15. Zak
Zak and her friends had one unwavering tradition: poker night. Once a month, they found time in their odd work schedules, or after gigs, for a few rounds of Texas hold’em. The only catch was, since they had no money to gamble with, they pooled other things together.
Edge always came with an assortment of Mexican candies from his mother’s restaurant. Dallas would sneak home tiny liquor bottles from his work, mostly for himself, but would wager them on poker night out of respect for the competition. Alex worked at a mom-and-pop CD store and brought back all the discs they acquired “for promotional use only.” Usually burned at home by local bands, never to see the general public. Zak herself had a stash of bumper stickers from patrons who would leave them at the front desk of Salt Surfto advertise their businesses, clubs, and causes.
The bragging rights were worth more than all the other junk the winner would receive, but having an armful of crap to show for one’s gambling prowess helped keep things entertaining.
Zak had been hesitant to be the first to pitch the idea of resuming their game night. They hadn’t had one since Link died, and the first of anything without him was always difficult and depressing. But thankfully, everyone seemed on board. Excited, even, to inaugurate Chase into the ritual.
“But I don’t have anything to bet,” Chase said from the couch as he watched the rest of them frisk the apartment for their individual piles of garbage.
“Go collect lint or something,” Edge suggested. “Who cares?”
Zak was in her room tallying up her bumper stickers, but she would have given anything to see the reaction on Chase’s face instead of only hearing his tone.
“What kind of poker is this, exactly?”
“The funner kind.” That was Dallas, primed for the evening by being as high as she’d ever seen him.
“Still not a word, you dumbass.” And that was Alex, from the opposite end of the room.
“Still don’t care, you dick.”
Zak ran to the kitchen for snacks and drinks. A bowl of popcorn the normal way, and a smaller one with red pepper flakes and hot sauce. A bag of pretzels. A six-pack of beers and a couple of sodas. She piled everything high in her arms and did her best to avoid leaving a trail of food from the countertop to the coffee table.
Everyone was seated and ready to go by the time she got there.
Chase had a small stack of loyalty cards lined up on the armrest of the couch, and half of them looked like they were from out-of-state businesses. It looked like he was well on his way to getting the hang of things.
She set down the refreshments and grabbed a pillow to sit on, but Chase caught her free hand before she could back away.
“So, are these at all related to your group”s addiction to bad gambling?” Chase gently spread the fingers on her left hand to point out the tattoo she had on the inside of her ring finger, because their five-way dating catchphrase had always been “married to the band.” It was an Ace of Spades symbol, thickened with age.
She had a leopard climbing up the back of her arm. A pair of wings beneath her elbows. A crescent moon capping one shoulder and a skull wearing sunglasses on the other. A hand holding a rose, a witch with a forked tongue, an art déco piece. And many more, all big and colorful. Link had been friends with a tattoo artist who had hooked her up in exchange for guitar lessons, which he did for about a year before giving up.
All of these, and Chase had noticed the tiniest one she had.
“It’s the final card dealt in each of our first winning games,” Edge told Chase.
They’d all gotten the matching tattoos on Zak’s eighteenth birthday, all in the same place. Link had a Three of Clubs, Dallas had a Jack of Hearts, Edge had a Five of Diamonds, and Alex had a Queen of Clubs.
Chase was saying something in response, but all Zak could think about was his hand on hers, his palms beneath her callused fingertips.
She’d been on plenty of dates before. She’d been kissed and fucked and had a guy do a line of blow off her left nipple. But no one had ever held her hand, and this was now twice in one week.
Zak slipped out of his grip, stuck her hand under the couch cushion, and fished around for the deck of cards.
“Wanna deal, new guy?” She held out the pack to Chase before taking her spot on the floor next to Edge.
“Sure. But I’m not new to poker. Fair warning.”
He flipped through the cards, admiring the artwork on a few of them before he turned them face down and started to shuffle. They were a gothic novelty pack Link had gotten her for Christmas one year from a local artist, and each suit had a different theme. Spades were reapers and skeletons, hearts were vampires, clubs were zombies and various severed body parts, and diamonds were gargoyles.
“You’re new to these guys, so watch your back,” she advised. “Alex is a major cheater. He probably sat next to you to take advantage of the fact that you’re the only one who doesn’t know that about him yet.”
Alex held a hand to his chest in mock offense. “It’s not my fault if you guys go showing your cards off.”
Zak caught herself watching the tendons in Chase’s hands flex as he began to deal, starting with her, and snapped her gaze away. “It is your fault when someone leaves for a bathroom break and you take a peek, though.”
“Advanced poker requires both an offensive and defensive strategy,” Alex said.
Edge lifted the corners of his cards to take a look. “Be careful where you go spouting that philosophy. Cheating at gambling is a felony, you know.”
Alex cocked an eyebrow and pried the cap off one of the beers with his teeth. “Good thing they love guys like me in prison.”
Dallas finished off his beer and moved on to a bottle of something stronger he had stashed under the side table. “I’m gonna need another drink if this conversation is headed toward butt-sex.”
“I’m fine with letting this conversation die, actually,” Zak said.
“Why, ‘cause you know it’ll come back around to your abysmal sex life?” Alex said.
“It’s not—”
What, was she planning to say it wasn’t? They’d definitely have a laugh at that. Nothing stayed a secret in this place, especially not when it came to strangers coming and going. Or not, in Zak’s case. She was busy between music and work, and taking care of her own needs was by far easier, faster, and less disappointing.
She turned over the cards in her hand, a pair of queens, and nodded to Dallas for him to start the bet. “It’s your go.”
Dallas looked down at the coffee table, like he just realized the cards had been dealt, and scooped them up. He tossed a tiny bottle of Irish Whiskey into the pot to call the bet.
“Classic topic avoidance,” Edge sing-songed.
Alex called with a CD that had a blurry photograph of a broken wheelbarrow on the cover. “We all just want you to have fun. Let loose for once, ya know? You’re uptight as hell. Isn’t she, Chase?”
It turned out Chase had one hell of a poker face because there was nothing on his expression. Not a hint of a smile or brightness in his eyes, but his grip tightened ever so slightly on the couch cushion.
Zak realized this was the first time she’d dared to look at him since Alex said the word “sex,” and what a mistake it was. She should have learned her lesson at the open mic night. Sex and Chase didn’t belong in the same room any more than gasoline and an open flame.
“I don’t see what I have to do with this.” Chase raised the bet.
Alex took a sip of his beer. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. She’s not the warmest and cuddliest with us either, but she’s real on edge around you. You should be the biggest supporter of the ‘Get Fucked, Zak’ movement out of all of us.”
“You’re such an instigator,” she grumbled, matching Chase’s raise. Luckily, the mortification disguised how optimistic she was about her hand because normally someone would have suspected her by now. Maybe it was in her best interest to let this one play out.
Chase shrugged. “Maybe you should get fucked.”
That word sounded mundane coming from everyone else around the table, but on his lips, it sounded obscene. She felt those hard consonants run down her spine.
Finally, a ghost of a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, telling her this was payback for the way she had teased him the other night. “But that’s none of my business.”
“It’s not,” she said. “And it’s none of theirs either.”
The round finished with Edge folding. Unwilling to relinquish two cocadas for a bad hand.
“Remind me, how many?” Chase said, his eyes on her, fingertips on the stack of cards.
She swallowed. Her breath was still caught in her throat. “Three.”
He dealt the flop: the Ten of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, and Ten of Spades. She had two pairs now. Not the worst start, but not what she’d been hoping for either.
Dallas was a much better liar when he was sober, which he hadn’t been since Link’s death. He frowned at his cards and called the bet again. “Keep not bringing dudes home, Zak. The last one woke up after you left for work, made pancakes with his dick out, and kept calling me ‘bro.’” He tossed his hands up as he talked, accidentally flipping his Two of Clubs and Seven of Diamonds to the rest of them. “Then he didn’t even offer me any.”
“Dick or pancakes?” Zak smirked.
Alex snorted. “Wow, your hand really is shit. I’ll raise.” He threw in a few more discs.
Chase stayed in the game, and though she kept searching, he was not only more stoic than her, he was also better at maintaining eye contact. “What’ll it be?”
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let you win,” she said, calling the bet.
He made a humming noise so low, she wasn’t sure anyone else heard it. “You are a little tense, huh?”
“Competitive,” she corrected him.
Chase flipped over the fourth card slowly. “That makes two of us.”
She looked down in avoidance and saw the newly turned Queen of Diamonds staring back at her. A full house.
Dallas sat there indecisively. Like that card made a difference for him.
“I swear, do you know how this game is played?” Edge finally spoke out. “You fold.”
“No one asked you,” he snipped, but tossed his cards on the table and slumped back with a tiny bottle of flavored rum.
“I fold, too,” Alex said. “I don’t want to be in the middle of… whatever this is.”
It took zero observational skills to see he was referring to the exchange going on with her and Chase, not the back-and-forth of the game.
“I’ll raise.” Chase’s focus centered on the cards between them, then trailed up until they were eye to eye.
She matched his bet. “Deal.”
He did. The fifth and final community card joined the others, face up on the table. The King of Hearts.
By now, she was confident Chase was bluffing. Odds were, at the very most, he had a straight or a flush, either of which her hand would overpower. So, she shoveled all those worthless bumper stickers to the center of the pile and told him she was all-in.
He matched her gamble. “Have it your way.”
“I will,” she said. The game was over. No need to stay impassive. She turned over her cards and fanned them out with a cocky grin. It had been a while since she’d won. Edge and Alex normally dominated the competition. “Full house.”
Edge whistled. He and the others gave the coffee table their full attention now, waiting for the outcome as though actual cash was at stake.
Chase smiled to himself. Before she saw his cards, she knew she’d lost. An Ace of Hearts and a Queen of Hearts joined the final lineup, making his hand a royal flush. In all their times playing, no one had ever gotten a royal flush, and all their faces said it.
“Well, thanks for that, man.” Alex clapped him on the shoulder. “Now everybody will have someone other than me to scrutinize for cheating.”
Foul-play would have been her first thought too, but she had been irrationally unable to take her eyes off him the entire time, and therefore knew for a fact he hadn’t messed with the cards. Kind-hearted people didn’t have to cheat to reap karmic rewards, she supposed.
Zak pushed the winnings his way and collected the cards to reshuffle for another round. “Bet you can’t do it again.”
“So where does the ‘Saint’ part tie in?” Chase asked later on.
They were standing outside the door to Zak’s apartment after a few more rounds of Texas hold’em, during which the universe had rebalanced itself and Edge won the night. Chase was still left with a pocketful of the worthless bullshit he’d won from the first round, though, which was probably why his hand hovered around with nowhere to go before finally resting on the banister.
Zak leaned against the door, struggling to make sense of how she didn’t know what time it was, didn’t care, and couldn’t bring herself to go back inside.
“We’re not a Christian rock band, if that’s what you’re asking.” She chuckled, mulling over the best way to tell someone that the closest thing she ever had to a convincing spiritual experience had been listening to “God Gave Rock ‘N’ Roll to You II”after accidentally eating a third of a tray of edibles. “No offense, if you are. Edge is. I went to his confirmation and everything.”
“My family is more of the Christmas and Easter crowd,” he told her. “But me? I don’t know. You hear about these people having some type of spiritual moment when they’re at the hospital, in between life and death. I never did. And I realized then, I’m okay with waiting until I die to find out the truth.”
“So much for those Irish roots, huh?”
“Yeah, well, I hate Guinness too.”
They laughed until the quiet seeped back in. A quiet that was becoming increasingly, unnervingly comfortable.
“My mom used to go to church every Sunday and not come home until Monday morning,” she said wryly. “She didn’t exactly take any of it seriously except for the ‘go forth and multiply’ bit. I’m sure you heard some things about that whole situation. People talk.”
Zak had tried to be discreet about where she stayed when she lived in her car, but she still had to park it in the school lot every day. All of her stuff in the trunk, her pillow and blanket in the back seat.
Chase shook his head. “I don’t care what anyone said. I only care about what you have to say.”
She remembered her childhood in two parts: one with her father, and one without. The beginning shecarried with her was the one she had already told him about. A guitar instead of a goodbye letter. This was a different starting point altogether.
What could she say about her mother? Jaclyn Desmond (formerly Jaclyn Parker, Jaclyn Guthrie, Jaclyn McNaughton, etc.) was a woman of God. A mother of eight, potentially more. A purveyor of hideous denim maxi skirts and PG movies marketed toward adults. A frequenter of both the confessional and the corner store. Above all else, she was a narcissistic bitch. So that was what Zak went with.
“The day after my parents’ divorce was finalized, my mother married the man she’d been having an affair with because she was seven months pregnant with his baby. My first half-sister. The second one came eleven months later. By then, my mom decided I was old enough to take care of the babies for her. So that’s exactly what she made me do after she divorced husband number two and married husband number three.”
Zak paused to do some mental math. “I got a brother when I was eleven. Another sister at some point when I was thirteen. Another stepdad. You get the drill, right?”
Chase nodded for her to go on, but this was the part where people started having opinions.
“You’re being such a good big sister,” her mom’s friends would say. “So what? I have to babysit my siblings,” her friends at school would say. And for a while, she tried to look at it that way, but it wasn’t babysitting at all. It was motherhood in every way, apart from pregnancy and birth.
She had changed a landfill’s worth of diapers, fed them every bottle, made lunches, and walked them home from the bus stop. Her first brother’s first word was “Mama,” and he’d said it staring her dead in the eye, spit foaming out of his chunky little mouth.
“When I was fifteen, my mom was pregnant with baby number five from husband number four. She always told me they were blessings from God, and big sisters were supposed to help. It was ‘good practice for when my husband wants a baby someday.’ That I should be happy for her because she was happy. But she was happy because she was always high. I was fucking miserable. So one night, when it was two in the morning and she still wasn’t home from church, I just left. I left all the kids at home, and I went to the park because I wanted it to be quiet for once. For one minute.”
“All those times you used to fall asleep at school?” he guessed.
“Yeah. It was my only time away from them.”
She had been woken up so often by the crying, she stopped trying to sleep at home and started sleeping in between classes. Pieces of her identity eroded every time her mom announced a new man, a new baby. Childhood friends slipped away, grades were a complete afterthought, and eventually all she had to herself was the guitar her father had left for her.
“I fell asleep on that park bench, too,” she said. “I was lucky nothing terrible happened to me, or to them, but one night alone made me realize I couldn’t go back to the way things were. When I got home, my mom and stepdad were furious, but I didn’t give a shit if they screamed at me or hit me or whatever. I couldn’t do it. And I held true to the promise I made myself until my mom got so sick of me staying at home—wasting money that she could’ve smoked—without watching her other kids, she decided she’d rather give in and sign the papers I handed her for my emancipation.”
To Chase’s credit, he didn’t look appalled by her at all. But he was speechless for a beat. Probably reconciling everything she just told him with whatever vile things their classmates had said about her years ago. “When you were sixteen?”
“Yes. And I haven’t seen any of my family since.”
“I can see why.”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “You don’t think I’m selfish? Unforgiving?”
He didn’t answer the question. At first, she thought maybe he believed she was overreacting. Cutting ties with her entire family probably seemed drastic, especially when her siblings needed her. She felt that way too, sometimes, but it was always overshadowed by relief. She didn’t want to know what would happen if her mother was still in her life, and she was never going to find out.
But then he pulled her to his body, and her brain short-circuited.
This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way things were between them. She didn’t hug people, let alone Chase, so would someone please remind her of that? Because instead of giving him a pat on the back and calling it a day, she tucked her head between his collarbone and chin and wrapped her arms around his waist. Fumbling, at first, because what did she know about getting hugged? Zilch.
All she knew was that she wasn’t ready for it to be over yet, so she stayed there. Breathing in the smell of fabric softener on his T-shirt, buried beneath cologne and popcorn and the hint of beer on his breath. And his touch was hard and soft all at once, and so, so nice.
“Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish. And not everyone deserves to be forgiven,” he said into her hair.
On sunny days with the windows rolled down in her car, or when it was late and she sat out on the patio looking up at the night sky, she would play music real softly. Not to listen and enjoy, but to hear the words. Sometimes lyrics were so perfect, they could fill in the cracks and holes weathered by years of neglect, abuse, or ignorance.
That was what Chase’s words sounded like now. Something she had no idea how badly she needed to hear until he said it.
Finally, reluctantly, she let go and looked up at him. “Anyway.” She stepped back. “The ‘Saint’ is us. At first it was just to be ironic, but it means something now. To me, at least. A lot of our music is about saying you can be broken, invisible, jaded, alone, and headed down a rough path, like we all were, and still be close to heaven. I like to think heaven is something you create. Not something you earn. Not faith in a higher power, but faith in yourself.”
“I like the way you think.” With how narrow the walkway was, she was close enough to see the subtle shifts in Chase’s expression. The way his gorgeous eyes lit up as he reached out and squeezed her shoulder at a tense arm’s length. “And for what it’s worth, you’ve given me that. Faith, hope. I was missing both for a long time, and you’ve given me a chance to find my way again. So, thank you.”
His touch lingered for only a few seconds before he pulled away and started down the stairs, gripping the railing as if every step shot pain up his leg. Zak told herself that was why she followed him to his car. In case he needed help.
Was worrying about him more or less incriminating than wanting to soak up those last moments of talking to him?
“You’ve given me—all of us—something to hope for again, too.”
A few blond waves dipped over his brow. “You have no idea you’re the driving force, do you? You are this band, Zak. Not Link, you. You got me to the coffee shop, you brought me here, you’re spending every single day working with me even though you’re completely burnt out.”
He said it almost like she’d been sacrificing herself, which was jarring because it faced her with the reality that she’d never once felt too exhausted or too burnt out to meet him for those lessons, no matter how busy she was. Chase energized her. He was the bright spot in otherwise dull days.
“I envy you,” he said. “I used to be like you, but somewhere along the way, I wasn’t making things happen anymore. Things just started happening to me.”
The thought that Chase Payton, the guy she’d resented out of jealousy for so many years, envied her was enough to break her brain.
“Hopefully we can both make this happen then,” she said, propping her hip against the fender of his car as he unlocked it. “Sounds like we both need a win.”
He stood with the driver’s side door open for what felt like too long for a goodbye. “Well, there’s no one else I’d rather have on my team.”