Riven (Riven 1)

He brushed another onion off gently, rubbing at it with the hem of his shirt, and it tugged at me when his shirt came away dirty and he didn’t seem to care. The second I’d given him permission to stay, showed him that he was welcome here, he’d shed the sticky skin of awkwardness that had strangled our earlier conversation, and slid back into being the man I’d met that night in New York. Expressive and open, lilting from topic to topic, and telling stories seeded with tiny gems of detail that gave me glimpses of how his brain worked.

It wasn’t just about music, either. He talked about the cities they’d been through, the hotel rooms and airports, and the food, all of it spangled with observations that pricked at me, made me want to see the world as he saw it.

“The DeadBeat Festival was…I dunno, the rest of them loved it. They thought being invited meant we’d arrived or something. But it felt…off somehow, to me. Like we were a pack of exotic animals in a zoo. I don’t know, maybe it’s that way for some people at a regular show, but it felt different. Kinda corporate or something? Like we were just there because we’d been deemed the right combination of chum to bait the masses.”

He shook his head and added another onion to the pile. “I sound ungrateful. I know it was an honor to be invited. A big deal or whatever,” he amended.

“I get it, man. Sometimes things are an honor because of what they mean but still feel like shit to do, because of what they are.”

“Yeah, exactly. Like how sometimes the most expensive thing on the menu is awful. Like caviar or that baby pig that’s fed only, like, acorns or some shit.”

I laughed and Theo’s answering grin was brighter than the sun.

* * *

—

“Seems only right you stay for dinner,” I said an hour later when we trooped back into the house, hot, dirty, and lugging a lot of produce. “After all, you helped source it.”

I threw it out between us like a hand resting palm up and waiting to be taken. I did it because I couldn’t bear to see him go, after he launched himself into my day and made it sparkle. I did it because watching him, listening to him, I was the most alive I’d felt in years. I did it because maybe—just maybe—I wouldn’t suffer for it later. And if I didn’t, then…what else might be possible?

“Okay.” Theo smiled up at me with a smear of dirt on his cheek and another over his eyebrow. He looked alive and so beautiful it took my breath away. I found myself cataloging his features in an attempt to find what made my heart beat faster and my insides turn to jelly.

His blue-gray eyes were bluer in the sunlit afternoon than they’d been the night we met, and they seemed to glow against his dark hair. His plump lower lip was a little chapped from the sun and I wanted to bite at it to feel him tumble against me in a fall of sinewy limbs, soft hair, and hot breath.

“I should shower.” He held up hands and forearms streaked with dirt. “Isn’t it funny how if you grow it yourself food’s actually filthy?”

I led him to the bathroom and got him a towel and some old clothes of mine that would certainly be too big for him. Then I forced myself to go back into the kitchen and not picture his lithe body moving under the fall of the shower where I’d jerked off thinking about fucking him at least ten times since the night it had happened.

When he came back into the kitchen, squeaky clean and warm, my cut-off sweats hanging precariously on his hipbones and my white undershirt thin enough to see through to nipples and tattoos, I almost cut my thumb off, staring.

The tension sizzled between us as he stared back. I’d stripped my dirty, sweaty shirt off and washed up at the sink, and was now cutting potatoes in just my jeans.

We stood, eye-fucking each other, until the oil spat in the pan.

“What are you making? Should I help? I shouldn’t help, really.”

Theo hitched himself up and sat on the counter exactly where Rhys had sat the last time he was over, and I amused myself imagining them both here at the same time, Rhys’s matter-of-fact truths dancing with Theo’s colorful ramblings.

“A hash kind of thing—the peppers and onions from the garden. With eggs. And, no, you’re fine.”

“Yeah, I tend to…not help well. I get annoyed. I don’t like cooking, just eating.”

“I’m not great at it, but I can get by.” I didn’t mention that nearly everything I cooked was some variation on thing-mushed-over-heat-with-eggs.

I plated the food and set the ketchup and hot sauce on the table, reminded again of Rhys and his invitation for me to write with him for his new album. I’d been fiddling around with a few things since he’d come by and should probably text him to tell him I had stuff for him to listen to.