I admit that I don’t mind being dry and safe.
I also admit that I don’t hate the continuation of the Levi Loveless Wet T-Shirt Extravaganza, even though I feel guilty that he’s all alone in the rain while I could be helping.
I grab another dry towel from the back of the cab, where there are plenty, and watch Levi circle my car with the roadside flares. He does it the way he seems to do everything: methodically, purposefully, as though this is all part of some plan.
He does it this way despite the driving rain, despite the lightning and thunder that are still all around us. I still jump every time the sky lights up and the boom sounds like it’ll split the earth in half, but Levi is completely unperturbed.
There are worse things to watch. He’s still got the gloves and boots on, which aren’t exactly what Chippendales fantasies are made of, but the rest?
Yes. Hi. Hello, wet t-shirt and big muscles and broad shoulders.
My younger, hopelessly-and-secretly-crushing-on-Levi-Loveless self is feeling very vindicated right now. She gets even more vindication as he walks to the edge of the forest, ducks inside, then comes out holding up a huge, long tree branch.
His body tenses. His muscles knot. I use a towel to wipe the steam from the inside of the windshield. He reaches out with the branch and nudges the passenger door of my car closed, then drops it back on the ground.
I don’t know when, exactly, I first started crushing on Levi Loveless. He was always hanging around with Silas, so it’s hard to pinpoint.
I just know that one day, my attitude toward Levi was he’s pretty cool and sometime later it was I think I want Levi to kiss me.
I was far from alone in my Loveless crush. If you were a lady of a certain age in Sprucevale, it was pretty much a rite of passage to have a crush on a Loveless brother.
There are five of them, and even as teenagers Lord in heaven were they good looking.
The girls my age were split between Eli, the second oldest, and Daniel, the middle of the five. Eli was competitive, smart, and a total wiseass, but mostly nice. Daniel — who graduated from high school the same year as me — was the hell raiser, always in trouble, down at the Sherriff’s station with some regularity.
He’s got a daughter and a fiancée now. Apparently, he’s straightened his act out, because last time I saw him, he gave me the stinkeye for saying damn in front of his kid.
Seth and Caleb were a few years younger, but everyone’s little sister had a crush on one of them. Seth was the second-youngest, good at baseball and so charming he should have had a warning sign. Caleb was three years younger than me, and despite his rugged, free-spirit vibe, he was already taking college-level math classes and the senior girls were lining up for homework help.
Levi was the oldest. The same age as Silas, three years ahead of me, a senior when I was a freshman.
He was the odd one out, because no one but me had a crush on Levi.
To this day, I don’t understand why. In a batch of five abnormally good-looking brothers, he’s the hottest — in my opinion, anyway, an opinion which clearly has not changed.
Levi was nice to little sisters. He rescued baby birds who fell from nests. He chopped wood for grandmothers, a moment that may or may not have contributed to my very first (and, in retrospect, very tame) sexual fantasy.
But then again, Levi was… weird.
In a school that emptied out the first day of deer hunting season every year, he was a vegetarian. He carried a book everywhere he went, and it wasn’t unusual to see him reading a paperback as he walked through the hallways from class to class. There was a solid six months where he wore a corduroy blazer over a t-shirt to school every single day, and I never did find out why.
I have no clue what he and my brother Silas — football star, middling student, obnoxious Big Man on Campus type — saw in each other, but they’ve been thicker than thieves since they were kids, and adulthood hasn’t changed that.
Outside the truck, Levi surveys his work, standing perfectly still in the driving rain, his shirt sticking to him like a second skin. I’m tempted to take a picture, but I know that would be straight-up creepy, so I commit it to memory instead.
Then he nods to himself and walks around to the back of the truck, takes off the gloves and boots, flops them into the bed, and opens the driver’s side door.
The water’s just dripping from him: his nose, his beard, his eyebrows, even his hair, knotted behind his head. I have ten thousand dirty thoughts.