10. Levi
LEVI
Tucker hits the horn a second time—longer, meaner, the full lean—and me and Josie freeze exactly like that, her dress shoved down her shoulder and half up her thigh, my hand flat against the dresser mirror, both of us breathing like we’ve been running stairs.
And then we crack up. Same second, foreheads dropping together, both of us wrecked and grinning like teenagers whose folks came home early.
“He’s gonna sit on that horn till we come out,” she says into my collarbone.
“He’s gonna sit on it till I break it off his steering column.”
“That’s assault, baby.”
“That’s maintenance.” I’ve still got a handful of green dress and no intention of doing anything responsible with it, and she’s laughing and flushed and gorgeous and thirty seconds ago she made a sound against my mouth that I’m going to be thinking about during every conversation I have tonight.
“We could not go. Genuinely a thing we could do. Tucker’ll get bored in an hour. ”
“It’s our party.”
“They won’t even notice. There’s brisket.”
“Levi.” But she’s grinning, and she stays right where she is one more second, forehead on mine, breathing with me, and I feel her heart going against my chest like a bird—she’s been wound up all week, my girl, tonight’s some kind of summit for her and I still don’t know why—and then she pats my chest twice, businesslike, closing the meeting. “Fix me. You broke it, you fix it.”
“For the record, the dress broke itself. Dress has been asking for it since you put it on.”
“Blaming the dress. Real strong legal position.”
“I got witnesses. Tucker heard the whole thing from the driveway.”
“Tucker,” she says, solemn, “would perjure himself for you in a heartbeat, and that’s why I can’t call him as a witness.”
I put her back together, which is harder than it sounds, because my hands have opinions.
Dress up over her shoulder. Zipper—again, second time tonight, same zipper, and doing it up is a whole lot less fun than it was the first time.
I smooth the fabric down over her hip and my hand does not want to leave, it’s got roots there, and I make it leave anyway, and I press one more kiss under her ear, right on the spot.
“Later,” I tell her. Rough. And I mean it like a signed contract.
I mean every version of it I’ve been thinking since she put that dress on—I got a whole list, I’ve been adding to it since four o’clock, and tonight when this party’s done and it’s just us and that zipper again, I’m working straight through it top to bottom.
“Later,” she says back, and the way she says it, half a laugh and half a promise, is going to be a problem for me all night.
Horn again. Three short ones. Tucker’s doing a rhythm now, entertaining himself.
“We’re taking two rigs, by the way,” I tell her, finding my boots. “You take your car. I’m stuck in the truck.”
“Stuck,” she says. “Tragic.”
“It is tragic. It’s June.” Best riding month this valley makes, and I’m going to a party in the cage like somebody’s accountant—but I’m on teardown duty after, and you don’t haul a smoker and forty folding tables home on a Dyna.
That’s the whole deal with the truck: parts runs, plow season, hauling.
The bike’s for living; the truck’s for freight.
Tonight I’m freight. “I gotta stay after and help Reyes load the smoker back, break down tables, whole bit. That’s a two-in-the-morning job.
You want to be yawning in a folding chair at two a.m. or you want your own getaway car? ”
She considers it, hopping, getting a shoe on. “Getaway car.”
“Smart girl. Besides—“ I catch her around the waist on her way past, one arm, reel her in for one more, because apparently I’m not done, apparently tonight I’m never done—“you gotta drive careful in that dress. That dress is a moving violation.”
“You’ve been saving that one.”
“Since four o’clock,” I admit, and she laughs against my mouth, and Tucker lays on the horn like the building’s on fire.
While she’s hunting her little jacket thing I check my phone in the hall.
Quick, guilty, angled away from the bedroom door like a man checking a scratch ticket.
Nothing. No new texts since Wednesday’s, which is still sitting there unanswered where I left it, and I feel my shoulders come down an inch.
Maybe that’s how this goes. Maybe she shoots her photos tonight, cashes Nell’s check, and the whole thing stays a stone at the bottom of a lake, and in ten years it’s just a thing I did once that nobody ever?—
“Ready!” Josie, sailing out of the bedroom.
Pocket. Gone. Smile.
She checks the mirror once—she’s so goddamn beautiful it’s actually stupid, I don’t know how I’m supposed to talk to people tonight—and heads up the hall, and I follow a step behind like always, and watch the trouble dress do what the trouble dress does, sway and swing all the way to the door.
Outside, Tucker’s hanging out his truck window. “You two done? I’ve aged. I’ve got a beard now that I didn’t have when I pulled in.”
“You had that beard.”
“It’s grayer.” He jerks a thumb at the bed of his truck, four bags of ice sweating through their plastic. “And your ice is water, so there’s that too.”
Josie sails past him to her car, queenly, not taking the bait, and Tucker watches her go and then looks at me and mouths trouble dress, because the man’s an idiot but he’s not blind.
“Hey.” I point at him over the hood. “Tonight goes smooth. Whatever dumb thing you’ve got planned—the speech, the slideshow, whatever Reyes bet you—smooth. It matters to her.”
“Levi.” He puts his hand over his heart, wounded, the picture of a man with no slideshow. “It’s gonna be the best night of your whole life.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“Three years, brother.” He drops the bit for exactly one sentence, the way Tucker does, the real thing surfacing like a trout and gone again.
“Nobody thought you had it in you, and I mean that with all my heart as an insult.” Then the grin’s back and he’s hollering at Josie’s car about ice logistics, and I lock the front door of the house we filled up together, and check it, and check it again, which isn’t a thing I do—we’re a leave-it-open valley—but tonight some part of me wants everything latched.
At the stop sign where the county road tees, Josie’s arm comes out her window and signals left about four hundred years before the turn, because she signals in the middle of open rangeland to an audience of cows, three years and it still kills me, and I flash my lights at her about it, and her hand comes back out the window with a different gesture entirely, and I laugh alone in my truck like a lunatic.
That’s the whole three years, right there in one intersection, if anybody ever asks me to explain it.
She does the careful thing even when nobody’s watching, because that’s who she is, all the way through, same grain top to bottom like good wood.
And I’m the guy one truck back flashing my lights, giving her hell because giving her hell is how I get her hand out the window.
I’d follow that turn signal anywhere on earth.
I should tell her that sometime. In words.
I keep meaning to and then the moment’s always got an engine in it, or a party, or her mouth doing something better than listening?—
Tonight, maybe. It’s an anniversary. Man could say a thing like that at an anniversary.
And rolling on in convoy—Tucker leading with the ice, Josie’s little car in the middle, me sweeping in the truck—I get one of those moments.
Warm June evening, the Absarokas going purple behind the house, her taillights right there in front of me the whole way down the county road, one bare arm out her window riding the wind the way she’s done every warm night for three years, and the whole night lined up in front of us like a runway.
I am the luckiest son of a bitch in Paradise Valley, I think, following my girl’s taillights to a party our family threw us, and I don’t deserve one bit of it.
Both halves of that are true. I got no idea yet how true. I’m grinning like an idiot the whole drive, half-hard and happy, thirty minutes from watching the whole thing come apart in my hands.