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.