Page 172 of Levi

The car comes. The car goes. Life goes on.

Nobody ever told me this. That I could just not get in the damn car. That I could lie in a warm bed at quarter to five, Dante’s arm over me, and simply let the car leave without me. The sun comes up anyway.

I drift back to sleep. Sometime later the bed shifts. Dante’s awake, rough with sleep, his mouth in my hair.

“Morning.” He nuzzles my ear. I can feel him smiling against my skin. “You getting on that flight this morning?”

I laugh. It comes up fast, out of somewhere I didn’t know still worked.

“Fuck no,” I tell him.

And that’s it. The revolution, right there, two words, before the sun’s even up. And the war for my own life comes down to a sleepy question and me laughing the answer back. He laughs into my neck and pulls me in tighter.

We get up at five-thirty, same as always. I guess that’ll be my new getting-up time now too. I’m on his clock, in his rhythm, and I don’t mind it even a little.

He makes coffee. I sit at his little table and watch him move around the kitchen wearing only a pair of shorts. It’s the most ordinary morning I can imagine. I’ve never had it, and I have to look away and blink my eyes a few times so I don’t lose it again because my heart’s so full.

He catches me at it anyway. He crosses the kitchen, takes my jaw in one hand, tips my face up, and kisses me. No hurry in it anywhere, like there’s nothing in the world scheduled for either of us.

“Hungry?” he says against my mouth. “Say yes. I’ve been wanting to feed you since Wednesday.”

“Yes.”

“Good answer.” One more kiss, on my forehead this time, and he goes to the stove.

Then the world shows up.

Last night is on every screen by the time the coffee’s done. My phone’s been buzzing face-down so long it’s walked itself a clear six inches across the table. Dante slides it over to me without a word, eyebrow up, and goes back to his coffee. Letting me decide what to do with it.

I turn it over.

I don’t even have to open anything. The lock screen can’t hold it all. It’s a wall of it, scrolling under my thumb. Lee Streeter everywhere, the name they built for me, except this morning it’s bolted to the truth for the first time. Clips of last night. The guitar. Me looking at Dante. Ninety seconds of me telling the truth, copied, shared, argued over a few million times while Dante held me.

My whole life I believed bone-deep, surer than I’ve ever been about anything, that the truth would be the end of me. I believed it because of what my father did to me in Tennessee a long time back.

And because I’m not stupid.

I know what country music is. I know there’s no place in it for a man like me. That’s a known fact.

I start scrolling, looking for the end of me.

I can’t find it.

Behind me the burner clicks and catches. Butter in the pan. Eggs cracked one-handed, the little knock of the spoon. The biggest scandal in American music is scrolling under my thumb, and three feet away Dante is making me breakfast. Every sound out of that kitchen is him telling me the same thing.

Whatever’s on that phone, this table holds for us.

The full song is up in countless versions, shot from phones. The count under the biggest one has more digits than anything the label ever posted with my name on it. Overnight. Trending number one. Not country music trending. Everything trending.

The last line is already a caption on more posts than I can scroll past.

You can’t hold your breath and sing — over a soldier coming off a plane into his family, over a girl pulling out of her hometown with the windows down, over two gray-haired men slow-dancing in a kitchen.

Overnight, strangers have decided what my line means to them, and they’ve decided it means every held-in life finally let out. I wrote it about one door. They’re using it for all of theirs.

And here’s the crazy part. The recorded song doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to stream, nothing to buy, no version of it anywhere but phone recordings of one take on one night. And people are begging for it.

Covers are up already. A kid at a piano, a girl with a banjo on a porch. Petitions tagging the label to release a song the label has never heard. My old records are spiking too, every one of them, people going back through every Lee Streeter record listening for the man hiding in him.