Page 148 of Levi

“Yeah. That’s why.”

“Thank you for telling me, Levi. I’ll never close the doors. Any room you’re ever in. The door stays open. I can do that for you. It’s all I’ve got. I don’t have anything that fixes it. I’m not going to insult you by pretending I do. But I’m here for whatever you need from me. I’m here, Levi. For you.”

And that undoes the last bolt in me. I sit up and wipe my face. He opens his arms wide and takes my full weight against him.

I’m not fixed. I know that even now, with the worst of me finally out in the air. The box is in me way down deep. Tomorrow I’ll still need the door open, still count when it thunders.

But there’s somebody else holding all of it now with me. Dante knows my story. The box, the boy, the thing they tried to beat out of me. And he’s still here with the door open at my back.

I’ve never once not been alone in it.

I’m not alone in it now.

Chapter 58: Dante

I hold him in my arms for a long time, the worst of him out in the open between us. I don’t dare move. I’m not moving first. Not after what he told me.

His phone is on the coffee table where he set it when we came in. It’s been buzzing continuously for the past few minutes. I reach for it and put it in his hand.

“Text Freddie. Tell him you’re alive, you’re somewhere private, you’ll handle the rest tomorrow.” He’s the only one who’d be lighting that phone up by now. Worried about his asset, not Levi. “Then shut it off.”

He looks at the phone. “Off?”

“All the way off. No one gets you tonight. Not the label, not the manager, not the crowd with their cameras out. They had you all day. They’re done.” I tighten my arms around him. “Tonight you’re mine. Not theirs. Mine.”

His throat works at that. He’s been owned forever. Now he’s hearing mine mean wanted instead of used. He thumbs out one short text to Freddie. I don’t read it. He turns the phone off, and sets it face-down beside the burner. For one night he belongs only to me.

“Okay,” he says. Wrecked, but steadier than I’ve heard him in days. “Okay.”

I help him up and take him to my bedroom. When I pull my shirt up over his head, the one I put him in when we came home dripping, I take my time. I look at his body with appreciation while I do.

He leans into me. Whatever else the world managed to do to him, it never once put a flinch between us. Tonight his words have him raw and wide open, making him hungry instead of shy. He turns into my palms, and after the day he’s had, being wanted is the only language that reaches all the way in.

“You keep staring at me,” he says.

“I enjoy looking at you. You’re beautiful, Levi.”

I push him down on the bed and take the rest of the night as slow as I can stand. The rest of his clothes come off. Unhurried, with me touching. My hands go over the lean length of him, the strip of hair under his navel. I know his body now. I cover it again anyway, because tonight he needs touch.

His breath jumps when my palm drags low across his stomach. Every place my mouth goes, he rises to meet it. The hollow of his throat. The flat of his stomach. The crease of his hip, where I set my teeth and feel him jerk.

“Mark me again,” he murmurs, fisting my hair.

I bite and suck the skin until a red spot begins to form. “Like this?” I murmur.

“Yes, I want more.”

His body was punished for years, in a hot dark box, to make him believe its own softness was the crime — and yet every inch of it opens for me willingly like the sentence never took.

When I take him in my mouth, the sound he makes is half relief, half surrender. I take him deep, one hand wrapped around the base of him. The other lies flat on his stomach, feeling the muscle pull tight. I stay there until he’s shaking, until he’s right at the edge. Then I back off. Tonight is not about fast.

“Dante—” My name, half a question.

“No hurry.” I come back up his body and say it against his mouth, both of us hard between us, slick already where we move against each other. “All night. There’s no part of this you have to earn.”

I take him apart the way he’s shown me how. I know what tightens him. What opens him. When to slow. When he needs my voice more than my hands. I use every bit of it.

When I reach for the bottle in the nightstand he freezes. I stop, my hand flat on his hip and wait.