“That’s a movie?” he asks, eyes narrowed.
I narrow my eyes back at him in jest, though I have no idea whether Levi realizes it’s a joke or not.
He can be… inscrutable.
“Technically, it’s also a book,” I say. “About a woman. Who’s a princess. And also a bride, thus the catchy name.”
“Girl, are you a princess?” he asks the dog.
The dog sits, looking up at Levi, wagging her tail and grinning a doggy grin.
“No? What about a bride?”
Same reaction from the dog, and Levi looks back at me. I’m about sixty percent sure he’s smiling, but I can’t quite tell.
Levi makes me feel off-balance and helter skelter, like everything I say is either too much or not enough, like I’m an object of some scientific interest. I am, generally speaking, good with people. I’m good at gauging their reactions to me, good at understanding how to speak and act to make others comfortable, good at saying the appropriate thing for a situation.
It’s why I’m a good journalist. Or at least, it’s why I was a good journalist. I’m good at getting people to talk to me.
Not Levi.
Levi is a mystery wrapped in an enigma stuffed into a crate labeled puzzle, and I don’t think he likes me.
Let me clarify. I don’t think he dislikes me. I just get the feeling that, to Levi, the vast majority of people fall into the neutral feelings category, and he feels as strongly about us as he does rocks or dirt or the sky above.
“These are the smallest things I could find,” he says, and even though he’s holding out a stack of clothes it still takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about, because he throws me so off-balance.
“Thanks,” I say, pushing myself off the floor.
He offers me his other hand. I take it. It’s big and rough and strong, qualities which certainly do not give me a dangerous, deep-down thrill.
“I’d offer you use of my shower but I’m afraid the well pump runs on electricity,” he says, pushing his hands back into his pockets. “But I’ve got several buckets of emergency water outside, and if you’d like I can bring some in for your use.”
His eyes.
I’d almost forgotten about his eyes: light brown, the color of deep amber. I’d forgotten the way they always seem lit from within, like candles behind a stained glass window.
“That’s okay,” I hear myself saying. “I’m fine, really, as long as you don’t mind these clothes getting a little gross—”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Carrying buckets of water inside is trouble.”
“Certainly not more trouble than I’m used to.”
“How much trouble are you used to?” I ask, raising one eyebrow.
Levi half-frowns, half-smiles, like he’s amused and consternated all at once.
“More than you might think,” he says, and turns away from me, heads for his back door. “I’ll be right back with the water and there’s nothing you can do about it, June.”Chapter ThreeLeviJune is now nude in my bathroom.
Presumably. It’s a reasonable assumption to make, that several minutes after carrying in two large buckets of water, setting them in the shower despite her protests, and pointing out the soap and shampoo, she has disrobed and is currently bathing.
Silas’s little sister. Naked. Right now. On the other side of that wall.
It’s a thought I shouldn’t be thinking at all, but it’s impossibly distracting. I turn away, toward the dim interior of the house, averting my eyes as if that will help.
It doesn’t help.
June makes me feel like I suddenly no longer understand the world I thought I inhabited. She makes me feel as though I’m walking through brand-new territory without a map or a compass.
She makes me feel as though, without warning, the solid wall that I built with my own two hands might suddenly turn into panes of clear glass. That the world is topsy-turvy and unpredictable and that there are entire dimensions to reality that I’d never even considered before, waiting for me to discover them.
And yet every time I talk to her, there’s that iron fist in my gut, the squeezing heaviness that whispers you traitor, he trusts you. Even though I’ve done nothing.
Besides bring her home. Besides invite her to get naked in your bathroom while you think about the way water would run over her—
“Don’t,” I growl out loud to myself, standing in my kitchen, facing away from the bathroom door.
The dog gives me a look.
“Not you,” I say, and she yawns.
Finally, in the absence of June, she comes over and presents the sock monkey to me. After a few minutes of wrestling, she lets me check her paw, which is almost completely healed, nothing more than a pink line in a patch of shaved fur.
A few weeks ago, my younger brother Eli was hosting a barbecue at his house when the dog wandered up. She was dirty, skinny, and limping, but she was friendly, and I’ve got a soft spot for animals.