Riven (Riven 1)

I smiled at the thought of Theo in a white coat with all his tattoos and his long hair and his eyeliner.

“They just liked it when I was playing piano. It was proper, respectable. Nothing threatening or humiliating.” His fingers crept into my beard, then he ran his thumb over my mouth. “You have the sexiest mouth,” he murmured. I smiled under his thumb, and he kissed me. Then he fiddled with the guitar pick he wore on a string around his neck.

“I tell you they’re not really my parents?”

“What? No,” I said, sitting up. “You adopted?”

He shook his head.

“They’re my grandparents. My mom—I guess she was kind of wild. Got pregnant when she was sixteen, and my parents were mortified. Her parents. Anyway. She wouldn’t say who the father was, and I don’t really know what the deal was—like, maybe she didn’t know for a while that she was pregnant? But basically they wanted her to have the baby, give it up for adoption, and go on like nothing had ever happened. She probably wanted to get rid of it. Me. But I think it might’ve been too late, medically?”

He delivered all this in a matter-of-fact tone, but the moonlight revealed a slight tremble in his limbs, and I tugged him down to lie close to me.

“She had it. Me. And then I guess she just took off. I think they got letters or something from her for a few years, then she ended up in L.A., and stopped writing. I think of her sometimes, when we’ve played shows in L.A. Like…what if she’s there? In the crowd. What if I’ve walked past her on the street and never knew? I’ve seen pictures, but only up until she was a teenager. Anyway.”

“Did you always know, growing up?”

He shook his head and rolled over so he was lying on his back next to me, our arms touching.

“They didn’t tell me until I was a freshman in high school. I just knew that—well, that they were…cold, I guess, is the best way to say it. They were nice to me and everything, took care of me. But it didn’t feel…intimate? And once they told me, it made sense. Like, they were going through the motions for the second time. They’d already had their own kid and I wasn’t supposed to be there but it would have been scandalous to get rid of me. Wouldn’t have been proper. Whatever.”

He shrugged, but the hurt in his voice carved into me like a blade, and I slid my arm under his shoulders, wanting contact.

“Right after they told me, that whole year, it was so weird. I kept having this thought that I had to, like, make it worth their while or some shit, so I tried really hard to be good. Follow all the rules, do well in school, clean my room, play the music they wanted me to play. I even told them that I’d try the whole go-to-college-be-a-doctor thing. But it…it didn’t matter, because they still didn’t—” He broke off, shaking his head, and I hugged him close, breathing in the smell of his hair.

“They still didn’t really love me very much at all, I don’t think,” he finished in a whisper, and the pain of it washed through me, followed by a fierce wave of anger at the people who had made Theo Decker think that he wasn’t enough. I held him to me, running a hand up and down his spine.

“When I joined the band, I kinda…it sounds pathetic, but I guess I kind of thought it would be like a family? But…” He just shook his head and burrowed closer to me, wrapping a leg around my hip and an arm around my waist.

He didn’t have to finish the thought because he’d already said it all. He’d joined the band looking for family, connection, acceptance. And instead, he felt like the odd man out, alienated by the people he’d wanted to feel closest to. Again.

* * *

—

“Caleb! Ca— Oh, shit,” came Theo’s voice from outside, interrupted by the sound of him tripping over something. I smiled down at the potatoes I was cutting.

“In the kitchen.”

He burst through the door, a blur of manic energy. He blazed into the kitchen and jumped on me, practically before I could put the knife down, kissing me deeply, still smiling.

“I take it things went well, then?” I said, smiling and trying not to drop him.

“Fuck, yes, it was great,” he rhapsodized. I deposited him on the counter and told him to tell me as I cooked.

“They loved the songs, and I wasn’t a fucking train wreck like before, thank god. Ven agreed about that bass line and he came up with a variation on it that worked great. And you know the part in “Cupcake Apocalypse” after the bridge? Coco added this bit like”—he hummed four notes—“that totally changes the rhythm and just makes the whole thing pop! And, oh, man, wait till you hear Ethan’s drum part for it. He went sort of the opposite of Coco, and sped up that part, so the guitar feels kind of like it’s racing the drumbeat, but they’re still synchronized. Oh, and Ven is singing harmony on the no-name song, right, and his harmony, gah! It’s sick. It’s kind of eerily close to the melody, but then he drops down a whole octave so it gets kinda sinister in the chorus, which makes the chorus sort of sound like a bridge. Anyway, it fucking rocks. The whole thing just worked, you know? After a whole week of fuckin’ nothing, we recorded both tracks today, and fuck, I’m so relieved. And tired. And hungry. And really horny. Also, did I say hi?”