Zac finally pulls away, gaze slumberous and dazed, and his thumb strokes a stray bit of wetness away from Cal’s lip, and Cal shivers under the touch.
“What are we doing?” Cal asks stupidly. “I don’t know how—what do we do next?”
Zac seems every bit as stunned. He doesn’t say anything. They sit there staring at each other for a long minute.
“Let’s make cookies,” Anya says.
* * *
It’s a bizarrely normal Sunday after that.
They have to clean up first, and it’s so weird how not-weird it is, showering and dressing together. Anya wants to do something to her hair after, so they leave her to the steamy bathroom and head for the kitchen. Cal washes his hands (ignoring their trembling), and then turns to find Zac standing in front of the open pantry door. He’s staring at Cal rather than searching for ingredients, though. It makes Cal’s skin too tight. Cal knows where they keep their pans, and he pulls out a cookie sheet in self-defense, anything to distract himself from what’s happening inside him.
“Wax paper,” Zac mutters, handing over the roll, and then he leans in and kisses Cal. It’s every bit as bossy and demanding and sloppy as the kiss in the living room. Cal fucking loves it, and he finds himself meeting Zac head on, putting his arms around Zac, clinging, getting hard again. He hasn’t come three times in one day since he discovered what his dick was for. He isn’t sure he could manage it, but his libido is more than willing to give it a shot. It’s bewildering, this heat, this need. It’s like his body’s become a stranger. They kiss and Zac presses him against the counter, grinding against him. Cal has his hands on the bare skin of Zac’s back now, finds muscle and sweat and the vulnerable curve of a spine under his T-shirt and it’s ridiculous how hot that gets him. Cal has always found the idea of kitchen sex vaguely off-putting and unhygienic, but he’s not sure he cares right now. He might let Zac do anything, and from the way Zac’s kissing him, he thinks Zac might want to do any number of things.
At least, until the sound of PJ crying splits them up. Zac pulls away gasping. “Shit. Naptime’s over.”
“Yeah.” Cal can’t make his fingers unwind from Zac’s shirt, so Zac eases them free with a knowing grin before stepping away.
“I gotta—” Zac jerks a thumb toward the stairs. “You should make me some cookies, motherfucker.”
“Rude,” Cal manages, but Zac only grins wider and turns to go. He pauses in the doorway to adjust himself, and Cal thinks, I did that, I got him hard.
He washes his hands again (ignoring their trembling again) and starts searching for a mixing bowl.
Zac’s back with PJ in only a minute, the baby red-faced and in tiny footie pajamas with a skull on the front. He stops crying when he sees Cal, which does wonderful things to his heart, and Zac passes PJ over with a smile.
“Hey, little man,” Cal says, and PJ grabs his hair in hello.
They make cookies like that, stealing tiny kisses that can’t go anywhere with their toddler chaperone there between them. Anya joins them after a while and adds way too many chocolate chips to the batter, arguing with Zac about how many chips there should be and why it won’t ruin the cookies and could he please stop backseat cookie-making? Cal sides with Anya about the chips, and Zac glares at them in openmouthed outrage for violating some arcane rule about the ratio of dough to chip that only he knows. Zac ends up wiping dough on her face and she kicks at him and he kisses her throat loudly, giving her a raspberry that makes her squeal, and when Cal laughs, Zac throws a handful of chocolate chips at him, making PJ laugh too and it’s...
It’s everything he hadn’t realized he was missing.
They eat steaming cookies standing at the counter, burning their fingers, soothing their sore tongues on glasses of milk, talking about a million different things, all of it the sort of boring, everyday stuff that people talk about when they share lives.
And for a little while, Cal forgets that eventually it’s going to end.
* * *
Cal doesn’t leave. For the first week, it makes sense. It’s important to his recovery. He needs his routine, but he doesn’t trust that he can maintain it without supervision. So he sleeps in the big bed with Anya in the middle, and gets up to run with the morning dark still painting the drowsy neighborhood streets. Zac and Anya are both heavy sleepers; the soft chime of his phone never makes them so much as stir. Zac’s lazy about exercise, rarely doing more than is required to stay in shape for long hours spent strutting around a stage under hot lights. Anya is much more rigorous, but she prefers afternoon Pilates to pre-dawn running and has zero motivation to get up early to work out with Cal. He’s relieved to still have his quiet time alone in the mornings to brace himself for the day. One of them is usually up with PJ by the time he returns, but he doesn’t mind actual noise by then.
Whichever one of them is awake pours him his shot in the morning and then puts the tequila back in its hiding spot. Zac likes to sit on the far side of the table out of Cal’s way, offering silent support while he fiddles on his phone and knuckles sleep out of his eyes. Anya will plunk the baby down right next to him and Cal likes that too, likes that she doesn’t feel like Cal and his complicated recovery processes are things that should be shamefully avoided or hidden. And there’s something reassuring about looking up from the shot glass into PJ’s chubby face. PJ doesn’t care about his messy humanity; he loves Cal just as he is and sometimes, on the hardest mornings, that love is the main reason why the tequila goes down the drain.
Whoever didn’t get up with the baby eventually migrates into the kitchen and the real morning begins—breakfasts cooked and consumed, coffee made, PJ fed and cleaned up, the nanny arriving, all of them jostling in the bathroom to brush teeth before they run out to meetings or disappear into their own corners of the house—Anya to her darkroom or a shoot, maybe, and Cal and Zac to Zac’s studio.
That’s another thing that makes sense: the time that Zac and Cal share in the studio.
The thing is, while they’ve grown closer in countless ways over the years, in one way, they’ve actually grown apart. Once they were no longer roommates, the synchronous magic of songwriting became a more isolated event, with Cal giving Zac assignments about solos here and there but doing everything else alone. It’s not until they’re together in the studio once again that it all floods back, those early days when Zac lived in Cal’s pocket, lifting his eyebrows, pursing his lips, wrinkling his nose, always pushing Cal to dig deeper, to be better.
Maybe this is why Zac began thinking he’s only a front man. Maybe this accidental exclusion made him think he didn’t have anything else to offer.
It feels like the old days now, sitting side by side, Cal with his bass in his lap, Zac with his guitar in his, both of them picking out riffs and arguing and making faces when their fingers can’t reproduce what they hear in their heads. A memory suddenly hits Cal hard: the way Zac would stand at Cal’s counter at the old house in Boyle Heights, making sandwiches on cheap bread with cheaper mayo, pushing pieces of cheese and deli meat into his mouth while humming the notes they’d written that morning, one skinny hip dipping to the beat, laughing with his mouth full and wide open when Cal told him to put his dishes in the sink instead of on the floor.