged by getting cranky about bath time, but she can’t help feeling guilty, like she’s doing something wrong.
It takes forever to get him to sleep.
By the time she does, it’s almost nine and she’s hangry beyond belief.
Unfortunately, Zac was right about the fridge being bare. She has no intention of going out to the store on a Saturday night when she’s already frazzled and in her house clothes, because she would probably end up throwing a fit in one of the aisles and all she needs is some random person putting video of it up on the internet. She decides to make Alfredo—box pasta and jar sauce. It’ll trash her diet, but Zac likes it so maybe that’ll help him calm down.
She snacks on cheese sticks while she prepares things, hoping that’ll help calm her down.
Then he wanders in while she’s heating the sauce, coming to stand beside her, and says, “I don’t like Alfredo.”
And that is it.
She gives him the nastiest face she has in her repertoire. “Look, I know you’re pissed off and hurt that Cal’s being a child and avoiding you instead of putting out, but that’s not my fault, so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop taking it out on me and grow the fuck up.”
Never let it be said that Anya Elizabeth Alexander doesn’t know how to sum up a complex idea into one cutting sentence.
For a moment, Zac just stares at her. Then he says, “It is your fault.”
She taps the stirring spoon on the edge of the pot, a little harder than she needs to. “How the hell do you figure?”
“You brought it up!” Zac shouts.
“Seriously?” Anya asks. “Because asking a grown man a few questions about his relationship with his best friend is the same thing as taking all responsibility for every following thought and feeling that occurs in his brain?”
He glares at her. “I wasn’t thinking about him that way until you brought it up. I was fine.”
“You could have said no at any point,” she snaps, leaving alone his outrageous lie that he hadn’t thought about Cal that way. “And don’t act like I’m the only one who pushed this forward. I’m not the one who talked about Cal going down on me while we fucked. You said okay. I asked you several times if you wanted this. You said okay.”
Zac flushes a dull red. “You opened the box! That never would’ve happened if you hadn’t asked me about it in the first place. Now I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s driving me nuts, and I didn’t even know I wanted it until you did this, but I do and I can’t have it, and it’s all your fault, why the hell did you have to be so—”
In a low voice, she says, “Red light, Zac.”
His mouth slams closed, and he turns to stare furiously at the wall. Red light is their conversational safe word, their code for this is about to hurt me or anger me to the point where damage is done, so think. Pause and think. It’s part of their oldest rule, the one they came up with in Paris, when they were both fucked out and sore and afraid of what they’d unleashed on each other, what they’d brought out of each other. We’re both hotheaded, Zac said, back in that trashed hotel bed. We need a way to defuse each other before we get to this. He gestured at the room around them, and then at their own sweaty bodies.