Chapter 53 Levi
The next morning, Little Blondie gets to the beach house behind the cleaners, orchids stacked to his chin, hands me a box through the door, takes it back, sets it down, and squares up to me like a man with an agenda.
“Before anything else,” he says, holding out his hand. “You and I have never been formally introduced, and I’ve decided it’s because Dante keeps us apart on purpose. I’m Benji. The best friend. Forever. The forever part is not negotiable.”
“I know who you are.” I shake the hand he’s holding out like a treaty. “Fair warning, I’ve been calling you Little Blondie in my head all this time. It’s going to be hard getting used to a name.”
“You can call me Blondie if you want. It’s fine. You already did once.” He watches me not remember. “Day one. You called me Blondie to my face and sent me upstairs for your duffel bag like I came with the house.”
“I did not.”
“You did. I ran, too. Took the stairs two at a time to get you out of here. Blondie is fine.”
“No nicknames,” Dante calls from the great room. “That’s the rule. Call him Benji.”
“He has so many rules,” Benji says, at a volume engineered to carry. “You’ll learn.”
Now that we’re formally introduced, he puts me to work. Benji hands me a box of orchids and tells me I’m holding them wrong.
“Like a bouquet, not a six-pack,” he says, already three feet gone, nudging a chair Dante set down a minute ago a half-inch to the left. “White one goes on the console. Gold one goes upstairs to apologize for the master bath.”
I carry the orchids over in both hands, careful as a man who’s never been trusted with anything breakable, and set them where he points.
Dante glances up from the dining table he’s dressing, says, “Other end,” and I move them.
We’re spending a Friday morning making it gorgeous so a woman from Atlanta can fly in tomorrow and decide whether she’d like to wake up looking at it.
“Hold this.” Benji puts a level in my hand, climbs onto a chair he shouldn’t be standing on, and squints at a mirror. “Is it straight? Tell me the truth, I can take it.”
“It’s straight.”
“Liar. You didn’t even look.” He’s right. I didn’t. “Levi. Eyes on the mirror or I tell Dante you don’t respect the work, and he’ll make the face.”
“I have one face,” Dante says from the kitchen.
“It’s true. He only has one face,” Benji agrees, grinning. “His face does a winning offer and a house fire exactly the same. Watch.” He hops down. “Dante, the beach house sold over ask. Big news.”
Dante doesn’t change expression. Benji turns to me like he’s rested his case before a jury. The laugh comes out of me loud, surprising all three of us. One corner of Dante’s mouth lifts, barely, the most he ever gives, and then he goes back to work.
That’s when the questions start. I don’t see it coming, because Benji doesn’t aim straight at me. He just talks, his hands never stopping, and the questions come sideways out of the chatter so I’m still on the first when the third one’s already out.
“Have you ever been to Miami?” He’s fanning hand towels. “You’d hate it for a day and then never leave. Do you like Cuban food? Tell me you like Cuban food.”
“I like —”
“Because his mother will feed you until you explode. She’s in Coral Gables.
Crazy loud house, his abuela argues with her friends until the day they die.
Maybe she kills them. I don’t know. You need to go meet them.
What happened to your cowboy hat? There’s always a hat in the pictures. Did the hat not make it today?”
“The hat’s —”
“Retired? Correct answer, next. What about the girlfriends? I counted six. I’m not asking if they were real, I’m asking if one of them ever knew a single true thing about you.
A middle name. An allergy.” He doesn’t wait for an answer.
“What does a stadium pay you for one night? Don’t answer that, I’d have to sit down and we’re behind schedule.
Do you wear cowboy boots to bed? Be honest.”
“Benji!” Dante calls out. “That’s inappropriate. Stop grilling him. I need to check the upstairs bathrooms. Behave while I’m gone.”
Benji waits until Dante is out of earshot. “Have you ever dated a man?”
“No,” I say. Which is true. “No. I haven’t.”
“Do you want to?” He says it light, an orchid in each hand, deciding which faces the door. “Have you thought about it, what it would be like if it was a regular thing? Two toothbrushes on the bathroom counter kind of thing?”
Benji’s asking me to picture a life I’ve never let myself want. Like wanting is a thing I’m permitted to do. I look at the orchid I’m still holding. I don’t have an answer that fits in this kitchen.
“Where do you want this flower?” I say instead.
Benji catches the dodge. “Give it to me, I know the perfect place.” He takes it from me. “Do you cook?”
“No. Dante cooks for me sometimes. At his place, Cuban food.”
Benji freezes. Turns his head slowly toward the stairs, then back to me, eyes enormous. “He cooked for you? At his apartment? Oh my God. He doesn’t cook for people until he knows them forever. When we first met, I had to forage for two years before he would feed me. Do you like his food?”
“Yeah, he’s a great cook.”
He points a stem of greenery at me. “Okay. Last thing quickly before he comes back. If you hurt him, I will leave you one-star reviews on every platform until your streaming numbers bomb.” He waves the greenery in the air and his blue eyes go big.
“No wait, I’ve got a better idea. Instead, I’ll leave reviews saying while I don’t have any evidence of this at all, I’m very suspicious that you’re an AI cowboy.
Your music is AI, and your guitar is made of cardboard.
And that cowboy hat you wear has a little bitty AI-generated silver star on the brim. ”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I’ve been doing live performances since I was a kid.”
Benji swats my arm hard with the plant stem.
“Levi! Why would I ever let the truth stand in the way of a juicy rumor? I bet you don’t even have the right number of fingers. Give me your hands. Let me take a look.”
He throws the greenery down and grabs my hands with both of his. “See! Look at you. Eight fingers on one hand and seven on the other. Called it. You’re definitely ‘sus.’”
I burst out laughing. “Nobody will believe you.”
“Sure, they will,” he says. “You know why? Because they’re terrified you’re personally going to drink all their water. Besides, every rumor starts small. All it takes is a little whisper to get it going. So, do you understand now what I’m willing to do if you hurt Dante?”
“I’m getting the idea.”
He nods once, satisfied, and goes back to the greenery.
“Glad we got that settled. Also.” He doesn’t look up.
“That thing at the bar. When you grabbed the guy who wouldn’t take his hand off Dante.
I watched the clip nine hundred times like everyone else.
” He arranges a stem that’s already perfect.
“I’ve waited seven years to watch someone care enough to do that for him. So…”
Dante runs back down the stairs, and Benji doesn’t finish whatever he was going to say. The front door opens without a knock and somebody walks in. It can only be one person.
Freddie.
Sunglasses up on his head, two coffees in a cardboard tray. “There’s my headliner.” His voice is warm. As if he’s not here to lay eyes on me the day before the show.
His eyes go around the room, taking stock. Me, casual, barefoot, a roll of paper towels in my hand. Dante with his sleeves shoved up. Benji, eyeliner, hair pulled up, stem of greenery cocked between two fingers like a cigarette.
All week he’s been suspicious of Dante. He’s walked in on the answer. I’m standing in their circle.
“I brought coffee.” He sets the tray on the counter Benji just cleared. “Don’t let me interrupt. It looks incredible in here, by the way. You do beautiful work.” His comment is pointed at Benji, who has a frozen smile on his face.
“That’s the job.” Benji gives the tray a quarter-turn on the counter.
“Mm.” Freddie turns to me. “You look rested, Levi. Big night tomorrow. Nice that you’ve got somewhere comfortable to relax.”
“It’s a nice house,” I say.
“It’s Mr. Reyes’s nice house. Or his client’s, I should say.” He turns to Dante and smiles. “Hard to keep straight whose it is, everyone’s so at home in it.”
Dante doesn’t move. His professional mask came down the second the door opened. “The house belongs to a developer in Atlanta,” he says. “I hope to sell it for him tomorrow. Everyone here is working under the direction of the owner.”
The two of them stare at each other a few seconds too long.
“Of course,” Freddie says.
Nobody’s hands are doing what they were doing two minutes ago. The easy thing we had is gone.
Dante turns to Benji. “We’re low on stems and the cheese needs to be picked up.”
Benji hears it for what it is. We need to go. He wipes his hands, grabs his keys. On his way past me he drops close, “Text me if you need an extraction.” Then, for Freddie’s benefit, “Don’t touch the orchids. They’re sensitive.”
Dante’s last out. His hand finds my back one second as he passes, on Freddie’s blind side, there and gone. Then it’s only me and Freddie.
“Sit down, Levi.” He doesn’t sit. “I want to say something once, and I want you to hear it. Tomorrow’s a big day. I need your head right.”
I stay standing and he doesn’t argue.
“I’ve always known,” he says. “You think this is news to me? I’ve known since you were a kid in an old jacket who couldn’t look the camera in the eye when we talked about girls.
I knew before you knew, probably.” He watches me take it in.
“I don’t care that you’re gay. I never have.
I want to be very clear, because I think you’ve spent a long time believing I’m something I’m not.
It’s not a moral position for me. It was never going to be a problem between us. I genuinely do not care.”
Eight years of my life in a closet comes apart without a sound.
I was sure to my bones the day the truth got out to Freddie was the day the roof came down. I’ve built my life on it. It cost me everything I had.
And Freddie just told me it didn’t matter to him.
“Okay,” I say. It’s all I can get out.
“It’s not okay yet.” The kindness goes out of him, and the bloodless manager comes up.
“It’s far from okay. Because what I walked into just now, that I care about.
You getting sloppy in a house full of people who let you forget what you are to millions of fans.
That’s what blows it up, Levi.” He buttons his jacket.
“Your brand is straight. The brand sells out stadiums on straight. You let what I just watched get out of here with a phone in its pocket, and it’s not a bad week, it’s everything.
The tours, the catalog, every dollar with your name near it, gone.
A lot of people’s mortgages with it. People who are counting on you to keep up your end of the deal will be hurt.
” He’s already turning for the foyer. “I know exactly what you are. It changes nothing. Now go be straight on a stage tomorrow night like your life depends on it. Because the fancy life you have? It does.”
He lets himself out. I sit down on a kitchen stool before my legs give way.
All these years. Everything I gave up, for nothing.
Because if he always knew and never cared, the lock on me was never about anybody’s heart.
There’s nobody on the other side of the closet I’ve been protecting.
Nobody’s heart breaks if I open it. It just costs the label money.
Which makes it smaller than I ever thought it was.
Cheaper. Easier, someday, to walk out of.
Because walking out doesn’t betray a single soul.
The thought is dangerous and I let it stay.
The burner buzzes against my hip.
Dante: You okay over there?
Define okay, I think, and don’t send.
Levi: Yeah. Hurry back to finish up.
Tomorrow, he has a sale to make and a stage is waiting on me.