Chapter 46 Dante
I’m awake at five-thirty. It’s already hot, the air thick even in here, and there’s a man asleep against my chest.
Except Levi isn’t asleep.
I know it immediately. A sleeping man is heavy and his breath goes where it wants.
His breath is being kept steady. His shoulders are stiff.
He has his back to me and his face to the window.
He is wide awake and working hard at pretending not to be.
From the tension in his back, he’s been at it a while.
He’s waiting on me to wake up. The easy version is to let him keep the cover. I shift, I yawn, I give him room to fake waking up, and we both skip whatever this is.
I don’t take the easy version. I don’t want him getting the wrong idea. Instead, I pull him back into me. My arm doesn’t go anywhere. I bring it tighter, get him in against my chest, close where I want him, and put my mouth to the back of his neck where it’s warm.
“Morning, cowboy. Can you stay for breakfast?”
His breathing stops all at once. I don’t know what button I hit. I asked him about making eggs. He’s gone rigid in my arm. I nuzzle him behind his ear, and feel the shiver that goes through him.
“Is that a yes?” I murmur into his ear. “Or do you need more persuasion?”
“Yeah.” It comes out rough. “Yeah. I can stay.”
“Are you hungry? I want to cook for you.”
“You bet. I’d like that.”
He reaches up tentatively and lightly touches my arm across his chest. He’s testing me to see if it’s still allowed this morning in the daylight.
“What I told you last night still stands,” I say. “You can touch me however you want here or in public. Understood?”
“Yeah.” His hand strokes my arm. “And you can do that too.”
“What?”
“Touch me.”
I chuckle against his shoulder. “Oh, I plan to. I’m a touchy-feely guy. You’re forewarned. Get used to it.”
I let go of him, get up and put on shorts.
“Anywhere you have to be?” I ask a couple of minutes later from the kitchen.
“No.” He calls out from the bedroom. “Nothing till the afternoon.”
I get the coffee going. The cafetera is where it lives, back left burner. Water in the bottom, the basket packed with Bustelo and tamped firm, the lid down, the flame caught under it. I stand there and wait for the hiss.
He comes out in jeans, shirtless, feet bare, and sits at the kitchen table.
I lose count on the coffee. Sleep-warm and rumpled, all that country muscle in the morning light, jeans riding low on his hips — and he’s mine to look at now.
So I take my time and I look. Then I make myself turn back to the stove before I burn my grandmother’s coffee over a man’s bare shoulders.
I pour two cups, small and dark, and set his in front of him.
He wraps both hands around it and drinks.
“Good Lord.” He stares deep into the cup. “What kind of coffee is this anyway?”
“Bustelo.”
“My heart’s going double time.” He pushes the cup back across the table. “Another please. With a little mixer in it this time.”
I scald the milk, pour the next shot into it, set the café con leche down, and pull the Cuban bread out of the freezer. He squints at it.
“Why are you using frozen bread?” he asks.
“It’s special Cuban bread.”
“It’s frozen solid.”
“I brought it back from Miami in a checked bag. Same thing I do every trip. There’s no version of it up here worth eating.”
“Are you telling me there’s nobody in the Panhandle that can bake you a loaf of bread?”
“Not good Cuban bread. At least, none that I’ve found yet.”
Levi comes and leans on the counter where he can watch me cook, coffee in hand, close enough that his shoulder brushes against mine when I reach for the pan.
He doesn’t move it away. Testing the new rule in daylight.
I bump his ribs with my elbow on purpose, and the last of the morning’s stiffness goes out of his back.
The bread goes into the pan. Split, buttered. Eggs after, fried hard in the oil till the edges go brown and lacy, the way my father takes them.
“Who taught you how to cook like this?”
“My mother while my father supervised.”
“Sounds serious,” he says.
“Trust me, it was very serious.”
He laughs. Somewhere between the bread and the eggs he starts humming. Low, under his breath, notes going nowhere in particular. I like listening to him, and I cook the eggs slower than I need to, to make the morning last as long as I can.
He takes his plate to the table and eats fast.
“Would you like more?” I ask, glad to see him eating. “It’ll only take me a minute to put more on.”
“Do you mind?” he asks. “This is really good.”
“I don’t mind,” I tell him. It’s true. Not only do I not mind, I’m enjoying cooking for him. I like him here at my kitchen table, watching me cook, eating my food. Shirtless and barefoot.
I give him more. Eggs, bread. Outside the heat is coming up fast. In here, we’re two men at a table, having a leisurely breakfast.
“You’re a good cook,” he says. “Does your offer still stand to make that dish for me you cooked for your family in Miami?”
I reach over and ruffle the thick hair at the back of his neck. “Anytime. How long will you be in town?”
“At least till the Bash’s over.” He mops up the last of the yolk with a corner of bread. “I headline the next two Saturday nights.”
“I know,” I say. “I was at the first one.”
The bread stops halfway to his mouth. “You were not.”
“Yes, I was. Benji found a fringe jacket in his closet and wore it. He dressed me out of the back of my own closet and told me we needed to blend.”
He puts the bread down, and I watch him arrive at what is apparently the most urgent question. “What did you wear?”
“That’s what you want to know? What I wore?”
“That’s the first thing I want to know. Answer it.”
“Jeans and a white shirt. Benji dug the jeans out of—”
“The jeans. The broken-in ones. One pair in the closet of linen.”
“How do you know what’s in the bottom of my closet?”
“I was a prisoner in this apartment. I inventoried everything you own. Including your spices.” There’s not one ounce of shame anywhere on him.
Then he tips his head back. “I stood in that closet holding those jeans, trying to picture you off-duty in them, and decided it wasn’t good for me to dwell on it.
And the one night you put them on, you’re standing in a dark field behind thousands of people while I sing at the lights.
” He levels a look at me across the eggs. “Will you wear them again? For me?”
“That depends.” I take my time with it. “How important is it to you?”
“Very.”
“Then I will. If you make it worth my while.”
“How do I do that?”
“For starters, you take them off me afterwards. You can figure out the rest on your own.”
The flush starts at his collarbone and climbs his neck, and he drops his eyes to his plate, fighting a grin he can’t hold down and losing. He picks up the café con leche just to have somewhere to hide.
I reach over and put my hand on his arm. “You okay with me flirting with you?” I ask, serious.
He sets the cup down and takes a while with it, thumb going around the rim.
“People have flirted at Lee my whole life,” he says. “Fields of them. Screaming it.” He looks up, and the flush is still there, but he holds my eyes. “Nobody’s ever flirted with me. Over eggs. At a table. I don’t know how to act or where to put my hands.”
I lean closer and kiss him below his ear. “Here’s a tip. You can put your hands anywhere you want.”
“Damn, Dante. You’re killing me here.”
He ducks his head and the grin finally gets loose.
“Why’d you go, though? To my concert?” It comes out quieter, and I let him change the subject. “You weren’t speaking to me.”
“To prove to myself I could stand in a field with your name all over it and feel nothing.” I drink my coffee. “You want to know how well that went?”
“No.” His eyes come up. “Yes. Maybe. Tell me what you thought.”
He performs for a living and he’s bracing like this is a review that can hurt him. I give him the truth.
“You were flawless. I mean that. Every note dead center, every mark hit, thousands of people getting exactly what they drove hours for. You’re an amazing performer. I had no idea, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“But…”
“I had a hard night there, and I’m not going to lie to you about it.
The lights came up, and a man with your face walked out and took that stage like he owned the ground it stood on.
Opened his arms to a screaming field like it was nothing.
My heart almost stopped when you smiled and they threw you up on the big screens.
Benji turned to me and yelled, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ and I told him I didn’t know.
I felt like you had been stolen from me. ”
“Dante—”
“I stood there the entire show trying to make the two of you the same person, and I couldn’t do it.
The woman next to me had your face on her shirt and cried through every song, screaming a name that isn’t yours.
Everyone there got exactly the man they came for.
Except me. I was there for you, the Levi I know. ”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say. I should’ve told you.”
“Even if you had, it wouldn’t have prepared me for that.
For what it’s worth, Benji had the night of his life,” I say, to let him off the hook.
“Lost both heels by the first encore and made me carry him out of the field on my back. He knows all your choruses now. Sings them wrong with total commitment. He’s a new fan. ”
The laugh comes up out of him loud and unguarded, and for a second the kitchen holds the morning I’m trying to make last.
“Where are you headed next?” I ask.
“Don’t know yet. I find out when it all gets set.”
“Set by who?”
He shrugs. “The schedule. I stopped trying to plan ahead for anything a long time ago. I go where they tell me and never think about it.”
Not a who. A what. The schedule decides and he gets told. The light of the morning drains off him when he says it, and I watch it go. He doesn’t own a single hour of his own day. Someone else holds all of it.
His phone goes off on the table.
He glances at the screen. Between one ring and the next he disappears somewhere I can’t follow. Everything I watched in him come unwound all morning pulling tight again. He looks at it a second too long. Then he stands, turns half away from me, and answers.
“Yeah.”
I only hear one side of the conversation. It’s enough.
He listens a long time. “Wait. Hang on. It’s where?” A long pause. “TMZ. How bad?” He listens longer. “What time?” He stares at the floor. “Where am I doing them?”
Them, he said. More than one of whatever he’s doing.
“I know. I know, Freddie,” he says, all fight gone out of him.
“I’ll be there.” Then the topic must change, and he shuts down in a different way.
“What about him? Same guy from the house. That’s it.
” Another pause, longer. He glances over at me with pain in his eyes.
“There’s nothing to it. No, I’m telling you it’s nothing. ”
He closes his eyes and drops his head, holding the phone in his hand.
And there’s the same position in him I’ve seen before. Once. Freddie standing over him, screaming into the top of his bowed head, Levi taking it, before I crossed the room and put the man into the wall.
The same posture. In at the shoulders, down at the neck, a grown man shrinking back to the size these people keep him at.
I don’t move while I work out what the call is about. It’s not difficult. The video is out. What Levi did at the Roadhouse, because he couldn’t stand to watch a man put his hand on me, is on a screen now with his name under it.
He puts the phone down. He’s already half gone.
“Your face is in the video,” he says. “Freddie recognized you. The video shows me clearly hauling that guy up, and you’re in the back of it pulling me off him.
Your name’s already on a jail slip next to mine.
Now your face is in a story with mine.” He shakes his head slowly. “I walked my mess straight to you.”
“Levi, stop.”
“Dante—”
“That is not yours to carry. Whatever happens, I’ll deal with it. What happens next?”
“Freddie has interviews with the press already set up for this afternoon.” He sighs. “I knew this wouldn’t last long. I need to go. I’m sorry. Thank you…for everything.”
I drive him back to the beach house without argument. The leisurely morning I’d hoped we would have is gone. The closer we get to the house, the more of him fades away. By the time the house is in sight, he’s disappeared back behind the public face.
He was mine for one night and a morning.
Now, the world is taking him back.
I pull up to the house. His hand is on the door before I’ve stopped the car.
“Levi. Look at me.” He stops and turns with his hand on the latch. “This isn’t the last morning for us.”
I get one second of his eyes.
Then the face closes over them, and he’s out.