Riven (Riven 1)

He nuzzled my throat for emphasis, but I held him off, hands on his shoulders. A chill slid down my spine like the screams of the barn owls late at night.

“What the hell, Theo?”

“I—what?”

The anger and the fear waged war with each other so quickly I almost shoved him away from me so it wouldn’t touch him. So he couldn’t see. Instead, I slipped around him and stalked into the kitchen for a lemonade, hoping that putting something into my mouth would help keep other things from coming out.

“Caleb, I don’t—what did I do?”

“Look, don’t do me any favors, all right?” I snapped. “That’s exactly what I don’t want—all your bandmates taking pity on the washed-up asshole you’re fucking who ruined his career. No thanks.”

And there it was, on the heels of the anger and fear: shame, turning my stomach to acid. I just wanted him out of there so that I could curl up and lick my wounds.

“That’s not what they thought at all! They thought you were great. And I didn’t tell them that we’re—that we—about the fucking.” He trailed off self-consciously, voice trembling.

“Did I say that I wanted back in the studio? Did I ask you to do this? No. There are reasons why I’m here and not in New York. And when I’m ready to record again, I don’t need you lighting the way, okay?”

Theo threw his hands up. “Okay! Jesus. Sorry I fucking wanted to help.”

“I don’t need your help, Theo! I had a career in this business when you were playing the violin in your high school orchestra. I don’t need your damned charity.”

“Fine!” Theo snarled at me, glorious in his righteous anger. “Excuse the fuck out of me for thinking it would be good for you to do something other than sitting around in this house and digging in the dirt. Sometimes you actually have to take a chance, you know?”

He stood before me, so clean and shiny, the world at his feet. And in that moment, I hated him.

Chapter 9

Theo

“Fucking hell, Decker, that’s you. Again.”

I’d missed my vocal for the third time in a row. Ven was rolling his eyes, Coco’s nostrils were flared, and even Ethan, usually the mildest among us, tossed a stick in the air hopelessly. It wasn’t just missed cues. I sounded blah, I was distracted, and I’d written fuck-all for the last two weeks, even though before that the songs had been coming at me from all sides.

“Sorry,” I muttered, dropping my chin so my hair hid my face.

“Uh, try dropping down an octave for the second chorus,” Coco suggested to Ven. “While we’re stopped anyway.”

“Yup, good call,” Ven said, trying it.

We had been working on this album the way we wished we’d done the last one—one song at a time, completing one before moving on to the next. Our first album we’d recorded in five days. But that was because it was all we’d been given the budget for, and we didn’t know our sound well enough to experiment. On our second album, we’d gone in with the songs pretty solidly constructed, and recorded them piecemeal, adding in tracks later as we needed them. From a production standpoint, the album had worked well, but the songs had possessed none of the soul of performing live. We’d hated how perfect they sounded, how engineered.

This time, we had the money and the time to do it the way we wanted. And not only was I too miserable to enjoy it, I was also fucking it up for the others.

The first two days we thought we were just warming back up. I’d brought in the two songs I’d written to start us off, promising I’d have more soon. But even though the songs had seemed promising when I wrote them, and Caleb had said they were great when I played them for him, once we got into the studio it all fell apart. We were missing something vital. Some energy or spark to tie the whole thing together.

“That shit comes when it comes, man,” Ven had said on day two, when I’d raised my concern. “We’ll know it when we hear it. For now, just trust.”

Ethan had nodded. “It’s true. We’ll just be playing and something will hit us that we want to pull through the whole album.”

But then day three happened, and day four, and it was crap. I was crap. And my bandmates started exchanging looks I pretended I didn’t see. Now we’d been at it for a week and hadn’t laid down even one solid track.

“Sorry, guys,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time. “I’m gonna just take ten.”

I left the studio to muttering and the feeling of eyes on my back. I pushed through the doors and slunk through the rabbit warren of carpeted hallways until I got outside. The warm breeze after the close air of the studio was welcome, and I tucked myself into a crouch against the sun-warmed brick around the corner of the exit.