Caleb

SIX MONTHS LATER

The Stormville farmer’s market was a riot of color, stalls piled with buckets of flowers and vegetables that gleamed through their dirt like jewels. The air was thick with the smell of popcorn and empanadas, and two young women played folk music, standing on wooden pallets at the corner of the parking lot.

It was Saturday morning, and the sun was shining, and Theo was walking beside me, staring absently at the stalls. It had become a weekly ritual for us as soon as the weather warmed up. He wouldn’t say exactly why he loved to come here, since he didn’t cook, just shrugged and said he liked the atmosphere. I suspected that it was something he did because he knew routine helped me feel grounded. He’d ask what I was going to make with the things I bought, and he’d pick out flowers he liked. Sometimes he’d munch on a bag of popcorn as we walked around, or sit in the sun while I talked to people.

Now, his hair loose and shining in the sun, the brim of his hat shading his eyes, he waved at Charisse, the Pepper Lady, who sold pints of fresh peppers and strings of dried peppers and always wore overalls and a shirt printed with peppers.

“You want some strawberries?” I asked, hooking his elbow with mine.

“Yeah, sure.” Theo would eat whatever I put in front of him, but he liked when I asked.

“Hey, guys,” Barry greeted us from behind his stall. He held out a spoonful of something to Theo. “Try this.”

Theo had developed something of a reputation for being willing to try anything last month when Jessie, who usually sold cream and butter, decided she’d try her hand at ice cream. When we’d approached the stand, I’d noticed a few people shaking their heads at us, but in my paranoia I’d imagined that maybe they just didn’t want us there. Jessie had held out a taster cup to us and encouraged us to try what she was calling “butter ice cream.” That’s when I realized the folks around the stand had been trying to warn us away.

I nearly gagged at the thought, but Theo had shrugged and taken the cup. His eyes had gone wide when he tasted it, then his expression turned contemplative. He took another spoonful and cocked his head. “Hmm,” was all he’d said to Jessie. But ever since, people had given him their experiments to try. And it turned out that nearly everyone who sold at farmer’s markets had experiments.

Theo didn’t ask what Barry was giving him, just licked it off the spoon.

“Is it…blueberry?” he asked. I smiled. Theo also couldn’t tell what things were in unfamiliar presentations.

“It’s boysenberry caramel,” Barry said excitedly. “I’m thinking of selling it alongside the jam.”

“Cool,” Theo said. Then to me, while Barry bagged our strawberries, “What’s a boysenberry?”

I smiled at him and brushed some hair off his shoulder. He hadn’t cut it since we met, and it had grown long. I loved to twist it around my fingers while I kissed him, and the way silky strands of it would fall over my chest and face when he was on top of me. Though he was generally oblivious to his own appearance, Theo knew how much I liked it. Once, he’d gone down on me and I’d moaned at the feel of his hot mouth around me as his hair brushed the insides of my thighs, and he’d wrapped his hair around my erection, teasing me with it until I was mad with need for him, then taking me deep until I came down his throat, one hand tangled in his hair.

“Hey, none of that!” I heard Barry yell, bringing me back from my Theo-induced lust.

I turned to see someone I didn’t recognize pointing their phone at us, taking a picture. He was next to Lucy’s herb stall—probably just on a day trip in the area. Lucy’d been selling at this market for fifteen years, and she considered everything that went on here to be her business. She stepped out in front of the young man and spoke to him sternly, though I couldn’t hear her words. Theo slid his hand into mine. The man hung his head and stalked away, and Lucy raised a hand to us. I nodded to her and waved back in thanks.

It had taken me by surprise, the way this community had gathered us up, taken us into it as soon as people had seen that we wanted to be part of it. When I’d first moved here, I hadn’t been able to spare more than a distracted nod to anyone. The first time Theo and I had come to the farmers market, months ago, I’d been nervous that they’d know who I was. I knew they did. Everyone here knew everyone. They’d know where I was living and why. It was just the way of things.

I’d been embarrassed, a little resentful. Theo’d been shy. He was always reluctant to go places where he thought he’d be recognized, even after leaving Riven. And he knew I didn’t like to get caught in the spotlight. He’d offered not to come with me, that first time. But as we walked up and down the rows of produce, local meats, fresh eggs, and flowers, I’d felt a sense of calm wash over me.

When Theo bought an armful of flowers, the blooms bright and delicate against his black shirt and hair, the woman had smiled at him, told him the flowers he’d picked would look beautiful together, and I’d seen the surprise on his face, and the delight.

“You think so?” he’d asked her, eyeliner-smudged eyes wide and sincere. “I’ve never bought flowers before so I wasn’t sure.”

That was how it had started. Now Theo bought flowers every week, and Lucy and Barry were protecting our privacy when someone tried to intrude upon it. It felt like a new life.

At home, I put away the groceries as Theo replaced his weekly flower arrangements. He picked through last week’s bouquets, adding whichever blooms still had some life in them to the new arrangements. He couldn’t bear to throw away any that still had beauty to offer.

It was something I had grown to love and admire about him over the past six months, when he’d basically moved in here. Theo saw potential in everything. Hope in everything. Even though it had taken him a while to believe that he deserved attention, admiration, love, he had so much of it for others—even for flowers—that it took my breath away.

At first it had been hard. Without the rudder of Riven to steer his life, Theo was uncertain about everything. He wasn’t used to making his own decisions, and it was hard for me to know I was making decisions for anyone else, since I hadn’t always made the best decisions for myself. But we’d learned to trust each other and we’d learned to trust ourselves, and after the first month or so that he was here, we’d found a balance that worked for us. Turned out, that rudder had been an anchor, and once he cut the tie, he soared. We both did.

At any time of the day or night, we were working on music, and the farmhouse became littered with pieces of lyric-scribbled paper, extra guitars and keyboards, cords and amps, and another computer with editing software.

I recorded Rhys’s album with him, and with an absence of nearly two years from a studio, it felt like I was taking a deep breath after living underground. I knew then that I would be recording my own songs again. And I’d been working on them ever since. I was almost ready. Almost.

It was different than my other work. Theo said it sounded like someone writing about things that cut deep but from a distance. But, of course, Theo also said I was the best musician in the whole world, so. I hadn’t told him yet, but I was going to use the photo he took of me in Nola, leaning against the wall outside Wolf’s Howl, for the cover.

“Hey, baby, can you help me?” Theo called from the bedroom. I’d been standing in the kitchen, looking out the window at our garden in kind of a trance after I finished putting the groceries away.

I walked to the bedroom to see what Theo needed help with, and my breath caught at the sight of him naked on our bed, stroking himself. His beauty sometimes broke me when I looked at him. Against the white sheets, his hair was a spill of ink, his tattoos curving around the lines of muscle and bone tantalizingly. His lush mouth was soft, and his gorgeous eyes heavy-lidded with desire. He stroked his erection slowly, and reached the other hand out to me.

“Hi,” he said, when I sat down on the bed and took his hand, kissing his palm.

I bent down and kissed his mouth. The love I saw in his eyes was overwhelming. Sometimes it caught me unawares, and nearly choked me. With how lucky I was. How unbelievably, gut-clenchingly lucky.

“Hi. What can I help you with,” I murmured.

“I missed you,” Theo said, eyes dreamy. “I want you.” Then he gave me the private smile that was just for me.

“Yeah?”

He nodded and guided my hand between his legs as he watched me.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to touch me. I want to look at you. I love you,” he added, eyes fluttering shut as I ran my hand up the delicate skin on the inside of his thigh.

“I love you,” I breathed, and then I took him apart.

I touched him everywhere, until he was pushing his hips off the bed and begging me with mouth, eyes, body, to give him what he needed. My own need was huge, but I loved him like this, completely bare while I was clothed, giving him his pleasure and delaying mine until the last possible moment, when it felt like equal parts reward and relief.

When I eased on top of his beautiful, writhing body, and took his mouth, Theo moaned, opening to me as sweetly as a ripe peach split by two thumbs.

“What do you want, love?” I asked.

“You, you, you, please you, always you,” Theo chanted, and the worship in his voice took my breath away. I fumbled with my fly just enough to push my jeans down over my hips, letting out a moan of relief as my hard flesh was released.

“Just like this,” Theo said, rolling his hips up.

I pressed into him slowly, and his face was ecstasy as he wrapped his legs around me. We moved together, already on the edge, the grip and slide of our bodies pure, sweet pleasure. Theo clutched at my shoulders and I knew he was going to come by the way his neck tightened and he threw his head back. It was always my favorite moment. The moment his breath caught, like the pleasure was too large for him to do anything but feel it as it ripped through him.

He came with a silent cry, heat spilling between us, breath sweet against my face. His body shuddered beneath me, around me, and I couldn’t hold on any longer.

When I came it was like a dark wave, sweet pulses of pleasure that washed through me as I lost myself in Theo’s body. He cradled me like I was coming home.

Theo

“Oh my god, I’m gonna puke.” I squeezed Caleb’s hand so hard that he winced. He leaned in to give me a kiss, to calm me down, but I said, “No, seriously. I’m seriously gonna puke,” and he moved back, with wide eyes and a pitying smile. Thank god he was patient, because I’d been a nervous fucking wreck for days.

My album, which I’d been working on for the last four months, was about to drop. I’d decided on a simultaneous e-release so it could be downloaded immediately, but now I was regretting my decision, since it also meant that people could hate it immediately.

The two songs that I’d written while I was on tour with Riven set the mood for the album, and while at first I’d found myself writing in the patterns of Riven songs, eventually my brain caught up to reality and realized that I didn’t have to do it that way anymore. That I could write any way I wanted. Anything I wanted. I had about a week where the sprawling freedom of infinity made it so I couldn’t write anything, but then I settled back into my usual writing routine, and I felt giddy, like a kid. Well, a kid who had someone else’s life, since even as a kid, I’d never felt like I could do what I wanted.

It had taken about a month for the chaos that followed my leaving Riven to die down. I hid at Caleb’s for most of it. He took my phone and my tablet and put them in the closet so I didn’t have to deal with any of it. Of course, I knew where they were, could have accessed them whenever I wanted. But he’d given me the option of living a life without fame for a little while, and I’d jumped on it.

Part of which was distancing myself from Lewis, and getting a new manager. Clarissa Kane was young—only two years older than me—and she called me soon after the news about Riven broke and left a message saying that she was interested in a new kind of music distribution, one that used new media and current technology to let the artist control the content, and allowed the consumer to buy more directly. If I would be interested in talking with her, she’d said, I should give her a call.

I had turned my apartment in Manhattan into a kind of ersatz recording studio to cut my record, since all I’d really wanted was privacy and complete control. Exactly what I’d never had when recording with Riven. Caleb was amazing, helping me contact a producer, and people to play on the album, all things I’d never had to do before.

I was awed by Caleb. His strength and his determination humbled me. I started spending most of my time at the farmhouse, coming back to the city once a week or so to get more stuff. Eventually, I decided it was silly, and one morning as we lay in bed, I’d told Caleb that I was moving in. He gaped at me, and I saw all the fears and all the arguments flicker through him, so I put a hand over his mouth and said, “I already did it. I live here now. I know you want me here, so just deal with it.”

His eyes cycled through fear, then desire, then relief, and I took my hand away so he could kiss the shit out of me, since he clearly didn’t have any words.

I met Huey, and it had been kind of awkward, until Caleb got up to use the bathroom and I finally got to speak my piece. Huey’s eyes went soft when I promised him I was going to look out for Caleb. And I could have sworn they got a little misty when I thanked him for helping Caleb stay okay until he could find me.

“What did you do to Huey?” Caleb asked later, but I just smiled.

It was Caleb’s sister’s birthday not long after that, and he called her for the first time in three years. When she passed the phone to his mom, Caleb hung his head and listened to her yell at him for staying away so long. When he croaked out that he couldn’t stand to disappoint her again, whatever she said made him sob. But after he hung up the phone, there was a peace in him that hadn’t been there before.

The next day he told me that he wanted to record the songs he’d been working on, and that’s when I decided to finish the studio in my apartment. The songs were mostly finished, and he was planning to record the album next month. And, though he waved my praise away with a vaguely pleased look, it was fucking brilliant—he might not have known it yet, but it was going to blow people away.

Now, I begged Caleb, “Distract me, please.” It was 11:42 and the album dropped at midnight.

“Uh. Sure, okay. Um. What do you get from a pampered cow?”

“Omigod, is this a farm joke? I don’t know, what?”

“Spoiled milk.”

I just shook my head at him. “You’re awful.”

“Right, sorry, okay. Oh, tell me about your plan for the studio. You said you figured out what you wanted to do.”

I leaned against him on the couch.

“Yeah, okay, so tell me what you think. I want to subsidize albums—or, I dunno what you’d call it. Bankroll them, but that sounds all Daddy Warbucks or something. There are so many amazing bands and musicians, and they can’t afford studio time, or they don’t know any producers or anything. So what if I set it all up, paid people for their time or whatever, and let people record here. Then they would have the files and they could release the albums. If they made money, they could pay the studio back, if not they just wouldn’t.”

Caleb ran a hand over my hair, playing with the ends. He smiled at me.

“How would you pick the bands?”

“I dunno, I haven’t gotten that far. Maybe…well, I’d want it to only be people who really couldn’t afford to do it themselves. Maybe they could submit a song online and a little thingie about their goals and stuff? Like how people apply for grants or whatever? I could choose, or I guess I could hire someone to do it? I should ask Clarissa. Either way, I just want it to be people making great music. Stuff that’s different than what’s out there already. And also it’d be people who were interested in doing it themselves, you know, because this would be them releasing their own stuff.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” Caleb said. And this time when he leaned toward me, I kissed him, relishing the taste of him. We started to get a little carried away, when he said, “Hey, it’s time.”

“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god. Okay.”

I reached a hand out to the laptop open on the coffee table, and pressed the button that would release my first solo album into the world.

“Fuck,” I breathed. “I can’t believe it.”

“You did it, baby,” Caleb rumbled against my ear, and ran fingers through my hair. “Whoa,” he said, looking at me. “You’re really pale. You okay?”

I nodded, unable to speak. I was okay. I was so much better than okay.

Finally, I said, “I’m just sitting here realizing that I have everything I’ve ever wanted. It…I…it’s just a lot.”

Caleb pulled me to him and held me.

“Me too,” he said. “It is a lot.”

He let me go and reached for the computer.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m downloading my boyfriend’s first solo album, duh,” he said, looking at me like I was nuts.

“I have the masters right—”

“Not the point, love.”

He clicked Download and paid for the album, then opened it. I’d done the same thing hundreds of times with hundreds of bands, but it felt entirely surreal.

When the first notes of the opening track started playing automatically upon downloading, I reached to shut it off, but Caleb caught my hand. He leaned back on the couch and pulled me to him, arm around my shoulders.

And then we just listened. He sat there with me, and listened to the whole album, and every time I moved to shut it off or get up, he just kissed my head and pulled me back to him. Even though he’d heard the songs already, he listened intently, like he was meeting them for the first time.

As we reached the second to last song, I started to squirm.

“What? Do you have to pee or something?”

“No. I just, um…I didn’t tell you, but there’s a thirteenth track.”

“Oh, yeah? You decide to record the one with the waltzy chorus? You know I thought it was cool.”

“No, I—not exactly.”

“Okay, well, hush and let me listen.”

The last morning of recording the album, I’d sat bolt upright before dawn, but hadn’t been sure what woke me. I had stayed over at the apartment because I’d been up late working the night before. We’d recorded everything, and I had just planned to go back through and layer a couple of guitar parts, add a few lines of harmony. Small things. When I sent her home, I’d even told Samantha, my amazing producer, that I didn’t need her to come in that day, since I’d just be fiddling.

But when I’d woken up, I found myself drifting over to the piano and sitting down in the darkness. I started to play the song I’d played for Caleb the night he gave me the piano. For months, I’d heard it in my head, in pieces. But now, it fell together as completely and effortlessly as the last pieces in a puzzle. I couldn’t even play fast enough to keep up with what I heard in my head. And when I finished it, I played through it again and again and again, as the sun rose, illuminating the city outside my windows.

I hummed along with it, at first, then bits of the lyrics rearranged themselves, words hooking other words, catching at verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, and fitting themselves together as I played.

I switched on the mics and laid it down in one take. When I listened back, I couldn’t believe it. The track was raw and aching, and I could hear the love in my voice. The need. Then, about two-thirds of the way through, in the piano part between the bridge and the penultimate chorus, a mourning dove called out. They roosted in the eaves, and I often heard their cries in the morning. When I looked over, I saw two of them, sitting on the windowsill, still and ruffled in the sun.

I never did another take.

When the first notes of the track began, I held my breath. It was such a personal song, such a private song. At first I hadn’t even meant it to be part of the album. I’d thought I would just bring it home to Caleb. Surprise him with it in our bed. But then days had gone by, and I hadn’t played it for him yet. Then a week, and I hadn’t mentioned it. I’d uploaded it to be the final track on the album, and as I’d watched the bar load to completion, I’d felt a flutter in my stomach and known it was right.

With Riven, I’d had so much to hide behind. This…I wanted this to reveal something.

The track sounded different than the others, since it wasn’t produced. You could hear the bellows of the pedals as they were pressed and released, hear the slide of my fingers and the echo of the keys. As my voice came in, I saw Caleb’s eyes widen. I turned to him and watched him listen to the song I’d written for him. The song that had gathered inside me, that I’d held tight all these months and finally unspooled for him in the early morning light. The song that told him all the things he already knew, but in the language we both felt deeper than words.

I watched the appreciation in his face turn to awe, and then he looked at me, tears streaming down his face, looking happier than I had ever imagined he could. He grinned through tears and grabbed me, pulled me onto his lap, and squeezed me so hard I could barely move. I wrapped my arms around his neck and held him, face in his neck, as I felt him breathe deeply.

We held each other as my song—our song—played, and the album started all over again.