Page 68 of Levi

The air comes back slowly. It lets go grudging, taking its time about what it gives up first. But the bottom of each breath comes back to me. I get one down full and hold it a second just to know I can, then let it out long, and his hand never stops, like he’s got all night and nowhere else in the world he needs to be.

“You’re doing good,” he says, when he can hear the difference in me. “Levi. I want you to step inside. Just inside the door. I want you sitting down.”

I don’t move. I tighten my grip. The rail is the only thing I’ve trusted for the last ten minutes.

“You’re pale, you’re sweating, and you’re leaning on an old piece of metal hanging over a parking lot,” he says, same low voice, no push in it, just laying the truth out where I can see it. “If you go down, I want you going down on carpet. Come on. I’ve got you. Three steps back. That’s all. The door stays open. Walk with me.”

I let go of the rail. I let him turn me with the hand that’s on my back, and I take the three steps. I get inside the door and go down to the floor, the warm night coming through the open screen, and before I can miss his hand it’s back.

He sits down close behind me. Folds himself down onto the carpet at my back in nothing but his shorts, this polished house-selling man, bare feet, hair loose across his forehead for the first time since I’ve known him. He gets himself set behind my shoulder and keeps rubbing my back, same motion, and neither one of us says a word about how strange it is or isn’t.

The lot’s dead quiet below. Somewhere across the dark a truck shifts down on the highway and the sound rolls out and is gone. The evil thing that came up through the floor into me has slid back down to hell where it lives.

“Dante, go back to bed,” I say, when I finally get my voice back. “I’m okay now. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

He stops behind me a second. Then the hand lifts, and he gets up. I hear him cross the room. He’s down the hall, and there’s rustling, and when he comes back he’s got both sleeping bags in his arms.

He lays them out side by side in front of the open door, square in the path of the warm air coming through the screen, and smooths mine flat with one pass of his hand.

“Lie down,” he says, patting the sleeping bag. “With your face right there in the doorway. You’ll have the fresh air.”

I look at the two bags on the floor, no space between them. I lie down where he told me. The night comes through the screen and moves over me, and the last of the shaking runs itself out into the floor.

He lies down on the other one, right behind me, between me and everything else in this world.

“You need to sleep,” I say. “You have to be at the house by six.”

“No, I don’t need sleep,” he says. “I need to keep watch over you while you sleep, Levi.”

There’s no answering that so I don’t even try.

Chapter 24: Dante

At five in the morning, I stop pretending there’s a version of this night where I sleep.

I’ve been on my back on the sleeping bag for two hours, listening to Levi breathe. In through his nose, out through his mouth, the rhythm I laid down for him still running in him like he took it in and kept it.

Every time the rhythm stutters — a catch, a turn, a long pause at the top of a breath — everything in me comes up off the floor an inch and waits. Then it evens out, and I lie back down, and we do it again.

I said I’d keep watch over him. I meant it.

I decide to get up, because the showing is at ten and twenty million dollars deserves an agent who’s showered, and because there’s nothing more I can do for him from the floor.

I get up the way you get up from beside a sleeping animal you don’t want to spook — weight on the hands first, then the feet, no sound. He doesn’t stir. He’s face to the open door the way I put him.

I don’t turn on a light anywhere in the apartment. Light travels, and he’s twelve feet from every wall. I shower with the bathroom door shut and the water run soft.

And that’s where I find it.

The stain is gone. The rust bloom at the drain end of the tub, the one that came with the unit, the one I’ve scrubbed at many times and finally made peace with. It’s gone. The porcelain scoured back to white. I stand there with the water going over me and I know exactly what happened, because there’s only one other set of hands in this apartment. Levi did it yesterday. He didn’t mention it, and he isn’t going to, and if I brought it up, he’d shrug it off.

Which is when I understand he has learned my language.

Because that’s mine. The food that’s there when he opens the refrigerator, no note on it. The sleeping bag that appeared. I leave them where he’ll find them. And now there’s a scrubbed-white tub in my bathroom saying something back to me in perfect grammar, and no way to answer it out loud without breaking the rules.

I dress in the dark and skip the coffee. At the door I stop and look back at him one more time. A big man asleep on the floor of my living room with his face in a doorway, breathing deeply. And that’s when it hits me. What I’m actually doing.

I’m leaving him alone in this apartment with no phone.