18. Levi
LEVI
Idon’t go after the car.
Don’t know if that’s respect or the biggest mistake of a night already full of them.
I just stand there in the gravel watching her taillights swing out onto the county road and shrink to nothing, two red sparks and then the dark eats them, and my own hands are shaking now.
Bad. Worse than hers were, and hers could barely hold her keys.
My chest won’t slow down. It’s that feeling right after a fight—the real kind, the parking-lot kind—that sick buzzing running up both arms with nowhere to go, all that voltage and nothing to put it into.
Except after a fight there’s a guy on the ground or a guy standing over you, either way it’s done, it went somewhere.
This has got nowhere to go. There’s nobody to hit.
There’s nothing to hit that fixes one single thing about this?—
I slam my palm flat on the roof of my truck.
Hard. It goes off like a shot in the empty lot and stings clear up through my elbow to the shoulder, and it doesn’t help, doesn’t touch it, and I do it again anyway.
Harder. Third time the sting finally gets through to something and I stand there braced on the truck with both arms, head down, breathing like a blown radiator, a dent the size of my hand up there in the roof that I’ll be looking at every day now, which—fine. Good. Every day.
The guy smoking by the fence has gone inside. Smart guy.
Her taillights are twenty minutes gone and I’m still standing in this lot like the lot’s going to do something about it.
She said I still. She said I hate you a little and I still—and then she slammed her own mouth shut on it, on purpose, right in front of me, and I watched her decide I don’t get the rest. That half a sentence is going to live in my chest like a fist. However long it takes her to finish it—days, years, never—that’s how long it sits there.
And the other thing she said, the one that’s going to keep me company on whatever couch I’m sleeping on: I have loved you so much it’s actually humiliating.
Said it like a confession, like the crime was hers.
Three years I knew she loved me big—knew it the way you know the sun’s up, walked around warm in it, never once did the math on what it cost her to run that hot toward a man who pays out in weather reports and brake jobs.
It cost her this. It was costing her the whole time.
Tonight I just finally made her say the price out loud in a parking lot.
I go back inside because I don’t know what else to do with my body.
Bad call. Inside is bright and loud and full of everybody I know.
Music’s still going—party doesn’t know it’s over, nobody in here knows anything, that’s the insane part, a hundred people laughing and eating cake inside a thing that already burned down.
Somebody puts a beer in my hand. I don’t remember whose hand or saying thanks.
I try to lift it a minute later and my hand’s still shaking bad enough the bottle knocks against my teeth, and I set it down on the nearest table and leave it.
Tucker finds me. Course he does. Saying something—his mouth’s moving, carburetor’s in it somewhere, party stuff, happy stuff—and I don’t hear one word.
Ears are roaring, same as they’ve been since the second I saw her face across this room, this high flat hiss like a compressor line with a leak.
He gets about four sentences in before he actually looks at me, and I watch it register—whatever my face is doing, whatever’s left of it—and his mouth slows down and stops.
“Where’s Josie?” he says. Different voice.
“Home.”
“...You good?”
“No.” First honest thing I’ve said all night.
Feels like coughing up a bolt. And I walk off before the next question, because the next question’s got Marley in it somewhere even if Tucker doesn’t know it yet, this whole room’s going to have Marley in it by Monday, small towns don’t keep anything, they just wait?—
And across the room, through a gap in the crowd, Wyatt’s looking at me.
Not coming over. Not waving. Just looking—beer still in his hand, Dot saying something up at his shoulder—that flat steady read he does, the one that’s been X-raying prospects for thirty years, and I turn out of it like turning out of headlights.
I end up in the back bathroom with the door locked, which is a thing I have never once done at a party in my life.
Both hands on the sink. Water running so there’s a sound.
The mirror over the basin’s been cracked since some New Year’s before my time and I stand there looking at myself in it, split down the middle by somebody else’s old bad night, and my face looks like it always looks.
That’s the thing I can’t get over. Same face.
You’d think it’d show. Three years of her looking at this face like it was worth something and it doesn’t even have the decency to look different now.
I splash water on it anyway, like the movies, like that does anything. Dry my hands on my jeans because the towel situation in this bathroom has been a crime since 2019. Unlock the door.
“To family,” Wyatt says on a loop somewhere behind my eyes. “However you build it.”
However you build it. However you build it.
And standing there in the middle of my own anniversary party with a beer I can’t drink, my gut drops straight through the floor, gut and floor both gone, like missing a stair in the dark.
Over and over. Every time I remember her face at the drink table, the stair’s not there again.
No bottom to it. It just keeps dropping.
This one’s got no edges anywhere. No bell coming, no guy in front of you the same size as the problem.
Just a room full of everybody who loves me, and the worst thing in my life already happened three weeks ago, and I’m only now walking in on it—a man showing up to his own house fire with a garden hose, already smelling the smoke.
Casey’s saying something to me now, holding a plate of cake.
Dot’s laughing behind the counter. String lights all gold on all of it, and my girl’s out on a dark county road somewhere crying too hard to see the centerline, because of me, and every second I stand here is another second of being a guy standing at a party while that’s true.
I get my phone out right there in the middle of the room and call her.
Straight to nothing—four rings, voicemail, her bright recorded voice from some easier year telling me to leave it after the beep, and I hang up on the beep because what’s the message, what’s the possible message.
Call again. Same. I type please tell me you got home ok.
that’s all. you don’t have to answer anything else with my hands going, delete it, type it again the same, send it.
Stand there watching the screen like a man watching a monitor in a waiting room.
Nothing. Eleven minutes of nothing—I watch every one of them change on the clock—and then I type I’m so sorry, Jo, which is the emptiest sentence in the English language and also every single thing I have, and I send that too.
I don’t wait for it to end. Don’t say goodbye to anybody, don’t do the rounds, don’t find Wyatt. I just set my full beer down next to my other full beer and walk out the same doors she did.
And I’m in my truck with the engine going before I’ve decided anything—no speech ready, no plan, nothing in my head but the roar and her taillights and that unfinished sentence—hands still shaking on the wheel, headed for her place.
Our place.
Whatever it is now.