Chapter 43 Levi
He came. I knew he might. It’s his place, his people, and I’ve had him in the glass over the bottles since before Tex ever sat down — the near end of the bar, the stool beside Little Blondie, a bourbon in front of him.
And then his eyes come up and find mine.
For several long seconds across a packed room, in a strip of gray glass over the bottles, he’s looking right at me and I’m looking right at him and neither of us moves. It’s not a small look. It’s a look that gets in past everything and sets up house in your lungs.
I forget everything except his eyes in the glass holding mine.
And then he looks away.
Drops his eyes to his bourbon. Doesn’t nod. Doesn’t get up and come over. Looks right at me, and turns away on purpose.
The bar family let me back in and the one I came for looked me dead in the eye in the mirror and went back to his drink.
That’s worse than if he’d never looked at all.
The family forgave me. He’s the one who won’t.
Alright, then. I get the family back and not the man. I’ll take the deal. It’s more than I came in with and I’m grateful for it.
In the mirror I catch Little Blondie sliding off his stool, handing Mickey the binder, looking my way.
Then a guy sits down next to Dante.
I can’t hear what he says. That’s the problem with the mirror. It hands me the picture and keeps the sound, so all I’ve got is bodies, and I’ve made a study of this particular one. I know Dante’s tells better than I know my own right now.
Guy leans in. Says something. Dante sets his jaw the way that means no thank you and goes back to his drink.
Guy puts a hand on his arm. And Dante shifts his weight, half an inch, away.
The brush-off I’ve felt myself, the polite wall going up.
The guy scoots his stool in closer and leans to murmur low against the side of Dante’s face, and Dante leans back out of it, and the guy’s fucking hand is still on his arm.
Here’s what I can’t get a grip on, sitting in the corner I picked for its back wall, in a bandana, having needed a damn disguise just to walk in the door.
That guy just walked up to Dante. He walked up to a man he wanted, in a room full of people, and sat down close, and put a hand on him. Easy, like it costs nothing, like it’s simply allowed.
No survey of the exits. No disguise. No twenty-five years of learning to want with the sound turned off.
He saw a man he wanted and he reached, in the open, in the light, and the worst that can happen to him is a no. That’s his risk. A no. He doesn’t even know there’s another kind of price on it. He never will.
And I’m off hiding in a corner I picked for its back wall, wanting the same man so bad it’s been sitting on my chest all night like a… and I have never once in my life been allowed to…
The guy touches him a third time, puts his hand on Dante’s shoulder. And it’s not a hit-on anymore, it’s the not-taking-no, the hand coming back to touch Dante after two hints.
Dante’s entire body has gone rigid in the glass, him done being patient.
I’m watching a stranger refuse to hear no off the only person I…
Fuck, no.
I’m up.
One second, I’m on the stool and the next I’m out of it and moving, and some animal that’s been holding still for twenty-five years has stood up out of its own held breath and started across the room.
And I know, even as I’m moving, that I’m about to do the unforgivable, in the one sacred place. I’m about to torch the belonging I walked in and won back. This is Tex’s bar and these are Dante’s people and there’s a phone in every pocket in the room.
I know all of it.
And it doesn’t slow me one step. Even the family I just got back isn’t heavy enough to keep me in the seat watching that man touch Dante.
Nothing is.
My hand comes up on the way across the room and drags the sunglasses back down over my eyes. I catch it even as I do it. The disguise reflex firing on pure muscle memory at the exact second I’m about to do the least anonymous thing a hiding man can do. I leave them on and keep moving.
I come up on the guy’s other side and I hear myself say it, in a voice I didn’t know I still owned, “He said he wasn’t interested.”
I didn’t hear a word of what Dante said. Not one. He might have said anything. But his body said it and that’s enough for me.
The guy turns on the stool and looks up at me. “What the fuck’s it to you, buddy?”
I’ve got his collar in my fist and I’ve pulled him up off the stool before he’s done asking. I’ve done this before. That’s the joke of it, the piece nobody will ever get right. There’s a list of nights like this one.
Lee Streeter, troubled again. Lee Streeter, another scene.
Every one of those other nights was a man drowning, going under, taking a swing on the way down.
This is the first time in my life I’ve come up out of the water swinging toward somebody. Sober. Clear-eyed. My heart in my fist where the despair used to be.
The first fight I’ve ever been in that meant a goddamn thing.
I’ve got him up on his toes and my arm’s already cocking back when Dante’s between us.
He moves fast. He’s got my arm, and he’s in the space between me and the guy, and he’s broken the grip before my fist’s gone anywhere.
His shoulder turned into my chest, his hand flat and hard on my sternum, putting a room of distance back between me and the guy I had by the throat.
He doesn’t say anything. My fist comes down.
The guy slides back into his stool, swearing, fixing his collar.
The room’s turned toward us. In a packed bar you don’t have to land the punch. The grab’s the show. Faces have come around, and the noise has dropped like it drops when people smell a fight.
Off to my left a phone’s already up, a little black rectangle held high and steady, pointed dead at me. And the guy I grabbed is looking at my face now, really looking. The sunglasses, the bandana, the jaw. And I watch it happen behind his eyes. The click, the wait, the hold on, is that…
And that’s when it hits me. When I was crossing the room and taking his collar there was no fear in me anywhere.
The eruption ate it clean. Now that it’s done, now there’s a phone up and a man assembling my face out loud, the terror comes in all at once.
A wall of cold water closing over my head a full beat after I’ve already gone under.
Twenty-five years, fear’s been the first man through the door. Tonight it showed up afterwards, and there’s nothing for it to stop.
Fuck it. Let them have the face.
It’s mine.
Then Dante’s hand closes around my arm above the elbow, hard, and I’m being walked out.
Not gently, either. He’s got me by the arm and he’s moving me through the room toward the door, his body angled to put himself between me and the phones.
The family goes by in a blur. Sheila watching, Little Blondie moving up behind us, Tex coming out from behind the bar.
I try to talk. I get half of his name out. And he says, not looking at me, “Don’t. Not a word. Walk.” And it’s so cold and final that I shut my damn mouth and I walk.
The night air hits. He shoves me in his car, slams the door. We’re moving before I’ve got the seatbelt on, out of the lot and onto the highway, and he doesn’t say one single word.
I sit in the dark of his car and count what my actions tonight cost me.
The corner stool. The mahi tacos I didn’t order. Two Darlenes and a goat story. Tex telling me the name was never the thing. I had a family, and then I hauled a man off a stool in the middle of it, in Tex’s bar, in front of every phone in the room. Maybe that’s gone now. It hurts and I let it.
And then there’s the old script to say, right on time, warming up in my mouth.
Sorry. Don’t know what came over me. It’ll never happen again.
The full performance, the one I’ve given more times than I can count, where I hand everybody what they want to hear and go small until the floor quits tilting. I can feel my body reaching for it, same as it reached for it in my kitchen this morning with Freddie three feet off.
I don’t say it.
Because it’d be a lie. It would happen again. If I walked back in that bar right now and that guy’s hand went back on Dante’s arm, I’d cross the room again, and I wouldn’t walk one step slower.
Whatever tonight costs, the crossing isn’t the part I’d take back. First time I’ve done anything in the open in my life, and I’m not handing it to anybody as a mistake.
I sit with my face still hot and I grieve the loss without apologizing for it. The family, maybe. The coast, maybe. The short life I’d started to imagine down here.
Dante, probably.
Because he’s the one driving me away from it in a silence I can’t get a finger under.
Won’t look at me. Won’t let me talk. I made his careful life louder tonight, the one thing he asked me not to do, and a man like Dante doesn’t yell about that.
He just drives you home and then disappears in the rearview of your life.
I know how this goes. I don’t beg him out of it. I want to. I keep my mouth shut and let him be whatever he’s being, because he’s earned the right. Over and over.
And then I notice the road. This isn’t the way back. We’re not pointed at the beach house. We came off the highway too early, we’re going inland. I know these turns now, and they don’t end at the beach house. They end at his apartment.
And I can’t make it mean anything. Everything I’ve concluded says he’s done with me, dismissing me, hauling the trouble out of his life. And you don’t take a man you’re done with home to your apartment.
I sit there with my heart racing, watching his hands on the wheel. And I’m too wrung out and too scared of the answer to ask.
He pulls in and kills the engine. He gets out, and I get out behind him because I don’t know what else to do. I follow him up, and he unlocks the door and holds it. I go in past him into the apartment that smells like him, and the door shuts behind us.
Dante goes straight to the balcony door and opens it. Then he turns around and looks at me directly for the first time all night.
“What the hell was that about?”