“I don’t think I helped you very much by letting you know your brother is dead,” Levi scoffed.
“How else would I have found out?” I argued. “It was my brother who told me to stay put. If I didn’t know he was gone, who knows how long I would’ve stayed in that town…that job…that house.”
“Your brother wanted you to stay there?”
“Only until he saved up enough money to move me to the city,” I said. “That was the plan before he died.”
“Which is why he asked me to help,” Levi said. “He wanted me to help get you to New York City, like he’d promised.”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s why I’m saying that your obligation to my brother ends once we land. You don’t even have to give me a ride from the airport.”
“Don’t be silly,” Levi said. “I’m having a car meet us at the airport. It would be ludicrous if I didn’t take you to wherever you needed to go. And wasteful. Where do you want to go, once we land?”
I froze. The plan had always been to get out of my hometown and get to New York City. I hadn’t ever thought very hard about the next part of what was going to happen. New York City had always seemed like the culmination of everything—not a beginning.
“Meagan, do you even have anywhere to go in New York City?” Levi seemed more resigned than incredulous, which meant he was getting to know me better with each passing revelation.
“No, but I’m sure I’ll find my way,” I said, forcing cheer into my voice, even if the idea was daunting. “I have enough money for several nights at a hotel. And then the rest of everything will fall into place.”
“I’m half a mind to turn this car right back around and drive you home,” he warned.
“Then you wouldn’t be helping me,” I reminded him. “You’d be back to owing my brother one.”
“You don’t understand,” Levi said, wheeling in to the airport entrance. I noticed that he bypassed all of the regular signage threatening prosecution and dismemberment and all forms of punishment that led all other motorists to the entrance of the terminal, following other routes, waved on by security personnel. “I don’t just owe your brother ‘one.’ I owe him my entire life, and that’s why I’m going to do everything in my power to get you exactly what you need to be successful.”
“I’m going to be successful. You wait and see. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing, yet, but I’m going to be good at it. I have a strong work ethic.”
“I witnessed you physically pushing paying customers out of the bar where you work and locking the door during business hours.” Levi stared at me meaningfully as he parked the car on the tarmac near a small but sleek plane that I figured had to be the jet he’d mentioned.
“If you’ll remember, it was for a very good reason,” I said, raising my own eyebrows at him. “An extremely pleasurable reason.”
“Yes, it was extremely pleasurable,” Levi agreed. “When we land in New York City, you’ll be joining me in the car I’ve ordered to meet us, you’ll let me take you out to dinner, and you’ll be staying with me in my townhouse until I decide that you’re ready to be out on your own.”
“Is everyone in the city so bossy?” I asked, wrinkling my nose as a valet opened my door for me.
“New York City is very different from your…hamlet.” Levi shook his head at the valet who was trying to pluck my plastic bag from my grasp—ostensibly to put under the plane for safe keeping. We walked to the plane, and I saw that he was gallantly offering me his arm when I was a couple of yards away. I slipped my arm through his.
“Hamlet is the nicest way I’ve ever heard my town described,” I remarked, enjoying the warmth of his body next to me in the cold night. It was going to be a harsh winter—everyone was saying so—but at least I wouldn’t stick around to find out. New York City seemed like paradise. I fully expected to step off the plane and into tropical summer or something.
“The town was nice enough.” Levi helped me up the steps to the plane as if he were afraid I’d tumble down them.
“The town was a dump.” Especially compared to the inside of this jet. There were several seats and a long couch covered in buttery soft camel-colored leather. It was the nicest room I’d ever seen, and it was inside a plane. I slipped my hand down it, wondered what it would feel like against my bare skin, and realized I wanted to find out.
I wanted to find out specifically with Levi.
That was a strange thing to realize—that as an attendant closed the door and Levi sat down next to me on the couch, I wanted to have sex with this man and this man only. It wasn’t that we were about to take off with him as my only option until we landed again. No, it was that lightness I’d experienced after we were together. The opposite of shame. The sense that things were going to get better and better. I wanted to be with him—needed to be with him—in order to see this new feeling through.
I never thought anything was going to get better. I’d come to believe that I was stuck in some kind of awful limbo, forced to creep around that damn house, afraid of memories of the past.
It was Levi who’d done what my brother couldn’t. He’d saved me—or at least gotten me out of there.
The sudden pressure of takeoff made me gasp. I’d been lost in my thoughts, lost in my wonderment that this was actually happening. I fully expected to wake up suddenly and see that it was morning, light coming in through the windows of the house as I stretched on my cushion pallet and examined my soreness and stiffness from sleeping there.
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” I asked, looking up at Levi.
“I was just wondering the same thing.”
I laughed at him. “You probably fly in this thing all the time.”
“For business, sure. Not for something like this.”
“I’m not just business?”
“Absolutely not.”
I looked out one of the windows, hoping to catch one last look at the town I’d grew up in, the town that had let me down and nearly destroyed me. I wanted to give it some parting shot, a double-handed middle finger salute, for example, but I didn’t recognize anything from below. There were no constellations of ground lights that meant anything to me, and maybe that was just as important to understand.
That town and the house within it hadn’t been my home. I could make my home elsewhere.
I was going to the place Levi called home, and I could stay there for as long as I wanted, as long as it took me to figure out just how I was going to make it in New York City.
Did he have to know that I had no intention of leaving him anytime soon? That could be my little secret for the time being.
I couldn’t leave someone who made me feel the way that Levi did, not until I figured out why and how to make it happen with anyone else who crossed my path. I craved that goodness, craved that light, and was quickly figuring out how to wean myself off the darkness that had been my sole friend for years of my life.
“Do you have your mile-high club membership?” I asked, grinning as Levi flushed and directed a forceful nod at the attendant, who was busily serving us a pair of cocktails.
“If you mean what I think you do, the answer’s no.”
“No?” I was surprised. “You’re not one of those kinky, repressed billionaires who has sex with beautiful women at every possible opportunity?”
“I work hard,” he said, sipping the drink. I was pleased to see that it was whiskey, and wondered when he’d alerted the attendant to his change of preferred liquors. I took a sip of the drink placed in front of me and smiled. They were both Manhattans—very appropriate. “And there’s only one beautiful woman I could think of right now whom I’d want to have sex with.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said, clinking my glass with his. “You already know I’d be more than willing to have sex with you. You don’t have to lie to me.”
“Lie about what?” Levi looked genuinely confused, which was cute.
“About the way I look.”
He shook his head and frowned at me. “You’re a beautiful woman, Meagan. That’s no lie.”
“I’m average, at best,” I said. “What I lack in looks I make up for with forwardness.”
It was his turn to laugh. “Believe me, you’re the full package on those two fronts. Haven’t you looked at yourself in a mirror?”
I generally tried to avoid that, but that wasn’t something I thought would make for good conversation, so I just shrugged.
“You have an amazing figure, if you don’t mind me saying so,” he said. “And your hair is a shade of auburn that most women would pay top dollar for a stylist to replicate.”
“It’s just red hair,” I said, rolling my eyes at him.
“It’s auburn,” he insisted, “and don’t get me started on those green eyes.”
“Enough.” I sipped my drink, embarrassed. “I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”
“I’m more than ready to dole them out, especially if you don’t actually think you’re beautiful.”
It was hard to think of myself with that adjective, especially when I’d felt so ugly for so long. I’d been living in an ugly place, doing ugly things to get by as recently as yesterday. If Levi hadn’t come along, I would’ve been mired there for God knew how long, waiting for my brother to save me.
“Well, I’m not a member of the mile-high club,” I said, falling back on my old faithful way out of any situation I didn’t feel a hundred percent about. “You think you could help make it happen for a peasant like me?”
“Tell you what.” Levi waved the attendant away, who vanished into the cockpit with the pilot. “If you can admit that you’re beautiful, we can join the mile-high club together.”
I wasn’t used to sex with caveats. I was used to getting what I wanted.
“That’s stupid,” I said, sipping my drink.
“What’s stupid is that you can’t see it.”
I wanted the sex. That’s the only reason I said my next words. “Fine. I’m beautiful.”
“Was that so hard?”
There was something between us that certainly was hard. Levi pulled me into his lap and undressed us—he was getting so good at it—and we struck up a friendly, leisurely pace. I liked this. I liked this casual gentleness. There wasn’t a need for desperation. There wasn’t anything to run away from right now. There was only us and this delicious furniture.
Us and this feeling.
We missed the lights of Manhattan from the window as we were too engrossed in each other. By the time we landed, I’d had so many Manhattans to celebrate that we had to go straight to Levi’s townhouse, forgoing the dinner he’d wanted to treat me to.
I was so tired that I only barely registered the rich wood floors of the townhouse, the opulent furniture that looked too fancy to touch, and the way everything sort of gleamed.
“Straight to bed,” Levi said, a smile in his voice as he kissed my forehead and tucked the covers around me.
It wasn’t long before I was hearing the same voice say, “Meagan.”
I stretched and searched my body for its various aches and pains, but there was nothing there. Puzzled, my mind flailed around for a little bit. Had I not spent the night on my couch cushion pallet? I wasn’t stiff or sore. I felt incredible, in fact. Where could I possibly be?
I cracked an eye open to see Levi seated next to me, a steaming mug of coffee in hand. He was already dressed, and I wondered if I’d overslept something.
“What time is it?” I croaked, feeling groggier than I usually was upon waking with the sun.
“It’s nearly three in the afternoon.”
“What?” I nearly burned myself on the coffee I’d taken from him, and his hands fluttered around the mug as if he could save me from my own clumsiness.
“You must’ve been really tired,” Levi remarked. “You never woke up—not even once. When’s the last time you’ve slept in a comfortable bed?”
“Never mind that,” I said, pushing myself up to a sitting position and blowing on the hot coffee. “I’m an early riser. Just what was in those Manhattans we drank?”
“Nothing you’ve never had before,” he said, smiling. “Your body needed rest, and that’s what it got.”
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” I’d slept too long—nearly fourteen hours—and yet I felt like I could sleep all day.
“The company can run itself. I’ve created it to be pretty self-sufficient.”
“Careful with that, or they’ll decide that you’re expendable.”
“I’m not expendable. I own the place.”
“Well, you don’t have to stick around here on my account.” I took a perfunctory sip of the coffee, which was roughly a hundred times better than what I’d been buying for myself at the gas station each morning back in town. I couldn’t play that game or I’d never be able to stop. Things in New York City were going to be better than things in my stupid town. That was just the reality. I was going to get old and gray by the time I finished making comparisons.
“Actually, I feel like I should,” Levi said. “I was hoping you’d feel up to making the arrangements for your brother’s funeral today.”
I grimaced. Definitely not the way I wanted to spend my first day in the city, but I recognized that it needed to be done. I wouldn’t even be here if Matt hadn’t sent Levi to get me. I had to pay my respects—and figure out how to send my brother off in a way that made sense.
“I really don’t want it to be anything big,” I said. “I wasn't lying when I said I was the only one left. There’s nothing more depressing than a small funeral.” I knew that one from experience. “I’d be the only one there.”
“That’s not true,” Levi said. “I’d be there.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do. He saved my life. And even though he was on the payroll, I really did consider him a friend. I’m not saying that for your consolation. It’s the truth.”
I decided, in the end, that cremation was fine. That the funeral could just be us in the room with my brother before they burned his body. That seemed to satisfy whatever part of Levi wanted the ritual of the final rites.
“Do you want to see your brother before they put him in?” Levi asked. “All of the formalities—the paperwork, the identification—that’s all taken care of. It would only be if you wanted to. Before he’s cremated.”
***
I wondered if I should be crying—if he expected me to cry. I just didn’t feel like crying. And I didn’t understand the draw of gazing upon the face of someone who was dead. He wasn’t going to hear me if I came up with anything to say. There weren’t going to be any pearls of wisdom I was going to catch from those dead lips.
Still, there was the fear that I might regret not seeing him, consigning him to the flames without that last look.
“I’ll be quick,” I said, motioning to the technician standing by, who opened the coffin.
“Take your time,” she said. “There’s no hurry.”
“I guess he isn’t going anywhere,” I said, wincing at my own poorly timed joked. I didn’t know what to do or say, didn’t understand how I needed to act. This was the second person I’d lost in my life to an untimely, violent death. It didn’t get any easier.
I cast my eyes downward, and sure enough, there was Matt. Levi hadn’t been lying to me. My brother was lying in the casket, ready to be transformed into ashes that I could store in a convenient urn.
I willed those eyes open again, even if I knew I was an idiot for doing so. He was dead. Gone. This body was an empty vessel. It wasn’t my brother anymore.
And yet I did have questions for him. Why had he pushed Levi out of the way? Why hadn’t he just let the man take the bullet that was intended for him? What was the special thing that my brother had seen in Levi to save him? And why had he asked Levi to save me?
I thought I’d known my brother well, but maybe I only knew him as well as he had known me. I’d made sure that Matt didn’t know what had ha
ppened to me, that he knew as little as possible about the hell he’d left behind when he went to New York City.
But somehow, with his dying breath, he knew that I still required saving, and had sent Levi to complete a task he hadn’t been able to do.
Maybe Matt knew more than I thought he did.
There was no more knowledge I could glean here. I stepped away and nodded at the technician, hoping I looked like I’d been making peace with the fact that my brother was dead.
Levi put his arm around me as the technician closed the casket again and turned on the conveyer belt, feeding my brother into the oven. I waited there, expecting to feel grief, but there was just a gaping emptiness. My brother’s death had brought the man beside me into my life. It was a never-ending cycle of loss and gain. I’d known that long before I met Levi.
I itched to go somewhere—anywhere—away from here, but I forced myself to be patient, to draw strength from the warmth of the man beside me, and the relentless professionalism of the technician in charge of this operation.
“You can go, if you’d like,” she said, and I was so thankful that I could’ve kissed her on the mouth. “This is something of a process. We’ll have the remains ready for you in the urn you selected in a few hours.”
“Let’s go,” I said eagerly, looking up at Levi. “Leave the professionals to their jobs.”
“If that’s what you’d like to do.”
Grief was a funny thing—a twisting, unexpected thing that I couldn’t begin to understand. I’d loved my brother, and depended on him. Why couldn’t I hold vigil there at the facility, staying with him until his transformation to ash was complete? I simply didn’t want to. I wanted a distraction. I needed one.
We had a late lunch—or an early dinner—and Levi took me driving around the city, silent as I vibrated with excitement at the looming buildings, the landmarks I’d only ever dreamed about, the crush of people all wanting to be here, right here, in this city. My heart beat in time with the pulse of this place. This was going to be home.
ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5) Page 98
