Page 66 of Levi

I’m building a man in my head now, out of his own rules.

“Levi, I won’t go into your phone,” I say. “I know what you’re handing me here. Your personal life is behind those six digits, and none of it is mine to read. I’ll reply to his text, and I’ll close it, and that’s all. That’s my word.”

“I know,” he says finally. “I trust you. That’s why I gave it to you.”

He settles back into the cushions. The baseball game is over.

I don’t even know who won.

Chapter 23: Levi

I come up out of the nightmare already drowning.

There’s no in-between. No swim up from sleep into the room. One second I’m down under the dark with no bottom, and the next I’m awake on the floor, heart going like a fist on a door.

The dream’s gone. It leaves nothing behind but the knocking, and the knocking’s in my chest, and it won’t stop.

I try to breathe and the breath won’t go down. It gets partway and stops. Welded shut at the bottom.

The more I chase it the further it runs. I’m hauling at air like a rope tied to nothing.

The floor’s solid under me. The wall’s solid at my back. I still can’t get a full breath in a room I know.

I’m in my jeans. Shirtless, jeans on, boots by the wall where I can reach them. I sleep dressed in strange rooms, always have. A man should be able to be on his feet and gone in the time it takes to stand. And right now the one thing my body’s sure of is that I’m dying, and I’m dying with my boots off.

I get a hand flat on the carpet. The other presses my own chest, like I can force the air in. It doesn’t go. I’m soaked through. The sweat came up out of nowhere and ran me through, hair stuck to my forehead, the sleeping bag damp under my palm. I’m burning up. Somebody set the room on fire while I was under. My heart’s slamming hard enough to feel in my throat, in my wrists.

The thing I’ve spent years staying ahead of has caught up and sat down on me with its full weight. And I’m sure this is the one that finishes me.

And here’s what does the most damage, while I’m fighting to pull one clean breath.

It happened here at Dante’s.

I know where I am. The gap by the wall, the flannel under me, the boxes of his face stacked to my left, the door down the hall standing open like he leaves it. Safest floor I’ve put my body down on in years. I had the best night I’ve had in a long time. The bar, the long baseball game neither of us would turn off. Dante asleep down the hall.

I let my guard down for the first time since I crossed the line into this state. And this is what came up through the floor the minute I did.

I’ve got to get out of the room. My body knows it.

I can’t stay folded against this wall. I get up off the floor in a lurch, one hand clawing at the boxes for balance, and the room tips and rights and I’m moving for the only opening. The sliding glass door and the screen behind it.

I shove the glass and the screen goes with it, no catch to fight, and I’m out on the little lip of balcony. The metal rail in front of me, the hot dark of the parking lot below, the hum off the highway.

I lean over and get both hands on that rail and haul at the air. As if out here will have more air than in there did.

It doesn’t.

The night’s thick as a wet towel. I drag and drag and only the top of each breath comes. I hang on, shaking, and wait to find out if I can die of this or if it only feels like I will.

I hear Dante moving. Thank God, he’s up.

I came barreling out of that room like an animal through a fence. I’d have woken the dead two floors down. I hear him in the hall, quick, and then he’s in the doorway behind me and across the room. And the first thing out of him isn’t what happened, and it isn’t are you okay.

“Levi.” Close now, but there’s an edge run up under the calm. “What did you take? Did you take something? Tell me. Do I need to call 911?”

And even here, even with no air, the question gets in. The small clean cut of it. What did you take? Drenched and gasping on a stranger’s balcony at three in the morning, I look like exactly what he thinks I am. I’ve earned the question. It still nicks me.

I push out the only word I’ve got. “No.” Barely. A shake of the head with it, because the word didn’t have enough behind it to carry. “Nothing.”