5. Levi
LEVI
She’s asleep in about four minutes. Out like a light, sprawled across my chest, one leg thrown over mine, breath going slow and even against my neck.
I’m so wide awake it hurts.
I lie there in the dark with my hand on the small of her back and I replay the last twenty minutes, and guilt at one in the morning has this way of turning all the lights on, and what I see, clear as a parts diagram, is exactly what I was doing.
I was trying to fuck three weeks out of my own body.
Like if I could make her feel good enough, make her come apart hard enough, make her want me loud enough—enough times, enough—it’d sand the motel room out of me.
Overwrite it. Nine days of us barely talking, then Marley’s name on a text, then two hours I’d cut my own arm off to take back, and I’ve been trying to bury all of it under being good, and tonight I tried to bury it under her, and she doesn’t even know she’s a shovel.
Don’t ever. That’s what came out of me, right in the middle of it. Don’t ever—what? Leave? Find out? I don’t even know which one I meant. Both. Her body all wrapped up in mine and me begging her for something I don’t have the guts to name.
It doesn’t work like that. Making her feel good doesn’t pay anything down. I know it, and I did it anyway, and I’d do it again tomorrow, because when I’m inside her is the only time in three weeks my head’s gone quiet.
And that’s the sick part, right, because it’s not like it’s work.
Being with her has never once been work.
Three years and I still know her body better than I know any engine I’ve ever built—the freckles across her chest like somebody flicked a paintbrush, the little sound she makes when I first push into her, caught halfway between a gasp and my name, I’d know it blind.
The exact spot low on her neck that makes her whole spine go loose.
The way she grabs my wrist when I’ve got her close—did it again tonight, both hands clamped on my forearm while I worked her, nails in, like she’s scared I’ll stop.
Like I’d ever stop. Like there’s a version of me in any universe that stops.
Tonight she was hungry in this way she gets maybe once a month, where she starts it, climbs me in the dark, all mouth and no patience, and usually I love that—usually I lie back and let her run it and count myself the luckiest bastard in the state.
Tonight I couldn’t. Tonight I had to have my hands on every inch of her, had to flip her and hear her shout into the pillow, had to make her say it—whose is it—had to hear it out loud like a man checking a bolt he already torqued.
Three times I checked it. She said it every time, easy, sweet, no idea she was answering a question I got no right to keep asking.
And when I finished—buried deep with her wrapped all the way around me, her heels in my back, her voice in my ear—it hit me so hard my arms nearly went, this long rolling blackout of a thing, and for about ten seconds after, I swear to God, I was nobody.
No motel, no Marley, no three weeks. Just her heartbeat coming down under mine and her hand moving slow on the back of my neck and nothing else in the world. Ten seconds.
Best ten seconds I’ve had in three weeks. And I chased them like a drunk chases the first beer, and that’s the truth, and there it is.
I’ve had her a thousand times and I have never one single time been done wanting her.
Guys at the shop complain about their old ladies like the wanting wears off, like it’s tread on a tire, and I keep my mouth shut because what am I gonna say—mine never wore off?
Three years and I still watch her walk to the bathroom in my T-shirt and feel like I won something I never bought a ticket for?
That’s the truth. And three weeks ago I put it all in a motel room ashtray anyway, and I’ve got no version of why that survives her hearing it.
I’ve tried to build one. Lying right here, night after night, I’ve tried to build the sentence like you’d build an engine, piece by piece, some order of words where it makes sense: we were in a bad stretch.
Nine days of her going quiet on me, quiet at dinner, quiet in bed, rolled over with her back like a wall, and I didn’t ask why—that’s the part that sinks every version, I never once asked why—I just decided.
Decided it was ending. Decided I could feel it going, same as you feel a motor about to let go, and instead of opening it up and finding the problem I just—got off the bike.
Let Marley’s text sit in my phone two days and then answered it. Rode out to a motel on 89 with my chest full of concrete and did the one thing you can’t undo, to prove—what. That leaving first hurts less. That I was right about forever all along.
Some engine. Every bolt of that sentence strips the second I put a wrench on it. There’s no version. There’s just a thing I did.
And here’s the part that would kill her worse than any of it, the part I’ll take to my grave: I can’t even tell you what the fight was about.
The one that started the nine days. I’ve gone looking for it a hundred times lying right here—some Tuesday in May, something about the weekend, or money, or the thing I said about her sister’s visit, or nothing, actually nothing, one of those fights that’s really about the fight underneath the fight—and it’s just gone.
The rough patch that I treated like a verdict on three years, the cold stretch I read like a diagnosis, terminal, better start saying goodbye—I cannot remember what started it. A man burned his house down over a fight he can’t remember. Put that on the report.
She makes a little sound in her sleep and burrows in closer, and my arm goes around her automatic, and for a second—one second—everything’s just quiet. Her weight. Her breath. The ceiling fan ticking on its bad bearing. Peace, or something wearing its jacket.
Then my heart rate comes down the rest of the way and the guilt rolls back in right on schedule, like it just stepped out for a smoke.
And I do the thing I do now, the nightly thing, my own private church: I inventory what I’d lose.
Her side of the bathroom counter, all those little bottles I bitch about and would keep like relics.
Her cold feet finding my calves in January.
The way she sings wrong lyrics on purpose to make me crazy.
Sunday dinners with her wedged between Dot and Casey, laughing, mine, everybody knowing she’s mine.
The whole warm freight of a life I never believed I’d get and got anyway, the best of it asleep on my chest right now with her hand curled over my heart like she owns it, which she does.
Because that’s the other thing about tonight, the thing I keep circling back around to in the dark: she came to me.
Climbed over me in the middle of the night wanting something she couldn’t name, and I felt it in her hands, some urgency under the want, and instead of asking—hey, what’s going on in there, what do you need—I answered it with my body like I answer everything, and now she’s asleep thinking whatever she was reaching for got reached.
Maybe it did. Or maybe two people had two completely different nights in the same bed.
Her reaching. Me handling. Nobody asking.
I look down at her in the dark. Can’t see much, just the shape of her, hair everywhere, one hand curled on my chest like a kid’s.
And the thought that comes isn’t smart, isn’t anything I could say at a church podium. It’s just this, plain as a hammer: I’d burn the clubhouse down before I let anything take this away from me.
I’d burn anything. Anything.
I fall asleep like that, hand splayed flat over the small of her back, holding on like a man can keep a thing together by grip strength alone.