“I hope this helps.”
Thane read the words and read them again, deciding not to sign the message. How could he justify signing Nathaniel when Thane was the name he went by? He pushed send and minimized the program on his screen, forcing himself to focus. No more dilly-dallying. He had work to do.
~~~
Levi sat at the kitchen table, going over the household bills. Another much smaller stack was from the financial aid he’d taken out over the last five or six years. The last pile held the bill collectors; for bills he hadn’t been able to talk the companies into giving him more time to pay. No matter how he organized the stacks, nothing ever changed. No magical wand had been waved, wiping out the debt, and his shoulders began to slump.
Instead of letting the heavy financial load mess with his head, Levi flipped through the household utility bills, making sure nothing was scheduled for disconnect this week. Thankfully, he had time on those. Grabbing all the bills, Levi put them together and placed them on the cabinet, the same location where they’d always belonged.
Grabbing a screwdriver from the cabinet drawer, Levi went to his bedroom and pushed the dresser aside. Carefully, he popped a board out of the flooring. No one in the world knew about this hiding place. He couldn’t see into the dark recesses, but he reached down and pulled out a slim lockbox. He rose, grabbing his wallet off the dresser, and moved to his bed. He’d managed to save four hundred dollars from last week. He took the money from his wallet and opened the lockbox. Like he always did, he counted out all the bills.
Twenty-six hundred dollars. He didn’t know how far that would take them, but if he could keep saving like this, they might actually stand a chance of getting to Maryland and making a go of things.
Levi purposefully ignored the envelope holding five thousand dollars; that was going back to Thane Walker the first chance he got. The reminder had him recalling the simple things about the night he’d shared with Thane. He remembered laughing a lot, even Thane seemed uproariously happy when he’d somehow managed to talk Levi into giving twerking a try. How Thane had even gotten him out on the dance floor in the first place was a mystery. Except it really wasn’t. From the very beginning, Thane had pushed him past his restrictive boundaries in everything they did. Even before he knew the guy, Thane’s nightclub had Levi shucking his clothes, stripping down to just his underwear, serving drinks to horny older men. Not in a million years would he have ever considered a job like that; yet, he had, and he’d done well there. All thanks to Thane’s vision.
Since that initial anger over Thane coming to the house had begun to fade, Levi seemed to be committing every moment of their time together to memory. He’d even somehow gotten to where he excused all of Thane’s assumptions about what kind of man he was. After all, Levi was working in the nightclub, hanging out in that environment. Men throwing money around like nothing he’d ever seen before. And hell, Julian was his friend as well as his boss. Of course, Thane would come to those conclusions—it wasn’t rocket science. Anyone would have thought those things; it’s the exact reason he hadn’t been forthcoming to the people in his life about where he worked.
In the future, he just had to keep his distance from Thane. That wouldn’t be a problem, since he hadn’t heard a word from the man and didn’t expect to. No matter how good they were together, their life philosophies were too far off. Levi had a simplistic view to life. He believed in love and marriage and family. He craved monogamy and normalcy. Thane oozed sophistication and ran in the fast lane. He preferred the Julians of the world—quick, gratifying moments of intimacy with no strings attached. Levi liked all those strings. He hadn’t really known that before, but he did now.
Instead of dwelling on what could have been, Levi took a deep cleansing breath and placed the money back inside the box. He carefully put the lockbox back in its hiding place, sealed the panel in the floor, and moved the dresser back in place.
He looked around the bedroom before heading out into the hall and stopping abruptly. He was in uncharted territory—alone in the house with time to kill before work. The clinic had closed after lunch today. A regional inspection or something like that had sent all the aides home early. He and his brothers had done all the household chores yesterday. He just didn’t know what to do with himself. At a loss, Levi tugged his phone out of his back pocket, found the remote-control app, and went for the sofa before turning on the television.