Page 43 of Levi

I stand in the doorway and look at the gap instead. Eighteen inches between the boxes of my own face smiling off four hundred flyers and the wall. That is the real estate he chose. Three times in this apartment now.

I want to understand why, so I do something I would never let another person watch me do. I lie down in the space. The carpet’s thin. The concrete underneath is cold. Inside four seconds my hip and shoulder are aching.

There’s no way this is comfortable. From down here on the floor, I can see straight out the door, down the hall, past my own open bedroom, all the way to the front. Every way into the apartment, laid out in one line.

Whatever he’s watching for, he can watch all of it without lifting his head.

That’s all the info I can gather. The sightline, the hard floor, and a man who’d rather have both than a bed. I lie there longer than the lesson takes. The answer doesn’t come.

His comment about who tracks his phone keeps circling.

Somebody who thinks they own him.

A hundred things fit that sentence. I’ve turned over maybe nine of them on the drive home. Not one of them is good.

I get up off the floor to go give my hands a job instead.

The Walmart’s busy as always, no matter the time of day. I walk the camping aisle with a list in my head that keeps getting longer. The first sleeping bag I pull off the rack is a summer-weight, a thin nylon. I carry it halfway to the register before I realize it’s not thick enough. It’ll do nothing against concrete.

I go back and find the heavier one, flannel-lined, rated for cold no one will ever see here in Florida. I grab two. One is a blanket and two is a bed. The bags go in the back of the SUV, next to the tequila-infused rug that’s still riding around with me. Then I drive for donuts.

The donut shop is a cinderblock box between a bait store and a nail place. Best donuts on this coast. The bell goes and the girl behind the counter lights up.

“Hey!” she says. “A dozen, Dante?”

She’s nineteen, maybe twenty with flour to the elbows and a marker stuck behind one ear for writing on box lids. Community college sticker on the register. She’s the kind of kid who’s going to run this place or leave this town, and I’ve never been able to guess which.

“A dozen, assorted, and whatever your mama just pulled out of the fryer that I can smell from the parking lot.”

“Crullers.”

“Then it’s not assorted anymore. Three of those, the rest you pick. You’ve got better taste than me.”

“You say that so you don’t have to waste time trying to choose.”

“I say that because it’s true.”

She snaps a pink box open one-handed and starts building it like she’s dealing cards. I lean on the counter and the easy version of me comes back. I buy a lot of donuts in this business. You learn the people who fry them.

“That glaze is criminal, by the way.”

“You say that every time too.”

She rings me up, slides the box across, drops a paper sack of buttermilk bars on top without charging me for them, and dares me with a look to say anything about it. I tip her well. It’s the easiest ten seconds I’ll have all day.

Now I have a pink box on the passenger seat and two sleeping bags in the back. I drive to the beach house.

The gate lifts for a code I could punch in my sleep. I knock. No answer. I give it a count and use the lockbox.

Inside, the terrace glass door is shoved all the way to the wall, the Gulf coming over the threshold hot and thick. I leave it. I gave him that on a handshake, and I’m not the one who breaks handshakes. I check the meter under the supply vent on my way through. Sixty-six and creeping, the AC throwing everything it has at a wide-open door and losing ground by the hour.

It hasn’t warped a floorboard yet. Yet is the margin I’m working with, on the house and on the week both. I’ll take yet. I’ve taken everything else since Saturday.

I set the pink box of donuts on the white marble island. I don’t write a note. A note is a conversation, and I came here to leave a food offering, not to start a conversation I’m not ready to finish.

I turn to go and hear feet on the stairs, bare and fast. Then he’s at the bottom of the staircase in a towel and nothing else. Water running off him, hair dripping dark down his neck. He pulls up short when he sees me standing in the kitchen.

I forget for one full second why I came.