It’s Worth It for This
Summer
The sun is setting on the horizon, rays streaming through the trees, when I finally step back out into the warm air.
And I’m thinking about my father’s offer of weekly dinner dates that I agreed to, when the sore thumb of a vehicle pulls my attention to the left once my feet touch the end of the driveway.
Levi’s truck is pulled off against the curb, one house down.
I’m seventeen again as I approach where he waits, my heart skipping through beats as I remember him outside my house, waiting to make sure I was okay after that big confrontation with my father, after I told him he didn’t need to stay.
I told him again I was coming here, and he asked me again if I needed company, and again, I said no.
And he’s here. Again.
I squint through the passenger side window to see him slumped some against the seat, his head leaned against the headrest, his eyes closed.
My breath comes in slowly as I study him, almost memorizing him like this, here for me. Then comes my smile as I adjust the box against my chest and give a light knock on the glass.
Levi wakes with a small jolt, his hand immediately grabbing for something in the seat, between his legs—his phone. I chuckle in the seconds he taps in to find out the sound wasn’t from there, then I wave when he looks at the window.
He sighs through a sleepy smile and drops his phone into a cup holder, and I don’t wait for the invite before climbing in.
“Sorry to tire you out with the wait time,” I tease to his mini stretch and yawn.
“You should be,” he teases back, rolling up his window and starting the truck to get some air flowing. “It was getting hot.” His accompanying gaze starts from the side, then connects with mine fully as he leans back in a shift toward me. The slight tilt of his head, his half smile, the whole thing, makes me feel flush and thankful for the air conditioning.
My laugh even has a flush to it as I ask, “What’d you think was gonna happen?”
His inhale is deep. “Nothing bad and everything good, but…if you needed someone, you could call me and I’d be here faster.”
Not someone. Him.
“You knew it’d be you,” I murmur.
He looks at me a long moment. “I’m sorry it’s not Adam,” he murmurs back, and I don’t know if it was the lowness in my voice, my lack of a tone to properly decipher, but that wasn’t exactly what I meant. Even if it should’ve been.
“Are you?” I ask, some tone in my voice now, a press for more, because I’m tired of having less. And I can’t have less in this moment. “Or are you glad it’s you?”
His lips part, his eyes dancing between mine. “I want what makes you happy…but I’m glad I can do that.” There’s a strain in the words and I feel it in my swallow.
Levi gives a raised brow glance toward my dad’s house. “So is this goodbye?” There’s still some strain, but his voice is lighter with the teasing way of asking how my time went, and that it didn’t go south.
I shake my head with my mouth scrunched in a tiny grin. Then I tell him, “I’m not sure if we can ever be as close as I’ve wanted, but as long as he keeps trying, I will too.”
It’s like a years-long burden is lifted from my chest when I make the promise out loud, and Levi’s wider smile, tinged with relief, helps my decision feel more right.
He reaches for his phone and taps in, and I’m thinking he’s thinking he’s done and ready to move on. Which he is and he does, but he holds the phone out to me and says with some nerves, “I have something for you.”
The phone doesn’t immediately steal my gaze from his when I take it, but when I blink down at the screen, I inhale a sharp gasp, only short of a scream.
E-tickets. To a concert. Just a couple hours away.
For Ten Decembers.
“What? Is this—? Are you—” I stumble over thoughts, trying to find them, until it settles in what’s happening, what he’s offering, and even then, I sound like a mess. “Two? Me?”
Levi laughs as if to say of course you . “Yeah,” he says. “You and me.”
Me and Levi. Going to a concert for our favorite band together.
I’ve been to small things in college, for relatively unknowns, but never something like this . A venue show. For Ten fucking Decembers !
“They’re not the best seats—”
“They’re seats , Levi,” I cut into his apologetic tone for not getting us better, but he got us in— us —and that’s more than enough.
“Well…yeah.” He laughs again, like he can’t argue that.
My desire to kiss him is the strongest it’s been, that strength growing a bit every day, and I snap my eyes back down to the screen, forcing my thoughts to younger Summer, who imagined herself kissing Kai Coleman more than a few times.
“Wait,” I say. “Wouldn’t these be sold out?”
“Oh yeah,” Levi says, with a nod and look that reflects what I’m thinking; he shouldn’t have been able to get these now, with the show so soon. “I got lucky. A woman and her friend couldn’t go anymore and were auctioning them off and I won.”
I groan a laugh, knowing what that means. “So you paid more than they did.”
“It’s worth it for this.” His hand reaches out, his thumb at the corner of my lip, his touch in a natural gravitation to my smile—
A one second touch before he pulls his hand back fast, his gaze shifting toward the windshield at the same speed.
My smile fades to an open-mouthed stalled breath as I snap my own gaze down to the phone, letting Ten Decembers run through my head—it picks their song “We’ll Get It Right This Time”—over which of my sudden thoughts to Levi’s reaction is the true falseness; that he should be touching me or that he shouldn’t be touching me.
There’s something weighty to the motion, either way, asking a question he didn’t wait to answer.
What if he lingered?
He doesn’t apologize, and I admit to myself I don’t want him to be sorry. He doesn’t attempt to take the touch back at all, as quick as it was, and I let my heart ease, then beat more for his intention.
I hand him back his phone with a sighed “Thank you” as I find my smile again.
He finds his again, too, with a slight uncertain stretch in one corner before he says, “So, just to confirm…you and me?”
My laugh is one burst from my mouth, my nod more of a circling of my head in my own disbelief that we’re going to a Ten Decembers concert. “You and me.”
Levi bites into his smile as he gives his phone a swing between his fingers— cha-ching! —and I turn the heat rush to my face toward the air conditioning as I move the box from my lap to the floor, shifting to face him as he’s been facing me.
“I need you to tell me how you take care of my dad,” I tell him after the deepest inhale. “Because I’ll be doing that at least once a week now.”
“He was being stubborn, wasn’t he?” It’s more statement than question, as he can guess from his own experience that I asked my dad to tell me himself and he insisted he didn’t need or want that.
“He’s worse than me.”
Levi makes a teasing noise of disagreement and when I kick my foot at him, he gives me his frustratingly comforting and attractive smile again before he goes into everything he gets and has been doing for my father.
I’ve had a long time to think there’s something wrong with all the men in my life. But as I listen to the second one being better, too, basking in Levi, I admit this is the better day, with better feelings, and hope this doesn’t worsen my still helpless heart.