Page 86 of Levi

Property guy. Not realtor. I’ll burn this house down before Freddie’s hand finds the truth about Dante. And I hear myself do it. I call the man who crossed a room for me property management. Defending him would’ve taken one true sentence. Instead, I knife him surgically for his own good. Knowing it’s for his own good doesn’t take the sting off the blade.

Freddie’s breathing slows. Behind the outrage, those flat eyes go to work. A property guy doesn’t put a man against a wall over how he talks to another man.

Freddie’s not stupid. But he decides, for now, to let it go. He’s got bigger fires. He remembers what he drove over here screaming about. He picks the phone up off the floor and shoves it at my face again.

“This.” The screen’s lit. “Do you understand what this is?”

Yeah, it’s me. The night of the bonfire on the beach.

The girl’s phone video, vertical, shaky, the fire throwing orange up the side of my face. Me on a log with a borrowed guitar and a beard. No lights, no band, no name on me. Singing a song I wrote that nobody approved, to a circle of kids who didn’t know me from any other drifter off the beach.

And God… I’m alive in it. Fully alive and glowing. You can see it on a little phone screen. The most alive I’ve looked in years. The music came back to me that night.

“Eleven million views,” Freddie says, “and climbing, and the comments have already made you, half of them have your name, and we open tomorrow. Do you have any idea what it costs me to spin a story where my headliner’s wandering barefoot down a beach and shows up singing songs no one wants to hear at a bonfire the week before the—”

I stop hearing him.

Because the one pure thing I did, the one hour that was mine, is a crisis now. A brand problem. They took the most authentic I’ve ever been and turned it into a reason to scream at me.

And under it all is the undeniable fact the video is out. Eleven million views already. My name in the comments. The world is going to get to Dante first, or it’s about to. Eleven million times louder than I ever could.

Everything drops on me at once, with Freddie still yelling.

My grand plan to keep Freddie and Dante apart failed spectacularly. The heads-up from Dante I asked for, the privacy at the house I demanded from Freddie. All of it to keep the exact thing that just happened from ever happening.

And below it all, it’s going to look like a con.

I run through it like Dante’s going to run it, and I can’t make it come out any other way. Dante’s going to find out who I am. When he does, every single thing about these two weeks flips over and shows its other face.

I didn’t lie to him about any of it. I told him my phone and credit cards were tracked. I told him I was low on cash and couldn’t touch the rest without it pinging somebody in another state. The one thing I ever asked him to pay for was three beers and supper at the Roadhouse. I asked him straight, no game in it. Everything else, the sleeping bags, the ribs that showed up in my fridge, the burner phone, he did on his own. I let a true thing stand in front of a false picture and didn’t correct it. That’s the only crime I committed.

And none of that will matter to him.

None of it.

Because the heaviest thing in the pot is the one that looks the worst. The drunk tank at the jail. And it was the truest thing in all of it. I had not a soul to call except him. I couldn’t call Freddie from a jail cell. I couldn’t hand him that kind of rope. Dante was the only person in this world who I thought might be willing to help me. And he did.

I know how a humiliated man would see that though. As signing a wasted, lying millionaire out of a drunk tank. The one decent stretch of my life, and Dante’s going to remember it as the time some guy laughed at him from behind a beard.

That’s what I can’t live in. That he spends the rest of his life sure the kindest thing that ever happened to me was me being cruel to him.

I need to explain. I’d give anything for one hour with him listening to do it.

But I don’t have an hour even if he was willing to listen. I don’t have five minutes. I’ve got a soundcheck at six, a fitting after, press at nine in the morning, a stage tomorrow night, and a two-week run bolted to the calendar behind it.

I claw through the schedule in my head for one window, one hour I could get to him. There isn’t one. They own all of it. Always have. I just forgot.

They own all of me.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Freddie’s voice comes back in like a radio off scan. He’s stopped mid-sentence and he’s staring at me. Whatever’s on my face, it’s not the face of a man receiving his talking-to, because his jaw goes tight. Ten minutes of screaming and his headliner’s been somewhere else for most of it. Even Freddie’s fury has a limit, and he’s hit it.

“I’m sick to death of this, Levi. Sick to death of dragging you over finish lines. I’m leaving. I’ve got a story to kill and a lineup announcement sitting on top of eleven million views of you playing some Godforsaken song, and I’ll be doing that work while you do yours. Six o’clock. You be standing where you’re supposed to be standing, sober, tuned, ready to work — or so help me God.” He doesn’t finish it. He never finishes them. The unfinished ones are the ones that hold.

He goes out the front door and leaves it standing open behind him. Men like Freddie don’t close doors. There’s always somebody behind them for that.

I wait until the Uber crunches down the drive and the gate clears. Then I take the burner phone out.