“I have a book club. Same thing.”
“Hi, Levi!”Jo’s voice carries down the stairs.“Have her home by midnight!”
“It’s a Tuesday,” I yell back. “I’m an adult.”
“And yet you still need supervision!”
I grab my purse and pull Levi toward the door. “Let’s go before they start taking photos.”
He opens the car door for me, and I slide in feeling like I’m starring in a movie about someone else’s life. Someone who gets the guy and keeps him.
The restaurant is in Beaufort—thirty minutes down the coast, small and quiet, with candles on the tables and a view of the water.
“Dean recommended it,” Levi says as we’re seated. “He brought Jo here for their six-month anniversary.”
“That’s unexpectedly romantic of Dean.”
“His exact words were ‘the crab cakes are not terrible,’ which is high praise in Dean-speak.”
We order the crab cakes and wine. The waiterdisappears, and suddenly it’s just us, the ocean a dark ribbon beyond the windows.
He looks different in candlelight. Not younger, exactly — more like a version of himself I never got to see. The Levi I knew wore ripped jeans and played open mic nights at bars that smelled like spilled beer. This Levi wears a button-down that fits him properly and orders wine without checking the price. LA polished him. Success gave him a steadiness he didn’t have at twenty-seven, when everything about him vibrated with nervous energy and want.
But his hands are the same. I keep staring at them — the calluses on his fingertips from guitar strings, the way he turns his water glass in slow quarter-rotations when he’s thinking. Some things ten years can’t touch.
“This is surreal,” I admit.
“Good surreal or bad surreal?”
“Good. Definitely good.” I fiddle with my napkin. “The last time we had dinner together, we were twenty-seven and splitting nachos at that dive bar on the boardwalk.”
“I remember. You ate all the ones with extra cheese.”
“I have a system.”
“Your system is cheese theft.”
“It’s served me well for two decades.”
He laughs, and the sound loosens something in my chest. This is still Levi, the boy who wrote me love songs and waited years for me to come back. The fancy restaurant doesn’t change that.
But something fragile hums underneath the ease. Like we’re both being very careful with this, holding it the way you hold a glass ornament, aware of how little force it would take to shatter. I catch myself memorizing details: the flicker of the candle reflected in his eyes, the exact curve of his smile, the low warmth in his voice when he says my name. As if some part of me is already preparing for the moment I won’t have this anymore.
Which is ridiculous. I’m sitting across from a man who kissed me under a pecan tree last night and texted me poetry this morning. I should be happy.
Iamhappy. That’s what scares me.
Happy has never lasted. Not for the women in my family. We fall hard and then we lose, to distance, to ambition, to the slow erosion of choosing different lives. My mother loved my father with everything she had, and it still wasn’t enough to keep him.
I push the thought down and focus onLevi’s face.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I say. “From the last ten years.”
He considers. “I have a tattoo.”
“You do not.”
“I do. Got it in LA about five years ago. I was celebrating a record deal. It’s deeply embarrassing.”
