Page 63 of Levi

It slashes through me fast like a blade slipped between two ribs. And fuck if it doesn’t hurt. I’m sitting on a stool I chose specifically so I’d see everything coming in that door, and I didn’t see this coming.

It walked straight past me.

I’m sitting here hurting over a man I’ve got no claim on, watching him keep his hand on the back of somebody else’s neck, and it’s the no-claim part that hurts worst.

And this entire time, he’s already been taken.

I’m wondering how much trouble I’d get into if I ordered a shot of tequila instead of the third beer I haven’t had when Little Blondie squeezes Dante’s arm and peels off. He crosses to the end of the bar. To the man in the wheelchair, the Bay County uniform, the cop I’ve been keeping half an eye on all night. He slides both arms around his neck from behind and bends down.

Whatever he says in the cop’s ear breaks a grin across the man’s face, and the cop reaches up and covers Blondie’s hands with his own like he’s done it ten thousand times and means to do it ten thousand more.

Jesus Christ.

That’s the unit right there. They’re the matched set.

Not Dante.

The cop and Little Blondie.

I’ve never had such an overwhelming feeling of fondness for a cop in my life. The blade slides back out in one clean pull. I’m light again. I pick up my beer with a hand that isn’t entirely steady, and I drink what’s left in the bottom.

Sheila’s there before I set the glass down. No plate this time. Just a rag in her hand she isn’t using and a look on her face.

She’s been watching me all night. She watched Dante walk in with Blondie’s neck under his hand. She watched the blade go in my side and she watched it come back out. She leans in close. Just for me, under the jukebox and the noise.

“Let me tell you something about that one.” A small tip of her head down the bar, to where Dante’s shaking a man’s hand, every hair right where he put it, the man assembled back to spec. “He’s got a heart on him as big as that Gulf out there. And he guards it like it’s the last one they ever made. You’re going to have to work a lot harder than you’ve been working, baby.”

I’ve got nothing for a comeback. Before I can scrape a word together, she straightens up, sets a glass of water down in front of me, and lifts the four stapled receipts off the register.

Sheila confirmed everything. She looked dead straight into the one place I keep locked and told me what she saw there. And now she’s making her walk down the bar, folded paper on a tray, headed for a man who doesn’t know yet what fourteen courses cost at market price.

Chapter 22: Dante

I hear the laugh before I’m through the door.

Loud, unguarded, bent over the bar. I don’t recognize it. Then I see who it’s coming out of, and I stop where I’m standing, because it’s Levi, head-to-head with Tex over something on the bar top, laughing until his shoulders shake.

Beside me, Benji makes a small sound like he’s watching a sunrise. “Oh…”

“Don’t,” I tell him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He spots Mickey at the far end, squeezes my arm once, and peels off down the bar to go wrap himself around his fiancé. I’m working my way in, a hand to shake here, a nod there, when I catch Sheila down at Levi’s end of the bar, leaned in close. Whatever it is, Levi’s taking it like a man receiving a diagnosis. Then she straightens up, sets a glass of water in front of him, and lifts a folded paper off the register.

That’s when the room changes.

Stormy appears near the kitchen door with a dish towel and no reason to be standing there. Tex crosses his arms. And Sheila comes down the rail toward me carrying the folded paper on a tray.

She presents it to me the way she sets down my unsweet tea. Then she waits.

Four receipts, stapled. Her handwriting, top to bottom. Every course itemized, fourteen of them, oysters through a dessert platter. Sweet tea, listed three times. And near the bottom, a line that says celery and ranch, which I read three times, because no one in the history of this bar has ever eaten the celery, and Sheila doesn’t write anything down by accident.

That one line isn’t a charge. It’s a message.

It means we could.

I can almost hear Tex saying it.