Riven (Riven 1)

I stood up so fast I knocked over the water glass Caleb had set on the floor. Then a hand yanked me back down onto the couch. Those green eyes regarded me steadily and Caleb stroked his beard.

Finally, he nodded once and said, simply, “Okay.”

“O-okay?”

“Yeah, but if you’re staying for a bit you can help me in the garden. My squash and peppers are up. And the onions.”

Could it be that easy?

“I—uh, sure.”

Chapter 6

Caleb

When I opened the door to find the man I’d thought about and watched videos of for the last few weeks standing on my doorstep, I had a moment of dislocation so strong it was like waking up on tour and realizing you were in an entirely different city than you’d thought you were in, the trappings similar enough that you’d read familiarity where there was only foreignness.

The blur, I’d called it, back then. “I’ve got the blur, man,” I’d say to Rhys, and he’d nod, and say, “Memphis,” or “London,” because he always knew just where we were.

To open my grandfather’s door on Theo Decker had given me the blur like I hadn’t had in more than a year. All this time, I’d thought the house, the land, the trees, those ugly fucking sunflowers, had a clarity to them that my life before had lacked. But they all stood dimmed and fuzzy in comparison to the sharp edges of the man before me. He was the most in-focus thing I’d ever seen.

And I…I let him in. Opened the door and let him slip inside as sharp and sweet as a needle. I let him in because the idea of turning him away was more than I could bear. The quiet isolation of this place had been a necessary precaution; then a balm, when my every nerve was raw and each sensation felt like an amp turned to 10. It took Theo standing there, silver-snap eyes hopeful and sheepish, all sharp angles and messy hair and bitten lips, to let me feel. Really feel. And what I felt was a wave of longing so strong it nearly knocked me on my ass.

Longing like that isn’t born of lust, it’s born of loneliness. It’s born of lack. It’s born of knowing the depths inside yourself that can gape wide enough to lose yourself in forever. And it’s about the hope that maybe, somehow, something has come along that makes you want to turn away from the abyss and face the light.

Watching Theo in the garden was a trip. He wore black jeans that had broken in to skim his body like a second skin, another pair of old Chucks—red, this time—and a Warhammer concert T-shirt that had probably once been black, but was now laundered to gray. His hair was like wild black feathers curving around his finely drawn face, eyes made fathomless by the remainder of what must have been days of caked-on eyeliner, black nail polish chipped and bitten, and a tangle of black strings tied around his left wrist.

On his knees, in the dirt, he looked like a crow, gleaming black in the dusty sunlight, sharp beak scratching at the dull ground.

“I got one!” he called triumphantly, holding up a small onion as if it were the surprise of an Easter egg hunt, and not a row I’d carefully planted a foot apart, with visible stalks. “Uh, what do I do with it?”

“Just brush the dirt off it and put it in the basket.”

He nodded, and went back to work, squinting in the sun as I clipped peppers nearby, taking ones that had sweetened to yellow, orange, and red, and leaving the green ones behind. I’d had enough bitterness lately.

“How was your tour? The DeadBeat Festival?”

“We had a really good show in Helsinki. You know those shows where the whole thing goes by really fast but also feels like it’s relaxed onstage?”

I nodded. I knew the feeling well. The dilation of a song so that you could see its strands intertwined, reach out and touch their colors in the space between you, then come back to yourself realizing the show is over and you went someplace else.

“Coco added this solo in the second half of ‘Galaxy,’ and the crowd loved it. Scandinavian crowds are always way more into solos than US crowds,” he mused. “And, damn, Ethan was ridiculous. He’s been singing more harmonies with me recently, and there’s just this, like, disconnect in my brain of how he can sing and drum at the same time, so I love to watch him, so then I had my back to the crowd to see him, and they thought I was playing coy or something, so they were screaming so loud and when I turned around it was this wave of just bam lust or something. And Ven was in a good mood that night so he was all chatty. It was almost like I was actually a part of them.”