Page 107 of Levi

They crossed the room like it was nothing.

I haven’t moved.

Benji’s elbow finds my ribs. He leans in over the binder like he’s showing me the seating chart, and drops to the register he believes is a whisper.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Corner stool. Bandana. Sunglasses at nine o’clock at night. That’s Levi, alone at this bar, in a disguise he assembled at a gas station. Out of every bar in the Panhandle, he picked this one. I do seating for a living. Seat choices are not accidental. He picked the room you drink in.”

“I saw him.”

“Yes, and you’ve been pretending you didn’t ever since. Sheila fed him. Tex went and sat with him. Stormy’s asking his opinion on the tuna dip. The entire family has been over there except the one person he came to see. Here’s the deal. You have five minutes. I’m not being dramatic for effect, I’m being specific. Five minutes to walk twenty feet, or I go sit on the stool next to him and talk to him about centerpieces. I’ll show him the binder and ask his opinions until you feel sorry for him. You know I’ll do it. I liked him before I knew who he was and I like him more now that he’s back.”

“I made him before the door shut behind him,” Mickey says, not looking up. “Been waiting on you two to catch up.”

“Benji, I’m warning you,” I say. “Do not go over there.”

“Four minutes,” Benji says, and turns a page of the binder like he’s got all night. “You’re wasting time.”

My face is on billboards along the highway and smaller signs on 30A. My name is on the sign-out sheet at the Bay County jail, right next to his, where anyone can pull it. And Levi is a viral scandal in a bandana, with a tracker on his phone and a handler who screams into the top of his head.

Everything wrong with him goes off in public, with cameras. I took one un-careful chance on this man. It cost me two weeks of my time and a humiliation I can still feel in my stomach. I’m staying on my stool. I’ll finish the bourbon and go home. Careful has never once steered me wrong.

And it settles nothing in my mind, because I know what he is now. I sat in Benji’s loft and watched a sixteen-year-old sing in a church. I know what’s hiding under the bandana. The boy that happened to.

His disguise holds. Nobody makes him. The corner stays his. Sheila runs interference without looking like she’s running anything. Benji and Mickey argue the seating chart at my elbow. It could almost be a night where the two of us are just in the same good room and nothing’s on fire.

It might hold.

There’s a mirror behind the bar. Long, old, gone gray at the edges. It runs the length of the back-bar behind the bottles. His back’s to the room. The mirror isn’t.

I check the glass. The sunglasses are pushed up now. He’s looking at the mirror, and the mirror is looking at me. Across a packed loud room full of people who have no idea, in a strip of gray glass over a row of whiskey bottles, he meets my eyes.

Neither of us moves. Neither of us nods. It’s not that kind of look. A mirror’s the only place this gets to happen. At a distance. He looks at me out of the glass and I look back. It nearly gets me up off the stool. My weight’s already shifted. My hand’s flat on the bar.

Because the look in that glass isn’t polite, and neither is what it does to me. Days of wanting to touch him, and one strip of gray mirror has my pulse going like his hand is already on my arm.

I stay down.

I look back at my drink and leave him in the mirror. Not getting up is the hardest thing I’ve done all week.

Chapter 43: Levi

He came. I knew he might. It’s his place, his people, and I’ve had him in the glass over the bottles since before Tex ever sat down — the near end of the bar, the stool beside Little Blondie, a bourbon in front of him.

And then his eyes come up and find mine.

For several long seconds across a packed room, in a strip of gray glass over the bottles, he’s looking right at me and I’m looking right at him and neither of us moves. It’s not a small look. It’s a look that gets in past everything and sets up house in your lungs.

I forget everything except his eyes in the glass holding mine.

And then he looks away.

Drops his eyes to his bourbon. Doesn’t nod. Doesn’t get up and come over. Looks right at me, and turns away on purpose.

The bar family let me back in and the one I came for looked me dead in the eye in the mirror and went back to his drink.

That’s worse than if he’d never looked at all.

The family forgave me. He’s the one who won’t.