Chapter 66 Dante
The last chord is still dying out over the field when the people around me start to turn.
I’m an emotional mess, and I don’t bother hiding it. I’m a grown man crying at a rail in front of strangers, and I don’t care. My brave Levi stood up there and claimed me. I’m not going to insult him by wiping my face.
Benji is past destroyed. He’s got both arms locked around my waist, sobbing into my shirt, and every few seconds he surfaces to scream at the stage.
“He sang the whole thing! He told everyone!” To me.
To the crowd. “Dante! He said it all out loud!” Then he’s back down in my shoulder, smearing what’s left of the glitter and eyeliner on the white shirt he bought me.
The woman beside me looks twice. At the screens, where they keep cutting back to me, then at my face a foot from hers. Her mouth falls open. “Oh my God. That’s you. You’re the one he—”
“Hey!” someone else says, a phone already up. “Hey, it’s that guy!”
Benji moves before I do. He plants himself between me and the phones with the full authority of a man who has walked brides through worse, still crying.
“No photos,” he tells them. “Phones down, please. He’s a person, not a scavenger hunt.” He throws an arm toward the stage. “Eyes up front, everyone! The encore could be anything! Lee Streeter’s coming back out on stage!”
Half of them actually look.
“Event security are en route,” Benji says in my ear, suddenly calm. “Two of them, cutting through the crowd, lanyards out. Those are ours, Dante. That’s an extraction. When they say move, we move.”
This is when I realize Levi already thought about this. The bigger of the two guys puts his mouth to my ear over the noise. “You Dante? Lee sent us. You and your friend, come with us, right now.”
I’ve spent a month hauling him out of his own messes. And he just reached back and pulled me out of a crowd. I let them move us.
“You do fast work,” Benji tells the big guard as we go, wiping his face with his sleeve. “I run events for a living. Tell whoever made that call they did a brilliant job tonight. I’m very impressed.” The man doesn’t answer, but he fights a smile.
My phone buzzes against my leg as they walk us up behind the scaffolding toward the lot.
Levi: Take Benji home. Then come get me at the house. Give me an hour. It’s a zoo back here.
Beside me, Benji is typing a text to Mickey with both thumbs, narrating every word, because at peak emotion, he’s never once used an inside voice.
“MICKEY! LEVI DID IT! IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE CROWD AND I WAS TWENTY FEET AWAY IN MY EMERALD JACKET! ON THE JUMBOTRON WITH DANTE!!! I AM NOT OKAY! I CAN’T WAIT TO TELL YOU EVERYTHING! !! WAIT UP! I LOVE YOU!!!”
Benji cries the whole drive to the Roadhouse. It keeps cresting into hysterical laughing and breaking back down again.
“I knew it,” he keeps saying, mopping his face with the heel of his hand, smearing the eyeliner. “I told you. First night, I told you, I said I was warming up to him, didn’t I say that—”
“You did.”
“That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.
” He grabs my arm at a red light with both hands and shakes it.
“Dante. He did that. For you. In front of the whole—” He’s gone again, face in his hands, shoulders heaving.
I drive home one-handed, my other hand on his shoulder.
I’m not in much better shape myself. “Can I plan your wedding? OMG! I have so many ideas! You should get married in a field of sunflowers with the reception in a barn! With red-checked tablecloths. We can reuse the mason jars I have stored away for candles. I’m so excited!
I’ve always wanted to do a country wedding. Where can we get a horse?”
“Benji, let’s get you married off first, okay? There’s plenty of time. One wedding at a time.”
“Okay. Right, right. Levi’s coming to my wedding.
Obviously, he’s coming to the wedding, he’s your plus-one, he is THE plus-one, and he’s not wearing a cowboy hat on my deck, so I’m taking him to my suit man in Destin.
Along with Tex and Stormy. Thursday, ten o’clock.
I’ll move the cake tasting forward a day. ”
“Thursday might be ambitious. Levi has a busy schedule.”
At the Roadhouse, Mickey’s still up, the loft light on. Benji gets one leg out of the car, stops, and leans back in. The over-the-top energy drains off him between one breath and the next.
“Seven years I’ve watched you hand men back before they could matter,” he says. “Tonight one stood up in front of the world and refused to be returned. Go get him, Dante. Expect me to cry more tomorrow. I’m not done. I’ll never be done over this. I can’t wait to tell Mickey all about it.”
Then he’s out and yelling at the top of his lungs as he runs through the parking lot, his emerald green jacket sparkling in the glow of my headlights.
“Mickey! Mickey! I’m home! Hurry! Unlock the door!”
I don’t go in with him. I point the SUV toward the beach house one more time, and sit in the gated lot with the engine ticking and wait.
Levi comes slinking out with the hood of a sweatshirt pulled up and his head down like a drug dealer waiting on a curb.
An hour ago, he stood tall on the stage.
None of that is left. He crosses the lot fast, pulls the door open, and drops into the seat beside me.
For a moment he just sits there breathing, hood up, hands in his lap.
Even now with him hunted and hiding in a hoodie, the first thought going through my head is that he’s close enough to touch again.
“I hope that was okay,” he says, afraid to even look at me. “I’m sorry.”
The bravest man I have ever seen just traded his career for the truth. And his first words to me are to ask permission. He’s braced for me to be mad as if he did something wrong.
I reach over, get a fistful of his shirt, tug him closer, and kiss him hard and quick, both of us off-center over the console. Then I pull back just far enough to make him hear it.
“Better than okay,” I tell him, my hand on the back of his neck. “I loved it. You made me very happy tonight. Now, let’s go home.”
He nods, knowing which place I mean. What he doesn’t understand yet is that the word ‘home’ covers him too. It’s his now. I’m not handing it back. I’ll teach him that part.
At the apartment he pushes the hood off and rubs both hands down his face. I go to the sliding glass door and push it open. The warm night comes in off the lot. The tension in his shoulders finally lets go.
“I outed you, Dante,” he says. “To everybody. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I didn’t even ask you first, I just—”
I let out a laugh. It comes up out of me because he has it backwards.
“Levi. What are you saying? I’ve been out since I was a teenager.
All of my family knows.” I take a step toward him.
“I’ve never hidden who I am. You didn’t out me tonight.
You let me claim you. You stood up in front of that crowd, and told the world you’re mine.
” Another step. “That’s not a harm you did me.
That’s everything I wanted. It was perfect. ”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t get it.
“But why?” he says. “You could have anybody. I’ve watched you. You walk into a room and people turn their heads. Women, straight men, married people. You could have any man you wanted, no problem, somebody normal, somebody who isn’t—” He stops. “Why would you want the disaster? Why me?”
I can’t let that stand. I close the last of the distance and I take his face in both my hands.
“Let me tell you when my heart decided it was yours. The first day. I came back from the house after leaving you here. I walked in and found you asleep on the floor between my boxes of listing flyers and yard signs with that cashmere throw wrapped around your shoulders. Every door in the apartment thrown wide open. Including the front door.”
He’s gone rigid.
“I stood there and looked down at you while you were asleep. And my heart didn’t say he’s the one.
You know what it said to me?” I wait until he meets my eyes.
“It said, you need to make him yours as soon as possible, and you need to protect him from the world forever. And it’s been saying it every single day since.
And I’ve been trying so hard to do that. ”
He’s shaking his head, so I don’t let go. I hold his face and keep going. He needs every word, and I’m done rationing them.
“I don’t fall, Levi. Ask Benji. Ask my mother.
My sisters. Ask anyone who’s ever known me.
I have walked away from men who had everything, felt nothing for them, never once looked back.
I didn’t know I had this much emotion in me until you showed up.
” My thumbs move across his cheekbones. “I want you, Levi. Only you. You’re mine now and I’m keeping you. That’s settled.”
He searches my face, then he asks carefully, like he’s taking a chance.
“Does that mean you’re mine too?” he asks.
“Does it work for both of us?” A small furrow creases between his brows.
“I don’t know how this all works. I’ve never had a relationship.
I don’t know if I’m doing it right. Or what to expect. ”
His words gut me. A grown man, the most gifted person I have ever met, asking whether he’s even allowed to have me back. No one ever taught him love can run in both directions. Or anything about love at all.
“A hundred percent,” I tell him. “All the way. Both of us. I’m yours, Levi. That’s how it works, and you already did it right. You claim me back, you never stop, I do the same. We’re together and we belong to each other now. That’s it. It’s as easy as that.”
He reaches for me and I’m kissing him, and it’s different from every other time. There’s always been a clock, or a secret sitting in the room with us. Tonight there’s none of it. He’s with me, and he’s mine, for keeps. And I get to take my time with him.