Chapter 62 Dante
Levi gets into the white SUV and pulls the door shut on the noise, the bar, all of Lee Streeter in one motion. The second the interior light dies he isn’t performing anymore. He’s just my Levi, grinning at me in the dark.
“Well, hello,” he says. “I was told there’d be a rude stranger out here waiting for me.”
“He left.” I back out of Tex’s gravel lot. “Sent me instead. I’m the polite one.”
“Shame. I met the rude one earlier tonight.” He drops his head against the rest and looks at me sideways, loose and happy. “In an elevator. Rudest thing that’s ever been done to me in my life. I almost didn’t survive it.”
“You should report him to management.”
“I’m drafting the letter.” He holds up a hand and starts counting off fingers.
“He also made me a lot of promises and I’ve been keeping up.
The ear. Delivered. Man whispered my own name into it and I felt it in my back teeth.
Filthy. Delivered, Lord, delivered, on the floor of an elevator, and then he set my hat back on my head like he was tucking in a child and told me nice meeting you.
” He folds down the last finger and looks at it.
“The parking lot remains outstanding. I checked the parking lot on my way to this vehicle. Nothing there except empty gravel.”
“We’re past the parking lot.” I take the turn toward the highway. “We’re going somewhere with a door that locks.”
“Listen to you. Talking romance now.” Levi’s hand has found my thigh, his thumb moving back and forth.
His hand keeps moving, farther up my thigh, and it takes an embarrassing amount of my attention to hold the speed limit. I drive a little faster than I should.
When we’re inside, before anything else, I cross the carpet and pull the sliding glass door open to the dark. It’s habit now. The first time he stayed, I did it without understanding it. Now I understand it, and I do it quicker.
When I turn around, he’s watching me with a look that isn’t playful anymore.
“Nobody ever did that before you,” he says. “Not once in my life. Just left it open.” Then he crosses the carpet and kisses me.
We don’t make it graceful. He’s half-laughing against my mouth, walking me backward down my own hall, and when I reach for his shirt, he catches both my wrists.
“Uh-uh. Payback time.” He hooks a thumb toward the bathroom. “You’ve been standing in a smokehouse and I taste like a sour key lime pie. Come on. We do this clean.”
“We?”
“Yeah, both of us at the same time to save water and time. It’ll be tight but we’ll fit.”
The tub was built for one person with modest ambitions. We fit anyway, chest to chest under the spray, too close to do anything but touch each other. When I reach for the soap he takes it out of my hand.
“No. That’s the whole point.” He turns me by the shoulders, the way I’m always turning him, and starts on my back.
“Every single time, it’s been your hands.
Tonight it’s mine. Stand there and let a man work.
When I think about the times I was dying to get my hands on you, and now we’re both buck naked in the shower and I’ve got soap in my hand. ”
He’s grinning and washing me playfully. Shoulders. Back. Down each arm to the hand, one finger at a time. The smells of the bar slide off me and go down the drain.
“Feel better?” he asks.
Then the washing turns into touching, and the touching turns into his mouth at my neck, my chest, the water running between us. And then he goes down onto his knees in the spray, a big man folded into that little tub like he’s practiced, and looks up at me with those green eyes.
“Levi—”
“Hush, I’m paying the man of his word what he’s owed.”
Then his mouth is on my cock, and whatever smart remark I had lined up goes straight down the drain with the soap. He takes me deep on the first pass, no teasing, just wet heat and pressure, the flat of his tongue working the underside while one hand wraps the base and strokes in time.
Water runs over his shoulders, down the curve of his back.
I brace a hand on the tile and the other in his wet hair, watching him suck me like he’s been waiting all night for it.
He hollows his cheeks, pulls back slow, then sinks again, deeper, the tight squeeze of his throat making my knees threaten to fold.
When I try to warn him off, he digs his fingers into my hip and takes me deeper. I come with my hand fisted in his wet hair, pulsing hard down his throat.
The moment I have my breath back I haul him up off his knees, turn him under the spray, and soap my hands.
I run them down his back, over the curve of his ass, then between his cheeks, rinsing every trace of the night away.
My fingers slide slick, cleaning him while the water pounds our shoulders.
Then I drop back to my knees right there in the cramped tub, spread him open with both hands, and put my mouth between his cheeks.
“What are you doing?” he yelps. “Fuck…”
My tongue is hot and focused, rimming him while the water streams down his spine. One soapy hand wraps around his cock and starts stroking with every long, wet drag of my tongue.
No grace to it — just the wet slap of skin, the harsh sound of my breathing against him, his own broken noises bouncing off the tile.
I open him up with my mouth and work him with my fist until he’s shaking, half-bent over the shower wall, coming in messy pulses across the porcelain while I keep licking him through it.
“Goddamn, Dante. You’re killing me!”
We stay under the spray until it starts going cool. Afterwards, I dry us both off. Then we end up in bed, his head on my chest.
This is when I ask him what’s been on my mind. The dark is the only place he tells the truth.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you want, Levi?” His breathing changes. He doesn’t follow yet. “Out of all of it. The rest of your life. If it could run any way you wanted it to, what does it look like? What makes you happy?”
His fingers move on my chest, tracing nothing.
“Nobody’s ever asked me that,” he says finally. “Freddie asks what I want and means do I want the chicken or the fish so he can send somebody for it.” He lets out a long breath. “A normal life. That’s all I want. I hear how that sounds when I have money and fame. I sound ungrateful and spoiled.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I’d hand it all back tomorrow. The money.
The name. The whole damn circus. It never once made me happy.
I kept waiting for it to, like it was coming in the next shipment, and it just never shows up.
” His thumb stills. “I want to run my own life. For starters. I want to decide where I can go, who I’m with, what I do on a Tuesday, instead of opening a calendar a stranger filled in with my name already on it. ”
I don’t say anything. I want all of it for him too.
“I want to be able to be with who I want and have it not be this dirty little secret I’ve got to bury in the dark.
Hold somebody’s hand in a restaurant with the lights on and not feel my chest seize up.
” He blows out a breath. “I want a house I’m actually comfortable in.
You know what else I figured out I want?
A kitchen with nobody in it. I’ve got staff at my house.
People I never hired, all through my house, doing everything, watching me eat.
And I can’t relax in one single room of it, because every room’s got a person in it being paid to be there. To spy on me.”
“What else?”
“I want to walk into a casual place like Tex’s, order a plate of ribs, a cold beer, have it be no kind of event.
Nobody filming it. Nobody wanting a piece off me.
No autographs. Just a guy. Eating ribs.” It comes quieter.
“Peace, I guess, if you boil it down. I just want some peace. This life is all I’ve known since I was a kid. I’m tired.”
I lie there in the dark. Every word he says makes me want to find a way to offer it. A kitchen with nobody in it but him. I’ve got one of those down the hall. I could hand it to him tonight. I don’t say that. I can’t care for him by handing over a life with my name on the deed.
“Can I ask you one more?”
“Yeah. You can ask me anything.”
“The drinking. The weed. The night I came and got you out of the jail.” He goes tense against my chest. “Was that you trying to get to the peace? Because if it was, I want to understand it.”
The quiet stretches out so long I think he’s not going to answer.
“I’m not a drunk. Or an alcoholic. Or a pothead. I know what it all looked like. The jail, all of it from the first day we met. But it was never about the whiskey, or the weed, and I need you to know that. The whiskey was just the one switch I ever found to turn down the volume.”
“Volume on what? What do you mean?”
“The loop in my head that doesn’t stop,” he says.
“The things I told you about. The shed. I told you it happened. I didn’t tell you it never stopped happening.
Up here.” He taps his own temple in the dark.
“It runs on a loop. Over and over. The worst nights, the same few, on repeat. It gets loud. It doesn’t give a damn that I’m grown, hundreds of miles gone from any of it.
I lie down to sleep and it just starts up. ”
“Every night?”
“Pretty much. It’s worst when I’m alone for too long.
That big empty house out there, nobody in it but me.
That’s when I’d reach for whatever shut it up the fastest. Enough whiskey, enough weed, it’d finally go quieter and I could get a couple hours.
That’s all I ever wanted off it. Sleep. Rest. I wasn’t chasing drunk.
I was trying to get the noise in my head to shut up long enough to close my eyes. ”
As far as I know, he hasn’t reached for it once since the first night he slept in my bed. I want to be what quiets the loop. Not a bottle, not a prescription. Me. I’ve wanted to keep him safe since the day I walked into my apartment and found him asleep on the floor between my real estate signs.
But that kind of wanting can go wrong in a hurry, and I’ve watched it go wrong all over him.
His father wanted to remake him and built a metal box to do it in.
Freddie wants to keep him earning and calls the control good management.
I will not be one more person steering him the way I want him to go.
He laid out the perfect idea of what he wants. The life, the house, the hand held in the light, the peace. I lay under the weight of him listening for two words that never came.
With you.
He didn’t say it. I don’t think he heard himself leave them out. I heard it. I’ll hear it for a while.
I’ve never let anyone get this far in with me. Not once, never. My line held right up until a hungover country singer showed up in my listing and moved inside my heart before I noticed the locks were off.
Now I’m in it deep. Over a man who is owned by other people. Who can’t see a clean exit from his own life. Who just described his idea of heaven and did not put me anywhere in it. Not even in the kitchen when I’ve cooked my family’s dishes for him, served him eggs.
Maybe because he can’t imagine getting to keep anything he chooses. Or maybe because I’m a good few weeks, not a future, and he’s too kind to say so in a bed with the sheets still warm.
I don’t know which. And I can’t ask.
The second I ask where I fit, whether I’m in the house or the story he tells later, I’ve put my hand down to tip a scale that has to stay clean.
I pull the blanket up over the shoulder that’s gone cool. I keep one hand moving slow down his back. I take care of the only parts of him I’m allowed to take care of, with everything I have.
He’s already going under into sleep. Easy and even, no loop tonight, his breath leveling out against me.
The quiet found him after all.
I lie awake a long time, holding the man I’d hand my life over to.
Not knowing if he’ll let me.