Riven (Riven 1)

Turned out that I hadn’t ever eaten radishes, and turned out that they tasted mostly like water and dirt. But I liked them. It was the right lesson for the moment.

* * *

—

After spending three days planting—three days thinking about nothing but dirt and sun, rainfall and fertilizer, deer and aphids—I couldn’t resist the urge anymore. I hauled out my little-used computer and googled Riven.

I’d recognized Theo because even living in my self-constructed isolation for the past year, I still went into the city a few times a month and stayed with Huey, ate all the foods I craved out in the country, and reminded myself there was still a world out there that I had left behind.

So I’d seen the cover articles and the midtown advertisements, heard the Top 10 countdowns and the subway swooning. But, though I’d noted Theo’s beauty—that of the whole band, really—and caught snatches of the music here and there, I hadn’t ever really listened.

I wasn’t expecting them to be so good. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, at first listen. Rock with one foot in prog and the other in industrial, an edge of glam, and a genre ranginess that was interesting but still unsettled, as of their second album. The radio edits and album tracks didn’t really do them justice. It was overproduced, commercial, all the edges sanded clean. But the videos of them live took my breath away.

Of the rest of the band, their drummer, Ethan, impressed me the most. He seamlessly integrated beats from country, blues, jazz, even big-band music into his repertoire, intricate rhythms snaking around each other. He used silence as well as he used noise, and he knew how to string out a moment until the crowd was desperate for the next hit. Ven, the bass player, held down the bottom of every song, and though he played with a cocky grin, he didn’t showboat. He watched the crowd and responded to them, his playing getting heavier as their response intensified. Coco ran and jumped and head-banged with passion through every song because she played effortlessly. Her solos were intricate and impressive, and she and Theo had great chemistry onstage.

Theo. His voice had a virtuosic resonance that let his sustained notes rip through the loudest instrumentation, but it was complex. His lower register was intimate and gravelly, his falsetto sweet and tremulous, and he sang with a raw vulnerability that made me feel like I was in bed with him all over again.

Onstage, he was sinuous and awkward by turns, as if he lost himself in the music and then suddenly slammed back into self-awareness. In one video, shot by someone standing right by the edge of the stage, Theo sang with his eyes squeezed shut, a hand outflung to the crowd, moving with the music, the final note held, a delicate crystalline thing echoing through the arena. He looked blissed out, joyous. Then the roar of the crowd began, and I could see, even in shaky video, the moment when he opened black-lined eyes, came back from wherever he went when he was singing, and became another person. He blinked owlishly, eyes wide and shocked, then seemed to register the crowd, smiled shyly for just a second, an acknowledgment that he had whipped them into this froth, then turned away from the camera as if he couldn’t bear to be seen any longer.

I knew that wide-open look. That startled look of being overwhelmed and the desperation for grounding or explosion. I had seen it from only inches away, in Theo’s bed.

* * *

—

Rhys arrived around dinnertime, which wasn’t a coincidence. Rhys was always hungry. He showed up twice a month or so, each time with something he needed to discuss or needed my help with, or the claim that he was in the mood for a drive.

“Been planting, huh?” he rumbled, jumping down from his battered blue Ford F-150, and gesturing to the freshly turned earth. He caught me up in the kind of hug that could crack a rib.

Rhys was a Viking of a man, even taller than me, with the kind of breadth that had him constantly pulling in his shoulders to avoid banging into things. His dark-blond hair was raked away from his face carelessly, and his eyes were the clear ice-blue of mountain glaciers. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had a confidence that was more galvanizing than beauty.

He followed me inside and hoisted himself up to sit on the counter as I cooked. It groaned beneath his weight, but he seemed unconcerned.

“Enough for two?” he asked, winking at me.

“Why don’t you get your husband to cook for you,” I muttered.

“Aw, come on, now, don’t be like that. You know I love you both.” He tried to wrap his legs around me as I reached past him for a wooden spoon.