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His eyes lifted to the door and his eyebrows shot up.
“Does he know he’s not invited?” He gestured with his chin.
Hannah followed his eyes, the hairs on the back of her neck already telling her he was in the room.
He had his hands stuffed into a ridiculous Lloyd Dobler trench coat, his hair combed up to the sky, and he was glowering, daring anyone to bother him. This was patently absurd, as he was not only a celebrity in a tiny town but had also gone to school with every single person in the bar since he was five. His wild Shenanigans had been talked about in increasingly improbable tales throughout town.
As he tried to make his way to their table, he was stopped every foot by someone hailing him to remember this time or that and ask him who won the show or about Australia. Whoever he was speaking to got his undivided, laser-like focus. He nodded seriously as he heard updates on siblings, relatives Hannah was certain he didn’t remember, and the minutiae that made up gossip in a small, remote town.
She watched him, worried he was going to be rude to these people she and Miriam and Noelle had worked so hard to build working relationships with. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t charming, not in the way he was on camera. He didn’t smile easily (or at all), didn’t have a quip or an anecdote in his back pocket designed to put people at ease.
Instead, he was present, and genuine, in a way he maybe had never been before at home. He felt, much more keenly than his siblings, the difference in being part of the Carrigan’s family and being the child of the cook and handyman. This, combined with his peers’ distrust of his own disinterest in fitting into the mold, and his general dislike of people knowing his business, had made him a cipher. This made people all the more interested in finding out everything about him.
And, of course, in any and all gossip about whether the two of them were getting back together. As he made his way to them, he caught her eyes and grimaced. She laughed. He’d hated that, but he’d done it anyway.
“People are going to be talking about their encounter with The Legendary Levi Blue for months. You just gave this small town so much gossip.”
“Why do they care?” he asked, seeming genuinely confused rather than angry. “They all hated me in high school, and I’ve never had a conversation with any of them.”
“Did they hate you, or did you hate them?” Hannah asked, not questioning his recollection, but wondering if it had been so cut-and-dried.
“If they didn’t hate me, they probably should have stopped calling me a faggot,” Levi pointed out. “Although none of those people are here tonight. Which is best, because I wouldn’t have been polite to them.”
Sawyer smiled, a little feral. “Those ones know they’re not welcome in Ernie’s establishment.”
“If most of them didn’t hate me, I was a very lonely, angry teenager for no good reason,” Levi grumbled, and Hannah shrugged.
“We all were. It’s developmentally appropriate,” she told him. “And you weren’t surly for no reason. Some awful things were said and done to you, and you were trying to figure out who you were, and we kind of all thought you were just being melodramatically weird and angry, which, in retrospect, was extremely shitty of us. We should have trusted you that it was actually bad, that you were really being hurt.”
He shrugged back at her. “I’m starting to think both things can be true. That some of them were awful, and no one really believed me,andthat I was so used to having my defenses up that I couldn’t see any of the non-awful people, except you and Miri.”
She leaned over to squeeze his hand. “That might be what happens when one of the adults who’s supposed to be your biggest supporter, isn’t.”
They stared at each other, and she thought Levi might kiss her.
Sawyer leaned down so they could hear him but no one else could.
“Whatever you do right now is going to be reported to the whole Adirondacks in about fifteen minutes, so if there is something going on between you, I wouldn’t let on unless you’re ready to go very public,” he said, winking at them.
“There’s nothing to go public with,” Hannah said.
“I don’t give a fuck what they think they know,” Levi said.
Elijah looked between them and took a swig of his beer. “You two are messy as hell.”
“We have much more important things to discuss than your drama,” Jason told them. “Specifically, Levi, do you know anything about geography? Like, at all?”
“I do, in fact,” Levi said, smiling at Jason. “It turns out traveling the world makes you better at remembering where all the parts are.”
“False,” Miriam said. “Hannah is worse at it than any of us.”
“Thank God,” Jason said. “We need you to fill out this visual round.” He shoved a map in front of Levi, along with a pen, and Levi immediately did as ordered.
“You can come to trivia forever,” Miriam told him.
Hannah’s heart turned over. She didn’t know what they were doing, where this could possibly go except inevitably off a cliff, but her heart was a traitor and wanted to believe in a version of the future where Levi was around to come to trivia.
At the end of the night, when they’d won, Hannah leaned over to whisper to him, “I’m counting this as date number three.”
