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He nodded and wrapped an arm around my waist.
“Caleb?”
“Hmm.”
“Why the fuck do you put your couch like that?”
I felt his chuckle against my hair.
“When I first got here, I was crawling out of my skin. Everything just made me want to jump up and drive right back into the city—hell, to the nearest bus station—to score. Or, that’s not exactly it. Drugs…I never just sat around and shot up, you know, drugs just always went with the music for me. So I wanted to cut and run back to the whole thing. To my fuckin’ life, you know? Because that’s what it was: my life. And suddenly I had nothing to fucking do. Even sitting on the couch, I’d stare out the window and see my truck. So, then, I drove my truck to Rhys’s and told him to keep it there for a month, not let me have it. And when he dropped me back home, I turned the couch around so I couldn’t see anything but the wall. So it was work to climb out of it.”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“Don’t really need it like that anymore, usually. I just…I was hiding a bit, I guess.” He ducked his head.
“Found you,” I said, and kissed him.
Chapter 10
Caleb
Theo was holed up with me at the farm. He’d called the band and told them he just needed a change of scenery, but if they gave him a week he promised he’d be back and ready to go with two new songs. He even offered to pay for the studio cancellation for this week out of pocket, a gesture that told me a lot about how he saw himself in relation to the band.
We went for long walks in the morning, and then worked on music all day. Once Theo went inside, I would wander around the property, muttering to myself for an hour and probably looking like a lunatic, but then the song would just be there. It was how they used to come to me, only it had happened when I’d been on tour, or walking through the city. Something about moving through space distracted me just enough that the notes and words settled in without me overthinking them.
The stuff I was writing was rough, but I knew it was good. I knew it with the gut instinct that had been slumbering for the last year but had now roared awake. It was dark, though, which is how I knew it wasn’t for Rhys’s album, even though I was pretty sure I was going to tell him I was in for the project.
Theo scribbled. He sat on the floor, long limbs scrunched or sprawled in various uncomfortable-looking configurations, with the keyboard in front of him and his notebook to his right. He’d scribble in the notebook, try something on the keyboard, and scribble some more. At first it sounded like he wasn’t getting anywhere, but if I stopped and really listened, I could hear the song emerge in three- and four-note clusters. And I realized that he wrote vertically, not linearly. Each bit he heard, he heard as guitar, vocals, bass, and drums. That little fucker was in there on my floor, writing rock music like he was composing a damn symphony. Not that I actually knew how one composed a symphony.
I had no clue how he kept all the parts straight in his head, and I’d had no idea that he wrote like that. It was like he was digging six feet down for every phrase. It kind of took my breath away, and it made me wonder what other surprises Theo Decker hid behind that fall of black hair, those gorgeous eyes, and the rock star persona the world saw.
When it was just the two of us, he was mercurial, sometimes shy and bumbling, sometimes awkward and goofy, often growly and intense, and occasionally so sweet I had to do a double take to check that he wasn’t messing with me. But he wasn’t.
On the third day he was there, Theo was writing in the living room and I was having a cigarette on the porch, when Rhys arrived in a growl of transmission and a cloud of dust from the road. It had been a dry week, and I was hoping for the sake of the garden that it would storm later.
“Your boy here?” he asked, gesturing over his shoulder to where Theo’s car was parked.
I objected to the phrasing, but didn’t bother trying to correct Rhys.
“He’s inside.” I also considered every version of Go easy on him that I could think of, then discarded them all because Rhys was gonna do what Rhys was gonna do, and if there was any hope for Theo and me going forward, he’d have to learn to deal with Rhys. And, fuck, was I actually thinking there might be a Theo and me going forward?
