Page 81 of Levi

Jesus Christ.

Dante would have a fit. “Keep a coaster under that water bottle,” I hear myself say. “It rings the wood.”

Freddie looks at me. Looks at the coaster. Looks at me again. “Since when do you care about a water ring? I didn’t realize you knew what they are.”

“It’s a rental,” I say. “They charge you for every mark.”

It’s thin, and it isn’t the truth. A water ring on the table might cost Dante a sale from the rich buyer that’s circling around. The contract hasn’t been signed yet.

Somewhere this week I turned into a man who guards a house he’s about to get put out of. A water ring on his table feels like letting somebody hurt Dante. None of that goes anywhere near Freddie.

“The office chose well with the house,” Freddie says, drifting to the window, looking out at the water. “Private beach. No fans to bother you out here.” He glances around the big empty room, and I feel the question coming before he asks it. “Owner ever come by?”

“Never seen or heard from an owner. There’s not a soul in any of the houses on this street. Might even be corporate owned.”

“Anyone got a key besides you?”

And there’s the question I’ve been dreading. The thread that runs straight to Dante if I let him pull it. A lockbox on the side door, Dante letting himself in to check the place and walk a buyer through, the business of a sale running under Freddie’s rental. If Freddie catches one corner of it, he’ll want to manage it. Managing it means meeting Dante.

I stay flat and keep my eyes off the side door. “Cleaner comes on Fridays. Property manager swung by to make sure I wasn’t throwing house parties. That’s it. Place came empty and it suits me empty.”

“Huh.” He takes that and tucks it away. Then he gets to the reason he drove over. “I want people around you.” He says it like it’s already settled. “Couple of the guys take the back rooms here, keep an eye, make sure you’re sleeping, make sure you’re —” he doesn’t say it, “— make sure you’re ready. We open Saturday. I’m not walking into a two-week run with my headliner held together with tape.”

And the hell of it is he’s not wrong. He’s got the receipts. He’s scraped me off a Nashville hotel floor more than once. He knows what I am alone with a bad night and a minibar. He’s just never known the difference between caretaking and owning. To Freddie they’re the same verb.

“No,” I say.

It comes out quiet and hits loud. I don’t draw lines. Never have. Freddie’s face changes, because I go along. That’s the deal, that’s what I’m here for. And here I am with my boots planted in a rented living room, telling him no for the first time.

“No?”

“Nobody stays at the house with me.” I’ve got reasons stacked high and I give him the ones that’ll hold. “Crew in here round the clock and I don’t sleep at all. You know I don’t sleep with people in the house, never have. I’ll be worse by Saturday, not better. I need the privacy. I’ve been better down here than I’ve been in years and that’s why.”

All true, every word.

A house full of crew means somebody figures out what’s going on with Dante and the house sale.

“I’ll do the work. I’ll hit every call. Just let me have the house.”

Freddie studies me a long time. I’ve handed him a symptom dressed up as a preference. I can’t sleep with people around.

“Fine,” he says, and it isn’t fine. “You can have your privacy.” He picks his bag off the couch. “But I’ll be checking on you.”

I know he means it. Freddie doesn’t like not knowing what I’m doing. He’ll come find out for himself. That’s a given.

I walk him out. He thumbs at his phone on the front step and an Uber comes up the drive inside of a minute. Freddie doesn’t drive himself, never has. Driving is for the help. I don’t breathe right until it clears the gate and he’s on the other side.

The stylist comes for my new beard that same afternoon. She sits me in a kitchen chair with a towel around my neck, a little battery clipper, and her shears. Talks about the humidity wrecking her flat iron. I watch it happen in the black mirror of the window.

It comes off in about a minute. The beard I started growing before I got on the plane. The beard that let me be a nobody at a bonfire, that let a bartender slide me a plate and not place me. And it surrenders without a word to a fifteen-dollar clipper. The jawline comes back. The one on the poster that’ll be going up.

I watch the line of it come up out from under the clipper, sharp and clean and famous, and there’s no fight in it at all. Days of being nobody, gone in one pass, and the old one walks right back in like it never left and puts its feet up.

Then she wets my hair down and takes the shears to it. Off my ears, off the back of my neck, every inch I’ve let grow since I got on the plane coming away in wet dark pieces onto the towel, down onto the beard already on the floor. She works product through what’s left, combs it the way the photos do, steps back.

“There he is,” she says, pleased. She means it kind, and it’s the worst thing anybody’s said to me since I got here.

Like the beard was the costume and this is the truth.