38. Levi
LEVI
She falls apart under me and takes me with her—no holding out this time, no making it last another mile. I just let go the second her pussy clenches around my cock, hot and slick and gripping, and Christ, it hits like nothing in my life ever has. Rolls up my spine and whites everything out.
Her heels dig into me, her mouth open against my jaw saying my name in pieces, and I bury myself as deep as I can get and stay there and shake—actually shake, this big graceless full-body thing I couldn’t stop if the house caught fire, pulsing into her long after I think I should be done.
Because it’s got nothing in it but her. That’s the difference, I understand it right in the middle of it, her name coming out of me broken: every time for a month—longer, be honest, longer—some part of me was using it.
Proving something, paying something, drowning something out.
Tonight there’s nothing underneath but I get to.
I get to have her. The whole miracle of it, three years old and brand new.
Neither of us moves for a long time. I’m braced on my forearms trying not to crush her and she won’t let me roll off, arms locked around my neck, legs still around me, keep, and so I stay, both of us slick and wrecked and breathing in each other’s ears, her heartbeat coming down against my chest one floor at a time.
When I finally do move she makes a small outraged sound at the loss of me that I plan to remember on my deathbed.
I take care of her after. That’s not new—I’ve always been good after, it’s the one part of loving somebody my hands never needed translating for—but tonight I do the whole liturgy slow, on purpose, because it’s the first time in three months I’ve been allowed: the warm washcloth, her hum when I drag it up the inside of her thigh, the water glass she drains in one go because she always forgets to drink at parties, prop-wine or no prop-wine.
I find her lotion on the nightstand—the one that smells like almonds, the one I’ve bought her every Christmas since the first because I panic in stores—and I work it into her hands, finger by finger, both of us quiet, her eyes going heavy watching me do it.
“You’re tucking me in,” she mumbles, half accusation.
“I’m tucking you both in.” My hand spreads over her belly one more time, and her hand lands on top of mine and holds it there, and neither of us says anything else about it, because there’s nothing to say that our hands aren’t already saying better.
After, I can’t quit touching her.
Not even hungry touching—she’s half asleep on my chest, boneless, wrung out, hair everywhere, this whole small stretch of her tucked up against everything I am like she was built to fit there, and my hands just keep moving on their own, slow, taking inventory.
The dip of her spine. The freckles on her shoulder like flicked paint.
The little sounds she makes settling. Somewhere down low against my side, the small warm fact of her belly, and I spread my hand flat over it in the dark, careful as a man handling glass, and think: one-sixty-two.
Working away in there right now. Building itself in the dark, not wasting a minute, same as us.
“You’re doing the counting thing,” she mumbles into my chest, not even half awake.
“What counting thing?”
“Freckles. You count. Your finger taps.” She burrows deeper. “Been doing it three years, big guy. S’not a secret.”
Three years I thought that was mine—my own private inventory, conducted while she slept.
Turns out I’ve been watched the whole time by the subject herself, filed and permitted and never once teased about it till tonight, and there’s something about that, about all the quiet ledgers this woman keeps and never calls in, that puts my throat out of commission for a minute.
Reverent and rough. That’s what tonight was, both at once, and I didn’t know you could get both in the same hour—worshipping her with the same mouth that said filthy things into her ear, wringing her out and then holding her like church.
A man who almost lost the right to touch a woman learns something about touching her, I guess.
I don’t touch her the same anymore. Slower.
Like I’m not allowed to take it for granted, because I’m not.
And lying here, coming all the way down, one piece of tonight keeps surfacing that Josie didn’t even see.
Wyatt. He didn’t rush us with the rest of the crowd after she said it—he waited till the roar wore itself out and the hugging thinned, and then he came over slow and took my hand in that vise of his and held it one second longer than a handshake, and what he said, quiet, underneath all that noise, just for me, was: “That’s the whole job, son. Every day now.”
And I said, “Every day,” and I meant it like church, because it was one—him and me and a handshake over everything both of us know about Ford men, and the road I just turned off of.
Tomorrow I move home. Actually home—my side of the bed, my boots by the door, Tucker getting his living room back and pretending he won’t miss the company, which he will, he’s already talking about keeping the fold-out “ready” like a man leaving a porch light on.
And the day after that, and the day after that, and ten thousand days after that: the job.
Wyatt’s whole job, every day now. I know exactly what I signed up here, and the knowing feels like the opposite of weight.
First promise I ever made in my life where I can see all the way down it, and it’s just her, the whole way. Easiest hard thing a man ever signed.
Nobody spit on me. That’s the other part I can’t get over, lying here in the dark doing arithmetic on it.
I handed that room the worst of me at full volume and the room—held.
Not because what I did was okay. Nobody in that building thinks what I did was okay, and they shouldn’t, and that’s fine, that’s correct, I’ll be buying Tucker’s beer for a decade and Dot’s going to have one eyebrow at me till Christmas and I’ve earned every inch of all of it.
It held because I finally quit asking the story to be smaller than it was.
That’s all the room was ever waiting on.
“Tucker’s gonna need his fold-out back,” she murmurs into my chest, somewhere at the edge of sleep, and I feel the smile in it against my skin. “Poor thing. Two months of you making it up like a Marine.”
“He told you about that?”
“Dot told me. Tucker told Dot.” A yawn. “Whole town knows you make the bed, baby. Ruined your reputation.”
“Great. Fifteen years building a name.”
“Mm. Terrifying biker. Hospital corners.” And she’s asleep before the end of it, mid-tease, the sentence just dissolving into breath, her hand going slack over my heart—and that, her falling asleep on me mid-sentence, sure enough of the world again to not finish a thought, undoes something in me all over, quiet, one more bolt letting go that I didn’t know was still torqued.
The ceiling fan ticks on its bad bearing.
The Hendersons’ dog has finally shut up.
Her breathing’s gone long and even against my chest, and my own heart’s done slowing down, and the house is so quiet I can hear the fridge cycle on down the hall—and I lie there in the plain dark of an ordinary Saturday night with my whole life asleep on my chest, and nobody’s watching, and nothing’s on fire, and no crisis has got a gun to me, and there’s no room, no mic, no audience, no reason?—
“I love you.”
Out loud. Into the dark. Just because it’s sitting in my chest and I’m done making it live there quietly—three years of making her read it off my hands like everything’s a garage and love’s a repair ticket. Plain words, unprompted, free: “I love you, Jo.”
She goes still against me.
Total. Breath and everything, one long frozen second—and I feel her surface from half-sleep, feel it land, feel her checking it the way she checks everything now, and I don’t take it back or pad it or make it a joke, I just let it stand there in the room?—
—and then she laughs. Wet, cracked, disbelieving, her face burrowing into my chest, her shoulders going, and when she tips her head up I can see her eyes shining in the dark.
“Say it again,” she says.
“I love you.”
Easy. It comes out easy. That’s the thing I never knew, all those years guarding it like it’d cost me something going out the door—it was never actually hard.
It was never the saying. I was just a man who grew up down the hall from what happens when you quit, holding his breath his whole life over a word.
“Again,” she whispers, grinning now, greedy, tears and all.
“I love you. Get used to it. I got three years of back pay coming.”
And she climbs up my chest and kisses me, laughing and leaking at the same time, and the last thing I think before we stop talking again for a while is that a man could get rich saying it, that easy, that cheap, that late—like it was never actually hard at all.