Page 109 of Levi

The room’s turned toward us. In a packed bar you don’t have to land the punch. The grab’s the show. Faces have come around, and the noise has dropped like it drops when people smell a fight.

Off to my left a phone’s already up, a little black rectangle held high and steady, pointed dead at me. And the guy I grabbed is looking at my face now, really looking. The sunglasses, the bandana, the jaw. And I watch it happen behind his eyes. The click, the wait, the hold on, is that…

And that’s when it hits me. When I was crossing the room and taking his collar there was no fear in me anywhere. The eruption ate it clean. Now that it’s done, now there’s a phone up and a man assembling my face out loud, the terror comes in all at once. A wall of cold water closing over my head a full beat after I’ve already gone under.

Twenty-five years, fear’s been the first man through the door. Tonight it showed up afterwards, and there’s nothing for it to stop.

Fuck it. Let them have the face.

It’s mine.

Then Dante’s hand closes around my arm above the elbow, hard, and I’m being walked out. Not gently, either. He’s got me by the arm and he’s moving me through the room toward the door, his body angled to put himself between me and the phones. The family goes by in a blur. Sheila watching, Little Blondie moving up behind us, Tex coming out from behind the bar.

I try to talk. I get half of his name out. And he says, not looking at me, “Don’t. Not a word. Walk.” And it’s so cold and final that I shut my damn mouth and I walk.

The night air hits. He shoves me in his car, slams the door. We’re moving before I’ve got the seatbelt on, out of the lot and onto the highway, and he doesn’t say one single word.

I sit in the dark of his car and count what my actions tonight cost me.

The corner stool. The mahi tacos I didn’t order. Two Darlenes and a goat story. Tex telling me the name was never the thing. I had a family, and then I hauled a man off a stool in the middle of it, in Tex’s bar, in front of every phone in the room. Maybe that’s gone now. It hurts and I let it.

And then there’s the old script to say, right on time, warming up in my mouth.

Sorry. Don’t know what came over me. It’ll never happen again.

The full performance, the one I’ve given more times than I can count, where I hand everybody what they want to hear and go small until the floor quits tilting. I can feel my body reaching for it, same as it reached for it in my kitchen this morning with Freddie three feet off.

I don’t say it.

Because it’d be a lie. It would happen again. If I walked back in that bar right now and that guy’s hand went back on Dante’s arm, I’d cross the room again, and I wouldn’t walk one step slower.

Whatever tonight costs, the crossing isn’t the part I’d take back. First time I’ve done anything in the open in my life, and I’m not handing it to anybody as a mistake.

I sit with my face still hot and I grieve the loss without apologizing for it. The family, maybe. The coast, maybe. The short life I’d started to imagine down here.

Dante, probably.

Because he’s the one driving me away from it in a silence I can’t get a finger under. Won’t look at me. Won’t let me talk. I made his careful life louder tonight, the one thing he asked me not to do, and a man like Dante doesn’t yell about that. He just drives you home and then disappears in the rearview of your life.

I know how this goes. I don’t beg him out of it. I want to. I keep my mouth shut and let him be whatever he’s being, because he’s earned the right. Over and over.

And then I notice the road. This isn’t the way back. We’re not pointed at the beach house. We came off the highway too early, we’re going inland. I know these turns now, and they don’t end at the beach house. They end at his apartment.

And I can’t make it mean anything. Everything I’ve concluded says he’s done with me, dismissing me, hauling the trouble out of his life. And you don’t take a man you’re done with home to your apartment.

I sit there with my heart racing, watching his hands on the wheel. And I’m too wrung out and too scared of the answer to ask.

He pulls in and kills the engine. He gets out, and I get out behind him because I don’t know what else to do. I follow him up, and he unlocks the door and holds it. I go in past him into the apartment that smells like him, and the door shuts behind us.

Dante goes straight to the balcony door and opens it. Then he turns around and looks at me directly for the first time all night.

“What the hell was that about?”

Chapter 44: Dante

Levi doesn’t answer me. He stands in the middle of my living room, bandana still tied around his hair, sunglasses shoved up into it. He doesn’t say a word. The silence feeds my anger instead of letting it drop.

I turn on the lamp. I need to see him clearly for this.