“But Monday’s Dancing with the Stars! I can’t watch Dancing with the Stars with PJ in the room. You know the mess he makes when he tries to dance. He’ll interrupt everything. I can’t concentrate on my vote if he’s running around like a monster with his head cut off.”
She gazes back at him serenely. “You’re the one who was disgusted by my ten bucks. Sack up, buddy.”
“Shit.” He tosses the unopened bag of popcorn on the counter. “Fine. Whatever. But I’m gonna win. So I don’t want to see any tears when that happens.”
She makes a noncommittal humming noise and crams more popcorn in her face. She bares her teeth, and he can only imagine what Vogue would think if they saw her now. But in the next breath, he’s entirely grateful that no one else gets to see this, the rough, shameless edges that other people wouldn’t appreciate. This is for him and Cal and PJ only. She’s theirs.
He finds himself crossing the room to wrap her in his arms. She growls when she nearly loses the bag of popcorn, but seems content to let him hold her once she gets a hand free so she can keep eating. He chuckles and buries his face in her hair. She smells like strawberries and butter and she’s so round and soft against him and he can hear PJ in the other room shouting at his toys and he knows Cal’s upstairs comparing flights from seventeen different airlines to get the best deal as a way of avoiding dealing with the choice he’s facing. They’re all his.
After a minute, Anya asks, “You okay, baby?”
He clears his throat. “Just happy.”
She tips her head against his shoulder. “Yeah,” she says softly. “Yeah, me too.” Then she lifts her face and yells, “CAL!”
Pretty much directly into Zac’s ear. “Fuck.” He darts away. It’s possible she gets a distant yell of acknowledgment, but Zac wouldn’t know because he’s deaf now.
“I was gonna ask you something.” She licks her fingers. “The album’s done now, right? Like, all done?”
“Do you not remember the celebration party?”
She points a sticky finger at her belly. “I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who remembers the celebration party.”
She’s definitely right. Everyone was trashed except for her and Cal, who woke up that morning with the cold from hell and spent most of the party sleeping off cough medicine. Zac finally found him snoring in the back of the VIP section, unbothered by the bass shaking the club down to its foundations. Zac nobly refrained from drawing a dick on his face. Something he promptly told Anya because he wanted credit for it.
“Good point.” Zac takes a bite of carrot. “That was a good party, though.”
She heaves a long-suffering sigh. “I’m asking about your part of the marketing duties. Interviews are over? Photographs taken?”
He thinks about it, trying to remember if there’s something still on the docket.
The thing is, the marketing for this one is weird, because the album itself is weird. Concept albums are always a little tricky to market, because individual songs don’t always lend themselves easily to radio-friendly singles, and This Is Not the End is no different.
They had to ask for an extension from the label, which they got without much hassle, but then they barely needed the extra time because Cal turned into a demon in the studio. He wrote two new songs over the course of five days, barely sleeping, barely eating, wandering around in a fog with ink from a cheap pen smeared all over his fingertips, his hair wild, his eyes bloodshot, all in the service of shaping a better ending to the story he was trying to tell for almost a year. He then revised all the other songs with the new ending in mind.
It’s the best stuff Cal’s ever written, and Zac can feel it in his guitar, in his voice, in his own head, the way the notes wrap around inside him, bleak and hopeful in turns, and made more powerful by the contrast. The critics seem to agree so far. The first reviews are starting to tumble in, and they’re glowing.
Anya’s looking at him expectantly, and Zac has to take a moment to remember her question about whether the marketing is done. “Oh. Shit. I don’t know. Probably? Mostly? Why?”
“Well, when this infant comes out, it’s going to need feeding. And I’d like to do my job without losing as much ground as I did when PJ came. It’d be really awesome if you guys could arrange to take your paternity leave one right after the other so that I can get back to work without killing myself thinking of our baby in the hands of strangers.”
“Marina isn’t a stranger,” Zac says. “We don’t buy vacations to Aruba as Christmas presents for strangers. PJ ignores her regularly. He doesn’t do that with just anyone.”
He’s not joking—PJ is every inch his father’s son, which means he’s a stubborn, reckless, rebellious little shit most of the time. Loving and lovable and cuter than a terror has any right to be, sure, but also a regular pain in the ass. Anya and Zac generally share taskmaster duties, trading off on who’s going to stand watch over PJ while he’s in time-out, taking turns resisting those big crocodile tears because their pangs of feeling cruel are less important than teaching him not to play on the stairs. But even with a nanny to help share the load, a child PJ’s age is exhausting, and more battles are forfeited than is probably wise.
Cal’s not much help, unfortunately. He’s still uneasy disciplining PJ; he never manages to look anything but daunted when he has to put the kid in time-out. He usually falls back on logic, which is useless with a toddler. Once Zac caught him trying to explain the concept of a social contract to PJ, who listened with huge, bewildered eyes while gnawing on the head of the doll he’d stuffed in his mouth, and everything about the moment left Zac laughing so hard he almost pissed himself.
However, because he does it so rarely, on the occasions when Cal does raise his voice, PJ snaps to like a private in basic training confronted with the world’s most vicious drill sergeant. Just the other day, for example, they were all at Anya’s OB-GYN appointment for a sonogram when PJ took off through the parking lot. Zac was helping Anya into the car and neither of them were in a good position to grab him. PJ gleefully ignored their panicked orders that he stop, only to instantly freeze and burst into terrified tears when Cal barked his name.
Cal’s anger is a handy ace in the pocket that Zac and Anya are careful not to overuse, lest it lose its power before PJ reaches adolescence.
“You know,” Zac says now, “I always thought I’d be one of those bohemian parents who lets their child make their own decisions and, like, listens to their thoughts and shit, and talks to him about all the different world religions before allowing him to choose the one that most speaks to him.”
“You’re dumb.”
“I really am. Maybe when he’s older. Like, twenty.”