Hold fast, p.10
Hold Fast, page 10
This was nothing like a job he was doing for someone. And it was even less like a favor.
“Well, shit.” He stretched, then clasped his hands behind his neck, digging into his brain to see what it was up to. If this wasn’t a job and it wasn’t a favor…
It was a collaboration. He paged through the document again, looking at the things he’d assigned to himself and the things he’d assigned to Zack. The tasks neatly divided along strengths lines: everything that required research, tedious data analysis, or record keeping, he’d given to Zack. Everything that involved audience engagement online, search engine optimization, or social media, he’d taken for himself.
Which is when he realized his mistake.
For the next hour he revised the proposal, more evenly distributing their tasks so Zack could start getting a feel for the things he was less comfortable with (but would need to get comfortable doing if he wanted to successfully launch additional campaigns after this one), and writing his own name next to the straggling list items he’d left blank last time so Zack wouldn’t accuse him of doing too much.
He’d have to tell Zack this was no longer a favor. Now they were in it together, and he had his own reasons for wanting the yoga series to bring in new members. With that in mind he added a Looking Forward section to the proposal that bullet pointed two more potential phases of development: an online membership program and an online level to the current memberships.
The jar was empty, so apparently he’d been drinking water while he worked. He stood, stretching, and his back cracked. When he checked the clock on his monitor he realized it was nearly eleven.
Six straight hours of work without noticing. Sure, he hadn’t gotten any closer to finding his next obsession, but what the hell. It was time spent on a good cause.
His phone was blinking when he discovered it on the kitchen counter where he must have put it down after talking to Pop. He laughed at himself when his heart jumped at Zack’s name attached to a message received eleven minutes earlier.
I just spent twenty minutes trying to come up with an excuse to invite you to my place, but I haven’t finished the book yet and I don’t have a studio to show off. Any interest in coming over?
So very Zack.
Sure, he hadn’t gone out earlier because he didn’t manage to do a damn bit of work today, but the only reason he’d wanted to was on the chance of seeing Zack.
He’d been virtuous. He’d resisted. He’d even gotten some stuff done.
This was clearly the universe rewarding his virtue. He sent Hell yes and waited for directions.
* * *
Zack’s one bedroom was in a blocky apartment building about halfway between downtown La Vista and the community college. He was on the second floor, in the middle of the hall, and Isaiah tapped lightly on the door when he reached it, wondering if he’d gotten the number wrong.
It opened immediately. “Sorry. I’m too paranoid to leave my door open. Uh, come in.” Zack was flushed, his hair standing on end as if he’d been nervously messing with it. “Do you want something to drink? I have water, milk, orange juice, and probably a bottle of rum somewhere. Which I feel like isn’t a great offer.”
Mmm. Babbling Zack. Isaiah leaned back against the front door and waited for Zack to notice that he wasn’t following.
Oh, that little irritated frown. Hot.
“What is it?” Zack demanded, then visibly shook himself. “Sorry, I had a shitty day. You want something to drink? I don’t keep refreshments in the entryway.”
Smartass. “C’mere.”
“I should come back to the door, even though both of us are going to end up in the living room?”
Isaiah leveled his best neutral expression at the man and waited.
Yeah. Zack sighed, the line in his forehead deepened, and he walked back to where Isaiah was standing. “What?”
Better already. Isaiah slid his hands into Zack’s hair and kissed him, slowly, luxuriously, closed-mouthed, without urgency, until Zack’s eyes fluttered shut and he began to kiss back.
When Zack reached out, Isaiah straightened and it was a challenge to keep himself in check.
They didn’t break apart or even pull away. Zack’s lips drifted to the side until he was breathing hard against Isaiah’s cheek.
“Tell me about your shitty day,” Isaiah murmured.
“God, that’s the last thing…wouldn’t you rather we had sex?”
“I wasn’t aware they were mutually exclusive. Come on, Zack.” He started massaging Zack’s neck. “We’ll drink orange juice and vent a little. After that we can revisit this whole ‘sex’ idea you have.”
Zack exhaled. “I’m not sure the OJ is still good.”
“I might as well go home, then. That was why I came over. For the OJ”
“Ha. It’s really good to see you. And smell you. And kiss you.” Zack wrenched his head away. “I sound like an idiot, don’t listen to me. Anyway, come see more than my entryway. This way.” He was still in his work clothes, Isaiah noticed as he followed. Eleven o’clock at night.
Exactly how hard was Zack working these days?
“The orange juice is drinkable. That’s about the first thing that went well today.” Zack brought two glasses of juice to the living room half of his open plan common area. He handed one to Isaiah and sank into the other side of the somewhat…floral couch. “I could probably scare up an old thing of popcorn or a banana. That’s about the extent of my ability to entertain tonight, sorry.”
Isaiah’s stomach grumbled. “Man, I should have picked something up. You think anywhere’s still open to order in?”
“In La Vista? Doubtful. Oh, wait.” Zack jumped up and went back to the kitchen. “Frozen pizza. I’m not even looking at the date. You in?”
“I’m in.”
“It’ll be small, but it’s better than nothing. I appear to have a thing of ice cream, too, but I’m pretty sure it’s inedible.” He turned the oven on to preheat and sat down again. “I’m going to get my venting out of the way before the pizza’s done. Then I have to stop stewing over this.”
“Sounds good.”
The frown was back. “So sometime last week I sent an email to my boss. Not Val, Terence, the guy who owns Crux. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had this momentary total failure of judgement and thought I could…talk to him. I, uh, googled how to deal with a bad boss.” He shook his head. “And this page said to treat my problem boss like a person.”
Isaiah covered his smile, but not quickly enough.
“I know. I know how I sound right now. Obviously Terence is a person, you know, technically speaking, even if you’d never know it by interacting with him in any way. So I wrote this email where I laid out like three tiers of sales goals, and what we could do if we met them, and how those improvements would positively grow the business. Which I thought would appeal to his, like, naked greed side.”
“Oh man. So what happened?”
“Let me throw the pizza in. Preheating is for the weak.” Zack giggled as he went back to the kitchen. “I’m off the rails tonight. I really shouldn’t have gone out of my way to see you in this state because you’ll think I’m nuts. Do you ever run the same thing over and over again in your head until you’re basically drunk with it and it no longer makes sense? That’s what I’ve been doing all night.”
“I’m glad you texted. Seriously, though, I’m on the edge of my seat. What’d your boss do when he got the email?”
“Nothing!” When the pizza was safely in the oven and a timer was set, Zack returned to the couch. With the ice cream. “Nothing for five days.” He pried the lid off and peered inside, then speculatively poked at whatever was inside with the spoon he’d brought with him. “Yeah, no. I’m nowhere near this desperate. Gross.” He tossed the carton on the coffee table and focused on Isaiah. “So for five days nothing. Then today I get this…this email. I mean, calling it that is making it into a grand gesture.”
“Okay…”
“Two lines.” He held up one finger. “Line one: ‘Scherzo, what do you want? Just be direct.’ Line two, which was actually three hard returns down: ‘I’m a busy man. Don’t email me unless you have something to say.’ He didn’t even sign it. I don’t even warrant a fucking email signature from the guy, you know? God, it was so…”
“Enraging?” Isaiah offered.
“I wish. But no. I just felt humiliated. Like I’d…tried to rise above my station or something, and been slapped down for it. Like I had no business even…trying…I don’t know.”
“The guy sounds like a prick,” Isaiah said, because he couldn’t lean over and kiss that line in Zack’s forehead away.
“He really is. Like it’s his job.”
The timer went off.
“Damn, that’s fucking fast. But it’s good, I’m done. I can be done now.” Zack nodded, as if confirming his own statement. “Yeah, I’m good. No more about Terence, or his tiny, effective power trip, or about me thinking I know anything about anything. Done with all that.”
On another night, Isaiah might have argued. And on another night, Zack might have enjoyed arguing. Tonight, though, he kept his peace.
They split the pizza exactly in half, which made it more of an appetizer than a meal. As they ate, Isaiah explained his theory that Zack’s invitation was actually the universe rewarding him for having the self control to not go out with Milo. He didn’t mention that the only real temptation had been the idea that Zack might be there.
“What I’m hearing is that I could have just skipped my agonizing over an excuse to call you since it was apparently pre-ordained.” Zack had relaxed a little; a smile played on his lips.
Mission accomplished. “Not pre-ordained,” Isaiah corrected. “Determined by my self-restraint. It’s really all about me.”
“Of course it is.”
“Yeah, I thought that should be obvious.” He considered sharing all the work he’d gotten done on the Crux yoga series, but he didn’t want Zack to tense up again. “Talked to my dad tonight. He gave me permission to take a break from working.”
Zack raised his eyebrows. “Did you need permission?”
“No.” Huh. “Actually, maybe I did. I didn’t think about it at the time, but yeah, maybe that’s why I called him. I mean, my pops? Dude never took a sick day that I can remember in my lifetime. Worked two jobs and picked up extra shifts when he wanted to save money for something, you know? So hearing him tell me that I work hard enough, I’ve earned a break…was surreal.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” The frown hadn’t exactly come back, but Zack’s eyes had gone a little distant. “I guess I think if I work nonstop right now, maybe I’ll earn something less…worky…later. There’s time to take vacations and stuff in the future, but I want to be able to enjoy myself, so I need to invest a lot of time in establishing a career right now. Even though school feels like it’s taking forever at the rate I’m going.”
“That’s exactly how I’ve always thought about it.” And it was. Except lately the plan had lost some of its shine. Isaiah stretched an arm across the back of the couch and shifted to sit cross-legged, looking at Zack. “But my mom never got the chance to live that future. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to take the risk of putting off enjoying life until some indeterminate future date.”
“You don’t enjoy your life now?”
“I do. Probably more than a lot of people. I don’t work for anyone, I don’t answer to anyone, and it’s been a while since I was staring at my bank account wondering where I’d find the money for rent, so all that’s great.”
Zack shuddered. “I could never live with that kind of instability. I’m not sure my parents actually had money problems—though feeding their strays, maybe they did—but they never paid anything before a final notice came in the mail.” He shuddered again. “I hated that. Scrambling to pay things before they were shut off, or before the garbage truck stopped picking up. That happened once or twice. Ugh.”
“You think they didn’t pay their bills and it wasn’t because of money?”
“It’s hard to describe them. Or the way they were back then. It’s like…the bills just weren’t a priority. Until they had to be or else. You know? Dad was saving the world through direct services and organizing, and Mom was saving the world through art. I always got the feeling they considered paying bills sort of…beneath them.”
Isaiah smiled and poked Zack’s leg with a toe. “I bet you pay your bills on time. I bet you even have a notebook for it.”
“Not an entire notebook…”
Oh man, yeah, that was Zack wanting something and not knowing how to get it: averted eyes, slight flush, twitchy fingers like he wished he had a pen to fuck with.
Isaiah made his voice seductive as hell. “Zachary…do you want to show me your notebooks?”
“Oh jeez, don’t say it like that.” A glance from under his lashes. “You’re not mocking me, are you?”
“Tell me something: are you more likely to have sex with someone or show them your”—Dammit, what was the word? Barney Miller—“WoJo?”
“I’ve never shown anyone my WoJo. Oh god, you made this whole thing dirty!” Yeah, Zack was blushing for real now.
So hot.
Still, it was time to drop the messing around. “I’m not mocking you. Your WoJos are awesome. Will you show me?”
“Uh…yeah. Okay.”
Isaiah wasn’t sure what to expect. He trailed Zack into his bedroom, which was small and bright, with a dark blue duvet and a wall of bookshelves. Zack sat down on the floor in front of his shelves, so Isaiah did as well.
“So…this was my first. I didn’t know what I was doing yet, so I bought a ruled comp book.”
A regular, marbled composition book. The edges of the pages were worn soft. Isaiah handled the notebook gently. “I don’t have to flip through it if you don’t want me to.”
“You really do. Here, I’ll show you.” Zack leaned in close and opened the cover. “It has an index, and specific pages for date-based planning up in front so you can use the rest of the notebook for whatever you need.” He tugged a ribbon out from the middle. “I had to DIY some of this because I had no idea what I was doing. I used this for whatever month I was currently on, though these days I do it by week because I need more space per day. And now I know that I burn through a notebook in about three months, so I don’t put in planning pages for the whole year.”
“Yeah I was going to ask. That’s a lot of set-up. And isn’t it basically just like other planners? Not that I’m critical of it.”
But of course Zack didn’t seem put off by the question. “Well, I really like the setting up part, but yeah, it was too much the way I used to do it. So now I leave blank spreads to be used as I go, one for each week, and one for each month I think the notebook will cover. Then I set them up as they arrive, so I still have fun with that, but it’s not two straight hours of drawing straight lines and trying to change up my writing enough to keep it interesting. I didn’t do that much here.” He pulled another notebook out of the stack, a black sketch book with blank pages. “Uh, this is the third. We’re skipping the second one because I sort of…broke up with a guy and wrote a lot about it? Yeah, never mind about that. This is when I started really putting some effort it.”
This time Isaiah was the one who leaned in, studying the pages on display. “Damn. You wrote all that?”
“Yeah. That was my…ornate period.”
Zack’s neat block letters were recognizable, but he’d added flair to page headers. Some of them were in gorgeous script, some were in actual calligraphy, and the one that stopped Isaiah in his flipping was a page in which the important phrases had been given gorgeous drop caps that would have looked at home in a medieval illuminated manuscript.
“These are incredible. I had no idea you could draw.”
“Oh, I definitely can’t. Mostly I can google image search and copy stuff, with a little bit of originality thrown in for the sake of my ego.”
Isaiah smoothed his thumb over a letter Z with a monkey hanging off the top bar. “You copied the monkey?”
“I found the monkey separately and sort of…made it work with the letter. I’d gone on a date to a zoo, so it seemed fitting.”
In his study of the particular letters, Isaiah hadn’t noticed that he was basically staring at a diary. “Sorry, I wasn’t actually reading.”
“It’s okay. I scanned the page when you stopped there to make sure there was nothing incriminating.”
Isaiah started turning pages again, stopping occasionally on entire sheets of letters in different styles.
“I was trying a lot of different things back then. There are people who do these really beautiful artistic WoJos, so I did that for a while.”
“And stopped?”
“I guess so. By the…sixth one or so, I really just settled into a groove with the planning pages where they aren’t that attractive, but their utility is much higher.” This one was dark green leather with graph paper inside. “That’s when I got into taking notes with icons and frames and stuff. So I poured a lot of energy into learning a basic icon set that I could use for pretty much anything.”
The open pages he held out this time were all little doodled pictures, or groupings of the same idea in different styles. Isaiah ran his finger over a line of exclamation marks. “I’ve seen you do this one. Or…that one, I think.”
“It’s my action item icon.”
Zack was sexy as hell when he was caught up in something. Isaiah couldn’t help tilting his face up for a kiss. “Thank you for showing me.”
“There’s so much. For a while I did sticker diaries, which didn’t end up really…fitting my brain. Though I did a great one about needing reading glasses, which actually made me feel better. It was a fun experiment even if I didn’t keep doing it. I have a list of all my DVDs that’s color coded by genre. I’ve also tracked just about everything I do at some point or other. Working out, meditating, reading challenging books, even bouldering routes at the gym. There’s a section in here where I sketched them as I completed them, though it was kind of laborious because I had to take pictures on my phone, then kind of draw from that—”
