Page 67 of Levi

And then I hear him walk away.

Footsteps going back across the room. Quick. Away from me. The sound of him leaving.

Whatever was left of the floor goes out from under me then. I get it. God help me, I get it all, in one piece, faster than I’ve ever understood anything.

Dante looked at me. He saw what I am with the packaging off — soaked, shaking, hanging on a rail like a drunk over a gutter — and he couldn’t stand to keep looking.

He asked the one question that mattered to him, got his answer, and left. I’d leave too. I’ve spent years trying to leave this exact man hanging on this rail and I’ve never once managed it, and Dante did it in four steps.

The shame comes up hotter than the panic and folds itself right into it, till I can’t tell which one has my throat. He saw me. Not the version I tried to show him — the fixed-up, useful, holds-his-end version — but this.

The derelict on the balcony.

And it disgusted him off his own porch in the middle of the night. I want to be gone before he has to walk past me in the morning. I want to be gone more than I want the air, and I can’t get the air either way. My hands are the only part of me still working and all they know how to do is hold a rail.

I don’t hear him come back. That’s how far down in a hole I am.

“Levi. I’m here.” His voice is right behind my shoulder, and I flinch so hard the rail rings under my hands. “I’ve got an ice pack that I’m putting on the back of your neck. You’re sweating and I need to get you cooled down.”

He came back.

He didn’t leave me. He went to the freezer.

The story I built and died inside of. He went to the kitchen for ice, and I buried myself with the sound of four steps.

I don’t have air enough to laugh or cry about it, so it just sits in me, huge and stupid, while the cold comes down on the back of my neck.

And Lord, the cold.

It lands like a slap and turns into mercy a half-second later. My burning body tilts toward that one cold spot. The roar in the back of my skull that’s been screaming since I woke up drops its voice a notch, just off the shock of it.

“Levi, wherever your mind is taking you, you’re not there.” He’s right at my ear, talking calm. “You’re here with me. It’s only you and me here, Levi. You’re safe with me. I’m watching over you. I won’t leave.”

He doesn’t ask what happened or why. He just looks at my body that can’t breathe and goes to work on it.

“Breathe in through your nose,” he says. “Out through your mouth. I need you to do this. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. Do it with me. Stay with me, Levi.”

And he does it where I can hear him. On purpose, loud enough to find, slow and long and even, laying it down like a track for me to walk in. He doesn’t tell me to calm down. Doesn’t tell me it’s fine, it’s nothing, get a grip. He just breathes, big and slow at my shoulder, the ice steady on my neck, and waits for me to come find the rhythm where he left it.

The first try gets nowhere. The next gets a little. Somewhere four or five breaths in, the welded place at the bottom of my lungs gives a quarter inch.

“Ice is starting to melt on you,” he says after a while. “It’s running down your back.”

I feel it then, now that he’s said it. A thin cold line tracking down my spine, the pack gone soft and sweating in his hand. He steps up closer behind me. I feel him do it, the warmth of him arriving at my back before anything touches.

The ice pack changes hands, right to left, and then his right hand comes down flat on my bare back and rubs the cool water in.

I tense. I feel myself do it, the flinch firing up the back of me toward his palm. A hand coming down on me in the dark. Mid-panic, no shirt, nothing between his palm and my spine.

But I don’t move because it’s Dante.

His hand is on my back and it isn’t going to hurt me. I know it. And I know something else, even with half a breath to think it in. Dante touches people. I’ve watched him do it at the Roadhouse with Blondie, the cop, Sheila. Like touch is just another word he speaks. He touches everybody he cares about and he has never once touched me.

Not until now.

His hand is on my back and it doesn’t come off. The ice stays on my neck and the hand moves on my back, slow circles, working the cold water into skin gone hot as a pot lid. He keeps breathing where I can hear him, and I keep laying my ragged breath down along the long clean edge of his.

In through my nose. Out through my mouth. Round goes his hand.