Page 127 of Levi

When I step inside his apartment, the day’s still going in me at full volume. The second the door’s shut I’m pacing his little front room. “It’s not going to stop,” I tell him. “It gets worse before it gets better, they dig and they keep digging, I never should have let you come near—”

“Hey.” He sets his keys down, unhurried. “You done, Levi? Here’s where I’m at.” He leans back against the counter, arms crossed, watching me wear a track in his carpet. “I knew exactly what I was doing every step of this.” He smiles. “Well, not exactly. But it doesn’t matter. You didn’t trick me into picking you up at the jail. I showed up, and I kept showing up. And I’d do it all again every time. You’re the only one who thinks I got conned into you.”

That stops me cold.

He pushes off the counter then and crosses to me. Catches me by the face, both hands, one on each side of my jaw, stops me where I stand, and makes me look at him.

He says it plain and simple, “Breathe.”

I try to keep talking, to make him understand how bad this is for him.

He says it again. “Levi. Look at me. Breathe.” His thumbs are on my cheekbones, his eyes steady on mine, and there’s nowhere left to go, no room left to spiral into, just his hands, his voice.

The air drags in ragged, comes out shaking, goes in again. Around the third one the day stops roaring quite so loud. He just holds my face and breathes with me until I can do it without him.

“I want to feed you,” he says, pointing me at a kitchen chair. “If you want to do something for me, you can sit.”

I watch him go to the stove and put a plate together of rice and the beef he makes. He already had it going before he picked me up, the smell filling the little kitchen. He sets it down in front of me with a fork. “Now calm down and eat. All of it.”

He moves behind me and rubs my shoulders until the tension melts off them. I pick up the fork and I eat. It undoes me a little. All day I’ve been a product, a liability, a scandal, a lie. Dante makes a place for me at his table and feeds me supper. I finish most of the plate before I’m able to talk, and he lets me.

“You know what dish this is?” he asks, once I’m eating slower.

“The beef I stole out of your refrigerator that first week.”

“You didn’t steal it. I left it there specifically for you. It’s picadillo. My mother’s. When I was in Miami, I stood at her stove in Coral Gables making a pot of it, my abuela arguing my cumin count in two languages, and I told myself the next pot I made was going to be for you.” He takes my plate without asking and brings it back full. “This is that pot.”

“Picadillo.” I try it in my mouth the way he says it and don’t get it right, and he doesn’t correct me.

“My sisters would love you, by the way,” he says, back at the stove. “Mirta would feed you worse than I do. Clara would interrogate you for an hour and then defend you to the death.”

When I’ve finished eating, he leans back against the counter across from me. “I went by the Roadhouse,” he says.

I open my mouth to start apologizing for that too, for torching the one good place, and he holds up his hand to stop me.

“Tex was throwing a huge party out in the parking lot,” he says. “The video’s bringing them in. Everyone wants to be where Lee Streeter hangs out and starts fights. Tex knows an opportunity when he sees it. He fired up the smoker, decorated the lot more than usual, cranked up the music, and tonight he’s running the biggest crowds that bar’s seen in a while, all because of you.”

“Is that all true?”

“Every word. Tex told me to give you a message. He said a bad night doesn’t un-claim a man. Said you got claimed a while back, and the door is exactly where you left it. You’re just going to have to wait out the crowd to come use it. Or, he said, you could come anyway. Up to you.”

I’ve had a life of people deciding I was too wrong, too costly to keep, and a bar full of near-strangers kept me. I want it so bad I don’t trust it.

I don’t know which of us moves first. I think it’s me. I get up out of that chair because I can’t sit in all this gratitude one more second, and his hands come up to catch me like he already knew I was coming. Maybe it’s him. It doesn’t matter. What matters is it’s slow. Nothing about how he takes hold of me tonight is in any kind of hurry.

That first time, with the wall going down all at once, was the thing between us rupturing, both of us starved, falling at each other in the dark. This is not that. Tonight he kisses me slow, both hands framing my face like they did when he made me breathe, and I feel every moment of it.

He walks me back toward the bedroom. At the foot of the bed, he stops me, a hand flat on my chest. “Let me.”

He takes the hem of my t-shirt in both hands. It’s an old one, washed soft and thin as paper and gone pale at the collar, the kind I live in when there’s no camera aimed at me. He eases it up, his knuckles dragging up my sides, and I raise my arms and let him pull it off over my head. He drops it behind him without looking where it lands.

“I might never let you wear a shirt again,” he says, running his hands down my arms.

He drops into a crouch and works my boots off, one at a time, heel then toe, and sets them down carefully instead of flinging them, because he won’t leave a mess even now. My socks go the same way, peeled off easy. Then he’s back up, his hands at my belt.

“These next.” He gets the buckle open, then the button, then the zip, watching my face, checking I’m still in the room with him and not halfway back in that press chair. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I get out.