“Shit,” I muttered, and heaved myself up to follow Rhys inside.
Theo, still spread out on the floor, didn’t even hear us come in. He was wearing headphones, frowning at his notebook, his lower lip caught in his teeth, tapping out a rhythm with his pen. He looked adorable.
“Fucking shit hell!” he swore when he startled at seeing us there. Rhys chuckled.
“Heya, I’m Rhys Nyland.” He stuck out a fist to Theo, to shake, and Theo scrambled to his feet, headphone cord jerking him back down so that when he stood his hair was everywhere and the neck of his T-shirt was slightly askew. Something about him in awkward mode always got to me. I thought Rhys perhaps agreed, because his smile was charmed.
“Hi. Theo.” He shook Rhys’s hand and tried to pull away, not knowing that Rhys shook hands for an abnormally long time. This resulted in Theo trying to step backward, and almost stepping on the keyboard. I caught him by the arm and extricated him from Rhys’s grip, snugging a hand around his hip in the process.
“Oh, hey, my Casio,” Rhys said.
“Theo’s a classically trained pianist,” I said, spelling out the warning to Rhys in my tone. Rhys wasn’t one to start shit, but he was protective of me in general, and had been doubly so over the last year, so I didn’t put it past him to poke.
Theo flushed and started to shrug off my comment, but Rhys said, “Yeah? Cool. I could never play, really. Hands got all caught up.” He held up his huge hands, which looked comical in the context of the small keyboard. “Play something,” he encouraged.
“Oh, naw, this thing isn’t really—”
“Come on. I’m not expecting fuckin’ Carnegie Hall–style shit or anything. Just a little…thing. Classical…music…thing.” He grinned at his own ignorance.
Theo smiled and shrugged, then settled himself back on the ground. He hit a few notes, played a scale, then took a deep breath and started to play. I didn’t know what the piece was, but though he was on the floor, Theo’s posture was ramrod straight, shoulders relaxed, where usually he sat in a tangle of limbs. The music was lovely, though it sounded odd and tinny on the keyboard, especially in the highest octave. Even Theo’s hands moved differently as he played than when I’d seen him working on songs.
He played as expressively as he sang, and though he’d said he was never passionate about the classical music he’d played when he was younger, there was a joy to him like this, and even the crappy Casio keyboard couldn’t disguise it. When he finished, he lifted his fingers off the keys in a manner that looked ritualistic and rested his hands on his knees, and then I saw what I hadn’t seen with his hair in his face. His eyes were closed. When they fluttered open, they were dreamy, more silver than blue, and I saw the self-consciousness set in as he looked at a slack-jawed Rhys. He ducked his head down and shrugged, that perfect posture folding in on itself like a flower.
“It’s awkward,” he said. “The keyboard’s so much smaller.”
“Holy shit,” Rhys said. “Holy shit.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Oh, uh, a Chopin nocturne. I played it for a recital once, a zillion years ago. Always liked it.” He shrugged again, and when we were silent, made an awkward gesture to indicate he was going to the bathroom, then nearly ran out of the room.
“Whoa, dude,” Rhys said. “Wasn’t expecting that.”
“You won’t believe how he writes songs,” I said, leaning in. Rhys was fascinated by other musicians’ processes, so I knew he’d be interested in this. “He writes like he’s taking cross-sections every phrase or so. Writes all the parts at once.”
“What?” Rhys breathed. “That’s unreal. Nobody writes like that. I gotta ask him. He’s not…like, one of those kids where I’m gonna freak him into a fuckin’ panic attack or something? Remember that guy, Gary, in Memphis?”
Gary had been a guitarist who ran sound at the Ruby Slipper in Memphis, and he’d traumatized Rhys by having a panic attack after Rhys kept asking him questions about how he used his bottleneck slide. The panic attack, it turned out, had only the slightest bit to do with Rhys’s intense focus, but Rhys had felt terrible about it. He was a teddy bear, really, and it upset him when his bulk and intensity were read as aggressive instead of invested.
I snorted. “Nope.”
“Okay, come here and show me this thing where you write all the parts at once,” Rhys said as soon as Theo came back into the room. Rhys was perched on the armchair and he looked like a fucked-up Santa Claus trying to get Theo to sit on his knee. I shoved them both onto the couch and went to make another pot of coffee.