River twisted the fidget spinner. After a moment he said, “Yeah. Take me to Seventh Circle, please? I need to run an errand.”
Sorting that out took the remainder of the day and all of River’s focus. By seven that night, he was debating taking up chain smoking again to get his nerves to chill the fuck out. Jem hadn’t answered his text, and River finally twigged that Ivy had probably gone into labor. Was Jem in the room for that? Tori could be kind of spastic; maybe she was getting her fingers crushed while Jem caught the baby.
Anyway, River couldn’t know for sure, but he tried to make himself believe Jem only had his phone off to avoid the wrath of the lady pushing his biological child out of her vagina.
At ten past, someone knocked on his door and he almost jumped out of his skin. He tripped over his own feet in his hasteto open it, and then tried to school his face into not showing his obvious disappointment when he saw Eric and Ward.
“Lara said we should feed you dinner,” Eric said as he pushed past River into the house.
“She also suggested sleeping pills.”
For fuck’s sake. River had changed the gate code last week; he knew the opener in the Subaru didn’t work anymore. He’d gotten his hopes up for no reason.
It helped, though, having Eric and Ward around. Ironically, focusing on the imminent end of their time as bandmates helped soothe the nervous energy that had been pumping through him since the Bean.
River still put away four slices of angry Hawaiian pizza without thinking about it just because he needed something to do with his hands.
The three of them stayed up late in the living room, watching shitty TV and eating cold pizza like they’d done when the band had just formed. When Eric started falling asleep on the couch, River poked him and sent him off to his mom’s room so he didn’t fuck himself up before the show. Ward took the throw blanket and the sofa.
River went to bed alone, wishing he had Jem next to him, but at least the promise of tomorrow made sleep come easily.
“He’s not coming.”
Amanda didn’t look up from her phone screen. “For the thirtieth time: you do not know that.”
“Well, where is he, then?”
“I don’t know. This is LA. He’s probably driving around the block looking for parking. Or there’s a protest against big oil in front of the arena. Or someone mistook him for a member of a boy band and he’s signing autographs.”
River blanched. “Amanda!”
“Nothing against boy bands! But he does kind of have the hair, you know?”
Oh God, he really did. River could never unknow this. For the rest of his life, he’d have to live with the fact that he’d fallen in love with a man who had teen-heartthrob hair.
That crisis momentarily took over brain space from theothercrisis, where Jem was fifteen minutes late and River wanted to cry about it.
River couldn’t cry before a performance. It would fuck with his voice. Sure, he only sang backing vocals for the Flat Tires, but he didn’t want to fuck up their last-ever concert.
The rational part of his brain—the one that sounded like Amanda—pointed out that he’d sprung this plan on Jem last-minute, by courier. Jem could have had conflicting plans. He might have had to shuffle some things around. Especially if he’d gotten a job for the summer. River didn’t know how else he could have managed to scrape together the money to replay him.
River hoped a loan shark hadn’t broken his kneecaps or something.
That was the other thing—he had to believe Jem meant what he’d said in the note. River hadn’t forgotten what that kind of money meant to regular people. So probably he was just having trouble, like, rearranging his life so that he could drop everything and meet River at the arena VIP area two and a half hours before the show was supposed to start.
Right?
Finally the walkie-talkie on the dresser crackled. “Got a visitor here for River Wild.”
River’s pulse spiked so quickly he got lightheaded and had to lean against the wall.
Amanda picked up the walkie-talkie. “Thanks. I’ll come get him.”
She stopped to pat River’s shoulder on her way out. “It’s going to be fine.”
Right. Totally. He smiled at her. “Yeah?”
A squeeze. “Yeah. And then I can stop feeling like a monster for setting you up for heartbreak.”
