Page 122 of Levi

The line’s already written. I don’t even feel my mouth start moving.

“Aw, man.” The rueful headshake, the one Freddie and I built an hour ago. “Yeah. Not my finest night, I’ll own that. Here’s the truth of it. I’m out having a couple, blowing off a little steam, and there’s a fella down the bar who’d been running his mouth all night. Ugly with it, wouldn’t quit. I’d had a few too many and appointed myself sheriff. I have the hat for the job.” The big grin, built to disarm. “Stepped clean into something that wasn’t mine and let it get away from me. That’s on me, nobody else. But him and me are square. No bad blood at all. Matter of fact he’s got VIP passes waiting for him at will-call. We’re good.”

It all rolls out of me wholesome and warm, every word sitting where Freddie set it. The room laughs. The nice-guy reporter laughs. Troubled-but-charming, a little wild, good heart and a long bar tab. Lee Streeter being a hot mess in a bar again.

Every word of it is a knife I’m passing them. The smoother I make it go, the more of it I’m killing. And God, am I smooth. I hate myself right now.

It’s a woman a few chairs later who finally does what I’m dreading, and she doesn’t do it mean. She does it smiling, leaning in like we’re trading gossip over a fence.

“Okay, I have to. I promised my listeners I’d ask,” she says. “That man in the video, the one who got you out of there. Tall, dark hair, unfairly good-looking.” She presses a hand flat to her chest and fans herself, playing it up, and somebody behind the lights laughs. “The whole internet has lost its mind over him. Everyone is asking the same question. Who is that guy?”

And there it is.

The question with everything lying at the bottom of it. She thinks she’s asking me for a name, a fun little who’s-that-hunk to hand back to her listeners. What she’s really doing is reaching past the bar and the video, down to Dante.

Freddie never prepped this one. There’s no line written for it. Nothing rehearsed at all. And Lee Streeter answers anyway. Before any part of me that’s still mine gets a hand up.

I give her the aw-shucks shake of my head. I hear it come out in Lee Streeter’s drawl, light, already sliding past her toward the next question. “Honest truth? No idea. The fella hauled me out before I made it worse. Never caught his name.” The shrug, the grin I don’t feel. “Don’t know him.”

About Dante.

About the man I woke up wrapped in this morning, his arm thrown over me and his face tucked into my neck. Freddie made me rehearse the lie about the fight. Nobody rehearsed me on this one.

The question came for the truth, and my training stepped in front of it like a hired body. I put the one person who actually knows and wants me flat on the ground with three words.

Don’t know him.

She nods, writes it, lets it go. The clipboard guy rotates her out. The makeup brush comes in. Somebody puts a water in my hand.

They run me another half-hour and I don’t remember one second of it. I must be doing good. Freddie’s face on the back wall stays smooth, and his face is the only scoreboard I’ve ever watched.

Then it’s over. The lights drop. The room goes from a set back to a hotel suite with a nice view. A guy starts coiling cable.

I’m in a folding chair with my hands in my lap, and the cost of what I did finally comes in all at once. I didn’t acknowledge that I even knew him. On a record. Forever.

I thought I’d been winning. Inch by inch, in the dark, I’d been getting myself back. I killed the app that watched me. I’d started, big fool that I am, to believe the real me was finally getting bigger than the Lee Streeter they built. Then they turned a light on and the machine chewed me up and spit me out.

I want loose from the lie. I’ve never despised anything in my life like I hated the smooth lying man I just was.

And there’s nowhere to take it.

The point of the lie is to keep the world believing it. Which means I have to keep living inside it. Which means the one place on earth I want to be is the one place I just made impossible to go.

I let the handler walk me to the elevator. I get in the car they send and ride back to the house.

I want to take my words back and I can’t.

I want, just once, out loud, in the light, where everybody can hear it, to tell the truth. I look out the window at the water going dark, and I let it die there, the same as it always does.

Chapter 48: Dante

I spend the early afternoon being a realtor. I do all of it from the SUV in a parking lot. The apartment, with its two clean cups drying in the rack, isn’t a place I can be right now. Then I drive out to the Roadhouse while building an apology. The second one in days.

I know what I did and what I need to apologize for. A man put his hands on me at the bar. I should’ve ended it faster. Cut it off before he escalated. I didn’t and Levi came across the room over it. It went off in front of fifty phones, under Tex’s roof.

Tex doesn’t allow trouble in his bar. He doesn’t have many rules, but that’s one of them along with no weapons.

However you cut it, the trouble walked in on my arm. I carried the scene straight through their door.