Chapter 69 Levi #2
Nobody would understand the importance of that except maybe Dante, who watched me not do it through the worst of it.
The loop isn’t gone. I don’t believe it ever fully goes.
But it’s quiet most nights now, enough that I drop off in the middle of an ordinary sentence and don’t come up till morning.
What finally turned the volume down wasn’t anything I ever reached for.
It wasn’t the bottle and it wasn’t the guitar and it wasn’t even the open door.
It was a person. It was knowing, down in the part of my brain that has never once believed anything, that I’m not in this alone anymore.
And then one day Dante handed me a list.
Same way he did the lawyers. He didn’t diagnose me, just came home one evening with four names on a piece of paper — people who work on exactly what happened to me — and set it on the counter, and went to start supper.
Said if I didn’t like those four people, he’d go find four more.
Then he left it alone. Didn’t bring it up once.
That paper sat on the counter for days and he walked past it every morning and never said a thing.
I finally got up my nerve and called the third name.
I’ve been going to therapy since August. Sometimes I come out of there worse than I went in, and he doesn’t ask me about it. He just slides a plate in front of me when I get back and kisses the top of my head.
She told me the first day it doesn’t get fixed. It gets smaller, and you get bigger around it, and one day you notice you’ve got room in there for other things. That’s about where I am. There’s room in there now.
We spend the first night on the floor of our new house because the bed doesn’t come till Thursday. The house is empty and it echoes. There’s a single lamp on the floor because neither of us thought about tables. There’s also a rug.
One rug, dead center in a bare front room, squared to the wall like it’s holding the territory until furniture shows up. Hand-knotted. I know it before I’m all the way through the door.
“That’s the rug I gave a bottle of tequila to.”
“It cleaned up,” Dante says, somewhere behind me with a box.
I get down on my hands and knees in the middle of an empty room and put my face to it. Take a good long sniff. Wool. Soap. A little bit of the back of his SUV.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Checking.”
“For what?”
“Tequila.” I sit back on my heels. “First night in that house I put a whole bottle into this thing. Knocked it over on my way down and never even felt it happen. You rolled it up and hauled it off before I was awake.”
He rolls his eyes. “I remember.”
“It rode around in the back of your car for a month.”
“I remember that too.”
“Whose bill did that end up on?”
He doesn’t answer, which is the answer. He sets the box down and goes back out to the SUV.
I owed somebody four figures for a hand-knotted rug and it never got collected, and now the rug lives here, in a house with my name on half of it.
We eat off paper plates sitting against the wall with our legs out. Dante’s still in his closing shirt with the sleeves shoved up. He’s got a legal pad going with a list on it, and every few minutes he adds something to it and then reads it to me.
“Window blinds,” he says.
“Why do we need blinds? We don’t need blinds. They’re a pain in the ass.”
“Levi, there is a road.”
“There’s a couple of palm trees and then a road.”
He writes down blinds and underlines it, and I let him, because watching that man make a list about a house we both own is a task I could do for the rest of my life.
There’s a box marked FRAGILE. I know Benji packed it and not Dante.
Dante doesn’t label. Inside, folded the way only Benji folds, is a brand-new cashmere throw.
Same gray as the one I stole off that sectional the first morning of my new life.
The one Benji hollered about while I walked out the door wearing it, the one I dragged through the coldest month of my life like a kid, the one that never got returned to a living soul because it was never getting returned and every person involved knew it.
There’s a card on top.
The old one stopped being staging inventory the day you wouldn’t give it back, so keep it. Consider the paperwork closed. This one is for the house, and it has never been near a staging kit or a drunk stranger. Do not put it on the floor. — Benji
Somewhere in a file Dante keeps is an itemized bill with a six-hundred-dollar throw on it that nobody ever collected, sitting right next to a hand-knotted rug. I’m starting to sense a pattern in how this family does its accounting.
Our bedroom is upstairs. A wall of glass and a sliding door out onto a balcony that hangs over the dunes, and past the dunes the water going on out.
I’m downstairs breaking down boxes when I hear Dante go upstairs. When I come up, the bed’s made. Two sleeping bags. They’re laid out side by side in the middle of the floor, dead center of the glass, both of them facing the door.
He’s got his back to me, working a crease flat with one pass of his hand, same as he did the night I had a panic attack and he took care of me.
I don’t say anything. Neither does he.
I go get Benji’s throw out of its box and I put it across both of them, and that’s my half of the bed making.
Then he’s gone back downstairs with the measuring tape and the legal pad, and the zip and snap of that tape starts working through the house, window by window. He’s measuring for blinds. I can only listen to that annoying sound so long before I form a plan.
I get every stitch of clothes off and set my hat on my head.
Benji’s throw comes right back off the bed and gets folded up safely on a box because I want to live.
The lube turned up in the first box of bathroom stuff Dante unpacked, which tells you something about the man’s priorities, and it’s already been put to use today. That part, he doesn’t know about yet.
I stretch out on top of the bags, prop up on one elbow, and take myself in my free hand.
“Hey, Dante,” I yell out casually. “Come here a minute.”
The tape zips. Footsteps on the stairs. He rounds the doorway with the tape in one hand and the pad in the other, already mid-sentence. “The hall window is going to need a custom—”
He stops dead.
I’m laid out on our floor bed wearing my hat and not one other thing, stroking myself, hard as a fence post and in no hurry about it.
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out. The measuring tape retracts in his hand with a zip and a snap, like even it knows the measuring is done for the day.
“I thought we’d break the new house in cowboy style,” I say.
He still hasn’t moved. His eyes do a full walkthrough of me, crown to boots, except there’s no boots, and his jaw is somewhere around the subfloor.
I tip the brim at him.
“I’m the cowboy, not you. In case you’re wondering.
” I give myself one long stroke, root to tip, and watch him track it like it’s the only moving object in the state of Florida.
“Now. Tell me. Were you planning on measuring my dick with that tape measure, or are you gonna put it down and get over here?”
“I don’t need a measuring tape to know exactly how big your dick is, cowboy.” He sets the legal pad down on a box. The tape he just drops. “I’ve had every inch of you memorized since July.”
“Then come show your work.”
“Oh, I’m going to.” His belt’s already open.
“I’ve been thinking about getting you naked in this house all day.
” The closing shirt comes off over his head with two buttons still done, which I have never once seen him do.
“Every empty room of it. Starting with this one.” Shoes kicked somewhere it’ll bother him tomorrow.
It is the least graceful I have ever seen Dante Reyes get out of his clothes, and I intend to bring it up regularly for the rest of our natural lives.
He comes down for me, and I put a hand flat on his chest and shove. He goes over onto his back on the sleeping bags, surprised, and before he can organize a response, I’m up and over him with a knee on either side of his hips.
“Uh-uh. I told you.” I settle my hat lower. “Cowboy style.”
He reaches for the lube sitting beside us and I catch his wrist.
“Already handled. What exactly did you think I was doing up here all this time while you were measuring windows?”
The sound he makes is not English or Spanish. His eyes go black as the far end of the Gulf. “Dios mío.”
“My God is right, Dante. Damn, you’re already hard.” I get a palmful of slick and get him ready for me, long pulls that arch him up off the floor.
When he’s about to say something smart I rise up, line him up, and sink down onto him in one long, greedy slide that empties both our lungs at the same time.
The head of his cock pushes past that last tight ring of muscle and then the thick length of him keeps going, filling me inch by inch until there’s nowhere left to go.
He’s seated deep, his hips under me, my thighs spread over him, the stretch of him big and blunt and everywhere. Heat blooms low in my gut.
The pressure is perfect. I can feel every ridge and vein of him, the way his cock throbs once, twice, deep inside me like it’s trying to get even deeper. My own cock twitches hard against his stomach, already leaking.
Then his hands clamp onto my thighs and his hips twitch up, wanting, and I press him flat with a palm on his chest.
“Did I say you could buck? This is a rodeo.”
“Levi—” It comes out half a laugh and half a curse.