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“Kiss me,” I demanded, and as Caleb’s mouth slammed down on mine, I came, jerking heat between us. Caleb’s grip was slicked by my come and he groaned, stroking faster, then plowed his hips into mine and came hot and slick on my belly and chest.
“Fuuuuuuck.” He collapsed on top of me, breath leaving him in a moan against the pillow.
We lay there for a while, a caress here, a kiss there, as the sun set outside, casting the bed in shadows.
“Will you stay?” I asked.
Caleb swiped at the stickiness on our stomachs with the shirt he’d been wearing, then gathered me against him, murmuring an affirmation into my ear. I fell asleep with his lips at my throat and his fingers in my hair.
* * *
—
“God, we come off as total twits.”
I tossed the magazine facedown on the coffee table and flopped back down on the floor with my guitar, strumming angry chords. Caleb flipped through it, his gaze assessing.
“Just tell me,” I said.
“It’s not that you seem like twits. It’s that Coco, Ven, and Ethan don’t really write the songs, so when the interviewers ask y’all questions about the process of writing the music, you’re the only one with anything to say. But you don’t want to because you’re afraid they’ll think you’re hogging the spotlight. So then Ven says something generic and Coco says something technical about her playing that they edit down because no one who isn’t a guitarist can understand it. Which adds to that impression that you hate, that you guys got lucky in hitting it big.”
I sighed. Part of the problem I always had was that I didn’t know why we’d hit it big. I thought our music was great, sure. But loads of bands were great and never got successful, much less famous.
“The interviewer was a dick, anyway,” I mumbled. “He was, like, leering at Coco the whole time but then didn’t include half the things she said in the piece. Even the stuff not about guitar,” I clarified. “And the photographer kept trying to grab my ass and Ven was like, ‘Well, you end up in the front of every picture anyway, so…’ as if I were fucking photographers to get more publicity. Asshole.”
My mouth tasted sour at the memory of the slimy photographer, inching my jeans lower and lower on my hips, saying the light caught my hipbones and he wanted to capture it, all the time rubbing against me. His hands splaying possessively over my stomach under the pretense of adjusting the leather vest that hung open over my bare torso. I shuddered.
Caleb was watching me keenly.
“Where was your manager in all this? Or Lewis?”
I shrugged, not wanting to think about it anymore, and Caleb’s jaw tightened.
“Whatever, anyway, are we doing this?”
I held up the guitar and Caleb nodded, letting it go, and stretched out on the couch with his own.
This morning I’d come into the kitchen at the smell of coffee and found him humming something under his breath.
“What’s that?” I asked, pressing my cheek to the warm skin of his bare back.
“Coffee.”
I bit his shoulder.
“Just a little hook that’s gotten stuck in my head.”
Which was how we’d started writing a song together, tapping out a rhythm with spoons and humming into our coffee. We were interrupted by the messengered magazine from Lewis, but I was eager to get back to it.
We spent the better part of the day working on the song. It was the first time I’d ever written with someone from scratch. With Riven, I brought songs mostly formed and then we tweaked them, or changed them.
This was a chance to see how Caleb’s mind worked, and I was fascinated. He’d play a fall of notes, transpose it up or down, something about the structure, their association, sticking with him, until he found its proper home, then build from there. He was a tinkerer, an experimenter, using one piece to find his way to another, sometimes seeking out holds methodically like a rock climber, other times just jumping from bit to bit in a way that seemed capricious but must’ve meant something to him. My approach was different—I’d find a note or a progression that just felt right to me, and then build out from there. But we understood each other. I could see what Caleb was grasping for just as he could feel the rightness of what I found, even if I couldn’t explain it.
And, by dinnertime, we had a song. A rough song, tentatively balanced between our two styles. A song that would need some work. But a song, nonetheless.
Chapter 14
Caleb
“No, Lewis, I’m not doing that! Absolutely not!” Theo was yelling into his phone, pacing on the porch where the signal was better. “Well, if that happens, I guess I’ll just accept that I’m crap at my job, won’t I? Because I’m not fuckin’ lip-synching and I can’t even believe you’re asking me.”
