“I should do that too,” Leo said, and leaned over, wrapping his arms around Caleb, shifting his weight on the barstool, until Caleb was nearly supporting him. “You're really good at this kind of thing, you know.”
“Not just the music thing?”
“Definitely not just the music thing.” Leo smirked, and Caleb knew he wasn't talking about sex but god, a few days without after two years of a steady diet, and sometimes that was all it took to get him worked up again. “I meant, you’re good at this whole life thing.”
That was not something Caleb had expected him to say. “You're kidding,” he said flatly, feeling all the fizzy beginnings of his arousal fade in the face of his indignity. Leo joked around a lot, but surely he knew better than to tease about this.
“I am not kidding,” Leo insisted. “You're the most even-keeled person I've ever met, at least on the surface, and that's something worth celebrating right there. I know you've got depths, and you've got bigger, deeper feelings, but you don't let them control you. You control them. I wish I could do that. And that's not even going into the insane self-control and self-assertiveness you have.” Leo shot him a lopsided grin. “When you came back, I wanted to hate you for a lot of reasons, but also because you seemed so sure. Sure that what you were doing was right, when there I was, floundering around, unsure of everything.”
“I didn't always feel that way,” Caleb admitted. “I just . . . pretended like I knew what I was doing.”
“Fake it til you make it,” Leo said sagely.
Caleb realized that maybe Leo was right. He'd been faking it for so long, maybe the truth had become a more complicated concept than he knew. Maybe, deep down, he'd believed it long before now, he'd just never seen it himself. But Leo had seen it, even way back then. When he hadn't trusted him. When he hadn't even liked him.
“I think . . .” Caleb took a deep breath. “No, not I think. I am, I'm going back to therapy. I think it'll be good for me, and good for us.”
Leo's gaze was warm and supportive, and he reached up and cupped Caleb's cheek. “I think you need to do whatever you need to do, to feel like you really deserve this.”
“You mean that,” Caleb said.
“I mean everything I say,” Leo insisted staunchly, even though they both definitely knew that wasn't true. “But I really do. If it meant you needed to go to the ends of the earth again, to find yourself, I'd support you one hundred and ten percent of the way. Would it suck? Absolutely. Just like this sucks now, this space we're giving each other. I want you with me at the hospital. I want to be with you in the studio. And I want you next to me, every single night, in our bed. But this is worth it. I have to believe that. Remember when you told me to trust you? That if things were meant to be, they would be? It turns out that it doesn't get easier to believe that, but I can do it, anyway.”
Caleb was quiet for a moment, absorbing this. Leo wasn't often this serious, so when he was, it was definitely important. “I believe it too,” he finally said. “And you know what else? You're pretty good at this life stuff, too.”
Leo made a face, but Caleb wouldn't accept it. “No, you really are. You bring humor and laughter to us, even when you're being a total pain in the ass. You claim you're never serious, but you see everything, don't you?”
“Sometimes, yeah,” Leo admitted.
“Not sometimes,” Caleb insisted. “You saw what was happening between Felix and Max, and you thought it would turn out, even when we were all nearly sure it was a disaster in the making.”
“That was just blind hope,” Leo confessed. “But sometimes I think that's the secret to life, isn't it? Blind hope.”
And just like that, Caleb knew what he and Steve and Mario would work on today, at the studio. Maybe not the song, not quite yet, but something else. Something about hope and all its unique forms.
CHAPTER SIX
A week later, Caleb and Leo sat in their living room, watching the last bits of sun fall over the ocean. “Did Benji say why we needed to clear our schedule for the weekend?” Caleb asked. They'd already been out to dinner, grabbing sushi at one of their favorite places.
Yesterday, Benji had called, claiming that he and Leo needed to be “totally available” for the next two days, starting at eight PM on Friday. That was still an hour away, and Caleb could tell how antsy Leo was about not knowing every single detail about what was going on.
“I don't know. It doesn't make sense. They weren't even supposed to be here,” Leo said, drumming his fingers on the arm of the sofa. “They were supposed to be gone for at least another month in South America, and now they're back, and making demands.” He sounded put out. “I had to call in like fifty favors with Felix, who understandably wants to spend time with his new boyfriend, and here I am, begging off for an entire weekend.”
It wasn't great timing for Caleb either. Steve and Mario had flown in last week, and they'd worked on the songs he'd initially started with Brad, as well as a few others. Caleb had made enough progress that he actually felt like he might want to pull in another producer soon, just to help polish up some of the tracks—and to work on the one, final song that he still hadn't really touched. His heart wanted it, no matter what made logical sense, to be Leo, but he still hadn't figured out a way to ask. He'd been working up to the question, when Benji had called with his request for two free days.
“Laurel will be fine. She's settling in great with Felix,” Caleb soothed. He reached out and captured Leo's hand with his own, stopping the relentless, nervous tapping of his fingers. “She'll be fine for two days. She even told you to go.”
“Yeah, it’s not her I’m worried about,” Leo retorted.
“Felix will be fine, too.” But Caleb was sure Felix would figure out a way to extract his own unique pound of flesh. After all, that was kind of Felix's signature. Caleb wasn't even sure, two years into his new relationship with Leo, that he had truly forgiven him for the way the first one had ended.
Nobody was more loyal than Felix Humphries; but nobody else could quite hold a grudge like him either.
“I hope so,” Leo said, then paused. “I'm sure this wasn't great timing for you, either. You've been at the studio every single day for a week. It must be going really well.”
Leo had asked so many leading questions just like this one. He'd even asked several at dinner, only an hour or so earlier. But Caleb didn't know how to talk about the album—at least not until he could figure out a way to pull Leo in, to play it for him, and ask him what he should be tweaking.
“I'm happy with it,” Caleb said. “We've made progress.”
“And you like these guys you met in Fiji? Even though they're Brad Maxwell's people?”
“They're musicians. Brad doesn't own them,” Caleb said. “And yeah, they're cool. They like my stuff, and maybe I'm egotistical enough to surround myself with yes men.”
Leo rolled his eyes fondly. “If that was true, I'd have convinced you to play it for me before now.”