Page 175 of Levi

I come with my fist against my own mouth. He reaches up without stopping and pulls my hand away by the wrist.

“No covering your sounds,” he says against me, after, standing, crowding me into the tile. “Nobody’s listening to you but me. That habit dies today.”

“But the neighbors will hear—” There’s a whole building of people on the other side of this tile.

“There are no neighbors.”

“It’s a Sunday morning. Somebody’s home in this building.”

“No one is home in this building. There never has been. I own it. Bought the whole building months ago. Haven’t had a chance to renovate it yet. It’s empty. Didn’t you ever notice the lack of people or cars in the parking lot?”

I stand there with the water running into my open mouth.

“You own—” And then I’m doing the math on every night I ever spent here. The empty corridor. The parking lot with nobody in it. Never a face peeking behind a curtain. Me slipping in and out with my hood up, proud as hell of my disguise. “There was never one single soul to hide from?”

“Not one.” He smiles. “You were very sneaky, though. I enjoyed watching you work. If I’d told you, you would’ve opened every damn door in the building.”

“You son of a—” But I’m laughing. This is Dante all the way down. I’ve known men who’d tattoo a building they owned across their own forehead. He bought one, moved into the plainest unit in it, went on scrubbing at a rust stain in a tub he could have torn out with one phone call. In my world, money screams. His money doesn’t even whisper.

“Who else knows you own it? Benji?”

“Of course, Benji knows. I don’t keep secrets from Benji. Same with him. It’s the basis of our friendship.” His hands come back to me, slick and warm. “Which means Mickey knows, and Mickey told Tex, and Tex told Stormy, and Stormy told Sheila. Tex congratulated me on the closing before I could sit down at the bar afterwards. There’s no such thing as one person at that bar knowing anything.”

I stand there shaking my head.

“The point is, make all the noise you want, mi amor.” His mouth comes back to my ear, the filth and the tenderness in the same breath, the way only he does it. “I bought you a whole building to make it in.”

“I swear to God if you keep talking to me in Spanish the way you do, I’ll get hard every time I hear Bad Bunny on the radio.”

“I’ll teach you a few phrases. So you’ll know when my sisters are talking about you.”

I go down for him in the spray. Above me the most controlled man on this coast comes apart by degrees. His hand flat on the tile, then fisted in my hair, the Spanish arriving when the English quits on him, mi amor, breathed up at the ceiling. When he finishes, his knees dip, and I hold him through it by the hips, and there is no performance on this earth I’ve ever been prouder of.

We stay under the water until it goes cold. He yelps something in Spanish that is definitely not mi amor and we bail out of the tub laughing, grabbing for towels folded in thirds.

He dries me off first. Hair, shoulders, all the way down, kneeling to get my calves like the caretaking and the filth are the same to him. Then he swats me with the towel.

“Go grab a good shirt out of my closet,” he says. “Revolution’s at noon.”

He drives me over to the house a little later. The windows down, the Gulf flashing between the houses, same as it has all summer, except this time I’m not watching it slide away from me on the road to somewhere I was sent.

We pull through the gate of the house that was my address for a few weeks and won’t be by Tuesday. Dante puts it in park and looks at me.

“You want me in there with you?” he asks.

“No,” I tell him. “This one’s all mine.”

He nods slow, like he expected it. “I’ll be right here,” he says. “You don’t owe him anything. You walk out whenever you want and we go back home.”

I go in alone.

Freddie’s in the big front room, glass wall, the Gulf behind him, pacing, on the phone. He turns when he hears me and hangs up without saying goodbye to whoever it was. He’s called every shot in my adult life. I keep waiting for the old feeling, the shrinking, the bracing. It doesn’t come.

“Finally, you show up,” Freddie says. “Do you have the faintest idea what you’ve done?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I think I do.”

“You detonated eight years of work in ninety seconds. Almost a decade of my life. The wholesomeness, the family audience, the position in the market, gone, on a stage, on camera.” He’s pacing again. “Every sponsor we have will be on the phone Monday morning. The Christian chains will drop you by lunch. You’ve humiliated the label, you’ve humiliated me, and worst of all you did it with no strategy.”