“Yeah. Probably.” Cal hesitates. “What are you going to tell Anya?”
“Nothing. You’re going to tell her yourself. When we get back.”
Cal’s gut clenches.
* * *
Cal waits outside in the car while Zac cleans up the mess. It takes a good hour, during which time Cal plays on his phone and tries to avoid going nuts.
Zac finally walks out with a trash bag in one hand that he drops in the big Rubbermaid can at the end of Cal’s driveway. “Come take a look.” He jerks a thumb toward the house. “Make sure I got everything.”
Cal braces himself in the entryway, but the house reeks of lemon cleanser, not tequila. The cabinet doors—driftwood-gray—are damp, but there’s no sign of a stain. The broom’s leaning against the fridge, the yellow fronds dust-bunny free and clean. Zac even washed the dustpan that he’d used to sweep up the wet glass. The shot glass has been either hidden or trashed. Cal doesn’t feel up to asking which it is.
“Does it pass go?” Zac asks.
“Yeah. Thanks. You did a great job.”
Zac preens a little, and Cal’s bowled over by overwhelming fondness and profound gratitude that this man is in his life. It’s hard to imagine putting it into words. Even after years of being overcome by how charming and giving Zac can be, Cal still finds it easier to buy Zac something silly or to take him to play mini-golf. Despite being a nearly forty-year-old man who wears a lot of leather, Zac has an unassailable love of mini-golf.
Half of their fight this morning was about how Cal needs to open up, though. Maybe he should try to explain that moments like this—the loyal, protective impulses that hide under Zac’s rough exterior—are a huge part of the reason that Cal loves him. Or...or maybe Cal could kiss him. His stomach goes liquid and hot at the thought, although his mind immediately rebels from it. It’s weird without Anya here to bridge the gap between what Cal and Zac used to be and what they are now. Whatever that is.
In the end, he stands there stupidly with his mouth closed.
“Good, good, good.” Zac fidgets in front of the sink, one long-fingered hand fiddling with the hot water tap. “Uh, can I ask what set all this off in the first place? The temptation to drink, I mean. You said it’s been a few weeks now that you’ve been feeling it.”
“Stress, I guess.” Cal goes to the fridge and pulls out a bowl of already-washed grapes, just to have something to do. He puts it on the counter and nudges it toward Zac.
Zac takes a few and pops them in his mouth. “Specifically which stress, though?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things. The album’s shit, you know.”
“It’s not,” Zac says, rote, taking more grapes. “Fuck it, though, I know you’re not going to agree with me. The world could give you a million awards and you’d say the voting public was full of idiots.”
Cal smiles. “Maybe.”
“But it’s been whatever it is for months now. There’s gotta be more than that. Did it get worse or something? Or is it, like, a combination of shit? Is it, you know, a fraction?” He takes a few more grapes and pushes the bowl over. “Eat some of these, huh? I feel weird being the only one eating.”
Cal takes a handful. “What do you want, a percentage? It’s 27% the album?”
Zac exhales hard, a frustrated noise coming with it. “I can only think of one big change lately that might’ve tipped you over, man, and I think it’s pretty obvious that I’d really like you to tell me that me and Anya didn’t break you. So if you could do that, that’d be great.”
“Oh.” Cal frowns. “I didn’t—”
“You don’t have to lie,” Zac interrupts, holding a hand out, all stop, wait. “That sounded like I wanted you to lie. If we broke you, you can say. Just...don’t. Be broken or anything.”
“I’m not broken.” Cal eats more grapes, a big, rude handful, so his mouth is busy and he has time to think of something to say. “It’s the nature of any recovery. There are setbacks when times get hard.”
“So we’re making it hard?” Then Zac blinks and adds, “That’s what she said.”
“Come on, that one’s too easy.”
“Don’t be judgmental. She did say it.”
“If you say so. Look, lusting after my best friend’s wife made me feel like an asshole. It’s not like it occurred to me that you wouldn’t mind. And then Anya said what she did and I... I don’t know. Would you say the past two weeks were fun for you? Or that last night wasn’t stressful?”
Zac laughs. “Sex isn’t stressful.”
“Maybe not the way you do it.”
“It’s true, I don’t have the Empire State Building hanging off my groin, so, yeah, I could see how that would be trickier.”
Cal can feel himself turning red, because juvenile as the joke had been, Zac is talking about his dick. And sure, Zac has talked about dicks as much as any other guy might over the course of a twenty-year friendship, but it’s different now. He knows what Cal’s looks like, what Cal does in bed. It’s not only embarrassment making him feel hot and flustered. He wonders if Zac’s been thinking about Cal’s dick and how big he is. If Zac might be more or less interested now that he knows.
“It’s not—it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Cal says. Which is an understatement. There are the obvious drawbacks—he’s never had a quickie in his life and the number of blow jobs he’s received can be counted on one hand—but it’s the other things that’ve left more of a mark over the years. It’s not so bad now that he’s more familiar with how women’s bodies work, but through his teens and early twenties, his size was a real problem in his relationships. He and Sharon, for instance, lost their virginities together, and since they were both idiot teenagers who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, he ended up hurting her without meaning to. Having his first girlfriend burst into tears beneath him kind of messed him up for a while. There were a few women who slept with him once only to apologetically break up with him afterward because their bodies simply weren’t compatible. He suspects that he knows more about the sensitivities of the average cervix than most men.
Cal maybe has some issues with his size.
Zac raises a doubtful eyebrow. “Porn wouldn’t lie to me, Cal.”
Cal decides Zac is joking. He really hopes Zac is joking. “Uh. Okay.”
Zac laughs again, this time more at him than near him, so Cal shrugs and turns away, taking the bowl of grapes back to the fridge. But then the laughter trails off, and Zac asks, “Seriously, though. Was it us? Did we do this to you?”