“I...don’t know, okay? I’m not sure. I was making a choice, good or bad, for myself and my future, and after fifteen years, I have no idea if I should have done it. Perhaps because I’ve been doing this for fifteen years and I’m so used to it that the idea of something else is so foreign I can’t conceive of what it would have meant,” he said with a sigh. “At the end of the day, I am what I am, and with that decision, it made sense to make sure you were not dragged into it. So, no, I’m not sorry I pushed you away. You had your life to live, your path to follow, and I knew that it in no way, shape, or form should have anything to do with what I was doing.”
A few points could be made about that. First, it wasn’t up to him to decide what to do with my life, but what would be thepoint? I could tell I wasn’t going to get anywhere with that other than an argument. Choices had been made, and we’d been living with them ever since. God, the past day with me was probably the most normal he had had in years, and that included him working. I wasn’t willing to let the topic go, not by a long shot, but I understood enough to know I didn’t understand at all.
My life, despite its ups and downs and occasional weirdness, had been normal, especially in comparison to the life he’d been living. I had a family and friends. I’d had lovers I could treat as lovers, and I had done everything a normal person did. I didn’t have to wonder where the next bullet might come from, I didn’t have to constantly look over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t going to get stabbed in the back, or bum-rushed by someone who thought I might be a good target to get ahead. I hadn’t been entrenched in a world of crime, pain, blood, and so much money it would make my head spin. Levi had left normal behind years ago, and I couldn’t expect him to think like a normal person.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I watched him feed water into a tube with grounds in it and...squeeze it down like a bicycle pump, but slower.
“Do you genuinely want to know, or are you flailing around for a different topic?” he asked with a small smile.
“I have no idea what the fuck you’re doing, but it does move us away from the argument we were getting ready to have.”
“Were having,” he corrected, sounding pleased. “And it’s called making coffee.”
“It’s the weirdest fucking way of making coffee I’ve ever seen,” I said as he poured the contents into a mug and handed it to me.
“Probably because you think coffee comes only from a drip maker,” he chuckled. “And out of plastic containers.”
“I probably don’t want to know how much this cup of coffee costs, let alone the bag or whatever you have of grounds, do I?”
“Probably not,” he said as he put things away and cleaned up. I took the chance to sip the coffee, which was incredibly strong and silky smooth in a way that made no sense, and looked around the house with a different eye than before.
The machine he’d used looked expensive, and, of course, there were the aforementioned coffee grounds. I remembered thinking the bed was absurdly comfortable to sleep in, the kind of comfortable you couldn’t get for a few hundred bucks. Chocolates were sitting on the counter, and the packaging alone looked like it cost more than a box of chocolate at the store, let alone the chocolates themselves. The soap in the bathroom had been a brand I’d never heard of, and while I hadn’t paid much attention, it had left my hands feeling nice. Come to think of it, his blankets and towels had also been ridiculously comfortable, and the pillows had been like sleeping on clouds made to wrap around your head and hold it just right.
“I’m starting to suspect that if I went through your closet, I’d find a lot of stupidly expensive but comfortable clothes,” I said, smirking when he gave me a quizzical look. “And I bet if I looked at your food bill, it would have tip-top quality.”
He frowned. “Do you...what is your point?”
“I don’t know, I just thought it was weird at first that your car was nice, but it didn’t scream money, your clothes are nice, but they also don’t scream ‘holy fuck look at all this blood money I have sitting around.’ And the house...it’s nice, but not the biggest or prettiest. We both know most of the money you spent went toward its location rather than its fancy features. And now this coffee machine and the coffee.”
He stared at me blankly. “Yes?”
I shook my head. “That’s where all your money has been going, these...what did Matty call them once? Creature comforts.”
“Oh,” he said, blinking and then chuckling. “I’ve never seen the point in flashing wealth. I remember there were a few kids like that in school, and I always thought it was the stupidest thing in the world to flash all that money around and pretend like it somehow made you important. What’s the point of using money to make people jealous? If you’re going to spend large sums of money, you might as well use it to make yourself and those closest to you as comfortable and happy as possible. Also, my occasional vacation expenditure is quite high.”
“Another creature comfort,” I pointed out.
“I wasn’t disagreeing, I was adding to the list,” he said as he filled the drying rack with parts from the machine. “Though I imagine you aren’t exactly lacking for funds. And before you say it, yes, I’m aware you have not made the kind of money I have over the years, but I suspect you’ve still made quite a good sum. Yet you’re driving a truck that is at least ten years old, and you aren’t exactly wearing the nicest clothes. You keep your hair short like you always did because you hate having to deal with it, there’s no jewelry, and last I checked, you have no holdings in the city.”
“No holdings in the...wait, you checked up on me?”
He stared at me, unbothered, and in fact, he looked as if I had asked a stupid question. “Of course, it was one of the first things I did when I got here. If you remember, I was trying to avoid running into you. One of the first ways to avoid you was to see if you were even in the city. According to all financial records, you weren’t in the city, as you neither owned nor rented anywhere. It wasn’t until I saw you at the end of the first week that I realized you were still here but chose to stay with your family at the hotel.”
“I also stay at Arlo’s pretty often when I’m in town,” I said, shaking my head. Only Levi would think it was normal for him to dig through records to try to find me rather than, oh, I don’tknow, walking into the family hotel and asking if I was still around. Or shit, if he wanted to avoid me, having someone else do it. No, he had to do it in the weirdest, most roundabout way possible, and it still didn’t help because I ended up seeing him.
“I saw he’d bought a little house a few years ago,” he said, and if it were anyone else, with his kind of money, I might have been annoyed at it being called a ‘little house.’ Itwaslittle, but for someone with the kind of money Levi had, that could easily be a snide judgment. But it wasn’t anyone else, and considering we were standing in a little house that Levi had bought for himself, I knew he didn’t mean it that way.
“Jesus, did you check up on everyone?”
“I feel if I answer that question honestly, I’m going to suffer more judgment from you.”
“Do you know how to do anything in the normal way?”
He cocked his head, smirking. “I’m quite sure I managed to give you head last night in the normal way.”
Alright, well, point to him. Not because he was right, but because it caught me off guard. “There wasnothingnormal about that blowjob.” There were plenty of words to describe that blowjob, but normal wasn’t one of them. Mind-blowing, amazing, in need of a repeat, but normal? Absolutely not.
Seriously, where the fuck had he learned to do that? I mean, probably plenty of practice over the years, but it wasn’t much fun to think about that too hard. It was far more fun to remember the sight of him between my legs, doing everything he could to drive me insane...and succeeding. There were a few other things about last night that were a lot more fun to think about than how he learned to do...all that.
