Chapter 39 Levi
Dante didn’t say a word the entire drive back to the house this morning.
Neither did I. Nothing to say that wouldn’t have come out the wrong way.
And he drove me in the dark unshaved for once, the first shadow I’ve ever seen on his jaw.
Evidence of another bad night of me printed right there on his face, and he didn’t take time to fix it.
It looks good on him though. That’s the thing I had no business noticing on the ride and noticed anyway. The pressed man gone rough at the edges, and my hands wanting to know what that jaw feels like now. Even gutted, even sure I’ve lost him, the wanting doesn’t come with an off switch.
But he made the coffee, two of the little strong ones, same as that first week when I wouldn’t touch mine and he drank both. This time I drank mine. Gladly.
The house is the same as last night, in the bad hour before his headlights came down the side cut. Every blind and door dragged shut. I go around and open everything.
My phone’s on the island where I left it, still telling Freddie exactly where I’m standing. I left it here on purpose again, so the dot would sit still and nobody’d come looking.
I pick it up. Open the tracking app. My thumb’s over the button that kills it, and I can’t make it move.
My heart’s going like I’m about to walk onto a stage. This is the stupidest thing I could do, and there’s a price I can’t see yet but will. Freddie will know inside the hour. My mind is screaming the old way, don’t, don’t, he’ll…
I’m sick to death of this shit.
I delete the app.
It’s gone in a second. A little box asks me to confirm I’m sure. I say yes and his eyes aren’t there anymore. On Freddie’s phone a dot that’s held steady over this house for two weeks blinks out. He’ll see it fast, that’s the design. Let him. I cut the eye out and didn’t run.
And then the strangest thing. Nothing happens.
I don’t go loose. My body doesn’t know how, it was built not to, and I’ll still sleep in my clothes tonight with one ear up. But unwatched. For one morning, unwatched. I didn’t know how loud the watching was until it quit.
It doesn’t last.
I knew it wouldn’t.
Freddie doesn’t call. That’s how I know how bad I’ve rattled him. Freddie always calls first. He runs me by phone. There are tires on the white street before I’ve thought about breakfast, a car door slamming, fast footsteps and then he’s at the open door.
He got dressed in a hurry. First thing I notice, and it tells me plenty, because Freddie doesn’t do anything in a hurry. The collar’s wrong, his color’s off, he came straight here because the dot disappeared.
Far as he knows he’s about to find me face-down with two empties and the Bash on fire. He’s walked into that room before. He’s got a reason to be worried.
“What the hell did you do to your phone?” He’s scanning me while he says it, the old scan, eyes going to my hands, the counter, my pupils, hunting the one failure he knows how to find. “App’s down. You delete it? Levi. Look at me. Are you drinking?”
Here’s where my body wants to do what it’s done a thousand times.
Go small. Sorry, the app must’ve glitched, I’m not drinking, everything’s fine.
Hand him the calm he drove all this way for, so he’ll go and the floor stops tilting.
The pull to do it is enormous. He’s three feet off and every cell I’ve got is saying make it okay, make him okay, that’s how you survive this.
I don’t.
I don’t have a clue where I get the backbone. This time, I don’t cower. I stand there and I say the thing I’ve asked for a hundred times and been patted off of a hundred times.
“I want some cash.”
He’s already shaking his head, already reaching for the script, and there’s almost relief on him. This he knows how to deal with. He can handle me wanting cash in my pocket. “Levi, we don’t— you don’t need cash, the cards are—”
“Two thousand. In cash. In my pocket by lunch.”
I say it calmly. I don’t tell him what it’s for, because it’s not for anything.
It’s mine and I want it in my hand. I don’t threaten.
I don’t reach for a lawyer or a contract or any of the words you’re supposed to reach for, because the second I reach for one of those I’ve handed him something to fight.
I just give him a hint about what’s coming, and I don’t explain it.
I watch him reach for the next move and not find it.
“After everything I do for you,” he starts. “That’s not how this works. The money’s structured. There’s people, there’s a process.”
I don’t answer that.
“What happened to the app, Levi?”
“I deleted it.”
“You delete an app and come at me for cash—” He spreads his hands. “You know how that looks. You want me worried about you?”
That’s him groping at the threat I haven’t made, trying to get me to say it out loud so he can argue it down. I just look at him and don’t say it, because the app already said it.
Freddie, who’s never once not known where I am or what I’ll do next, now doesn’t know what to do.
He blinks.
I spot the exact second it happens. The little stall, the half-beat where the script runs dry and there’s nothing loaded behind it.
The guy who’s never caught out is, for one split-second, caught out and bad at it.
Freddie doesn’t know how this ends. Neither do I.
But I’m used to not knowing how things end.
He isn’t. Knowing what’s coming next is his life.
And I took it off him by wanting cash and refusing to say please.
It doesn’t make me brave. My hands are still shaking. But Freddie flinched. I didn’t know he could.
Then he does the thing that tells me how far off his own map he’s wandered.
He quits working me and starts working the room.
He looks past me at the open doors, the house, like the answer’s hidden in here somewhere.
In Freddie’s mind, I’m a product he made, and things he made don’t wake up demanding stuff out of the blue. It doesn’t fit.
“Who’ve you been talking to?” he asks. “Has someone been in your ear down here?”
I keep my mouth shut. I watch him take my silence and give the wrong idea a home behind his eyes. He starts looking, already, for a hand that was never there.
He came scared I’d found the bottom of a bottle. He’s going to leave with a worse fear.
Now there’s a cold drop in my stomach watching it settle, because I know whose face that wrong idea puts itself on the second he goes hunting, and it’s the last face that ought to wear it.
“We’ll talk more when you’ve slept,” he says, gathering himself back into his normal version, except we both saw what happened. “Big week. Press tomorrow. Pull yourself together.”
“I’ve slept plenty, Freddie. I’m good. Honest.”
And he goes, fast as he came. The tires go back up the white street, and I stand in the open kitchen and let out a breath.
The Martin’s under the bed where it stays.
I drag it out once I’m sure he’s gone. I sit on the floor with it across my knee.
My hands move as if I’ve never left it. I put my fingers on the neck and they won’t settle.
My voice comes up under it on its own, cracking in spots.
And it doesn’t gut me. This morning it opens me.
What comes up through my own hands isn’t the wound this time.
It’s me, Levi.
I play a long time starting with the napkin songs. A couple of half-verses that’ve been sitting at the back of my throat for weeks, waiting on me to be home enough to let them out.
Nobody’s recording it. Nobody’s fixing it.
The songs are unfinished and all mine, and I haven’t felt this much like a person in so long that I have to stop in the middle of one and sit there with my hand flat on the strings.
Not because the hands went dead this time.
Because my chest’s gone full, and it’s the good kind of full, the kind I’d forgotten.
The courier comes a little before noon.
I hear the car and my body goes stiff. Somebody’s here.
What did I do? My heart starts flying. I know what I did. Who am I kidding.
But it’s a kid in a polo shirt with a clipboard and a flat envelope. He needs a signature. I sign my real name, he gets back in the car and is gone.
It’s cash inside the envelope. Two thousand banded up, twenties and hundreds. No note.
This isn’t about the cash at all. It’s that Freddie folded.
Every dollar came down through a hand that could close, came as a favor, a permission. I learned to ask small and be grateful for what I was given.
This morning I didn’t ask, I demanded.
I sit back down on the floor, the cash in one hand and the guitar still warm across my knee, and I look at the two of them. The money I was never allowed and the song I couldn’t touch.
Both of them mine now.