Just This Once by Evelyn Jeannie Hall

Eighteen

Over the next couple of days, Zane survived on a sort of autopilot, working extra hours, jogging three times further than usual, and practicing his MMA techniques instead of sleeping. Benjamin and Kat kept asking him what was wrong but letting them in on anything would defeat the purpose of he and Lacey choosing to keep this under wraps to begin with. So, Zane maintained his own council.

Once forty-eight hours had elapsed, it occurred to him that maybe he’d fucked up. After succumbing to nine hard hours of slumber—he’d slept so deeply he hadn’t even changed positions—he woke knowing he had. He resumed functioning as a rational human being, and with that came regret. And an ache he’d never experienced before. He’d overreacted when Lacey had mentioned the name Ethan because it’d flipped a switch inside Zane hadn’t been aware he had.

And that switch had everything to do with his ex-wife.

“I’m divorcing you, Zane. I want to be with Ethan,” Aliyah had broken this new to him out of the blue.

He’d been so flabbergasted, so utterly taken aback, that he’d stood there gaping at her like a loser.

“Ethan from the flower shop, Ethan?” He didn’t know why he’d needed to clarify which guy she meant, but he did. The only Ethan he knew worked at the florists next to the nail salon where she was employed part time. The rest of her days had been monopolized by the cosmetology classes Zane had sacrificed much of his limited income to pay for.

Or at least, that was how he’d thought she’d been spending her time.

Since he’d barely been a year out from graduating with his MBA from Columbia, he’d interned at the prestigious TRDD Investments in Manhattan with Benjamin. Interns there made about as much as restaurant servers with low tips, but he’d stayed with it to hopefully secure a permanent position. It’d been all he could do to cover his and Aliyah’s combined living expenses.

“But…” This can’t be true. “Our first wedding anniversary is this weekend.”

He’d already made reservations at her favorite—and lavishly expensive—French restaurant while scrimping and saving to purchase the diamond tennis bracelet she’d been saying she wanted.

“Yeah, well…” She smoothed her extensions behind her back, moving them carefully so they didn’t smudge her makeup, her long manicured nails flashing across his vision. “There’s never really a good time to do something like this.”

She had that right. Then, another tumbler clicked into place.

“This isn’t new… How long have you been cheating on me?” It didn’t come out as mean as it could’ve. Since he was in shock, his words left him more as a horrified realization.

Aliyah heaved out a breath as if she were the one getting her soul ripped from her body rather than him. As if it were her heart that had been left to rot in her chest instead of the other way around.

“Look, I didn’t intend for it to happen—”

“How long?” he cut her off, a spiraling outrage starting to travel alongside his hurt. She stuck her chin in the air and turned slightly to the side, all attitude even now.

“Since June.” June? His wife had been screwing this asshole for eleven of the twelve months they’d been married? It took him a second to tune back into the fact that she’d continued to talk. “…led to the other and I fell for him. Ethan has time for me. He gives me all his attention. You don’t. What was I supposed to do?”

Any paralysis that might’ve been holding Zane back chose then to melt away. “Oh, I don’t know. Honor the vows you made to me? Not get fucked by some flower delivery boy who’s not your goddamn husband?”

“Don’t you raise your voice at me,” she shrieked at twice the decibel he’d used.

“I did everything for you, Aliyah. I’ve given you all I had. How is that not enough?”

“It’s just not,” she continued to bellow out. “It’s not.”

“Why did you marry me, then? Did you love me? Have you ever loved me at all?” he asked her, needing to hear her reply no matter what it did to him. Because the truth was, he had loved her. He’d loved her more than anything. She blew out a sigh that sounded somewhere between apathetic and begrudging.

“I thought I did.”

He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. That’d been all she’d offered as an explanation. She’d asked him to give her twenty-four hours to get her stuff out of their—now his—apartment, then she’d gone off with her precious Ethan. Zane had gotten drunk on vodka since it wouldn’t fuck with his diabetes, poured out his woes to Benjamin, informed his family of being forced into a single status again, and attempted to go on with his life.

But going on with his life proved difficult to do.

For a while after signing the divorce papers, he’d stalked Aliyah on social media. He wanted to see some sign that she regretted her decision, that she might come back to him. But months elapsed with no such indication. It’d taken him another year to give that up. To give her up. To quit tormenting himself.

But he knew he’d never put himself in such a vulnerable position with a woman again. He’d sworn not to.

Which left him in the predicament he was in now. He shouldn’t have flipped out on Lacey like that. Not only was it cardinally unfair to her, he didn’t have the right. Lacey wasn’t his wife. Hell, she wasn’t even his girlfriend. But the instant he’d visualized her in another man’s arms… Boom. It was like he’d been thrust into the body of his twenty-four-year-old self again. He’d been all surly and spiteful and suspicious as fuck.

He’d taken his long repressed and pent-up infuriation with his ex out on a woman who hadn’t remotely deserved it. Worse, when he looked back on their disagreement, he could remember Lacey’s claims that she hadn’t slept with her old friend with crystal clarity. She’d been adamant about having never slept with the Uber driver. A guy who’d been wearing a rainbow tie-dyed shirt, light blue nail polish, and a triangle tattoo on the inside of his wrist.

Jesus Christ, I’m such a fucking moron.

Zane had sent Lacey dozens of texts apologizing since then. Voicemails, as well. But maybe because she’d ordered him to lose her number, Lacey hadn’t replied to any of them. Regardless, he couldn’t accept that she wanted what they’d had to end. It’d been one fight, for Christ’s sake. And whatever else they might’ve become, they’d also been friends, and friends forgave one another.

You’re not friends, the thought seemed to come from out of nowhere, making him glower.

Of course, they were friends. He and Lacey got along so well.

You’ve never been friends.Friends don’t treat friends like shit. Friends don’t fuck like bunnies every chance they get. And that time in the bakery and every time since? What you two have been doing is far more than fucking, my man.

His brain or his conscience or whatever was pissing him off, so Zane did his best to ignore those thoughts. Except much as he despised admitting this, there was some honest crap being spouted in there. He remembered the look he and Lacey shared as they’d come together against that door. Something fundamental had happened between them in that instant that had been building for a long while. A shift in their dynamic and in how he experienced being with her. In how he saw her. In how he felt about her.

And then he’d gone and torched it all to cinders.

Excellent job, Morrison. Talk about shooting yourself in your own goddamn foot.

All day at work Zane brooded about what he’d done anytime he wasn’t actively discussing stock prices and mutual funds with his clients. At one point, he opened up his own portfolio to doublecheck something and found himself staring at a ten-digit earnings number. It was so bizarre. As a kid, he’d lived through genuine poverty as well as the fear and hopelessness that goes with it.

He’d worked and slaved ever since to become this wealthy businessman, launching into millionaire status about five years ago. Yet now, as an equal partner in a firm with his name emblazoned over the top of the entrance, he’d just hit one billion dollars in assets for the first time ever, and he didn’t even care. All he could think about was Lacey Farrell. Everything else in his life had become little more than background noise. Which meant if she wouldn’t pick up his calls or respond to his texts, he was going to have to do something else to capture her interest.

If he could only determine what that might be.

For eight days, he dreamed up and discarded several ideas to win her back. One of them had been showing up at the bakery during business hours hoping she’d say yes to him simply to avoid an embarrassing scene. Yet that felt like trickery, and he didn’t want to trick her. He wanted her to come back to him of her own free accord.

When Benjamin and Kat had their falling out, his best bud had made some headway by sending her a gift of art supplies. But Zane couldn’t think of anything that might work like that for Lacey. Her hobbies included traveling nomadically for years and blurting whatever she might be thinking out loud, and he didn’t see how he could turn either of those into a proper present for her. Her lack of materialism meant she shopped at thrift shops, for fuck’s sake.

What was he supposed to do with that?

“Hey, man,” Benjamin said from beside his doorjamb. “Come out to dinner with Kat and me. We’re going to try this Korean Mexican fusion place over in Midtown West.”

“Can’t,” Zane told him, despite feeling both worn out and hungry he didn’t want to be their third wheel. “Have a uh… project I’m working on.”

But instead of his best bud nodding and leaving to take his wife on a date, Benjamin closed the door behind him and sat on the corner of Zane’s desk. “Morrison, we’re worried about you. I’m worried about you. Something’s up, and I’m tired of you keeping me out of the loop.”

Zane knew he had two options. He could deny it and hope Benjamin bought into his charade, or he could be real with him without exposing his and Lacey’s secret. “Listen, I’ve been grappling with something, but I’m handling it.”

“Is it your health? You’d tell me if it was something like that, right?” The glow usually surrounding his newlywedded friend appeared absent.

Goddammit. It was horrendous enough that he’d FUBARed things with Lacey. He couldn’t burn bridges with his best bud, too, even inadvertently.

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Your mom and Tasha all right?”

“Yeah, man.” He did need to call them, though. He was behind on that. Living without Lacey put him in a fog.

Benjamin scrutinized him for a long minute, and Zane found himself considering what his buddy would do if he discovered what he and Lacey had been up to all this time. Concealing everything had been one thing when the two of them had just been messing around, but now it felt different. Yet, until he managed to get Lacey to speak with him, he knew he couldn’t say anything to anyone else. This was an issue he had to deal with on his own.

“Okay, then. Kat and I are heading out, but if you need anything, you contact me, all right?”

“Aye, Captain.” Zane saluted as he forced some levity into his tone, but Benjamin didn’t smile.

“You gonna work late?”

He repressed a sigh. “Not too much longer.”

Benjamin departed, and Zane activated his Zoom app so he could contact the two people who’d loved and supported him unconditionally for as long as he could remember.

“There he is,” his mom said, with that wide grin of hers. The one he’d inherited. “Was wondering when you’d get around to calling.”

“Little bro!” Tasha called out as if she hadn’t spoken to him in an eternity. “Long time no see.”

“Hasn’t been that long.”

“Haven’t talked since right before you went down to those amazing islands,” his mom corrected him. Christ, had it honestly been four months? No wonder they were giving him a hard time.

“How are you, Boo-boo?” Tasha asked.

Zane grinned at the familiar schtick. “Good, Yogi. How’s Oberlin?”

“Ornery as always,” Tasha raised her eyebrow and smirked. “Still doing the dishes with the fork tines down instead of up. I keep telling him they’ll never get clean that way, but he won’t listen.”

“Oh, the sacrilege,” he deadpanned.

“I know, right?”

“What would he do if he didn’t have you to bitch at him all the time?”

“Language, Zane Malcolm,” his mom scolded him, but Tasha twisted her head to the side and wagged her finger at the screen as if she hadn’t spoken.

“My dearly beloved counts his blessings every day he has me in his life.”

The thing was, Zane knew that was true. He continued to banter along with his sister while their mom piped up occasionally, usually to chastise one of the other of them. Jesus, it felt good to reconnect with his family.

“What’s the matter, son? Something isn’t right.” His mother ultimately brought the conversation down to brass tacks. Nothing got past Roberta Morrison. Never had. That’s why he didn’t dare try to deceive her.

“I’ve just been having to cope with some extra stuff lately. Uh…” He rubbed his shaven scalp. A metallic taste that had been plaguing him all day coated his tongue, and he took a swig of his coffee even though it’d long gone cold. “It’s kinda complicated.” On the split screen he watched as his mom crossed her arms over her chest, and his sister veered in with interest. Might as well get all this out in the open, then. “It’s about a woman.”

“Ooh, no joke?” Tasha looked like he’d just said Christmas would come early this year, but his mom seemed more cautious. They both knew the number Aliyah had pulled on him. Had it not been for his family and Benjamin, he wasn’t sure how he would’ve gotten through it.

“No joke. Her name is Lacey. She’s one of Kat’s triplet sisters.” He went on to explain their situation, exchanging the term “fuck buddy” or “friends with bennies” for special friend. “I care about her. I want to get more serious with her, but I don’t know how. She’s cut me off.”

“And Benjamin hasn’t figured you two out?” his mother inquired.

“No. At least, I don’t think so. He’s not going to be thrilled with me when all this comes to light.”

“You said when not if,” Mom pointed out. “So that means you plan to tell him.”

Did he? Maybe so. If he and Lacey ever managed to become a legitimate couple, it wasn’t like they could conduct their affair undercover anymore. Of course, even progressing to that point was a big if.

“So, what are you thinking?” Tasha chimed in to his solemn musings. “Singing telegram? Her name written in the sky? A flash mob performing her favorite song? What kind of grand gesture will you be going with?”

“Grand gesture?”

“Yeah, Romeo. How you gonna tell her you love her?”

He choked on nothing. “Who said anything about love?”

“You did,” his mom and sister chorused in stereo.

He shook his head at them, but when he replayed everything he’d told them, maybe it did sound that way. Maybe it actually was that way. He put his face in his hands. How had he let himself fall in love with Lacey only to destroy it without even realizing what he’d done?

So much for his expensive Ivy League education.

“Zane Malcolm.” His mother middle-named him again, and he peeked up at her, unable not to snap to. “Let Aliyah go.”

“I have. She’s been out of my life for years now.”

“But she hasn’t been out of your heart. She shattered it along with your trust, and you haven’t let yourself have a real relationship since. Don’t allow what that drama queen did to you back then to wreck what you have now.”

“It’s already wrecked.”

“Don’t let it be. If you’re in love with this Lacey woman, fight for her. Tell her what she means to you even if you have to resort to one of those silly ideas Tasha mentioned.” His sister cast their mother an annoyed glance. “You’re no quitter, so don’t quit until you have her back.”

It took Zane another four days, but at last, an epiphany occurred to him. It would involve a nautical theme and a few more days of preparation, but he looked forward to springing it on her. Then, if she agreed that the two of them could be together for real, they would come out of the closet to her sisters and Benjamin. And maybe, just maybe, his best bud wouldn’t rip his head off and shove it up his ass.

As Zane did double duty both at the firm and to put everything into place for Lacey’s surprise, he felt a renewed sense of hope. Realistically, he knew this might not work, that Lacey might be through with him. But at least by the conclusion of this, she’d know how he felt. His mom and sister—as per usual—were right. He wasn’t a quitter, and he’d do all he could to repair the damage he’d caused.

That Saturday at dawn when his alarm went off, he hit the snooze button. That wasn’t his typical MO, generally speaking, but he felt uncommonly lethargic this morning. He’d had a series of bad dreams, and while he couldn’t remember specifics, his night had not been a restful one. His pillow felt damp, as did his sheets, evidence that he’d sweated all over them. Zane pressed his palm to his forehead, but he didn’t feel feverish. What he did feel was too fatigued to figure it out, so he let himself drift.

When his alarm went off again a second later, he felt stunned by the noise. He blinked at the clock, and it took him several tries to decipher the red numerals. A few minutes had passed even though it didn’t seem possible—hadn’t he just hit the snooze? Not ready to get up, he hit the button again. And again, gradually losing track of how many times. After a solid forty-five minutes of fits and starts, he gave up and turned off his alarm. His vision remained blurry, his throat dry, and that metallic taste had returned, so he smacked his lips in disgust. The glass of water he kept by his bed was empty, so he couldn’t wash his mouth out or quench his thirst.

Fine, he’d get up.

Pushing his bedding back, he sat up, which made his room spin on its axis like a frisbee. Zane clutched at his head. He had this vague sense of knowing there was something he needed to do today, something important, but he couldn’t recall what.

Was he coming down with something?

He studied one of the wrought iron rails of his four-poster, which kept going in and out of focus. His sharp pang of hunger made him wonder if his sugar was low. Thankfully, decades of muscle memory meant he could prick his finger without even looking. And sure enough, it registered not only on the low end, but so low that he needed to down some of the boxed apple juice he kept on hand for just such occasions.

Now.

Struggling a little, he shoved his legs off the side of his mattress. With an effort, he managed to lug himself into a standing position, but the floor bucked and wove beneath him. He slid backwards in a heap onto his comforter, perspiration breaking out all over him. His breaths sawed in and out of his lungs like he’d just gone fifteen rounds in the MMA ring with an incumbent pro.

All right, this was getting ridiculous.

Squaring his shoulders, he hauled himself up again. His master bath was to his right and as he took a couple of staggering steps—Christ—he caught sight of his commode. He hadn’t taken a leak yet, but what alarmed him was that he didn’t need to.

That couldn’t possibly bode well.

He’d made it halfway between the expanse extending from his four-poster to his bedroom door before he comprehended that he wasn’t capable of reaching his kitchen for the juice. He felt… off. Lightheaded. Abnormal. Even this little bit of exertion had caused his whole world to grow fuzzy around the edges. Maybe if he could wobble over to his bathroom sink and get some water, it would work to even him out some. Stabilize him. He dragged one foot forward, then the other, but the motion made him feel worse. Disturbingly so.

Much as he hated to admit it, he needed help.

Changing trajectories from his en suite to his phone on the nightstand, he swerved towards it. The “off” sensation increased, and the next thing he knew, his legs—usually so dependable—were no longer under his control. He began to tumble off his feet and made a last-ditch effort to grab at his mattress to soften his landing. His fingers brushed the edge of his sheets, but he couldn’t keep from crashing onto his hardwood floor. The pieces of him that had just collided with that hard surface now throbbed, and worse, he couldn’t find any leverage to pull himself back up.

A sense of weakness overcame him then, followed by a series of terrifyingly violent convulsions. He lay there helpless, his mind and body seizing as if he’d been zapped by a taser. He tried to shout for help as his limbs jerked and thrashed about, but only the most meager of gasps left his throat. At one point, pain shot like fire from his left shin, and he yelped, but again, it was like his vocal cords refused to make much noise. The shocks kept coming one after another, and Zane couldn’t stop them or even slow them down. Darkness encroached along the sides of his vision, then overwhelmed him entirely.

And the only thing Zane could do was disappear within it.