Page 44 of Levi

He’s clean. I’ve only ever seen him sweated through and hungover, and this is a different man. The hair’s pushed back wet off his face. The stubble’s gone past stubble into a beard that’s filling in. It suits him. It sets off a jaw I’d already noticed as too symmetrical to be fair.

Water’s tracking down a chest and a stomach I’ve never seen. He’s been buried in a black t-shirt since Saturday. His body is not the type built in front of a gym mirror. He looks strong, maybe from work, country muscle through the shoulders and the arms. There’s a happy trail going straight down into the towel, and my eyes follow it before I can stop them.

Heat goes through me, low and fast, nothing subtle about it. My mouth has gone dry. I make myself look at his face, which does not help, and I put one hand flat on the cold marble like the island is going to keep me steady. I close on eight-figure properties without my pulse moving. Right now, I can hear it in my ears.

“Dante.” He’s got one hand loosely on the towel. “What are you doing here? I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I knocked. Then I let myself in.” It comes out level, barely.

His eyes find the pink box on the marble. His face shuts down a little, the casual expression going careful. “Is somebody coming over? The house isn’t presentable for buyers.”

“No.” I shake my head. “I brought a box of donuts. For you. As a peace offering.”

“For what?”

“Putting my hands on you this morning. Yelling at you in Spanish. Losing my temper.” I focus my eyes north of his collarbone through raw discipline. “I apologize. That’s not who I am. I wanted you to know that.”

He smiles at me.

I’ve felt him freeze under my hand. I’ve watched him sleep on a concrete floor. I have never once seen him smile like this. It reaches his eyes and takes years of bad nights off him at once, and the heat that hasn’t finished leaving my body finds somewhere lower to live.

I understand all over again, worse than even this morning, exactly the kind of trouble I’m getting into with him.

“No need to apologize,” he says, smiling. “I dragged you out of bed in the middle of the night with an emergency and made you come get me out of jail. You earned the right to shove me into a refrigerator.”

“No.” I shake my head again. “I didn’t earn that right. And it won’t happen again.”

Chapter 15: Levi

I believe him.

Many people have promised things to me, and I learned young to count the seconds before they took it back. Dante doesn’t take things back. He’s standing in my rental kitchen apologizing to me after the night I put him through.

Where I come from, a man who grabs you doesn’t drive across town with donuts in a pink box after. He pretends it didn’t happen, or he tells you that you had it coming. The last thing I was prepared for was an apology from him.

I cross to the island. He slides the box an inch closer to me, and I notice he doesn’t come around it. He stays on his side with the marble between us like a fence line, and he’s got one hand laid flat on the countertop.

“I thought you might be hungry,” he says.

“I already ate a big breakfast off a delivery app.” I put a hand on the lid. “You drove all the way out here to bring me a box of donuts? That’s a lot of trouble for a man you put into a refrigerator this morning.”

“It’s a peace offering. It doesn’t mean anything past that.”

“Everything means something with you. You don’t do one thing by accident. A man as particular as you drives here with a pretty pink box, and I’m supposed to believe it’s nothing?”

“Believe what you want. Open the box, Levi. I didn’t choose the color.”

I flip the box open. A dozen of them, glazed and powdered and chocolate, three fat crullers riding the middle. I turn the box so it’s facing him and look up.

“Which one do you want?” I ask him.

While I was turning the box, I felt him staring at me. At the water sliding off my hair onto the marble, at the towel, at my chest. By the time I glance up his eyes are back on the donuts, but they landed there a half second too late.

“They’re all for you,” he says.

“Haven’t you heard it’s bad luck to eat donuts alone?” I keep my hand on the box, not picking yet, leaving him the first move. I don’t know why it matters that he goes first. It just does.

“I don’t believe in luck.”