Page 160 of Levi

“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.

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—”