Chapter 14 Dante
I can’t get past the fact I put my hands on Levi in anger this morning. I’ve sat across closing tables from men who came in swinging insults. I have never once given them my voice back.
Lose your temper, lose the room.
The pillow I dropped by his head last night is still on the floor of the second bedroom. The blanket is beside it, folded back into the square. I go in to pick them up and don’t.
I stand in the doorway and look at the gap instead. Eighteen inches between the boxes of my own face smiling off four hundred flyers and the wall. That is the real estate he chose. Three times in this apartment now.
I want to understand why, so I do something I would never let another person watch me do. I lie down in the space. The carpet’s thin. The concrete underneath is cold. Inside four seconds my hip and shoulder are aching.
There’s no way this is comfortable. From down here on the floor, I can see straight out the door, down the hall, past my own open bedroom, all the way to the front. Every way into the apartment, laid out in one line.
Whatever he’s watching for, he can watch all of it without lifting his head.
That’s all the info I can gather. The sightline, the hard floor, and a man who’d rather have both than a bed. I lie there longer than the lesson takes. The answer doesn’t come.
His comment about who tracks his phone keeps circling.
Somebody who thinks they own him.
A hundred things fit that sentence. I’ve turned over maybe nine of them on the drive home. Not one of them is good.
I get up off the floor to go give my hands a job instead.
The Walmart’s busy as always, no matter the time of day.
I walk the camping aisle with a list in my head that keeps getting longer.
The first sleeping bag I pull off the rack is a summer-weight, a thin nylon.
I carry it halfway to the register before I realize it’s not thick enough. It’ll do nothing against concrete.
I go back and find the heavier one, flannel-lined, rated for cold no one will ever see here in Florida. I grab two. One is a blanket and two is a bed. The bags go in the back of the SUV, next to the tequila-infused rug that’s still riding around with me. Then I drive for donuts.
The donut shop is a cinderblock box between a bait store and a nail place. Best donuts on this coast. The bell goes and the girl behind the counter lights up.
“Hey!” she says. “A dozen, Dante?”
She’s nineteen, maybe twenty with flour to the elbows and a marker stuck behind one ear for writing on box lids. Community college sticker on the register. She’s the kind of kid who’s going to run this place or leave this town, and I’ve never been able to guess which.
“A dozen, assorted, and whatever your mama just pulled out of the fryer that I can smell from the parking lot.”
“Crullers.”
“Then it’s not assorted anymore. Three of those, the rest you pick. You’ve got better taste than me.”
“You say that so you don’t have to waste time trying to choose.”
“I say that because it’s true.”
She snaps a pink box open one-handed and starts building it like she’s dealing cards. I lean on the counter and the easy version of me comes back. I buy a lot of donuts in this business. You learn the people who fry them.
“That glaze is criminal, by the way.”
“You say that every time too.”
She rings me up, slides the box across, drops a paper sack of buttermilk bars on top without charging me for them, and dares me with a look to say anything about it. I tip her well. It’s the easiest ten seconds I’ll have all day.
Now I have a pink box on the passenger seat and two sleeping bags in the back. I drive to the beach house.
The gate lifts for a code I could punch in my sleep. I knock. No answer. I give it a count and use the lockbox.
Inside, the terrace glass door is shoved all the way to the wall, the Gulf coming over the threshold hot and thick.
I leave it. I gave him that on a handshake, and I’m not the one who breaks handshakes.
I check the meter under the supply vent on my way through.
Sixty-six and creeping, the AC throwing everything it has at a wide-open door and losing ground by the hour.
It hasn’t warped a floorboard yet. Yet is the margin I’m working with, on the house and on the week both. I’ll take yet. I’ve taken everything else since Saturday.
I set the pink box of donuts on the white marble island. I don’t write a note. A note is a conversation, and I came here to leave a food offering, not to start a conversation I’m not ready to finish.
I turn to go and hear feet on the stairs, bare and fast. Then he’s at the bottom of the staircase in a towel and nothing else. Water running off him, hair dripping dark down his neck. He pulls up short when he sees me standing in the kitchen.
I forget for one full second why I came.
He’s clean. I’ve only ever seen him sweated through and hungover, and this is a different man. The hair’s pushed back wet off his face. The stubble’s gone past stubble into a beard that’s filling in. It suits him. It sets off a jaw I’d already noticed as too symmetrical to be fair.
Water’s tracking down a chest and a stomach I’ve never seen.
He’s been buried in a black t-shirt since Saturday.
His body is not the type built in front of a gym mirror.
He looks strong, maybe from work, country muscle through the shoulders and the arms. There’s a happy trail going straight down into the towel, and my eyes follow it before I can stop them.
Heat goes through me, low and fast, nothing subtle about it.
My mouth has gone dry. I make myself look at his face, which does not help, and I put one hand flat on the cold marble like the island is going to keep me steady.
I close on eight-figure properties without my pulse moving. Right now, I can hear it in my ears.
“Dante.” He’s got one hand loosely on the towel. “What are you doing here? I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I knocked. Then I let myself in.” It comes out level, barely.
His eyes find the pink box on the marble. His face shuts down a little, the casual expression going careful. “Is somebody coming over? The house isn’t presentable for buyers.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I brought a box of donuts. For you. As a peace offering.”
“For what?”
“Putting my hands on you this morning. Yelling at you in Spanish. Losing my temper.” I focus my eyes north of his collarbone through raw discipline. “I apologize. That’s not who I am. I wanted you to know that.”
He smiles at me.
I’ve felt him freeze under my hand. I’ve watched him sleep on a concrete floor. I have never once seen him smile like this. It reaches his eyes and takes years of bad nights off him at once, and the heat that hasn’t finished leaving my body finds somewhere lower to live.
I understand all over again, worse than even this morning, exactly the kind of trouble I’m getting into with him.
“No need to apologize,” he says, smiling. “I dragged you out of bed in the middle of the night with an emergency and made you come get me out of jail. You earned the right to shove me into a refrigerator.”
“No.” I shake my head again. “I didn’t earn that right. And it won’t happen again.”