I take the elevator up. The loft feels wrong without him in it.
At midnight I send one more text.
Mickey:I know what I did. I know why you left. I’m going to find you tomorrow and I’m going to say your name right. To everyone. I’m sorry, Benji.
Delivered. Not read.
Chapter 41: Benji
Dante opens the cottage door at eight-fifteen in the morning carrying garment bags.
“Get up,” he says. “Shower and change. I brought options for you.”
I’m on the couch because I couldn’t sleep in the bed. The bed was too comfortable and comfortable felt wrong so I took the couch. The couch was miserable and miserable felt accurate.
My face is swollen from crying. My eyeliner is smeared on the pillowcase. Frankie is on the windowsill catching the first light through the screen and looking healthier than I feel, which is insulting from a succulent.
“I don’t want clothing options,” I say. “I want to lie here and mope.”
“You’re not lying here or moping. You’re getting up, you’re putting on clothes that make you feel like yourself, and you’re coming with me today. I have three open houses to check out this morning. Multi-million-dollar properties on 30A. I need a second opinionandI need you to remember that you’re a person who walks into rooms and makes them beautiful.”
“I don’t feel like making rooms beautiful today.”
“That’s why we’re starting with other people’s rooms. Hit the shower. Now. No arguments. The first showing is at nine-thirty and I’m not walking into a four-point-two-million-dollar listing with a man who looks like he slept in a flophouse.”
“I slept on the couch.”
“Believe me, I can tell,” he says. “Go shower and make yourself gorgeous.”
I do what he says because arguing with Dante in crisis-management mode is like arguing with weather — pointless and exhausting.
“I stopped by your apartment on the way to the airport,” he says. “I grabbed the coral linen and the white button-down. Cream pants. Navy shorts. Your good eyeliner, not the drugstore one. And the brown belt, not the black, because the black one makes you look like you’re going to a funeral and today is not a funeral.”
“You broke into my apartment in the middle of the night to pack me outfits?”
“I have a key, it’s not breaking in. And someone had to. You left that man’s loft with one bag packed by a person in crisis. Crisis packing is not packing. Crisis packing is shoving things into a zipper and hoping for the best. I was not going to let you face today in whatever you grabbed in the dark at midnight.”
The bathroom is small and white. The water pressure is adequate, which is a word I would never use to describe water pressure if I were feeling like myself, but I’m not feeling like myself.
I pick the coral outfit. The coral makes my skin glow and my eyes pop.
Dante does my hair. He stands behind me with product and a comb. His hands in my hair are steady and familiar. He’s been doing my hair since we were twenty-three and he decided my styling was “an emergency that required intervention.” The hair goes back. The volume comes up. He hands me my eyeliner.
“Sharp,” he says. “Today we do sharp, Benji. No arguments.”
I line my eyes. The pencil is steady even though my hands shouldn’t be. The eyeliner goes on the way it’s gone on every morning since I was sixteen and decided that my face was mine and nobody else gets a vote. The line is sharp. The wing is precise.
“And there he is,” Dante says in approval. “You’re back, Benji.”
We take Dante’s rental, a white SUV that he upgraded at the counter. Dante doesn’t drive economy when he’s working. The drive to the first open house takes twelve minutes on 30A.
The first showing is a four-bedroom house with a courtyard pool and a rooftop deck. Dante works the listing agent while I walk the rooms. The rooms are beautiful. White walls, wide plank floors, the clean coastal aesthetic that sells for a premium. I run my hand along the countertops. I check the light in every room. I stand in the courtyard and look up at the sky through the palms. Panama City Beach is ten minutes from here. Same sky. Same water. I wonder if he’s looking at it too. I push the thought away. I walk into the next room.
The second showing is new construction, five bedrooms, a pool that vanishes into the tree line. The listing agent is awoman who shakes Dante’s hand and immediately clocks that Dante knows his business. They talk comps and absorption rates. I drift through the house touching light switches and opening closets and checking the way the doors hang.
“What do you think?” Dante asks me in the kitchen.
“The bones of the house are good,” I say. “The finishes are builder-grade trying to look custom. The backsplash is wrong for the price point but the pool saves it.”
