Chapter 52 Dante
At noon Benji starts sending texts every fifteen minutes. I’ve answered one.
The footage started midmorning and hasn’t let up. Lee Streeter at Crab Island, beer up, a blonde folded under his arm, grinning at a thousand phones. It’s on every feed.
I watched it twice. Plenty enough time to understand the setup. The girl’s a plant. The boat’s staged, down to the beer in his hand. Freddie pouring concrete over a question no one has asked yet.
She’s nothing. Jealousy isn’t a problem because I know it isn’t real. What’s got my gut tied up is the terms I’ve temporarily accepted. Being in this means I watch the lie get built in real time, all day, on every screen, with no move I’m allowed to make.
Benji’s texts come in a stack.
Benji: Are you okay?
Benji: Talk to me.
Benji: Answer me or I am driving to your apartment.
Benji: Come to the Roadhouse. Get out of your own head!
Benji: I’m coming to you. I’m bringing snacks. And alcohol. I will not leave. These are all promises!
I head to the Roadhouse before Benji shows up at my place with Sheila’s margarita machine, tequila, and salt. I wouldn’t put it past him.
The place is still riding the video. The lot is full of license plates from four states, the deck packed, Tex working the smoker.
Benji’s got a loaded tray on one arm and a bar towel over his shoulder, running food to the rail because the place is slammed and Benji does not spectate.
He would rather be working for free than sitting there doing nothing.
He clocks me across the room and points his chin at the corner booth, where his laptop and a binder are holding the table, two iced teas already sweating.
“You look like hell,” he says, landing across from me two tables of empties later. “We do the house first, because I respect the work. Then we do you.”
He spins the laptop around. He’s marked the floor plan in three colors.
“Tomorrow, eight a.m., while your buyer’s still asleep in Atlanta.
Cleaners first, then me. By noon, everything Levi’s done to that house is gone.
The terrace dressed like the sunset’s a permanent fixture.
My orchid woman in Destin is holding fourteen phalaenopsis for pickup at nine, which cost me two favors.
Do not ask the dollar figure. It would upset you and you’re fragile today.
” He taps the great room. “The buyer is a freshly single rich woman who wants to walk into a finished life and never think about a contractor again. Saturday, she stands at that glass with a glass of champagne in her hand, and she’s already telling her sister she bought it. ”
Watching him work is the first solid ground I’ve stood on all day. Sheila yells his name. He goes, comes back after clearing two tables, not one hair out of place.
We get through it fast, in the gaps between his runs. Then he returns, shuts the laptop, and sits all the way down for the first time since I walked in. Folds his hands on top of it, looks at me.
“Now let’s talk about you,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“You watched a man you’ve fallen for put his arm around a swimsuit model on a loop for nine hours, and you texted me back like a hostage blinking in code.
” He doesn’t raise his voice. “Do not ‘I’m fine’ me, Dante.
I know you. One time, I told you my ribs were fine while you were folding me into a rental car, and you didn’t buy it from me either.
You know exactly how much of your ‘fine’ I’m buying right now. ”
“Benji—”
“I’m not going to tell you to walk away.
I would sooner die. I’d given up on you ever falling for someone.
Then a closeted disaster in a cowboy hat trashes a listing, and you go under in the deep end.
I’m watching you hurt over a person for the first time in my life.
I can’t tell you how strange it is to be this happy and this terrified in the same body. ”
He leans in. “And do not give me the Mickey thing. Oh, Benji survived, so you’ll survive too.
No. You were there for mine, so I’m not retelling it.
Half that story is Mickey’s, and it stays ours.
All you need is the part you watched. I once hurt over that man so bad somebody had to scrape me off a floor.
And mine was the small, kind version. It still took me apart and drove me to acts of spite involving swimwear.
” He spreads his hands. “Yours is the same wound at a much bigger size. And no one’s coming to scrape you off your floor, because you’re the one and only Dante. ” He sits back. “Who’s yours?”
“You’re my Benji,” I say. “It’s the same.”
He blinks up at the ceiling, fast. “Damn it, Dante. You’re messing up my eyeliner.”
“I watched the video,” I tell him. “Twice was plenty. The girl’s a plant. I don’t know what the future is with him. He might never get to say my name out loud, anywhere, ever.” I make myself finish it. “And I’m in the middle of it anyway. I don’t know how this can be resolved.”
Benji reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine.
“Okay,” he says. “Then that’s where we are.
” He squeezes once. “I’m not going to fix it, because I can’t.
I didn’t want you sitting alone in a parking lot pretending you were working.
The only thing worse than feeling hurt is feeling it by yourself.
Someone wise and very handsome once flew up with my best clothes and taught me that. ” He lets go of my hand.
My phone buzzes on the table. Benji’s eyes drop to it, then come back to me. “Is that him?”
I turn it over. Benji leans over to read it too.
Levi: Can’t stand this. Same lot as last time. Full dark. I’ll be waiting. Take me to your place. Let me have one night of taking care of you for a change. You’ve got one job tonight. Driving. I’ve got the rest.
Every meetup, I planned it. The burner, the dark lot, the cover, the plan. Tonight he’s running my own playbook back at me, down to my own words at the end of it. The man I’ve hauled around reached down and picked me up. My face must show it.
“Go, get out of here,” Benji says. “I’ll be at the house with orchids early tomorrow. Call if you need me before then.” He’s already up.
I pocket my phone and start to head out.
“Dante.” I look back at him. “He’s scared, he’s famous, he’s a thousand kinds of complicated. And tonight he wants to take care of you. Let him.” He flaps a hand at me. “Now go, before I cry in a biker bar.”
By the time I make it to the apartment, it’s already dusk.
I shower and change quickly, then drive to him.
He’s in the lot before me, deep in the shadow where I parked the first time, and he’s in the seat before I’ve fully stopped.
Neither of us says much on the drive. At my door he takes the keys out of my hand and lets us in himself, like that’s his job tonight too.
Inside, under the one lamp, there’s no blonde, no beer held up for a lens, no grin aimed at anyone else. Just Levi, boots pulled off, barefoot on my floor inside of two minutes, looking at me.
Him being barefoot does something to me that nine hours of beach footage couldn’t. The staged version gets the cameras. I get this — bare feet on my carpet, hair messy, the day scrubbed off him — the version no lens will ever own.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“You watched it. I’m sorry. I—”
“I don’t want the sorry.” I grab his belt loops with both hands and tug him to me. “I saw it. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t get to me. I’m sorry this is your life.”
“It’s my fault though.”
He kisses me first. That’s new. He takes my face in both hands, same as I’ve taken his before, walks me back into the edge of the counter, kisses me slowly. I let him take charge.
He pulls back. “I don’t want you to be mad at me,” he murmurs against my mouth. “I didn’t want to do all that today. Please don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad at you, Levi.”
The hold I’ve kept clamped down since noon comes loose. I wrap my hands in his hair and kiss him with nothing held back. Then we’re moving down the hall.
In the bedroom he takes the rest of my clothes off.
The buttons his fingers started in the hall.
My belt. Everything after. He does it carefully, and I stand there and let him, which is not something I ever do.
I’m always the one in control but this seems to be important to him.
Tonight I keep my hands at my sides and let him take his time.
He walks me to the bed. I reach for him on instinct, to set the pace, and he closes his hand over both of mine.
“Let me this time, Dante,” he says. “Lie down.”
I do it, curious to see where he’s going with this.
His palm settles flat between my shoulder blades. He presses, not hard, turning me.
“On your front,” he says. “On your stomach. I’ll take care of the rest.”
I put my face down, let my hands fall open on the sheet, and hold still, turned away from him.
I hear him take off his clothes, then his mouth comes down on the back of my shoulder.
He kisses across the top of it, then the other side.
His hands spread over my back and travel down and come up again.
He isn’t building toward anything. He’s touching me because he can now, his mouth moving down my spine.
“You want to know what I think about all the time,” he says against my skin.
“First day I saw you.” His mouth moves lower between the words.
“You in fancy clothes, not a hair wrong, smelling good, telling me I had no business in that house. I opened my eyes, hungover as hell, and I thought you were the best-looking man I’d ever set eyes on.
I’ve stood in rooms full of famous, beautiful people many times and not one of them ever knocked the wind out of me like you did that day.
And every day since. I couldn’t hold your eyes more than a second.
I forced myself to stare out the car window so you wouldn’t suspect what I was thinking and feeling. ”
His hands run down my sides. He keeps on.