Page 142 of Levi

Dante: You okay for tonight? Can’t wait to see you.

There’s a long gap. While I wait, I watch the dark wall of clouds offshore. It has moved closer in the last two hours. The water has turned three different shades of blue. The strange color it gets before the pressure breaks.

Levi: Big set tonight. Been a week. I’ll be fine once I’m on.

Dante: I’ll be there.

Levi: Hey hang on. What are you wearing tonight?

Dante: Why are you asking?

Levi: Tell me.

Dante: Your requested outfit. Jeans. T-shirt.

Levi: Damn. Don’t you dare change until I see you.

I’m smiling at the phone like an idiot when I text back.

Dante: OK. Jeans stay on.

Levi: Only until I get there.

Heat rolls through me right there in the staged kitchen, twenty minutes after the biggest closing of my career.

The sale isn’t even close to being the best thing that’s happened to me today.

Chapter 55: Levi

They build Lee Streeter one piece at a time, dressing a man that can’t dress himself.

Boots first, a girl kneeling at my feet to work the fancy pair up over my calves. The shirt with the pearl snaps, pressed stiff enough to stand on its own. The buckle the size of a saucer riding my hip, heavy, somebody else’s idea of a strong man. The black cowboy hat goes on last, set square by a guy whose only job tonight is my head. He steps back and there’s a stranger in the mirror wearing my face. Thousands bought tickets to see him. Not one of them knows the difference.

“Chin,” says the woman fixing my collar, and I lift it. Her name’s on a laminate on a lanyard and I’ve already lost it. “There. Don’t sweat through it in the first song, you’ll go translucent under the lights.”

“No promises. It’s a hundred degrees in here.”

“Ninety-four and climbing.” This from the stage manager, headset on, tablet up, the calmest person in any room she’s ever stood in. “Heads up, everyone. We’ve got a storm cell offshore the weather guy doesn’t like. Anything tracks inside eight miles, we pause the show on a lightning hold. If I pull you off, Lee, you go, no hero stuff.”

“You’d pull the headliner?” I ask, knowing she will in a heartbeat.

“I’d pull the Pope.” She doesn’t look up. “Twenty minutes to the opener. You’re good?”

“I’m good,” I say, which is the biggest lie of the night.

Under the pearl snaps and the big hat, I’m still standing in yesterday’s kitchen hearing Freddie’s words.

I’ve always known. I don’t care that you’re gay, Levi. I never have.

Through the load-in door, the sky over the Gulf flickers white and shuts off. No sound with it. Just light popping down inside the clouds, way out over the water, off and on. Heat lightning, and nobody back here gives it a second look. I give it several.

“Two minutes,” the stage manager calls, and the band’s already moving past me toward the lip of the stage, a backup singer slapping my shoulder, a musician saying kill it. The noise out there is the kind you feel in your bones before you hear it.

I put my hand flat against my hip where the burner phone sits. Dante’s out there somewhere. He’s here with me even if I can’t see him.

I move toward the stage.

Damn, the heat’s wrong.