Page 174 of Levi

Around eleven, noon starts pulling at me. Dante feels me go quiet and squeezes my arm. But instead of reaching for his keys, he goes to the bedroom and comes back with a folder. Manila, thick, tabs down the side in three colors. He sets it in my lap and sits down on the coffee table facing me, knees to my knees.

“Before Freddie,” he says. “You need to know what you’re walking in there holding. You know I flew to Miami Wednesday to catch up on my office there. What I didn’t tell you is why I picked this week to go. The lawyer who read your stack works out of Brickell. Entertainment law, twenty years of it. While I was down there, I pushed my way into her schedule, and I spent most of Thursday at her conference table going through your life, line by line.” He taps the folder. “It’s all in there. What the pages actually say, next to what Freddie’s told you they say. She flagged every gap. Starting with the fact that half of it was signed by a seventeen-year-old.”

I look at the folder. Then at him. “You flew to Miami to do this for me? Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

“I couldn’t put this in front of you before the show. You had enough to carry. And I need you to hear the other reason. I did it before I knew if there was an after with us. When I flew to Miami, I didn’t know if you wanted me in your life past this weekend. But whatever you turned out to want, I wanted you to know what was in your contracts.”

It takes a minute for it to sink in what he’s telling me. “Wait,” I say. “You actually thought I might not want a future with you?”

“You never said it. Tuesday night, you laid out the life you wanted. The house, the quiet, the hand held in the light. I listened to every word, Levi. I wasn’t anywhere in it. And when I told you my door was open, what came back was maybe when it slows down.” He holds my eyes. “I don’t try to guess what people are thinking. I read what’s on the page. The page said maybe.”

I’m shocked. He was lying there counting the words I didn’t say while I was lying there thinking them so damn loud I figured he could hear them in his head.

“You weren’t in the list because you are the whole fucking list. All of it.” It comes out rough. “Every word of that life I described — the house, the quiet, the peace — I was picturing you in it. You were standing in every room of it. I just couldn’t say so out loud.” I stop, start again. “Where I come from, you don’t say the real wish out loud, because saying it is how it gets taken from you. The second anybody knew what I wanted, they used it on me. Always. So I kept the one wish that mattered silent. I was trying to protect us. And all it did was leave you lying there thinking you weren’t wanted. I can’t believe you thought that.”

“All I could go by was what I heard,” he says. “And then you fixed it, in front of ten thousand people. I finally heard what I needed to hear.”

Two of the last nights we had, and he spent them in a conference room buying me back for myself, while believing he might not be in the deal.

I lean forward and kiss him. “I’m sorry,” I whisper against his mouth. “I don’t know how to do this. Don’t let me screw it up for us.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” he says before deepening the kiss.

We break apart reluctantly and I open the folder. We go through the tabs till I’m clear on what’s in the folder. Then he stands, pulls me up off the couch, and points me at the bathroom. “Come on, cowboy. Shower. Can’t run a revolution in yesterday’s shirt.”

The water in Dante’s shower takes a minute to warm up, and I stand in the little tub waiting on it, looking down at porcelain so white it could be new. My head is under the spray with shampoo in my hair when the curtain rings shriek down the rod.

I damn near jump out of my skin. “What are you doing?”

“Paying the repairman back for scrubbing the rust stain.” And Dante steps into the tub.

I stand there blinking water, my heart still restarting. “You knew about that?”

“I stepped into this tub the next morning and the stain was gone.” He crowds me back out of the spray. “You think I don’t know every inch of what’s mine? You never said a word. I never said a word. Those were the rules.” He takes the shampoo out of my hand. “We don’t have those rules anymore.”

He turns me around by the shoulders and washes my hair. Strong fingers kneading my scalp in slow circles, the length of him warm all down my back, and I about liquefy standing up. Nobody has washed my hair since I was small enough to cry about the soap in my eyes. He takes his time, tips my head back into the water himself, one hand shading my eyes.

Then he gets the bar of soap and starts at my shoulders, and somewhere between my shoulder blades the caretaking turns into something else entirely.

“Here’s my plan.” His mouth is at my ear, conversational, while the soap goes down my spine at a pace nobody could call innocent. “I’m going to wash every inch of you. And when you’re standing in front of Freddie this afternoon in your good shirt, being reasonable and calm, you’re going to know exactly whose hands you’re still feeling.”

This is what takes my knees out about Dante every single time. The man irons his t-shirts. He folds towels in thirds. He speaks to buyers in a voice you could pour over ice. And then he gets me somewhere private and that same controlled mouth says things that would melt paint, in the same level tone he uses to discuss closing dates. I harden so fast I get lightheaded.

His hand closes around me, soap-slick. “Sore this morning?”

“Some.” No point lying. Every move I’ve made today, I’ve felt where he was.

“Get used to it.” He says it low, satisfied, filthy, right against my neck. “Every time it aches today, that’s me. You’re walking into that meeting with me already in the room with you.”

“Jesus, Dante.”

“You keep being surprised.” He turns me around to face him, water running between us, and drops straight down to his knees in the tub, folding into the small space like it was built to his measurements. He looks up at me through the spray with his hair plastered down and his eyes saying the rest. “A month of behaving myself around you, Levi. I have a backlog to work through.”

Then his mouth is on me and I quit thinking about the meeting.

He works me exactly the way he talked. One hand braced on my hip to hold me up against the cool tile, the other doing things that make me forget my own name. The water beats down on his shoulders and runs off him and he doesn’t hurry for any of it.

When my legs start to shake he just plants my hips harder into the wall and takes me deeper, humming like a man enjoying his own work, and the sight of him — Dante Reyes, on his knees in the tub I scrubbed, wrecked hair and water running off his jaw — is what finishes me more than anything his mouth does.