Chapter Ten
Like a River Song
“Sorry,” said Amanda, “you did what?”
“This is what you wanted!” River pointed out. “You masterminded this! Why are you surprised your diabolical plan worked?”
And what did she care if he gave Jem a car?
She huffed a breath that fluffed her bangs. “I thought it would take you longer to figure it out—”
“Okay, ouch—”
“And way longer to act on it. Like, you are a rock star. Excuse me for thinking you might have some chill.”
Have you met me? River wanted to say, but then he realized yeah, she had. She’d been there for all the assholes who’d cheated, stolen, treated him like shit, and he’d let all that roll off him.
She thought he might be able to be chill about a guy he was falling ass over head in love with because she’d never seen him with someone he actually gave a shit about. And neither had he.
“Okay, fair,” he said finally. “You think the car was too much?” It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, but Jem seemed to like it. River was still thinking about what he’d said. He was too old to have back-seat-of-the-car fantasies, but if that was what Jem wanted, he’d make it happen.
“I think you probably had a very sweet reason for giving him a car, and I’ll get your feelings all over me if you tell me what it was.” She shook her head. “But you didn’t ask me here to talk about Jem.”
“I didn’t.”
“Are you going to tell me why you did?”
Was he? Once he said it out loud, he couldn’t unsay it. What if she thought he was crazy and wanted to ditch him as a client?
No, that was dumb. She already knew he was nuts and had compensated by hiring him a sugar baby. She was going to match his freak.
“It’s probably easier if I show you,” he said finally. “Come on.”
River recorded enough demos at home to have a decent setup.
It wasn’t fancy, but it got the job done.
It always sounded better on a pair of high-quality headphones, so he handed a set to Amanda and slipped on his own ruby-red pair, leaving them around his neck for the time being.
“So uh, I’ve been writing a little. A lot, actually. But it’s kind of all over the place.”
“How so?”
Well, see, I was eating ice cream with Jem, and he went on a rant about just letting people like things, and it awakened something in me, and now I refuse to be pigeonholed.
So I’ve written a pop ballad, a pop-punk patter song, a country tune, a riff on classic rock, and my best approximation of R car was so easy to rhyme.
Instead the song was full of romantic longing and whimsical things, like the first cup of coffee in the pot and the last piece of cake and the side of the bed without the wet spot.
“Terminal. Down-bad. Disease.”
Yeah, okay. River rubbed his hands over his face. “Terminal?” he asked sheepishly.
“Well.” She gave him a smirk. “The little death, at least.”
So that was one less thing to worry about.
Amanda left him to his own devices, and River spent the rest of the day poking at things in the studio.
He fixed the rough parts in the patter song and tried out a couple of effects on some others, but nothing quite fit.
The songs ended up sounding more different than similar.
“Ugh.” What River really needed was—
Probably to wait for whoever Amanda was going to set him up with.
He was too close to the music to be able to see it.
And his brain was buzzing with nerves, with hope, with something that felt like it might grow into a foundation he could build his life on.
He needed to do something. Take a walk. Take a swim.
Go rock climbing. Learn parkour. Try BASE jumping. Get another tattoo—
The doorbell rang.
River blinked at his computer screen, then got up and went see who it was.
Normally he didn’t get people on his doorstep, what with the whole needing privacy thing. He had a security gate. He hated it, because it made him feel like he was a psycho cult leader, but it was a security gate or live in an apartment with a doorman, and he liked his privacy.
So the fact that the person had gotten this far meant they had the gate code, which meant River wasn’t worried about it when he pulled the door open.
But he also wasn’t expecting Jem.
The surprise must’ve shown on his face, because the first thing Jem said was, “You left the gate opener in the Subaru.”
He didn’t say anything after that, because River was kissing him, pulling him into the house with both hands on his face. Jem made a short, surprised sound of approval and let himself be pulled as he kicked the door closed behind him.
Yeah, said the insistent buzzing in River’s brain, now vibrating at a whole new frequency as Jem’s mouth opened under his. This’ll work.
River couldn’t let go of Jem’s perfect face, which made navigating to the couch difficult.
He stumbled backward into the conversation pit and narrowly avoided falling on his ass.
Jem followed with grace and even more enthusiasm, clutching at River’s shoulders, waist, ass until the backs of River’s knees hit the couch and he sat down with Jem already in his lap.
God, he felt incredible. River didn’t know for sure if he could bounce a quarter off Jem’s ass, but his dick was certainly interested in finding out how pliable it was. From the way Jem’s breath caught when he ground down in River’s lap, it seemed like Jem wanted to know too.
River carefully bit his lip and shivered when he felt the heat of Jem’s flush under his fingers.
Somewhere in the back of his brain, he recognized that he didn’t want to fuck Jem on the couch.
At least not this time. But despite the grinding, and the kissing, and the handsiness—Jem had his long fingers threaded through River’s hair now and River was half a second from purring about it—neither of them seemed to be in a rush.
If Jem wanted to make out on the couch for two hours, River would happily resign himself to stubble rash.
Eric and Ward would mock him endlessly and River would bask in it just like he was doing now, with Jem in his lap.
Hopefully with a less obvious boner.
Before the stubble rash could fully form, Jem pulled his mouth away from River’s—terrible, but River made do kissing down his neck instead—and gasped gratifyingly into the quiet house. “River.”
River fell in love with the way Jem’s vocal cords vibrated beneath his lips. “Mmm,” he agreed.
A sharp tug as Jem pulled River away from his neck. His mouth was swollen pink and a dark flush stained his cheeks—a perfect vision.
River watched him lick his lips.
Then, “You’re going to let me this time, right?”
Let him? Maybe River’d accidentally held his breath too long, because his brain couldn’t piece that together. What exactly had he not let Jem do before? “Let you what, sunshine?”