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Thom/Beck	By : VinylTap Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Radiohead Views: 2950 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not know Beck or any of the members of Radiohead. This story is a work of fiction, and I make no money or profit from it.

Chapter List
- 19
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- 21
If you stood out by the rail at Santa Monica Pier, you couldn’t see very deep into the water. People said there was all this waste dumped in the sea, and you weren’t sure if it really were true, but you didn’t go in the water, just in case. Beck and Leigh leaned onto the wooden banister, Beck’s sneakers lodged partway between the bars, hair whipping, bent dangerously forth as he stared at where barnacles had lined the greenish posts beneath. Milky lights broke and reformed in the water that splashed around the poles, the low sound drowned by discordant laughter and shouts, music and bikes and rollerblades.
Somewhere about a foot up from the water, someone had managed to tag the post in white, there was a half-torn sticker that read most of Billabong. Leigh wiped her hands on her jeans, they were a little sticky from soft-serve ice cream, her napkin was a crumpled mess and she wasn’t sure where to put it. The wooden beams in the walkway reverberated with impact as children ran past, voices annoyingly shrill the way children never seemed quite aware of how close they were to other people when they shouted.
It was a curious thing, dating someone who appeared to grow gradually famous. She’d been accustomed from the get-go to how Beck had worked on sample tapes and played coffee shops, but there was no way to anticipate it when it actually came. She wasn’t sure what to make of it now. She had her own life, she worked to become a designer. She suspected warily in the back of her mind she might find herself through no fault of her own the woman behind the man, whose full identity was defined by the guy she was dating.
You think in life you do what you want and ignore what everyone thinks, but the fact remains you live in a community, and just as you are part of the human race, you are part of the community. You think you and your boyfriend are your own private unit, and then you’re stunned to realize the world had already formed all manner of perceptions without ever meaning to. Your man is so great. Aren’t you lucky. You love him of course, but you also put up with his shit, and you get into fights, and you sit down patiently to work out problems, you watch the stupid shows he likes because they mean so much to him and you pretend the stuff he screwed up isn’t so bad, you console him when he comes crying to you about stuff he’d never dare cry about to others— because you really care about him, and he really tries to treat you well even if he fucks up.
But all everyone tells you is aren’t you lucky. You must really be excited for him. Like there couldn’t be stuff in your life that didn’t also involve him.
No matter what you, yourself, had accomplished. No matter how much harder you’d worked. It wasn’t Beck’s fault, she liked seeing him happy; but she was vaguely aware there was something beyond her control, and she wasn’t sure where it would leave her.
Beck was really still a child; that he were invested and determined was something intrinsic that manifested since boyhood, but he was all the while very innocently helpless against what he didn’t know. He did what he thought he decided, and what people he trusted had told him that sounded like stuff he should probably do. He was taken by ideas he had that formed in his mind on their own, with a train of associations that had him curiously following, trying to figure out what they were and what they meant and what it was like that they were there.
It’s hard for someone so profoundly stirred by his own associations to force a rigid sort of discipline on what he knows he shouldn’t tell. It was what people he trusted had told him that sounded like stuff he should probably do. Leigh knew his secrets, he told her in the context of humbling moments that dispel magic over time and separate love from in love.
This bit about how he got with two guys, that was hot. It was something else she wasn’t exactly sure what to make of, because as far as fantasy went, if you’d asked her a few years ago, she’d say it was just hot as fuck on an absolute scale— but when it actually happened, she felt she also had to ask herself the whole bit about but is that cheating and am I immature for not taking it more seriously, and could I actually be jealous of something like that?
If Beck wanted to experiment, so let him. If he wanted to play parlor pet, she wanted to watch; this bit fell in the context of the magic of in love, which fooled you pleasantly but also stirred all manner of painful feelings that set the stage for longing.
She wondered whether by permitting something like this she wasn’t stupidly setting herself up for terrible heartache— but so early on, you never think stuff you do could ever actually matter.
When she told him it was hot, it made him smile. He’d laughed sheepishly and looked away, absently rubbing her back. It was both embarrassing and compelling to tell her the rest. She had all these questions, about how exactly it came to be, and who said what when, and but weren’t you worried someone might walk in? And but can you do that? Doesn’t that hurt?
Doesn’t really hurt, it’s kind of like this—
Like this?
No, here—
She could tell Beck, himself, was still partly overwhelmed he’d realized he’d liked it with a guy. She could tell he wasn’t certain what to make of it. She seemed cool with it, she asked him things, laughed with him knowingly when it became an inside joke; he didn’t think it could’ve hurt her. She made him promise next time he’d let her watch.
He called her over when the video for Stop Whispering came on, she oddly tilted her head, suddenly shy, smiling without understanding what for. “Why’s he bent over his guitar like that…?”
It became something his closest friends knew. He was a little timid about it, he joked with Channing the way guys joked around, roughhousing, calling each other gay where there was a thin line between curiosity and trying to pass curiosity off as a joke. They were out at the picnic tables behind Tito’s Tacos when Channing asked Leigh who she thought Beck should get with.
Here was familiar ground; she was hardly startled. She raised one eyebrow while trying uselessly to assemble the part of her taco that already had fallen apart. Beck smacked his brother on the back of the head, Justin’s arm was already around Beck as he wiggled his eyebrows at Leigh. She’d meant to act cool, but that was when the broken end of her taco fell into her lap, and she didn’t even catch that the two of them kissed until she looked back up from where she was bent over picking bits of food from her shirt.
Channing was laughing into the back of his hand. Leigh’s mouth went slack, she absently fingered her napkin where once she was going to use it on her top. She felt the electric tingle of astonishment in her neck and her cheeks, and the tender helplessness of infatuation. This would be get-off material for the next, like, year and a half.
“I can’t believe you did that, dude,” Beck laughed as he turned back to his food, and Justin winked at Leigh, arm still around Beck, visibly amused by the reaction it got out of her.
“Don’t worry, Leigh,” Channing grinned, “he can’t be better than that Radiohead guy.”
“He’s not,” Beck said.
Leigh’s mouth was now frozen somewhere between laughter and shock, both she and Channing started snickering while Beck stifled his grin with one hand. Justin appeared offended. Leigh made some desperate sound when he gripped Beck’s face with both hands and kissed him much more properly.
Beck’s various limbs scrambled with shock, Channing was vastly amused, here was material to make fun of his brother for, like, the rest of their lives. After a few moments, Beck actually began kissing back, he actually reached after Justin when he withdrew, and Justin gazed at him as though tremendously satisfied. He laughed, lightly smacked Beck on the cheek, went back to his food like nothing had happened.
Beck stared incredulously, one eyebrow raised; he muttered something about how he would so regret that before leaning partway over the table and mock-whispering loudly to Leigh, “Later on, bring your NES.”
Northward in the winding caverns of Burbank, the wicked Marissa Ribisi cackled diabolically over her scrying bowl—
—not really.
But it’s not like Bibbe Hansen never had the Ribisis over for dinner; they were friends of the family Beck and Channing had known since boyhood. Beck never really hung out with the twins, though, because when you’re a kid and even a teen, four years is a big difference in age.
He’d not been to his mom’s in a good two weeks, because he’d been in the studio recording with his dad. Really, he’d preferred when he was alone with his guitar, and maybe it was because he was distracted so easily by his own thoughts, or maybe because people always had this pensive expression when they heard what he came up with— something that always seemed dangerously like concern, like they didn’t know how to tell him in a gentle way he should scrap the whole thing.
Oh well.
He’d met Justin through his dad. He’d met Leigh through his mom. These days, he thought about both Leigh and Justin when he got off, but he really got off thinking about what happened on tour.
He’d lean back on the bench after hours across from the controls, head tilted back and lips parted, vaguely catching his own reflection in the glass, watching himself do it.
(On to chapter 21)
- 19
- 20
- 21
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Thom/Beck