It isn’t too much longer before Zac is making these soft, pleading noises every time she thrusts. Anya says Cal’s name, gentle, ordering, and Cal realizes that Anya’s getting close again, that Zac can’t get there untouched, that Cal needs to help.
He extricates himself from Zac’s arms, and when Zac protests wordlessly, he whispers, “Hey, hey, easy, let me help. I’m gonna help.” He bends forward and takes Zac in his mouth.
He’s never done this before either, and though he’s only gotten head a handful of times himself, he already knows that as long as there are no teeth involved, there’s no such thing as a bad blow job. He doesn’t dare risk going too deep, but judging from the way Zac’s hands fly into Cal’s hair, he doesn’t really need to.
Zac gives the same long, shuddering sigh as before and comes. Cal swallows, unsure what he thinks about the taste but liking that he made it good for Zac all the way to the end.
Anya’s still thrusting, the hum of her vibrator a little louder now. She must have a remote or something, and the thought of it has Cal considering a bunch of other dirty implications. She’s making a low sound of need, and Cal goes up on his knees, drives his hands into Anya’s hair, clutching her close, kissing her hard, letting her taste Zac on him. He cups her breast, teasing the nipple the way she likes, and a moment later she comes again too, bucking into Zac until he shouts, oversensitive. Her back arches, her mouth parts, and her eyes squeeze shut.
For a moment, they’re all still. Then Anya pulls out, fumbling at the straps, hands clumsy. Cal helps, directing his attention to where her fingers are sloppy on the buckles. She pushes the harness to the far corner of the bed before she sags into his arms, a sweaty, pleasant weight. He nuzzles her, lowers her carefully down, draping her over the both of them.
It takes a long time for Zac to recover. Anya and Cal cuddle him until he can stop hiding his face, and they’re both very careful not to tease, because it’s obvious from the set of his shoulders that he’s afraid of it. Cal would do mean things to whoever or whatever made him feel that way if he could, for making Zac flinch like he’s battling not to feel ashamed of what he likes.
Instead, he leans in and whispers to Zac about how much he liked it, about how perfect Zac was, about how sweet he was and how much Cal wants to do it again. Slowly, Zac unfolds, starts to hold himself more like Zac.
“This is good,” Anya announces at some point. The sun is coming in through the half-open blinds, and it’s warm and humid in the room. It reeks of sex and Cal would lie here forever if he could. “This is going to be an amazing marriage.”
Cal can’t stop the little voice in the back of his head that warns him not to count his chickens. It must be on his face because Anya shakes her head.
“We’ll work on you,” she promises. “Eventually we’ll make it that you won’t be so afraid to lose good things that you don’t risk reaching for them.”
“‘Everything will be okay in the end,’” Zac says. He sounds half-asleep, and his foot fidgets out randomly a couple of times before he finds Cal’s calf for a nudge. “C’mon. Finish it. ‘Everything will be okay in the end...’”
Cal sighs. “‘If it isn’t okay, it isn’t the end.’”
“John Lennon wouldn’t lie to us, man.”
Cal shakes his head, but he can’t stop smiling. He rolls over and buries his face in the curve of Anya’s arm and half listens to them talk about nonsense until he starts to doze. He likes the words in that quote. It reminds him of what Anya said to him yesterday after his foot rub. When she told him—how did she put it? That maybe his story isn’t over yet. She has a point. He never would’ve expected today to go the way it has, to have this whole new life, this entirely possible happiness unfurling in front of him.
He sits bolt upright, startling Anya to the point where she kicks him. She instantly starts to apologize, and Zac’s teasing her, telling her that she’s a wild animal whose fight-or-flight response is stuck permanently in the “fight” category, and then Cal’s off the bed, grabbing his underwear, and hurrying out the door.
“Hey, what the hell!” Zac yells after him, and Cal yells back, “Anya’s smarter than me!”
Her laughter trails him down the stairs and into the studio. The words are nearly bursting out of him and he tears half the studio apart searching until a pen appears in front of his face.
“Thanks,” he mutters to Zac, who also holds out a pad of paper for Cal to take. Cal sits right there on the floor and starts writing. He’s vaguely aware of Zac peering over his shoulder, reading, and it’s a hot mess on the page, the notes coming out disjointed, the lyrics filling up the spaces in between.
He gets wrapped up in it, the music coming together so fast he almost can’t trust it, spiderwebs sticking together in his head from a million different sources—Zac cleaning up his tequila, Anya dancing with him under the fairy lights, PJ’s crying trailing off as he settles into Cal’s arms, the way Cal’s pulse seems to slow at the sight of the big gray house.
At some point he’s pretty sure that Zac whispers something that sounds stunned, something about it being really good, and there’s a kiss against one bare shoulder that he still feels, phantom-like, long minutes later. When he next lifts his head it must be considerably later, because the room’s gone too dark to see his own scrawl and Zac’s in the armchair in the corner, a magazine in his lap, his mouth wide open as he sleeps with his head tipped back against the wall. Cal takes a minute to look at him, and everything in his chest matches the sounds he’s hearing in his head, the notes he’s trying to capture on paper, and soon the urge to record it takes over and he turns away to grab his laptop.
He turns on a light and opens the lid. He needs references. He needs something soft but not weak. Not piddling. An instrument that can carry the earlier melancholy themes in the album forward and can also provide something airy and warm and happy, a resolution that the narrative can settle into.
He needs a cello, he decides, and winces, because he’s never composed anything for a cello before. But it’s a cello, that’s the answer. He goes online, starts searching for cello music, goes to YouTube to hear it performed, and he gets lost in it all over again, searching for the sound, the right tones, the right feeling behind it all.
He gets his bass out, starts picking out the melody, but in his head it’s not the quiet twang of his bass that he hears, it’s the rich, low murmur of the cello, the highs and lows combined into something cohesive, and it’s working, it’s real and it’s right.
It’s not the story of his alcoholism, he realizes. It never has been. It’s been his story this whole time, a story that’s about more than his drinking, and Anya was right all along: it hasn’t ended yet.