A flurry of swearing followed, and then he banged back inside.
“They want you to lip-synch?”
“On the fucking Night Life Show! And you know what Lewis’s justification is? Everybody does it. Did you know that? That apparently every single person in this industry lip-synchs?” he said sarcastically.
Theo rolled his eyes and flung himself on the couch. After a moment, he pulled the keyboard onto his knees and launched into a lugubrious dirge. With his nostrils flared, his brow furrowed, and his black hair wild around his shoulders, he looked like a petulant teenaged Edgar Allan Poe, and I had to stop myself from laughing, since that would not go over well.
He’d been around long enough by now, and seen enough, that any scrap of naïveté about this business should’ve been stripped from him. But I was realizing that he spent so much of his time feeling like an interloper in Riven, he often missed the part where, compared to the world, he was a star. It jarred him when he received special treatment, made him uncomfortable when people deferred to him, and pissed him off when people thought he’d know better than someone else about anything but music.
But it ran deeper than an intentional disregard for his own celebrity. While onstage, Theo oozed sex, confidence, and charisma, Theo offstage was the man who had grown up in a cold, sterile home, with people who looked at him and saw their daughter’s mistakes. I could see it sometimes, when we were intimate. Theo would reach for me, ask for something he wanted, with words or with his body, and then retract, suddenly sure he’d stepped over a line; asked for something he had no right to. Something that he would surely be denied.
The other night, he’d come out of the shower to find me on the couch, and draped himself over me. After a few seconds, his whole body stiffened, and he started to pull away, as if he’d collect himself and take himself away before I could point out that he’d transgressed.
There was a deep need in him, and it sang to me. Plucked at strings pulled taut inside me that had never been strummed. I wanted to be able to grant him every right over me. I wasn’t there yet. Not quite. But I wanted it. For the first time, I wanted it.
“Well, so you told him no,” I said. “That’s good. That’s your right,” I told Theo, easing down next to him on the couch slowly so I didn’t dislodge the keyboard. I knew I should tell him he could take it home with him so he could use it whenever he wanted, but I couldn’t help thinking that keeping it here meant one more reason he had to come over.
He shrugged.
“No, Theo. It is. You get to decide when you sing and when you don’t. Period. You did the right thing.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. He pushed the keyboard onto the table and put up a knee to face me. “What if they want me to, though?” They invariably meant Ven, Coco, and Ethan.
“Well,” I said, running a hand through his hair, “you’re the singer, so you decide when you sing. If they told Coco she should fake play guitar, it’d be up to her whether she wanted to or not, right?”
Theo laughed.
“Oh my god, I’d pay to see someone try and get Coco to fake playing guitar. She’d behead them with a guitar string like cutting soft cheese.” He made a grotesque popping sound.
“There you go, then.”
“?’Kay.”
He relaxed, a finger trailing up my cheekbone and then tucking my hair behind my ear as he looked at me. Then, after a minute, “Thanks.”
“You hungry?” I asked. “I can make dinner and then we can do the pumpkins.”
It was the night before Halloween, and Theo had gotten all excited because the pumpkins I’d planted were ready and he wanted to carve jack-o’-lanterns.
“Yah, but, uh…” His eyes darted to his bag. “Don’t kill me, but I brought—” He rummaged around in the bag and brought out a stack of boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese. “I love your I-grew-this-and-we’re-gonna-eat-it thing, but I’m just…so effing sick of hash,” he said apologetically.
I laughed. “No worries. I can just throw an egg on top of this and we’ll be good to go.”
Theo’s eyes got wide and he looked a little queasy. I chucked him under the chin.
“Kidding,” I said.
* * *
—
The pumpkins were smaller than your commercial variety, but we’d managed to carve them anyway. Mine looked like the typical triangles-for-eyes-and-a-grin jack-o’-lantern that you saw on every stoop on Halloween. I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to what I was doing because I was absorbed in watching Theo carve what was possibly the single ugliest jack-o’-lantern I’d ever seen.
He’d spent long minutes deciding among the pumpkins, finally choosing the biggest one he could find. I’d teased him about size not being everything and he’d groped me and said fortunately for him, that wasn’t an issue.