Chapter 49 Levi #2
Freddie doesn’t say he believes me. He runs through everything again, and it comes out clean every time. The lost phone, the cash, the cell, the card, the decent stranger, all of it locked.
Dante is a pattern though, and Freddie never forgets a pattern.
“From now on that phone stays in your hand,” he says, already moving for the door, the crisis filed down into a schedule.
“It rings, you pick up. I don’t care what you’re doing or who you’re with.
” He pauses with his hand on the frame, not turning around.
“This realtor. Reyes.” He says the name like he already had the file pulled, because I’m sure he did.
“If he’s nothing, see that he stays nothing. ”
Then he’s gone, the door easing shut, the car backing down the drive.
There’s a thought that comes for me after that, and I can’t get it clear to the end. The obvious move, the one that sounds noble, is to take myself out of it. Let Dante go. Quit costing him. Stop dragging a good man through my mess.
The worst night I ever had on this coast is the night he came for me.
I think about that night the world’s busy turning into a punchline, and what none of them will ever get is that it was the best worst night of my life.
I went out because the quiet in that house was killing me and I couldn’t be alone in it one more hour.
A guy so lonely he rented a bus. But that’s the night I ended up in a cell with one card in my pocket.
The two phones sit on the couch beside me, and they couldn’t be more different.
One is Freddie’s line, the official number that tells me where to stand and when to be sorry.
The other’s forty dollars of plastic a man built me in a parking lot, one number in it, and when it lights up it’s the only thing that means anything.
It lights up while I’m holding it in my palm like he knows I’m thinking about him.
Dante: Soon as it’s dark I’m coming for you. Meet me two houses down, the empty lot on the Gulf side. Don’t let anyone see you leave the house. I’ve got the rest.
After a day of people telling me what to be, reporters, handlers, Freddie’s office running its mouth through every channel it owns, here’s Dante who’s already thought of everything.
He isn’t asking me to hold it together, he’s just coming.
His face is plastered across the country tonight on my account and he’s not panicking.
Instead, he’s trying to take care of me.
And it’s smart, where he’s picking me up. Anybody watching this house tonight is watching the front of it. The gate, the drive, the lit windows. Nobody watches a vacant lot two doors down. I don’t need to walk out past the guard or the keypad.
I put both phones in my pockets, and when the light’s gone, I move. I keep to the deep shadow along the sea oats. The beach below runs open to anybody with feet. I learned that the night the teenagers came up off it. But there’s nobody on it now, and I’m almost gone.
The white SUV is sitting in the empty lot with its lights off. I open the door and climb in. He doesn’t say anything for a second.
I tense up. Oh God, here it comes.
And then he reaches over, puts his hand on the back of my neck, just resting it there, the warm weight of his palm. “Hey,” he says, rubbing his thumb on the back of my neck. “I got you. Buckle up. You’re okay.”
The heat of his palm runs straight through me and stays there. I’d trade every screaming crowd I’ve ever stood in front of to keep the weight of his hand on my neck.
I start in anyway, before we’ve cleared the gate. “Your face, Dante. I’m sorry. It’s everywhere. I’ll fix it, I’ll get Freddie’s people to bury the realtor angle, I’ll—”
“You’ll do nothing.” He says it calmly, eyes on the drive.
“My face has been everywhere since about two this afternoon. You know what’s happened to me?
A flood of new showing requests, plus a voicemail from a woman in Destin who wants me to marry her.
” A dry sideways look. “Apparently, I’m unfairly good-looking.
I’ll find a way to live with the insult. ”
“But Dante—”
“Stop, Levi. You don’t get to manage this for me. I’ve been managing my own exposure since before you knew my name. I’m good at it. Tonight you’re going to sit in that seat, relax, and let me drive. That’s the one job I’ve got for you.”
He drives with one hand, keeps the other one on me, my neck, my shoulder, my knee, moving but always coming to rest somewhere. I turn to look out the window. I can’t watch the side of his face and hold myself together at the same time.
When I step inside his apartment, the day’s still going in me at full volume. The second the door’s shut I’m pacing his little front room. “It’s not going to stop,” I tell him. “It gets worse before it gets better, they dig and they keep digging, I never should have let you come near—”
“Hey.” He sets his keys down, unhurried.
“You done, Levi? Here’s where I’m at.” He leans back against the counter, arms crossed, watching me wear a track in his carpet.
“I knew exactly what I was doing every step of this.” He smiles.
“Well, not exactly. But it doesn’t matter.
You didn’t trick me into picking you up at the jail.
I showed up, and I kept showing up. And I’d do it all again every time.
You’re the only one who thinks I got conned into you. ”
That stops me cold.
He pushes off the counter then and crosses to me. Catches me by the face, both hands, one on each side of my jaw, stops me where I stand, and makes me look at him.
He says it plain and simple, “Breathe.”
I try to keep talking, to make him understand how bad this is for him.
He says it again. “Levi. Look at me. Breathe.” His thumbs are on my cheekbones, his eyes steady on mine, and there’s nowhere left to go, no room left to spiral into, just his hands, his voice.
The air drags in ragged, comes out shaking, goes in again. Around the third one the day stops roaring quite so loud. He just holds my face and breathes with me until I can do it without him.
“I want to feed you,” he says, pointing me at a kitchen chair. “If you want to do something for me, you can sit.”
I watch him go to the stove and put a plate together of rice and the beef he makes. He already had it going before he picked me up, the smell filling the little kitchen. He sets it down in front of me with a fork. “Now calm down and eat. All of it.”
He moves behind me and rubs my shoulders until the tension melts off them.
I pick up the fork and I eat. It undoes me a little.
All day I’ve been a product, a liability, a scandal, a lie.
Dante makes a place for me at his table and feeds me supper.
I finish most of the plate before I’m able to talk, and he lets me.
“You know what dish this is?” he asks, once I’m eating slower.
“The beef I stole out of your refrigerator that first week.”
“You didn’t steal it. I left it there specifically for you.
It’s picadillo. My mother’s. When I was in Miami, I stood at her stove in Coral Gables making a pot of it, my abuela arguing my cumin count in two languages, and I told myself the next pot I made was going to be for you.
” He takes my plate without asking and brings it back full. “This is that pot.”
“Picadillo.” I try it in my mouth the way he says it and don’t get it right, and he doesn’t correct me.
“My sisters would love you, by the way,” he says, back at the stove. “Mirta would feed you worse than I do. Clara would interrogate you for an hour and then defend you to the death.”
When I’ve finished eating, he leans back against the counter across from me. “I went by the Roadhouse,” he says.
I open my mouth to start apologizing for that too, for torching the one good place, and he holds up his hand to stop me.
“Tex was throwing a huge party out in the parking lot,” he says.
“The video’s bringing them in. Everyone wants to be where Lee Streeter hangs out and starts fights.
Tex knows an opportunity when he sees it.
He fired up the smoker, decorated the lot more than usual, cranked up the music, and tonight he’s running the biggest crowds that bar’s seen in a while, all because of you. ”
“Is that all true?”
“Every word. Tex told me to give you a message. He said a bad night doesn’t un-claim a man. Said you got claimed a while back, and the door is exactly where you left it. You’re just going to have to wait out the crowd to come use it. Or, he said, you could come anyway. Up to you.”
I’ve had a life of people deciding I was too wrong, too costly to keep, and a bar full of near-strangers kept me. I want it so bad I don’t trust it.
I don’t know which of us moves first. I think it’s me.
I get up out of that chair because I can’t sit in all this gratitude one more second, and his hands come up to catch me like he already knew I was coming.
Maybe it’s him. It doesn’t matter. What matters is it’s slow.
Nothing about how he takes hold of me tonight is in any kind of hurry.
That first time, with the wall going down all at once, was the thing between us rupturing, both of us starved, falling at each other in the dark. This is not that. Tonight he kisses me slow, both hands framing my face like they did when he made me breathe, and I feel every moment of it.
He walks me back toward the bedroom. At the foot of the bed, he stops me, a hand flat on my chest. “Let me.”
He takes the hem of my t-shirt in both hands.
It’s an old one, washed soft and thin as paper and gone pale at the collar, the kind I live in when there’s no camera aimed at me.
He eases it up, his knuckles dragging up my sides, and I raise my arms and let him pull it off over my head.
He drops it behind him without looking where it lands.
“I might never let you wear a shirt again,” he says, running his hands down my arms.