Page 124 of Levi

I hold up the shorts. “These are coral.”

“Half of everything I own is coral. You’re the one who chose it for my personal brand. Stop complaining. Change.”

I switch clothes without arguing and get to work. I’ve ended up in Benji’s coral shorts and a midriff shirt. I’m hauling eight-top tables across a gravel lot in the heat, soaked through by the second trip. Stormy jumps in to help. Halfway through the eight-tops, he stops and grins at me across the table.

“Levi likes you,” he says.

“Think so?”

He nods. “You should bring him here again. Lift your end, up over the curb.”

It’s the most words he’s said to me all year and they’re powerful. Levi is Stormy approved which says a lot. I lift my end up over the curb and that’s the entire conversation.

We’re near the end of moving the bar outside, carrying the last folding chairs down from upstairs, when Benji says it without looking at me. “Let’s talk about the video.”

“I know about it.”

“That tells me nothing.” He sets his stack down. This is what’s kept Benji my best friend forever and made him the most exhausting man I know; he never takes the polite lane. “Where is Levi right now? I’m asking because I’ve been watching your face since you arrived and I can’t tell if you’re happy or upset. I’m leaning toward happy. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

This is Benji. I don’t lie to him.

“He stayed with me,” I say.

Benji’s eyes go wide.

“Last night. At the apartment.” I’m arranging the chairs while I say it.

“You mean he slept in that weird little second bedroom full of boxes that you have handled? Same as the other times he stayed there?”

“No. This time he stayed with me.”

Benji’s gone silent. When I look up, his face is cycling through three different emotions and settling on careful.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Dante. That’s… new. You’re in it. Deep. What happened to the cautious not-getting-attached thing you always do? You already blew right past it. Didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

Benji loves me. I know this and I also know what’s coming next.

“I’m for this,” he says. “Whatever the two of you have got going on. You know I am. I’m not telling you he isn’t worth it.” The energy goes out of him all at once, and he’s just my best friend standing there. “I’m warning you he’s in a hard place with no clean way out. You got burned once already and never saw it coming. So I want you to be careful with you. That’s it. That’s my ask.”

“Neither of us knows what this is yet.”

“What do you think it is? To you?” Benji asks, his hand now on my arm.

“I’m not sure. It’s too soon. All I know is that I’m not walking away from him.”

Benji squeezes my arm and leans against my shoulder. Then he picks up his chairs. “Okay,” he says. “That’s a solid plan. I like it.”

We haul the last of the chairs down. The party is in the dark now, the lights doing their work over the gravel, Bertha cooked down to coals. The crowd is loud and stacked at the rail.

I change back into my own clothes. I came in braced to apologize for damage when there isn’t any. I’m leaving claimed the same as always.

Levi’s in a hotel suite, being whatever they need him to be, with no idea that Tex fired up the smoker and threw the year’s blowout on the strength of him.

Chapter 49: Levi

The house gets bigger after dark. Three stories of glass, the Gulf gone black out every window, nobody in it but me. I’m sitting in the middle of all that square footage with both phones, watching the internet hunt down Dante.