Chapter 59 Levi
I keep the phone off until noon.
Dante dropped me back an hour ago and gave me a quick kiss in the garage where the cameras aren’t. Then I’m left on my own to deal with Freddie. I’ve never let my phone sit dark this long. Turning it on feels like swallowing glass on purpose.
I do it at the kitchen island. If it’s going to gut me, I’d rather be standing.
The screen lights up and won’t stop. Notifications stack faster than it can count them. Missed calls in a column.
The internet has already sorted last night into a believable story. Lee Streeter cut his set short. Storm halted the Bash. A clip of me going somewhere else at the mic, four million views.
The lightning hold saved my skin. The crowd was already running for their trucks when I lost my shit. The cover story is weather. Not, what’s wrong with Lee Streeter?
Twelve hours ago, I was asleep on Dante’s arm, known clean through and kept anyway.
Now I’m holding a screen that’s stacked against me. That’s what one night on the outside does. You can’t un-taste it.
I should write a song about a dog that escapes out of the yard one time and spends the rest of his life digging holes underneath the fence. My fans would think it was about a coonhound and they’d cry for that dog. They’d never know the dog was me.
The door comes before I’ve answered a single message. Freddie’s dressed for business. A slim folder under one arm, which I notice and pretend I don’t.
“There’s my guy.” Warm voice. The warmth is the tell. Freddie’s never warmer than when he’s working an angle on me. “You gave us a night, Levi. You want to tell me where a headliner disappears to when the crowd watches him fall down?”
“I needed privacy.”
“Right. Privacy.” He sets the folder on the island, unhurried, and leaves it shut.
“Here’s where we are. The weather did us a kindness.
Half the field was already in the parking lot, so we’re calling it heat and exhaustion, a brutal schedule, an act of God.
You’ll cut a thirty-second thank-you Tuesday, promise a makeup date, look healthy.
It plays.” The warm thins by one degree.
“What does not play is the headliner going disappearing for a night where no one can reach him. Do you understand what that did to the people whose livelihood is you? I had a label president calling me at six this morning, Levi. I told him you were sleeping it off under a doctor’s care. I lied for you before coffee.”
“You’ve lied for me before lunch plenty of times.”
A muscle ticks at his jaw. He lets it go. The folder’s the point, and we both know it now.
“I’m not here about the show. The show’s handled.” He slides the folder a few inches toward me. “I’m here because while you were unreachable, I did what I’m paid to do. I looked deeper into Mr. Reyes.”
My heart starts racing and I try not to show it.
“I’ll be straight with you, the way I always am.” He flips it open with one finger.
There’s a stack of photographs. Dante in a tux at a fancy gala, a glass of champagne in his hand, smiling, a man’s arm across his back.
Dante on a yacht, leaning on a railing with another man, smiling again, sunglasses on, in a country far away from here.
Italy maybe, or France. How the fuck would I know?
Dante is smiling in every photo. He’s happy, relaxed, enjoying life. Here is yet another version of Dante I’ve never seen. The jealousy grabs my throat and won’t let go.
“When a stranger gets this close to you this fast, there are usually two reasons, and I assume both until I can rule them out. He’s interested in the money. Or he wants to stand near the fame.”
He turns a page. More men. Wealthy men. Businessmen. Faces I recognize from magazines.
“Look at the company he keeps in Miami. Men who own the planes the rest of us rent. Tech money. Old Miami money. A restaurateur with a house in five countries. And Reyes isn’t the guest on someone’s arm at these parties, Levi.
He’s on the list under his own name. He sold half of them their penthouses.
Not as expensive as this house but close enough.
Owns a high-rise condo himself, forty floors up.
That’s his level, his taste, the circles he’s run in for many years.
The relationships never last long and he’s the one who ends them.
Interestingly enough, no one says a bad word about him.
Apparently, he’s a class act in the circles he keeps. ”
He closes the folder, gentle, and folds his hands on top of it. “Mr. Reyes doesn’t need a dollar of yours. He’s got his own and plenty of it. And he’s not a fame chaser. So, he’s not interested in your spotlight either.”
He stops there. That’s the move. He stops, and he lets the silence do the part he’s too smart to say out loud.
If it’s not the money, and it’s not the fame, what is a man like Dante doing with you?
He doesn’t need to say it. He stands, buttons his jacket, leaves the folder where it lies.
“I just want you clear-eyed. And I don’t want you to get hurt. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.” At the door he pauses. “Get some rest. You look like you haven’t.”
Then he’s gone. The folder’s still on the island, and what he left unsaid starts doing its work. Because it finds the oldest, biggest hole in me and pours straight in.
I look at the glossy men with their planes, their yachts, and I see myself the first day Dante laid eyes on me. Sprawled out on the couch, hungover in his listing, days without a shower, no shave, mean, telling him to get out of his own listing.
That was his first sight of me.
A wreck at the bottom of myself. Then later, demanding he haul me to the liquor store every damn day like I can’t make it through an hour without tequila and picking me up from the drunk tank.
And Dante dates men with villas in five countries. A lot of them based on the pictures.
It shouldn’t surprise me. Dante could have any man he wants, anytime, anywhere. I’ve always suspected that. I just didn’t expect to see the evidence laid out in front of me.
The shame that rolls through me almost takes my breath away again.
I’ve never let myself think about his past boyfriends. Or the type of guy he dated because I’ve always known it wouldn’t be a derelict like me.
The hand Freddie dealt plays itself out. Maybe I mistook being hauled out of a hole for being wanted. The pain stands back up in me and starts squeezing.
For about five minutes, it works. And then it doesn’t. Not like it would have a week ago, a day ago, before last night.
I handed Dante the worst of me. The shed, the box, the storms, what my own mother let happen.
He didn’t flinch, didn’t leave. He stayed with me.
He took the part of me the world agreed was fixable and put his mouth to it like it was the opposite.
Hours ago. I can still feel everywhere his hands were.
What could somebody like Dante want with me?
That’s the question Freddie wanted me to ask myself. And I’ve got an answer he doesn’t know I have. Dante wanted me before he knew who I was and after he knew everything.
That’s all I need to know and I’m holding onto it with everything I’ve got. Maybe I’m not meant to question why. Dante sure as fuck doesn’t need to explain it to me. I’ll take whatever he gives me and never question it.
If there’s one person in this world I trust, it’s Dante.
Freddie’s poison doesn’t take this time. Instead, it shows me his hand. Shows me what Freddie is. Freddie will reach into anything good in my life and rot it from the inside to keep me his.
He didn’t come here about last night’s show. He came to make sure the only person who’s ever wanted the real me starts looking like an illusion. He’s expecting me to tuck my tail between my legs and run back to the one place left that’ll take me.
Him.
Freddie went too far and overplayed it. He meant to bind me tighter, and instead he showed me the truth.
I want out of this.
I’m still standing there when the garage door rolls, the side door opens, and Dante calls out. “Levi? You here?”
“I’m in the kitchen.”
He finds me at the island with the folder’s contents. He spots it immediately. Freddie’s handiwork, splayed open on the marble where he can’t miss it.
He doesn’t ask what it is. He picks it up, flips through the photos quickly. Then he pulls out the stool across from me and sits, calm as always. The world could be ending and Dante wouldn’t even sweat.
“Go ahead,” he says, waving a hand at the folder. “Ask me about anything in there. I’ll tell you all of it. I’d rather you hear it from me than from his folder.”
That’s the difference between them, sitting right there in one sentence. Freddie hands you a folder and walks out so the dark can do the talking. Dante turns on every light in the place.
“Freddie investigated you. Went deep into your background. He says you date men with their own planes. Tech guys.” I’m not steady. “Old money. Villas in five countries money. He says that’s your level. Always has been.”
“It was.” No denying it. “I had a life in Miami before I ever heard your name. My own money, my own place. I sold most of those men homes before I ever had dinner with them. I thought it was a good life at the time. The folder’s not wrong about any of it.
Sure, I dated the men in the photos.” He holds my eyes.
“I never felt anything real for any of them. They were pleasant, they were interesting, and not one of them ever mattered enough to cook them breakfast. Not a single one. I never considered it. I could’ve had that for the rest of my life.
My life was the most comfortable empty I’ve ever been. ”
“If you run in those circles in Miami, why are you in a cheap two-bedroom apartment in Panama City Beach? I still can’t wrap my head around that. What is the deal with the apartment? You gotta admit it doesn’t fit you.”
“I came to the Panhandle for Benji,” he says simply. “He needed to move up here to be with Mickey. They went through a lot of hard times in the past year. My best friend was four hundred miles from everyone who’d ever stood by him. I was not going to let him do it alone.”
He turns his hand over on the counter, open, waiting for me to take it.
“The market up here prints money right now. The commute pays for itself. I’ve been going back and forth from Miami for months.
Living in both places, increasingly more here than there.
I was renting short-term condos and houses here the same as the tourists do until it became too big of a hassle.
I needed a permanent space to sleep. I didn’t come here for the atmosphere.
I came here for a person.” He pulls his hand back, flips the folder open again.
“I show up for the people who are mine. I’m willing to move the entire world to make it happen, and I don’t think twice about it. ”
“That night I asked you to come get me,” I make myself say, because I have to hear him answer the worst one.
“You picked me up from a drunk tank. You saw me at the bottom of myself. I was wondering—” I stop.
“I wondered if maybe you saw a disaster and couldn’t walk away.
That all this is you being decent. You’re a good guy.
I know that. Maybe I mistook getting rescued for being wanted. ”
His jaw tightens. He’s close to anger, and none of it’s at me.
“Trust me, when we met, I did not feel sorry for you,” he says.
“At all. I drove home that night after bringing you back here and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.
It made me crazy, because the timing was a disaster.
You were a big problem, and I didn’t have time for this.
I kept showing up here because I could not physically make myself stay away from you.
Decency didn’t have one thing to do with it.
I can’t tell you how many times I created excuses with the house to swing by to see you.
Do you really think the humidity in this house needs to be checked as much as I checked it?
You know how many times I check the humidity in other houses I list? Once a week.”
I reach my hand out and turn it over, open, same as he did. I’m praying he takes it after I didn’t take his. He takes it without hesitation and interlaces our fingers.
The folder looks exactly what it is now. Just paper. A bluff that only worked in the shadow it needed. It doesn’t fix the hole with my insecurities. The hole’s too old and deep. But it’s loosened its grip. I can breathe past it.
“One more thing,” I say. “Not about him. About me.”
“Anything. Ask. I’m listening.”
I have to wait a minute to get it out. “I signed with Freddie when I was seventeen. My dad did the signing. I was a minor, so he put his name where mine couldn’t go. The same man who—” I don’t finish.
He knows where that sentence ends. He heard it last night. The man who built the box handed me to Freddie. Two cages, the same hands on the blueprint, and I never saw it until right now, saying it out loud in a kitchen.
“I never read any of it. Not one page. I was a scared kid, they slid papers at me, I signed where the arrow pointed, and I’ve been signing where the arrow points ever since.
I don’t actually know what I agreed to. I don’t know what Freddie can really do to me and what he just says he can.
” My face is hot from embarrassment. “It’s all in my emails somewhere.
The trail of it. Sitting in my pocket the entire time.
I’ve just never had the nerve, or anybody to help—”
I run out of breath. The asking for his help is the hardest part.
“You read contracts for a living,” I finish. “You’re smart. I know it’s a lot to—”
“Levi.” He squeezes my hand tighter and leans forward.
“Yes. Of course. I’ll help you anyway I can.
Forward me everything and I’ll go through all of it.
If it’s past me, I know people who do this for a living.
Entertainment law is a specialty, but I’ll find the right one.
” He says it simple. Like I asked him to grab milk at the store.
“You don’t have to do everything alone anymore. I’m here.”
I grab my phone and forward the folder of contracts before I can talk myself back out of it.
He thumbs it open right there, just the top one, the original, the one my father’s name is on. I watch the realtor in him come up. His eyebrows pull down a fraction. He scrolls. Stops. Goes back.
“What?” I ask.
“Not yet. I need to go through all of it before I say a word. I’m not going to give you a vague answer.
” There’s care in his words. He’s choosing not to promise what he can’t yet.
“I’ll say this much. This isn’t exactly what he’s told you it is.
” He sets the phone down. “Give me a couple days. Let me do it right.”
I nod. “Sure, whatever time it takes.”
I’ll wait as long as I need to for answers.
Nobody’s ever stood on my side of it before.