Chapter 63 Levi
The good Roadhouse night is still on me Wednesday morning. I woke at dawn in Dante’s bed, kissed him in the half-dark, and let a label car carry me off to be Lee Streeter for morning radio.
By nine I’d told a Pensacola morning show how grateful I am to my fans. By ten I was back at the beach house, still warm from a night that already feels like it happened to a freer man than me.
I should’ve known the bill was coming though. Joy like that never comes free in my life.
Freddie comes in already furious. “Sit down,” he says. “Tell me about the bus and the crew.”
“It was one night.” I keep it easy, because easy is the only card that’s ever worked on him. “I had a bus full of players with nowhere to be after the set. I took them for ribs.”
“You took them?” He drops his bag down on the couch.
“Lee Streeter took a chartered bus full of industry mouths into a biker bar nobody cleared, no advance, no security, no comms, and a phone in every pocket. There are over a hundred photos online this morning. I counted. You at a dirty dive, looking like you live there.” He walks over to look at the gorgeous Gulf water and doesn’t give it two seconds of interest. “Do you understand that you don’t get to do that?
That there is no version of you, anywhere, who gets to wander off on a Tuesday and decide where the night goes? ”
“Freddie—”
“No. Listen, because I’ll only lay it out once.
” He sits across from me, unhurried, folds his hands, and looks at me with what isn’t quite anger yet.
“You’ve gotten comfortable down here. I’ve watched it set in.
The bar. The locals.” He lets the word hang there a half-second too long.
“You’ve started walking around like a man who gets to have a regular life.
Levi.” He says the real name, the way he does when he wants me to feel exactly how much he knows.
“You don’t get a regular life. Ever. You get this one. ”
He doesn’t say the rest out loud. He’s known since I was seventeen. Told me so to my face a week ago. The not-saying is the whole point. What it’s called.
I keep my face Lee Streeter’s. It’s the one lesson I know worth keeping.
Then the temper folds away as fast as it came, and he’s back to business, pulling up the week on his phone without looking at me.
Thursday, a full run-through with the band.
Friday, press for the closer and a fitting.
Saturday, I close the Bash, the set we built, no surprises.
Sunday morning, I fly home to Nashville, studio early Monday, demos to learn on the plane.
“This was your month off,” he says. “It’s done now.”
Your month off. That’s what he calls it.
The first time in my adult life I’ve felt like a person and not a product on a shelf. A month off. A scheduling indulgence, a kindness he allowed and is now reeling back Sunday morning, with a plane ticket, with a studio he booked without asking me a single question.
I float one small request, the kind a normal person gets to make. “The lease here runs a few more days. I thought I might stay through the end, take some time—”
“You’ll fly out Sunday.” He doesn’t look up from the phone. “Car’s at a quarter to five. The label stops paying for this house Tuesday regardless. There’s nothing here worth taking your time over.”
I left Dante asleep in a bed. Flat on his back, one arm thrown up over his head, taking up the bed like a man who closes deals in his dreams. Freddie’s in my kitchen calling that nothing, so sure he’s right.
I say the words that make him go and leave me alone. Yes. Understood. Clean set, no surprises. I’ll be packed. I hear them leave Lee Streeter’s mouth, smooth and agreeable.
Freddie stands there smiling now, satisfied I know my place. The asset back in its slot. He lifts his bag and then he’s gone.
He doesn’t know what he just did.
I sit there a long time after the door clicks, and what comes isn’t a decision with steps in it. It just arrives in my head, plain and settled.
I can’t do it. I can’t get on that plane Sunday, fly back to Nashville, and cut another record of other men’s songs in another man’s voice.
Smiling big, playing straight, for sale.
For years.
For the rest of my damn life.
Not now. Not after this.
Because that’s the miracle of what they gave me by accident. One month where the leash went slack enough that I found out what’s on the other side of it.
Dante.
A once in a million years kind of guy. I want him. Not as a borrowed night I hand back Sunday but as a life I get to keep. I saw it. I can’t unsee it. I don’t want to forget it. I can’t.
I don’t know yet what that means or what I can do about it. I’m a man with a packed-up month, a plane ticket, and a manager who walked out of here certain he just put me back in my place.
Maybe he’s right. He’s been right a long time.
That night the loop finds me. It knows an empty house when it gets one. There’s nothing in this house to turn the volume down anymore, and I wouldn’t reach for it if there was. That much of me is new.
I get the Martin out of the case in the corner instead. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed and find the three chords my hands have known since I was seventeen.
There’s a line that’s been following me around for days. It won’t leave me be. I work it, swap a word, swap it back, hum the idea of whatever comes after. Nobody at the label ordered this one.
It’s the only piece of my life that’s mine, and I sit there turning it over until it starts to sound like my truth.
I don’t know where it goes. The song, or me, or any of it. But I sit on that floor with the one honest sound I own moving under my hands, and I am fucking done.
I’m done pretending the man who’s supposed to get on that plane Sunday is somebody I can keep being.