16. Levi
LEVI
I’ve got nothing.
Mouth open, whole head white noise, her fingers coming off my sleeve one at a time like she’s counting them off, and every alarm I own is going at once and none of them come with instructions.
Say something. There’s nothing. There’s no sentence in the English language that fits in the two feet between us.
“Levi! Josie! Move it, lovebirds!” Reyes now, off to the side of the stage, waving his beer at us, grinning like the world’s a good place.
And Josie’s face—shuts.
I watch it happen from two feet away. Everything that was cracking open in it a second ago just closes, smooths over, sets.
Like a door swinging shut on a burning room.
She turns toward the front of the house with her chin up and her party face on, perfect, seamless, and that—that’s the thing that guts me worse than the grab, worse than the question.
Watching her do that. Watching how good she is at it, how fast, and knowing I’m why she’s having to.
“There they are!” Wyatt, off-mic now, big arm sweeping us up toward the front, and the crowd’s turning, parting, making the lane it makes, and somebody starts a slow-clap that catches, and Marley’s flash goes off—she’s photographing this, she is standing on her tripod side of the room photographing this, and the flash hits the side of my face like a slap I can’t return.
I grab Josie’s hand.
Don’t decide to. My hand just goes, animal, and takes hers, because we’re getting called up in front of everybody and it’s what we do, and because if I don’t touch her right now some panicked thing in me is sure I never get to again.
Her fingers are ice. Ice, and shaking—this fine, fast tremor, like something small left out in weather.
And she lets me hold on.
Doesn’t squeeze back. Doesn’t pull away either.
Just lets her freezing hand sit in mine like it’s something she’s decided to permit for the next four minutes, and that’s worse than yanking loose would be, I can’t even tell you why, it just is.
It guts me the whole walk up—through the crowd parting and clapping, somebody whistling, Tucker howling our names—her hand dead cold in mine and her smile bolted on and me grinning at my family like a man who isn’t watching his whole life stand next to him bleeding out invisible.
The walk up front takes nine years. Reyes claps my shoulder as we pass.
Dot’s beaming at us from behind the cake table with her hands folded under her chin like we’re something worth folding hands about.
Somebody’s kid darts across our path chasing another kid and Josie steps around them smooth as anything, smiling, smiling, her hand frozen solid in mine, and I keep having this one thought over and over, dumb and roaring: all these people think they’re looking at the luckiest couple in the valley.
I thought it myself, forty-five minutes ago, in a truck, like an idiot, following her taillights.
Forty-five minutes. That’s how long ago the last good minute was.
Wyatt’s got his bottle up. Room settles. String lights all warm and gold on every face I’ve ever loved.
“Three years for these two.” Big grin in the beard. “Levi, son—when you first brought this girl around, I pulled you aside, you remember what I told you?”
“You told me don’t fuck it up!” I hear myself yell it, right on cue, big and easy, the crowd howling. Where’d it come from? Some autopilot Levi who’s been doing parties for fifteen years, out there running the body while the rest of me stands behind my own eyes screaming.
“That’s right!” Wyatt’s laughing. “And look at you. Proof any dumbass can listen once.” The room roars again.
Josie laughs too—I hear it, right beside me, pitched perfect, and it’s not hers.
It’s not her laugh. I want to put my fist through the nearest wall, watching her fake it this good for a room full of people who got no idea what I did to her forty feet from the drink table.
Wyatt lifts the bottle higher, and his voice drops into that register he saves.
“To family,” he says. “However you build it.”
However you build it. It lands on me like a dropped engine—and Wyatt doesn’t know, that’s the thing, he’s just being Wyatt, saying the Wyatt thing, family the one word this club runs on instead of gasoline, and it comes down on exactly the spot where three hours ago Josie said family with her whole face turned up to me and I handed her a punchline.
Everyone drinks—the whole room, one motion, bottles and cups and Casey’s tequila, Dot with her coffee mug because Dot toasts with coffee, a hundred arms going up in the string-light glow—and I don’t.
Can’t. I’m holding a full beer and my arm doesn’t move, I just stand there gripping Josie’s frozen hand like it’s the only thing keeping her upright—like it’s the only thing keeping me upright, more like it—while a hundred people drink to a thing I set fire to three weeks ago, and the only thought my head will make, over and over, flat, on a loop:
I did this. I did this. I did this.
Somebody yells kiss her.
Somebody always yells kiss her. It’s a party, it’s a toast, it’s us—and the yell catches, two or three voices, then the whistling, and Josie turns her face up to me with her bolted-on smile and her dead eyes, and I put my mouth on her cheekbone, one second, the chastest kiss two people ever manufactured in public, and the room awws like it saw something sweet, and up close, under the perfume, I can feel her jaw trembling, and I want to die.
Standing right there in the middle of the aww.
Simple as that. First time in my life I’ve ever wanted right out of it.
And here’s the piece of it I’ll be chewing the rest of my life: she gave them the kiss.
She could’ve turned her face away—half an inch, nobody’d have clocked it, parties eat little moments like that—and instead she stood there and let me put my mouth on her cheek and smiled for my family while her jaw shook, protecting this room’s good night with the last of whatever she had.
Even then. Even burning down, she was covering my exits.
That’s who I did this to. That’s the size of it.
Toast ends. Music kicks back up.
And her hand’s gone—yanked loose, no ceremony now, no finger-by-finger, just gone—and she’s already three steps away and moving, cutting through the crowd for the door, small and fast and straight as a dropped plumb line, and Tucker’s hand lands on my arm out of nowhere, him leaning in loud and happy: “Hey, so I’m thinking about that carburetor, if you got a sec?—“
“Not now.” I shake him off harder than he’s got coming and I’m moving, and behind me I hear him say whoa, okay to nobody, and I’ll owe him for that shove someday. Put it on the pile. The pile’s compounding tonight.
The crowd between me and that door is a hundred people I’ve known my whole life and every one of them wants a piece of the man of the hour—a hand on my shoulder, a bottle raised at me, somebody’s aunt saying three years!
straight into my face—and I wade through all of it saying yeah and thanks with a mouth I can’t feel, watching the door she went out of swing shut, and it takes thirty seconds to cross that room and it costs me a year.
Out the doors she just went through, and the June night hits me cool and quiet after all that noise?—
—and there she is. By her car, back to me, arms wrapped around herself, and even from the doorway, even in the dark, I can see it.
She’s shaking.
“Josie.”
She doesn’t turn around.