The One With The Porcelain Gods
Even though everyone seemed to be having a good time, I had the nagging feeling that this party had been a bad idea. I just couldn’t seem to put my finger on why I felt that way. The decorations were great (mostly thanks to Cade’s input), the refreshments were delicious, the alcohol was flowing… so what, exactly, was causing me to feel like the party wasn’t totally a success?
Maybe it was just this recent awkwardness between Zac and I. I knew confronting him about it at the party wasn’t the best idea, but we had to talk about it. I’d hoped he would see the party as an act of good will—a peace offering, even—and be more inclined to finally address the elephant in the room.
Speaking of the elephant in the room…
As I surveyed the crowd in Ruby’s living room, I realized what it was that felt off. Zac wasn’t in the room.
I glanced around again just to check, but he was nowhere to be found. The last I recalled seeing him, he was on the couch with some girl who appeared to have forgotten half her costume at home. Now that spot on the couch was suspiciously empty. Maybe he was in the kitchen getting another drink. He’d definitely been throwing them back, but I wasn’t one to judge. Near constant intoxication seemed to go hand in hand with this weird fracture on our decade-long friendship.
He wasn’t in the kitchen, though. I spotted Cade by the margarita machine and sidled up to him, hoping he could help me out.
“Have you seen Zac?” I asked.
Cade shook his head. “No, sorry. Not since the last time he needed a refill.”
“You lose your man?” Eduardo asked, suddenly appearing at my side. “He’s probably in the bathroom, puking up the liquor store’s worth of alcohol he drank..”
I didn’t think Zac had drank himself that sick since he stopped needing me to buy his alcohol for him, but it was the only theory I had at the moment. Thanking Eduardo for the idea, I turned and walked out of the kitchen, trying to remember where Ruby kept the bathrooms.
I didn’t need to remember.
Just as I turned down the hallway, Zac appeared, stumbling down the stairs. He was fumbling to button up his pants, one half of his shirt still tucked in and the other half sticking out. His wig had come off his head at some point, and so had that of Raggedy Ann, who was hot on his heels. Even if she hadn’t been wiping at her mouth, I still would have easily been able to interpret the scene in front of me.
Zac mumbled a mess of drunken slurs that I couldn’t quite make out. The girl—I should have known her name but in my own drunken haze I had lost it—was pleading with him not to run away, and I could fill in the blanks well enough to guess that I was witnessing a hookup gone horribly wrong.
Their argument reached a fever pitch, voices raised so much that people started to stream into the hall to see what was happening. It was only then that Zac seemed to notice my presence at all. Our eyes met, and he looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
For a brief moment, I was aware that I should feel sorry for him. It had to suck to face such an embarrassment on his birthday; I wasn’t oblivious to that. That thought passed, empathy quickly replaced with a hot, tingling sensation that I didn’t feel like putting a name to. If I had, it would have been the same emotion I’d accused him of feeling not too long ago.
The whole awful moment only lasted for a few seconds, but it felt like much longer. Zac’s face suddenly paled, and he gave a strange sort of twitch. He turned, not to run from the crowd, but into the nearest room.
I didn’t need to follow him to guess where he’d gone—the bathroom.
I did follow him, though, but I’d barely taken two steps before someone grabbed my arm. I spun around and found myself face to face with a very angry looking Ruby.
“You make sure he survives what I’m assuming is alcohol poisoning,” she said. “Because once you nurse him back to health, I’m going to kill him.”
That was odd, but I didn’t feel like sticking around to see what Ruby meant by that. Although perhaps not for the same reason, I could certainly relate to her anger with him, but right then, the need to take care of him won out. Like Ruby, I could wait until Zac was sober to beat the shit out of him. Probably.
I ignored the crowd of people, which now included Raggedy Ann sobbing on Ruby’s shoulder, and rushed to the bathroom Zac had entered. He was already on the floor, arms propped up on the toilet seat and horrible sounds coming out of his mouth. I suddenly remembered how much I hated hearing and seeing people barf. The alcohol had made me temporarily forget, but seeing Zac praising the porcelain gods was a pretty good reminder.
With one hand over my own mouth, just in case, I stepped further into the room and tried to decide what I should do. Zac didn’t seem to notice my presence at all, occupied as he was by all the alcohol forcing itself back out of his body. When I settled myself in the floor and rubbed my free hand up his back, he jumped and nearly banged his head against the toilet lid.
“Fuck! What the fuck—” He shouted, then looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “Just leave me alone.”
“No. I wanna know what the hell just happened here,” I replied, shaking my head. Even though the rational part of my brain told me this was a bad time to argue, I couldn’t stop myself.
“I drank too much. What does it look like?”
I rolled my eyes. “I mean with that chick. Where have I seen her before, anyway?”
“When you were rubbing your ass all over her lap at the club,” he replied.
At first, his words made no sense to me at all. After a moment, I remembered. She’d been far more plain looking that night at the club, her Halloween costume doing a pretty good job of disguising the fact that she wasn’t much to look at. She certainly wasn’t as pretty as the girls Zac usually went for. At that thought, another strange pang of… something… hit me, and I tried my best to ignore it.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to finish upchucking,” Zac said. “Unless you want me to hurl on you. Because I’m considering it.”
I backed away from him, just to get out of the splash zone, but I wasn’t leaving. I couldn’t really explain why—whether it was my stubborn need to take care of him or my need to scream at him for trying to have sex with some girl in Ruby’s bedroom, I really wasn’t sure. And not just any girl, apparently. A customer.
“You realize I’m the only thing standing between you and certain death at Ruby’s hands?” I asked.
Zac glanced back up at me and blinked. I could practically see the moment realization hit him. “Fuck,” he mumbled, then put his head back down.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I mean, we’re lucky she didn’t find out about you-know-who and the you-know-what. But now you go and whip your dick out in Ruby’s bedroom? How fucking dumb are you?”
“More like how fucking drunk am I,” he groaned. “And please don’t remind me what I just did.”
“Fine. I don’t want to think about it anyway.” It wasn’t until the words had left my mouth that I realized how strange of a statement that was. Why should I care where Zac put his dick?
But I did. I was starting to figure out just exactly what the name of that emotion I kept feeling was, and I didn’t like it one bit. Green was not a good color on me.
“I’m just… gonna go. Puke your guts out for all I care,” I mumbled, even though I did care—more than I should have, perhaps.
Not surprisingly, Ruby was the first person I saw when I left the bathroom. She was standing right in front of the door, in fact, her arms crossed over her chest and her foot tapping on the carpet. I could barely hear the party going on around us anymore; I supposed Zac’s scene had killed the mood.
“Well?” She asked. “Is the little shit going to make it?”
I shrugged. “He’s still got his face in the toilet. I need to get out of here, though. Can you bring him home? It’ll give you plenty of time to rip him a new asshole.”
“Oh, that’s just the beginning of what I’ve got planned for him,” she replied. “Get Cade or someone to give you a ride. I’ll deal with Zac.”
Since Cade had been my ride to the party in the first place, I didn’t think it would be hard to convince him to take me back home. The party had died down considerably thanks to Zac. Most of the guests were just sitting around the living room talking quietly; the loudest noise was Raggedy Ann crying in the kitchen. It didn’t take long at all to locate Cade in the thin crowd and ask him for a ride, and just as I’d suspected, he agreed easily.
He drove in silence for awhile, the only sound in the car the radio playing, all but inaudible. Finally, he asked, “So what the hell just happened there?”
“I really couldn’t tell you,” I replied. “Zac drank too much, obviously. And tried to hook up with that girl, who apparently came to the club a while back. And is also a friend of Ruby’s or something. So, he’s fucked, except… not.”
Cade let out a little snort of laughter, but the moment passed quickly. “Why didn’t you stay with him, though?”
I shrugged. “Just couldn’t deal with him. He didn’t want me around, anyway. Once he threatened to puke on me, I was out.”
He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t entirely buy my account of things. The truth was, I didn’t either. Everything I’d said was true, but I knew there was more going on than just me being frustrated with Zac’s drunkenness. It wasn’t that he was drunk that bothered me; it was what and who he’d tried to do while drunk that made my blood boil.
And why? I didn’t want to really think about that, but it boiled down to just one thing: I was positive he could do better than that girl.
I stole a glance at Cade. I wondered what Zac would have done if he’d seen me walk out of a bedroom with Cade in a state of undress. I couldn’t decide which of us he would punch first, but I was fairly certain violence would be involved in some way. And then another one of his angry kisses that might as well have been a punch.
There was a little part of me that wanted to fool around with Cade, not just because he was gorgeous, but because it just might get some kind of reaction out of Zac. Maybe he would finally come to his senses and admit what was happening between the two of us.
But maybe not. It was a tempting, but horrible, idea. I couldn’t even imagine how unbearable living together would be if we were both drowning in jealousy. Just one of us was enough, I decided.