Stop talking.
I stop talking. Levi and his silences make me nervous. He makes me feel like silence isn’t silence, like it’s something I can’t hear, something I’m not paying attention to. Like if I just listen hard enough, suddenly I’ll hear.
“One question,” he finally says reflectively, taking another sip of hot chocolate, standing on the other side of the kitchen island. “Do the dogs belong to celebrities, or are the dogs themselves celebrities?”
“The former,” I tell him. “But thank you for my next pitch.”
“You could do a whole series on celebrity pets,” he says. “Cats. Dogs. Birds. Hamsters.”
“I could write about weird celebrity pets,” I say, swirling the last third of my cocoa in the mug. “I could write a think piece about the meaning of pets, and what exactly constitutes a pet. Is an outdoor cat truly a pet? Can a lizard love you back? If you feed the birds, do they become your pets?”
On the floor, the dog sighs dramatically and puts her head on her paws.
“Do animals have to have names to be considered pets?” I muse.
“She has a name, I just don’t know it,” Levi.
“You poor thing,” I tell the dog.
Her tail thumps on the floor twice.
“Alice. Brenda,” I guess at her. No reaction. “Chanel. Denise. Florentina.”
“Georgette,” says Levi. “We’re going in alphabetical order, right? Harriet.”
The dog doesn’t react in the least.
“I don’t think it’s Harriet,” I say.
There’s another silence. I shift my weight against the counter, still standing, the pot that held the hot chocolate still sitting on a trivet to my right, empty.
I take a deep breath, wait, and listen to the silence.
“I don’t want to name her while I’m still actively looking for her owners,” Levi finally says, his low, unhurried voice drifting through the silence. “If I give her a name, I’ll feel like she’s mine, and I’d hate to do that only to have to give her back.”
“You could stop looking,” I say, my mug between my palms. “You don’t have to. You probably won’t find them if you haven’t already.”
“I’d want someone to find me if I lost her,” he says. “How could I do any differently?”
This time the silence is mine, even as just stop trying to find them, it’s that easy is on the tip of my tongue, because I know he’s right, or at least right for himself. Levi couldn’t do differently.
“Print journalism is dying,” I say suddenly, and take the last sip of my hot chocolate, now cold and gritty, but still good. “No one wants to pay for the news anymore. No one even wants to read the news any more, they just want to see feel-good stories about ducklings getting rescued from storm drains and kids in Thanksgiving parades, and they want to read endless lists of The Ten Worst Bridezillas Ever or You Won’t Believe What These Moms Are Doing On The Beach. I never really answered your question earlier. That’s how my job hunt is going. Shitty.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and then he looks up at me. I feel like a mosquito trapped in the gold-brown amber of his eyes, even as I notice other things about him: that he has a few light freckles on his cheeks, that he’s steadily, slowly, rubbing one thumb along the outside of the mug as he cups it in his big, rough hand.
“I’m sorry,” he finally says. “Looking for a job is shit.”
“I think I have to do something else and I don’t know what,” I admit.
“Do you want to do something else?” he asks.
“I want to have a job and get out of here again,” I say. “I want to not live in my childhood bedroom and hear my mom singing in the shower or my dad belching in the kitchen anymore. I want my stupid brother to stop acting like my ex-boyfriend is the leader of a terrorist cell instead of just some dickhead.”
I shut my mouth, but it’s too late because I just mentioned Brett to Levi and I didn’t mean to. I’m sure he knows, because Silas has never kept anything to himself in his entire life, but I didn’t want to talk about Brett in front of him.
“Anyway,” I say, trying to steer this conversation back away from my bad boyfriend choices, “I think I have to figure out something else to do with my life and I don’t know what that is, and to be honest I don’t really want to find another career because I liked this one. Mostly.”
“You’ll figure it out,” he says, softly. “If nothing else, through sheer tenacity.”
“Tenacity,” I repeat, both hands around my empty mug. “I like that. Usually it gets called pig-headedness.”
Levi just smiles. He holds out one hand, across the counter, and suddenly my heart hitches. My insides get gooey. My heart beats faster and instantly, I feel like I’m six again and he’s nine, climbing onto the counter to rescue my stuffed bunny that Silas put up there.