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“Wait!” I say, and dive between the seats.
Levi says nothing, just waits, still in the rain. I grab two more towels and spread them on the driver’s seat. Lightning flashes, a couple miles away now.
“There,” I say, and he gives me an amused look as he climbs into the cab and finally closes the door after himself. I hand him another towel.
“Thanks,” he says, and rubs it over his head.
“I heard this news story about this guy who was a total workout fiend and got a ton of sweat on the driver’s seat of his car,” I say, apologetically. “And he started having all these breathing problems, and it took his doctor a full year to figure out that it was from the mold growing on his sweaty, damp car seat.”
“He didn’t notice the smell?” Levi asks, pulling a band from his knotted hair, letting it flop wetly to his shoulders.
“I guess not,” I say, trying to remember the details of the story. “I think it was in Russia.”
“Russians can’t smell?”
“Too cold?” I say. I already feel like I’m in over my head here, the familiar nervous buzz starting just behind my sternum.
You know, the way I used to feel any time Levi talked to me. Back when I was a teenager with a crush, not an adult woman with… not a crush.
“You’d think that would inhibit mold growth,” he says, rubbing the towel on his head one last time, then tossing it into the back of the cab.
“It was Russian mold,” I say. “I assume it thrives on cold, vodka, and stoicism.”
Levi puts the keys in the ignition, looking ahead, but I swear I see the hint of a smile flicker across his face.
“I’ve got two options for you,” he says, his hand on the gearshift, still looking through the windshield. “I can drive you down through Breakwater Gap and back up the west side of the range and into town, or I can take you to my place. I don’t mind Option A, but Option B gets us both indoors and dry a whole lot faster.”
Levi Loveless just offered to take me home with him.
In the most platonic fashion possible, of course, but still.
“I like the dry option,” I say, pointing the heater vent at myself.
“I do too,” he says, and shifts his truck into reverse, turning to look over his shoulder. “And the dog will be thrilled.”Ten minutes later, we turn from the two-lane Appalachian Parkway onto a narrow gravel lane, the truck bumping over the edge of the pavement.
“Silas made me go for a trail run,” I explain.
“Made you?” Levi echoes.
“Well, he talked me into it,” I admit as the gravel rumbles underneath, the deep forest closing around us. “And, you know, I figure that doing more outdoorsy stuff is kind of a ‘when in Rome’ situation, so why not? Nature is nice.”
I don’t mention reinvention. I don’t mention the shitty past few months I’ve had. I don’t mention the self-help books I’ve read, or the mantras that I’ll repeat for a few days before inevitably deciding it’s stupid, or the sudden, jolting realization I had one night that in order for things to change, I had to change.
Three months ago, I had a very bad day. I got laid off from my job at the Raleigh Sun-Dispatch, along with about thirty other people. I texted my boyfriend, crying. He didn’t text back.
When I got home to the apartment we shared, he dumped me.
He said he’d been thinking about it for a while. He said I used to be fun and cool and now I worked too much and only ever wanted to talk about boring things, like politics and global warming.
And he said he “just wasn’t into it” anymore, after over a year together.
There was shouting (me) and there were tears (also me) and after a few hours, he went to stay with his parents.
That night, sitting miserably on the floor of the living room because I refused to sit on any of the furniture we’d shared, I had an epiphany: Brett sucked.
So did most of my previous boyfriends. Pretty much all of them, except maybe Peter, who I just wasn’t compatible with.
There was Tyler, who only ever wanted to hang out and play video games, and who ghosted me after seven months of dating.
There was Connor, who interrupted almost every sentence I said aloud and spent all our time together for at least three weeks trying to talk me into dressing as a cheerleader for Halloween.
There was Noah, with whom I once got into a shouting match about whether women should be legally required to change their names when they get married, and who cheated on me and then acted like I was crazy when I got mad about it.
Finally there was Brett, who acted like my career was a hobby, who’d mope for a full day if I talked to another man in front of him, and who broke up with me the same day I got laid off and then, a month later, held up a boom box outside my window at my parents’ house and asked me to marry him.
