Page 103 of Levi

Far as he knows he’s about to find me face-down with two empties and the Bash on fire. He’s walked into that room before. He’s got a reason to be worried.

“What the hell did you do to your phone?” He’s scanning me while he says it, the old scan, eyes going to my hands, the counter, my pupils, hunting the one failure he knows how to find. “App’s down. You delete it? Levi. Look at me. Are you drinking?”

Here’s where my body wants to do what it’s done a thousand times. Go small. Sorry, the app must’ve glitched, I’m not drinking, everything’s fine. Hand him the calm he drove all this way for, so he’ll go and the floor stops tilting. The pull to do it is enormous. He’s three feet off and every cell I’ve got is saying make it okay, make him okay, that’s how you survive this.

I don’t.

I don’t have a clue where I get the backbone. This time, I don’t cower. I stand there and I say the thing I’ve asked for a hundred times and been patted off of a hundred times.

“I want some cash.”

He’s already shaking his head, already reaching for the script, and there’s almost relief on him. This he knows how to deal with. He can handle me wanting cash in my pocket. “Levi, we don’t— you don’t need cash, the cards are—”

“Two thousand. In cash. In my pocket by lunch.”

I say it calmly. I don’t tell him what it’s for, because it’s not for anything. It’s mine and I want it in my hand. I don’t threaten. I don’t reach for a lawyer or a contract or any of the words you’re supposed to reach for, because the second I reach for one of those I’ve handed him something to fight. I just give him a hint about what’s coming, and I don’t explain it.

I watch him reach for the next move and not find it.

“After everything I do for you,” he starts. “That’s not how this works. The money’s structured. There’s people, there’s a process.”

I don’t answer that.

“What happened to the app, Levi?”

“I deleted it.”

“You delete an app and come at me for cash—” He spreads his hands. “You know how that looks. You want me worried about you?”

That’s him groping at the threat I haven’t made, trying to get me to say it out loud so he can argue it down. I just look at him and don’t say it, because the app already said it.

Freddie, who’s never once not known where I am or what I’ll do next, now doesn’t know what to do.

He blinks.

I spot the exact second it happens. The little stall, the half-beat where the script runs dry and there’s nothing loaded behind it. The guy who’s never caught out is, for one split-second, caught out and bad at it. Freddie doesn’t know how this ends. Neither do I. But I’m used to not knowing how things end. He isn’t. Knowing what’s coming next is his life. And I took it off him by wanting cash and refusing to say please.

It doesn’t make me brave. My hands are still shaking. But Freddie flinched. I didn’t know he could.

Then he does the thing that tells me how far off his own map he’s wandered. He quits working me and starts working the room. He looks past me at the open doors, the house, like the answer’s hidden in here somewhere. In Freddie’s mind, I’m a product he made, and things he made don’t wake up demanding stuff out of the blue. It doesn’t fit.

“Who’ve you been talking to?” he asks. “Has someone been in your ear down here?”

I keep my mouth shut. I watch him take my silence and give the wrong idea a home behind his eyes. He starts looking, already, for a hand that was never there.

He came scared I’d found the bottom of a bottle. He’s going to leave with a worse fear.

Now there’s a cold drop in my stomach watching it settle, because I know whose face that wrong idea puts itself on the second he goes hunting, and it’s the last face that ought to wear it.

“We’ll talk more when you’ve slept,” he says, gathering himself back into his normal version, except we both saw what happened. “Big week. Press tomorrow. Pull yourself together.”

“I’ve slept plenty, Freddie. I’m good. Honest.”

And he goes, fast as he came. The tires go back up the white street, and I stand in the open kitchen and let out a breath.

The Martin’s under the bed where it stays. I drag it out once I’m sure he’s gone. I sit on the floor with it across my knee. My hands move as if I’ve never left it. I put my fingers on the neck and they won’t settle. My voice comes up under it on its own, cracking in spots. And it doesn’t gut me. This morning it opens me. What comes up through my own hands isn’t the wound this time.

It’s me, Levi.