Page 98 of Levi

There’s no word important enough to be worth the air it would cost him.

I don’t know how long we stay there. His breathing comes down out of the rafters a notch at a time until it’s just tired, wet breathing, and the tears stop somewhere in there too. I keep my hand going a while past the point it’s needed, because neither of us was ready for me to stop.

Then he pushes himself up off my lap, and sits back against the seat. He wipes his face once with the collar of his shirt, matter-of-fact, the way you’d wipe off sweat.

“I’m okay,” he says, destroyed. “I’m okay now.”

“Are you sure?” I say, and I don’t move to go anywhere. “There’s no rush. None at all. We can sit here as long as you want.”

He holds my eyes a second, then he nods, and I let that be enough.

I look at him, then I take the ice pack, gone soft and sweating, and I get out and climb behind the wheel.

I don’t take him back to the house. There’s nothing to take him back to tonight but a closed-up house with a herd running loose below it till two in the morning. I’m not putting him inside a closed door again while I’ve got another one to offer.

I point the car at the apartment.

Chapter 37: Levi

The apartment’s a relief after the teenage mob and the car. Dante hands me a bottle of water when we step inside.

My breathing’s mine again. Wrung out, but mine.

I drink half the bottle standing in his little kitchen and my legs tell me they need a minute, so I head down the hall to splash some water on my face and put myself back together.

Every door in the apartment stands open, same as always. He’s never once made me ask for that. I’m passing the second bedroom when I see it, through the open doorway, in the light spilling down the hall.

The corner’s bare. The sleeping bags are gone. Folded up and put away, or thrown out. I don’t know which, and I stand there in the hall telling myself it could mean nothing. He was gone a few days. Out of town. Maybe he straightened up.

Except Dante doesn’t do things for no reason. And the burner’s been dark for two days. I’ve been telling myself a story about that too. He’s busy, he hates country music, he doesn’t live on the internet, maybe the flyers never made it to whatever corner of this coast he’s been working.

I’ve been telling it to myself the way you whistle past a graveyard. The bare corner finishes the story off. You don’t take up a man’s bed unless you’ve decided he’s not coming back to it. Or unless you found out he never needed it in the first place.

I go on to the bathroom, run the cold water and splash my face. The man in the mirror over the sink is Lee Streeter, bare-jawed, famous, dripping on Dante’s clean counter. I dry my face on my shirt instead of his towel. It feels like the least I can do.

When I come out, Dante’s leaning back against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, waiting on me. There’s nothing hot in his face. That’s what I notice first. Whatever’s in him tonight has been sitting long enough to go still, and still is worse with Dante.

“Why did you think those kids were there for you, Levi?” he asks. “Why would they be?”

And that’s it.

His tone tells me everything the burner phone didn’t.

“You know,” I say. It’s not what I meant to say. It’s just what comes out.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

No anger behind his words, and they land harder than shouting would’ve. He’s gone cold on me. Heat would mean he might still be feeling an emotion of some kind. Cold means it’s all gone.

I stand in his kitchen and I give him the answer. The one I’ve wanted to give since I sent that text to him. I finally got the room I wanted, him right in front of me, and it doesn’t feel like anything I asked for.

“My name’s Levi. That’s true. It’s the name I was born with, the one my mother gave me. Lee Streeter’s the stage name. That’s the one they sell.” He doesn’t move. “I was going to tell you. I’d decided to do it. This weekend, in person, once your buyer was through and you had an hour that wasn’t spoken for. I didn’t want to mess up your sale and cause you more trouble than I already have. I wanted to say it to your face and stand there and take whatever came back. Then that girl’s video went up from the bonfire, and Freddie came through the door screaming. You walked into the middle of it, and the world got to you before I did.”

“You threw me out,” he says. “You told me to leave. You stood there and told me I didn’t have any part in it.”

“I know what that looked like.” This is the one I’ve been carrying around since it happened. “You had Freddie against a wall. Another minute of that and he starts asking who you are. Freddie runs down everybody who gets near me. If he’d found out you were the agent selling the house out from under his rental, he’d have had you managed by Monday. The listing, your name, all of it. The only way to get him off you was to make you nothing in his eyes. A property guy. Nobody. I told him that’s what you are. I said it on purpose and I’d say it again to keep his hands out of your life. He has power and he doesn’t hesitate to use it to hurt people.”

He takes that in without his face changing. I can’t tell if it lands or slides off.