Chapter 11 Levi #3
I think about lying and don’t. “Because it’s tracked.”
He takes a deep breath. I can see the questions stacking up in his head. Who? Why? And him fighting against asking the questions because asking would make the problem his. He loses the fight anyway.
“Who is tracking your phone?”
“Somebody who thinks they own me.”
It comes out more truthful than I mean it to. It’s too late and I’m too far past sober to dress it up. “Can we go to your apartment?” I didn’t mean to ask. The words just blurted out in a panic.
His hand stills on the gearshift. “My apartment? Not the house?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to come to my apartment in the middle of the night? With me in it?”
“I know it’s a lot to ask. I don’t want to go back to that house tonight. I hate that fucking house.”
“Why do you hate the house?”
“It’s freezing cold, I’m alone, and the furniture is uncomfortable.”
“The furniture’s Italian. It photographs better than it sits.”
He turns his body to look at me, while I stare at the patrol cars lined up in front of the building.
“Do you need to be back tomorrow by a certain time?” he asks.
“By ten.”
“What happens at ten?”
“There’s a check-in. By phone.”
He puts the car in gear. Twenty minutes of silence to his apartment and neither of us fills them. Strip malls go by dark, gas stations open and empty. This time of night the road’s all ours.
The silence needs words thrown into it, so I throw. “Bet this isn’t how you pictured your night. Two in the morning, picking up a man at the jail whose last name you don’t even have.”
Nothing from him. Both hands at ten and two, eyes on the road.
“You had to get dressed for it, too,” I say. “Shorts, the whole production. I feel looked after.”
That’s usually where he throws something back, dry and a little sarcastic, and we’re off to the races. Not tonight. The line drops out of the air between us and dies on the floor mat.
I try once more. “For the record, you’re a better sight at two a.m. than the other guys in there.”
He doesn’t even look over.
It occurs to me slowly and painfully. Every time I’ve jabbed at him this week, he’s jabbed back, and somewhere along the way I quit noticing he was choosing to. I started taking it for granted like it was just there. Like it was mine.
It was never mine.
He’s been handing it to me, over and over, and I took every piece like it came free and like there’d always be more. Tonight there’s not. And until right now I didn’t know I’d been leaning on something that could just dead stop.
We go up the stairs. He unlocks the door and I’m through it and into the second bedroom before he’s got the key back out, pushing the door to the wall.
“The front door stays open,” I call out to him.
He’s got his hand on the deadbolt. He flips it locked, then turns to me. “The front door stays closed. This isn’t a gated community. It’s a parking lot, and I’m from Miami. There’s no way I can go to bed and close my eyes with the front door open. It’s not safe, Levi.”
My chest is pulling tighter. The deadbolt’s thrown and it’s standing between me and getting out.
He watches me struggle with it. “I’ll leave the balcony door open,” he says, walking toward it. He pulls the sliding glass back and the screen with it. He doesn’t ask why I need a way out of a second-floor room.
He left it open for me and that’s enough.
After running a glass of water at the tap, he sets it on the counter where I’ll see it. “If you throw up in my place, you’re the one cleaning it,” he warns.
I nod at him. “Fair enough.”
“Water first. All of it. You’ll thank me at ten.”
“You keep track of my schedule now?”
“You gave it to me.”
I drink the water, head for the second bedroom and stop in the hall. “Leave your door open too.”
I know I’m asking for a lot. He got up in the middle of the night and drove to a county jail for somebody who’s cost him a week of his life and a possible big house sale, and now I’m telling him how to sleep in his own damn apartment.
His face doesn’t give anything away. He just shakes his head, walks to his room, and leaves the door open.
I lie down in the second bedroom, in the gap between the sign boxes and the wall. From the floor I can see down the hall, past his open door, clear to the balcony and the night coming through it.
A few minutes later, there are sneakers in the doorway. I don’t look up. They stand a few seconds, go down the hall and come back, and a pillow drops onto the carpet by my head. Then a blanket, folded into a perfect square, set down by my feet too.
His steps go back to his room and his shoes hit the floor when he kicks them off. The bed creaks under his weight.
I shake the blanket out over my shoulders and pull the pillow under my head. The pillow smells like him. Jesus Christ. He gave me his own pillow off his bed. Come morning, when it’s time for me to leave, I’ll want to take it with me. I won’t. I know that already, lying here with it under my head.
Down the hall his breathing goes slow and even. There’s another person in the dark with me.
I can’t remember the last time I had that.