I stared. Was he proposing—was he was asking if I would sleep with him? I already knew the answer, and I opened my mouth to tell him. Yes. Yes, we would go back to our building, put Coral in my living room, and make use of the mattress that he thought was toddler-sized but was actually very comfortable. How much space did you even need for sex? We didn’t have to do a lot of frenzied rolling or gymnastic moves. I opened my mouth to respond but took a trembling breath before I said the word.
Levi spoke first. “Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s not how I’m going to act anymore.”
I closed my lips and swallowed.
“I was such an asshole and it was because I felt like crap about myself, so I was using women to feel better,” he continued.
“Were they anticipating any kind of commitment?” I asked. “Did you have coercive power over them, or had you lied to get them to sleep with you?”
“What? No! No, of course not.”
“Then you weren’t using them,” I said. “No one had expectations for anything more. What makes it bad is when you trust people and your heart is involved.”
“I don’t think I ever involved anyone’s heart,” Levi told me, but he was very wrong about that.
Chapter 12
Ileaned back from the screen and blinked a few times, and then I rubbed my hip. I’d been sitting in the same place and working for hours on the accounts of two clients, new ones passed along to me through my new contacts. One was a bakery owned by a friend of Ava’s husband Jeff, and another was a burgeoning fashion enterprise run by one of the Curran sisters, Levi’s former neighbors who had taught him to dance. Her finances were in perfect order but the bakery was a real mess, and it was taking me forever to get through everything. In anticipation of that, the baker had dropped off a pink box of doughnuts and other pastries that I appreciated a lot. Levi would, too, when he got home.
That should have been by now, but I wasn’t monitoring him Hernán-style. Levi was an adult and he had lots of friends and family members that he might want to hang out with. Or maybe he was staying later at work to make a good impression so he would move faster up their corporate ladder, even though the job didn’t really interest him and made him frown.
So I wasn’t monitoring, but I did look at the time every now and then and wonder. I definitely didn’t text to ask where he was. I was fully aware of how people didn’t like you to be all over them, spamming them with messages. Also, it was none of my business where he was because the relationship bonds we had didn’t give me any claim on him.
But I quickly swiveled when I heard a car in the street outside the building. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the noise of his particular car. This was a vehicle I didn’t recognize, but it was very nice—no, I did recognize it, I realized when I walked closer to the window to get a better look. It was the white Porsche that had been here before, and I also recognized the woman who paused for a moment to check her hair in the rearview mirror, to apply lipstick, and then to examine her teeth before she opened the driver’s door and exited.
Vivienne was back.
“What is she doing here again?” I asked Coral, who meowed. “I better go see before she has another fit about the apartment buzzers not working.” I paused as I thought. “You know what? She can just stay there and whine! Hernán’s not around anymore to let her in and I don’t care if she’s on the steps all night. She would never last, anyway. She won’t do for anything for more than a few minutes without getting bored and quitting.”
Coral didn’t care, but she listened instead of hiding or sitting by the front door, tense and ready to escape. She hadn’t done either of those things in a while, which was a relief.
“Hello? Hello?” Vivienne’s haughty voice demanded from outside.
The knocking started, too, but I turned back to my laptop screen. “We’re ignoring her,” I told the cat, and now she did run away. I couldn’t blame her; the knocking had become pounding and these walls were pretty thin.
“Emerson?Open this and come out!Emerson?Emerson?Emerson!”
It went on like that for much, much longer than I expected. The only other time I’d heard Vivienne carry on in a similar way was when there had been mushrooms on her plate when we’d been served our entrees at one of the nicest restaurants in Chicago. The thing was, she’d ordered mushroom risotto, but then she’d also said that she didn’t eat carbs and made them take the whole thing back.
“Emerson!”
It was too loud. Now I knew some of the other neighbors on this street due to all the walks I was taking, and I was aware that they wouldn’t appreciate what Hernán would have called ajaleoon our doorstep. He’d continued to try to teach me Spanish by sending voice memos and texts, and then I would practice the words with Levi. I seemed to be picking up a few things.
I went toward the bathroom to check myself in the mirror but halfway there, I stopped and shook my head. Instead, I swiveled went to open the front door.
“Finally!” Vivienne said. “I could have been mugged.”
I looked up and down the quiet, safe, residential street. “No, that wouldn’t have happened. What do you want now?”
“I can’t stand out here,” she answered, and she actually looked nervous about it.
“I’m not letting you in,” I told her. “The last time I did that, you wouldn’t leave. What do you want?”
“At least come sit in my car so I can lock the doors,” she said, and I hesitated but answered fine, ok. The sky had turned very dark and it looked like rain was coming, and there was no awning over these steps. Also, and despite myself, I wanted to know why she was here. Again.
First, she had to get all the exercise equipment out of the front seat to make room for me. She did that by gathering it into her arms and throwing it into the back, dropping a few resistance bands, a yoga mat, and earbuds into the gutter next to the car by mistake. I ignored all that and got in.
“Yes? Why are you here? Again?” I asked her when she joined me.
