But he was Theo, and everything about him got to me. The little sounds he made in my ear as he worked me, the heat inside me and wetness between us, the sweet way he pressed his mouth to my skin as I started to tremble. Then good turned into holy fuck, and I was coming for him again, spilling into his hand like my body would give him anything, even the things I thought were impossible.
Chapter 19
Theo
When I kissed Caleb goodbye at the airport in New Orleans, it had felt like something was being torn away from me. Somehow—though we’d spent countless hours together at the farmhouse, or in my apartment—being with Caleb out in the world, doing things with him, had made me feel like we were together. A team.
I’d had friends, of course, though not many, and the band, but with Caleb, I felt like I had someone who was…mine. I knew Caleb’s situation was a little different. He had Rhys, who had known him for so long, and so well. And he had Huey, who was, in a lot of ways, his first phone call. And I knew he had a whole community of folks he’d played music with for years, and I assumed that once he felt on steadier ground he’d reach out to them again.
But the last few days, moving through the city together, playing together, I felt, for the first time, like I had a partner. And letting that go—not just Caleb himself, but the feeling of being a part of that pairing—was wrenching. I felt more alone with him gone than I had before he’d arrived.
We went on to Atlanta after New Orleans. Then D.C. and Baltimore. Coco was from there and Ven had lived in Baltimore for a few years, so I let Coco, Ven, and Ethan drag me to tourist attractions, neighborhood bars, and favorite eateries. But I couldn’t wait to get back to my hotel room and have some peace. Not just that, but since Caleb and I had played our song, it was like a vast space had opened up inside of me—a well of ideas and possibilities for songs and music that rendered forth something new every time I had the opportunity to dive into it.
I was scribbling lyrics in a frenzy and recording bits of music on my phone voice memo so I wouldn’t forget them as we were wandering around, or when I was backstage. In the week after Caleb left, I’d written three songs. And they were different. Better, I thought, than anything I’d written before. I wasn’t writing them the way I usually did, like deep cross-sections where I imagined everyone else’s parts. I was writing them like they were wildfire sweeping through a stand of trees, or lightning ripping across an open stretch of desert.
We had a day off in Philly before our last three shows in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, and for all that Ven was convinced that Philly crowds were terrible (“They don’t cheer!” he insisted. He had strong generalizations about the crowds in nearly every town we played), I liked the city. The last time we’d been here, someone had told me about a curiosity museum, so I decided to ditch the band and go check it out. The Mütter Museum was full of medical anomalies, anatomical specimens, medical instruments, and a lot of super-weird shit, like a cabinet full of the foreign objects removed from people’s stomachs during surgery, and arranged in drawers—metal soldiers, nails, safety pins, buttons, dollhouse furniture, and on and on.
There were cross-sections of Einstein’s brain, medical texts bound in human skin, collections of gall- and kidney stones, skeletons of people who’d had rare diseases, and a whole room of fluid-filled specimen jars. I thought it was fascinating, but when I sent Caleb pictures of conjoined twin fetuses, he texted: Ugh, babe, I can’t look at this kind of stuff. Then, just as I felt guilty for freaking out my own boyfriend, he sent a second text: I’m glad you’re doing something fun in Philly, though. Eat a cheesesteak for me.
That evening, when I knocked on Coco’s door, she, Ven, and Ethan were lying around in sweats, eating delivery pizza and watching an episode of Law & Order.
“Theo!” Coco called, and raised a hand as if to say she was excited to see me, but was so comfortable right now that she couldn’t possibly move.
“Dude, have you seen this one?” Ven asked without looking at me. “There’s a guy in it who totally reminds me of that bassist from Orpheus Explosion—you remember?”
I hadn’t seen the show and I did remember the bassist, so I was caught between nodding and shaking my head, but it didn’t matter anyway because Ven didn’t look away from the TV.
“Want some pizza?” Ethan offered.