27. Levi
LEVI
Tucker’s fold-out has a bar that finds your spine no matter what you do, and I’ve given up on it by midnight, lying there staring at the ceiling fan with tonight running on a loop.
Ten seconds. That’s about what we got before she stopped it—ten seconds of her mouth and her hands at my belt and three years of my whole nervous system lighting up like a switchboard, and then stop, and I stopped, and now I’m on a fold-out counting the ways a man can ache.
The body part of it, fine. A cold shower at Tucker’s handled the loudest of that, with Tucker hollering through the door asking if I fell in.
It’s the other ache that won’t quit—the one right behind the sternum, this pulled-muscle feeling that flares every time I replay her saying I want to, God, Levi, I want to, because she meant it, I know meant-it when I hear it, she was shaking with meant-it—and she got up and left the room anyway.
Chose the fence over the gate with her whole body yelling the other direction.
And I stood by a cold fireplace listening to her go down the hall, and it hit me somewhere around the third slammed drawer that she’s not keeping the fence to punish me. She’s keeping it because she can’t trust the gate. Because I’m the one that taught her gates lie.
I told her the Stockman thing tonight, though.
Out loud. Been carrying that fact three years like a spare key I never handed over—it’s been you since the parking lot—and I finally said it to a cold fireplace with my back half turned, because looking at her while I said it was more than the machinery could take.
And you know what happened? Nothing broke.
The roof stayed on. She left the room, but she left it slower than she had to, and a man learns to read half-seconds when half-seconds are the only currency he’s getting paid in.
And the thing I keep chewing on, the thing that won’t let me under, isn’t even the want.
It’s what she said. I can’t tell what your hands are saying.
Like my own hands have been running a con I didn’t know about.
And lying here in the dark I keep reaching back—can’t help it—to the first time she ever said yes to me, four months in, her little apartment over the laundromat with the radiator that clanked, and how I’d been so sure some wire in the universe was crossed.
That’s the part I never told anybody: I stood in that room genuinely confused, because girls like Josie did not happen to guys like me, and she pulled her own sweater off over her head and looked at me—no armor, nothing held back, handing me the whole thing like it wasn’t even a question—and my hands shook.
Actually shook. I remember hiding it from her, pressing them flat against her back so she wouldn’t feel it, the disbelief of it, getting something that easy that I hadn’t earned, hadn’t built, hadn’t bled for?—
—and that’s the whole thing, isn’t it. Lying here with tonight’s ache stacked on top of that memory, I can see it plain as a torque spec: everything else I ever got, I earned with my hands.
The patch—five years of prospect shit-work and proving it.
The shop—a decade of busted knuckles. Wyatt’s respect—earned, slow, the hard way, the only way Wyatt sells it.
Everything good in my life I can point at and tell you what it cost me.
Except her. Her, I was just given.
Never paid for, though. She just showed up and gave me the whole thing, no charge, and I took it like free food—didn’t ask where it came from, didn’t wonder if it’d run out.
Just ate. Never once got up in the morning and thought what am I doing today to earn this, the way I thought it about the patch every single day for five years.
And the one time it got hard—one rough patch, nine days of cold—I acted like a man whose lease ran out instead of a man with something to fix.
Wanting her back. Earning her back. Those aren’t the same thing and I only just now get that, lying here like an idiot at two in the morning finding out something a smarter man would’ve known at nineteen.
Flowers and dinners and keeping fences is wanting with better manners.
Earning is what you do for a patch—you show up every day for years and you take the shit-work and you don’t ask when it’s over.
Okay. Then that’s the job.
And the thing about a job—this is the part that finally lets my eyes close, some time after two, Tucker’s spare-room bar carving its initials into my spine—is I know how to do a job.
You show up. You do the boring parts. You don’t ask the patch when it’s coming, you don’t ask the bike when it’ll run, you just come back tomorrow with your hands.
Stop waiting on a verdict, dumbass. Nobody’s handing down a verdict.
Just get up and turn the wrench again. Every day.
Longest rebuild I’ll ever do, no guarantee it runs at the end, and you do it anyway, because it’s hers.
I actually sleep after that, some. Like something decided.
Tucker’s up before me, which never happens—I come out at six-thirty and he’s at the stove doing violence to some eggs, and he slides half of them onto a plate and shoves it at me without being asked, and we eat standing up at his counter like two guys in a duck blind, and finally he says, around a mouthful, not looking at me: “You know you been at my place three weeks and you make the fold-out up every morning like a Marine. Blanket corners and everything.”
“So?”
“So nothing.” He chews. “Guys who are done fighting for something don’t make the bed, is all. My cousin got divorced, slept in a nest like a raccoon for a year.” He points the fork at me. “You make the bed.”
That’s the whole conversation. Tucker-deep, which people mistake for shallow because it comes with eggs. I make the bed. Huh.
And at seven-forty I’m barely through the shop doors, first coffee still burning my hand, Rusty’s radio already going and Gasket doing his morning rounds of everybody’s shins, when Casey leans out of the front office: “Dad wants you.”
“Now?”
“He said when you got in.” She’s got her braid over one shoulder and her face is doing absolutely nothing, which for Casey is doing a lot. Casey’s face not doing anything is a weather report. “You got in.”
The walk from the bay doors to the front office is maybe sixty feet and I’ve made it ten thousand times—carrying parts, carrying coffee, carrying invoices, nineteen years old and carrying a mop.
It’s never once been a long walk before.
This morning it’s got a whole geography to it: past the Road King I owe a customer, past Rusty who doesn’t look up too carefully, past the tool wall where every wrench I’ve ever earned hangs in its painted outline like evidence, and the coffee’s going cold in my hand and my heart’s doing the shop-accident thing, that big slow bass-drum whump-whump you get in the half-second after a jack slips, before you know if it caught anybody.
The club knows something. Wyatt knows something. And the man I’ve spent fifteen years not disappointing is behind that door deciding what to do about it.
Wyatt’s in the office with the door open, going through invoices. He looks up when I come in.
Then he reaches past me and shuts the door.
Wyatt doesn’t shut that door. Twenty years around this man—prospect, patch, brother—and I can count door-shuts on one hand, and every finger of it was a bad day.
And his face isn’t shop-business face, it’s something older and heavier and aimed straight at me, and it’s already clear as a struck bell that the club knows something.
Maybe everything. Small town. Loud party.
“Sit down,” Wyatt says. Quiet.
And my stomach drops the exact same way it did across a carburetor three weeks ago, the day he first said her name.