Caleb

It was Theo fucking Decker, lead singer of Riven. In Huey’s dingy bar. And he’d just heard me play—something I only let myself do in Huey’s presence these days. Casually, and alone, no one listening who cared; no one around who remembered me. Or who I used to be, anyway.

I had no idea how long Riven had been on the scene. I’d been out of it long enough that I no longer knew the lay of the land. Rehab and a complete tactical withdrawal from everything that reminded me of being a touring musician would do that.

It had seemed like the band came out of nowhere—somewhere between my third stint in rehab and the most recent one, which ended a year ago—gaining the kind of popularity that was instantly divisive. Were they complex or overcomplicated? Great performers or too showy? Were they an organic band, or had they been engineered by the label because they were all young and attractive?

Attractive? No. The man standing in front of me was beautiful. He had one of those faces that was put together flawlessly, and instead of appearing simple or fake, he was a different kind of gorgeous from every angle. He wasn’t wearing the black eyeliner he was often pictured in, but his thick black lashes framed some of the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. They were caught between blue and gray, like frost over water, a startling, silvery color that looked striking against his dark brows and shoulder-length fall of black hair.

High cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and a sharp nose, too perfectly formed for his messy look, like diamonds strewn in dirt. And his mouth was sinful. Lush and expressive, and currently curving in a shy smile that was—shit, really doing it for me. He was a lanky fucker, the jut of shoulders, elbows, knees almost aggressive.

No clue what the hell he was doing in Huey’s run-down bar at almost one in the morning. But something about what he’d said about my song had really gotten to me. He’d zeroed in on the exact moment that I thought made the song, and it was something I’d only figured out this week, after months of tinkering with the melody, without admitting to myself that I was writing at all.

Theo had started talking again as I took my time admiring him. It had started as a compliment about my song and turned into him describing some brilliant transition in a song he’d heard that haunted him.

As he spoke, I remembered how dangerous it was to get involved with singers. Because, in their mouths, everything sounded like music. His voice was pitched low but it had a velvet texture to it that made me lean in closer to him. That made me want to take his mouth in a bruising kiss, and touch him in ways that would let me know if he still sounded like velvet when he screamed.

“Listen, gents,” Huey said, coming out from behind the bar, “I’m closing up early, so you gotta go.” He was holding his phone.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He gave me the look and I knew what kind of call he’d just received.

“It will be,” he said. “Or it won’t be. You crashing on the couch tonight? Just hit the lock when you come up.”

I nestled my guitar in its case, grabbed my small duffel from the floor, and gestured Theo in front of me so I could watch him walk out the door. He was slinky-hipped and graceful, his black jeans clinging behind his knees and at his clutchable little ass. He had a broken-brimmed black cap stuffed in his back pocket and as we got outside he shoved it on, pulling it low so the brim hid his eyes.

He shifted his weight from foot to foot, scuffing the worn toes of black Chuck Taylors against the pavement, and pulling his jean jacket around his thin frame like he was chilled.

“I, uh…I only have tonight in the city before I have to take off for a little while.” Theo was looking dreamily up at the sky, as if the pollution might part and show him the stars. “Any chance you wanna take a long walk with me back to my apartment?”

He bit his lip and frowned, his nose wrinkling a little bit. It wasn’t explicitly a come-on, but I was pretty sure that’s how this would end. He was ridiculously fuckable, and I wanted to watch him writhe while I touched him, hear him moan into my mouth. I wanted to see his careless hair tangled from being fucked into the bed.

The fact that he wanted to talk about music had kind of sneak-attacked me. After all, I’d been telling myself for the last fifteen months or so that I could live without it. That I could cobble together an existence from the scraps I had left. Making an actual life? I hadn’t even gotten far enough to imagine what that might look like yet. But here, all of a sudden, was a siren, tempting me with just that. And I’d never been very good at resisting temptation.

“Yeah, I could do that,” I said.

We walked in silence for a few blocks. The wind had picked up a bit and Theo kept grabbing at his hat to keep it from blowing off.

“That so people don’t recognize you?” I asked.

His head whipped toward me.

“I recognized you,” I said, shrugging.

“It just makes things easier,” he mumbled. And something in his voice sounded hopeless.

“Yeah, I get it. But I think you’re probably safe at this time of night. Well,” I amended, “safe from being recognized. I hope you’re not counting on my ass to save us if we get jumped, though. I’m too old for that shit.”

He snorted.

“Never fear, I’ll protect you,” he said in a cartoon superhero voice, and I laughed.

A few blocks later he said, “So, you recognized me?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“That means, I could, maybe— There’s this song I’ve been working on, and one part is just wrong, but I’ve been fiddling with it so long I can’t hear it anymore. Maybe you could listen, tell me what you think?”

He bit at his thumbnail and threw a sideways glance up at me, that frosty blue bright even in the darkness.

“Okay.”

It was out of my mouth before my brain even caught up, and I stood, frozen, as if a thunderclap might follow, and I’d be dragged back down to hell.

“Great!” His smile was unexpectedly dazzling, all white teeth and crinkling eyes. “Okay, so—do you mind?”

He reached for my guitar case.

“What, here?”

He looked around like he hadn’t noticed where we were.

“No one will care.”

I mentally shook my head at him, wondering who the hell was letting a major rock star plunk down on a curb on Flatbush in the middle of the night. Right, I supposed that would be me. I sat next to him and handed over my guitar. My left knee pressed against his right, a point of warmth in the chilly night.

“So, it’s—” He started to play, singing wordlessly, his right foot tapping out the percussion part he must’ve heard in his head. He hummed what was clearly the chorus. “Then, here I have it go back to—” He repeated the verse, the chorus, then went into a bridge that inverted it, then back to the chorus. It was a good melody, a strong structure. It could be on the radio as it was. But he was right that there was a little something missing. A flat place where there should be a wrinkle.

“It needs a little…twist,” he said.

“Do you have lyrics?”

“Yeah, but…I…they’re not done.” He bit his nail.

“Title?”

“ ‘Man of the Crowd.’ It’s a—”

“A Poe story.”

“Yeah! Aw, man. Yeah, so it’s about that feeling of being lost somewhere, anonymous or invisible. Feeling like you can do anything because you’re just this one tiny speck. But then also how you can’t know who’s watching, and all that anonymity is actually someone’s cover for being able to see everything you thought was secret.”

He’d said this in a rush, and when he finished he looked down, like he didn’t want to see my reaction.

“I like that,” I said. “What about keeping your second chorus the same, then in your bridge, you sing in harmony. Close, close harmony.” I took the guitar from him and demonstrated. “Then you spread the harmony an octave apart for the last chorus and drop the instrument out at the very end. Or have just percussion and voice, like footsteps.”

Theo’s eyes were lasers of focus as I spoke and he started nodding manically. He grabbed the guitar from me and played through the song again, singing lyrics too softly for me to catch more than a word here and there. The song tightened like a noose, and I shivered at the feeling of hitting something just right in a song. I hadn’t worked with someone else in so long. It felt like a phantom limb, familiar but so very far away.

“Fuck,” Theo muttered, “that’s perfect.”

It was. It was absolutely perfect.

He turned to me, eyes dreamy and satisfied. “Thank you.” His gaze darted down to my mouth before he met my eyes again, and I knew. Oh, yeah, I would have that mouth tonight. But not yet.

I hauled myself to my feet. I really did feel old. Too little sleep and too much thinking. Holding out a hand to Theo, I pulled him off the ground.

“Come on, let’s get out of here before someone steals your song, anyway. So, you off on tour? That why you’re leaving our fair city tomorrow?”

“Yeah. We just got back from tour this morning. Four months.” He had his fingers in his mouth again, and I wondered if he’d given up smoking recently or something, or if he just had a wicked oral fixation. “But our manager is extending it. Three more weeks, then ending up in Helsinki for the DeadBeat Festival.”

“Whoa, that’s a big deal.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I’m fried, though. I’m not sure I can do three more weeks. My voice is strained and I’m just—” He cut himself off, shaking his head. “Jesus, I sound like a real asshole, complaining about getting paid to play music. Don’t listen to me.”

He looked so forlorn, hugging his arms around himself and chewing on his lip.

“Nah, I know what you mean.” I slid a hand to his shoulder as we walked and gave it a squeeze. “Thing about tour, for me anyway, was always finding a way to be there when you needed to be, but go somewhere else in between. Be present for the shows, or for hanging out with your bandmates. But have something for yourself. Now, me? I liked to read mysteries. Looked for the clues, tried to spot the killer. I could read anywhere, just stuck one in my guitar case. Instant escape. But Barker, who used to play with me? He was a needlepoint man.”

Theo’s eyebrow rose at that.

“Hand to God. He ordered these kits online and they came with the picture and the colored thread and everything. And he would do them in the van, at night, backstage, you name it. Then he’d leave them around when he finished. At the venue we played at, or as a thank-you for crashing on someone’s couch. Not that they were actually much of a thank-you, because those things were ugly as sin. They looked like puzzles your grandmother would have. A barn, or a basket of flowers, or a kitten hanging from a piece of yarn, shit like that.”

Theo’s laugh was warm and rich.

“Lord, once he did one of a…one of those Christmas villages? Bright red and brown. Ugliest thing. And he was so proud of it, because it took him weeks. So he left it for this girl he liked down in New Orleans, at a bar we played at there. She was too nice to tell him it was ugly, but I guarantee you that thing is not hanging above the bar like she promised.”

Theo had his shoulders hunched and his hands shoved deep in his pockets, and it pulled his pants tighter against his ass.

“An escape,” he murmured.

“Yeah. Anything you like to do? Besides music, I mean.”

“I used to like to read. I…I haven’t much lately. Not sure why.”

I would wager a guess that it was because he’d gotten famous, but I just squeezed his shoulder again.

“Well, there you go. Stick in headphones, crack a book, throw on some shades, and you can pretend you’re sitting in Central Park.”

“I knew you were a pro,” Theo said as we turned onto the path that would cross the bridge. At my raised eyebrow, he shrugged. “Something about how you played. And that song. Just, damn.”

I braced myself for the questions that usually followed. Should I have heard of you? Or, What are you working on now? Or, What happened, then? But they didn’t come. Theo looked at me out of the corner of his eyes for a moment, then started humming, like he was telling me he wouldn’t push the issue.

I felt myself relax and turned the conversation back to him.

“You play guitar. But not with the band?”

“Yeah, I love guitar. Coco’s better than me, though, and Dougal said—anyway, we don’t need a second guitar live. I play on about half the tracks on the albums.”

“Who’s Dougal?”

“Our manager. The band’s manager. He was Coco and Ethan and Ven’s, first. Now mine, I guess.”

“You don’t have a personal manager? Or does your agent handle both?”

“Um. Well, my agent works with Dougal. We just thought it’d be better to share, since it’s about the band’s interests, you know?”

When I glanced over at Theo, he seemed unbearably young, and it was clear he’d either gotten some very bad advice, or not listened to any advice at all. Looking at the tight set of his shoulders and the anxious line between his dark brows, I put my bet on the former. He paused, hands on the rail, to look out over the East River, and I had the sudden unbidden urge to stand behind him and wrap an arm around his chest, pull his body to mine, feel his back against my chest, his hair in my face.

“Are your interests always the same as the band’s?” I asked instead.

His shrug was eloquent, overwhelmed.

“I don’t want to be a brat about it.” He spat the comment out, and it had the ring of an echo, like this was something he’d been told many times before.

But the word brat sent a quake of lust through me. I could picture him that way in bed. Bratty and demanding of everything he wanted from me.

I would make you beg first, and then I would give you everything.

I let my fingertips skim his hair and started walking again, not trusting myself to keep my hands off him if he kept staring out at the water all sweet and moody like that. Even things that needed you could hurt you in the taking. It was a lesson I’d had to learn too many times to forget it now.

“They’re great, usually. The band. I don’t want you to think—”

“Hey, kid, I’m not the press. Don’t worry.” I smiled at him, and he gave me a tentative one back.

“They are, though. Most of the time. I was the new kid, you know? They’d all been together forever, so sometimes it just feels a little like I’m on the outside, that’s all.”

“Yeah. It can be a lonely biz even if you’re on the inside.”

And it sure as hell could be lonely to grow up in it, leave it, and realize you’ve got nothing left without it.