Levi Loveless is coming to your kindles THURSDAY! I’m SO excited to finally share him with you guys, in all his bearded, quiet, slightly odd glory.
Anyway, you don’t want me to talk at you, you want the first three chapters. Here they are (unedited, so yeah, there are typos).
Love,
Roxie
P.S. I would completely remiss if I didn’t mention that the first two Loveless brothers are still free in Kindle Unlimited! They’re all complete standalones, so you can start wherever you like.
Enemies With Benefits (Loveless #1)
Best Fake Fiance (Loveless #2)
Break the Rules
Chapter One
June
There’s a crash behind me, and I jump, duck, and look behind me without stopping.
The forest is pristine, still, and silent. There’s no sign of whatever made that noise. Bears? Mountain lions? A bear and a mountain lion doing battle for the honor of being the first to get at a tasty human snack, i.e. me?
I turn back around straight into a mouthful of twigs.
“Augh!” I shout, flailing my hands in front of myself.
“Almost there!” Silas calls over his shoulder, twenty feet ahead of me, utterly unfazed by the wildlife battle that’s clearly threatening our very lives.
“What was that?” I should, grabbing one sleeve of my t-shirt.
“Squirrel or something,” he calls as I push my feet to a jog again, rubbing my t-shirt sleeve on my tongue in an attempt to wipe the tree off. “Could be a black bear, I see ‘em in trees sometimes.”
“Oh,” I call, too out of breath and exhausted to say anything else, because now, in addition to watching every step I take on this narrow hillside trail, I need to watch the trees for bears.
I love nature. I love the outdoors. I love trees and rocks and dirt and… nature stuff. It’s just so peaceful and calm and nice and definitely not full of poison ivy and murderous animals with large teeth.
“We’re almost there!” Silas shouts. “Pick it up, Bug.”
He stops in the middle of the trail, jogging in place, and glances over his shoulder at me as I slog up to him, careful not to trip over rocks or tree roots.
I’m sweaty. I’m sticky. Dirt is plastered to my lower legs from this trail run, and I’m fairly sure there’s tree in my hair. I don’t need to look in a mirror to know that I’m currently fire-engine red, my SPF 50,000 sunscreen dripping down my face and neck in long white streaks.
Okay, fine. I don’t actually love nature yet, but I’m trying my hardest, and that’s why I let my dumb older brother talk me into going on this trail run with him. Because I am not only the sort of person who enjoys going outside and being on trails, I enjoy running on them.
Really. I do. For real. This is great and I’m having a great time.
“Race you?” Silas says, grinning and jogging in place as I finally get closer.
He’s not bright red or streaked with sunscreen. He’s sweaty, sure — it’s eighty degrees, even in the late afternoon, and at least 90% humidity — but he looks like a normal human right now. I guess he got the good workout genes.
“I’ll kill you,” I gasp under my breath, and Silas just laughs. Then he starts running again.
I can tell he’s going slow for me, and I try to be grateful that he’s not just sprinting off and leaving me in the middle of the forest, because even though I’ve declared myself a nature-loving person who loves nature, I’m not quite ready to get that up close and personal with it.
Up until recently, I’ve been a solid run-on-a-treadmill-and-watch-CSI kind of person.
“Watch out!” Silas calls back, still running ahead of me.
“Why?” I pant, my head swiveling side-to-side for the danger. “What’s — AIEEEE!”
I leap backward mid-step, flailing my arms and going off-balance. My foot hits a root and half a second later my ass is on the ground and I’ve tumbled into the trailside foliage.
Across the trail, the tail of the enormous black snake slides into the dense greenery and disappears.
“June!” Silas shouts, already sprinting back to me. “You okay?”
He offers me his hand, and I take it, lifted instantly to my feet. I brush dirt off my butt and step into the middle of the trail, nervously inspecting the spot where I landed.
I just want to make sure there are no more snakes, because those sneaky bastards could be hiding literally almost anywhere and I want no part of it.
“Sorry,” he says. “I thought you saw it.”
I shake my head, still gasping for air, one hand to my chest. My heart is thumping like a two-year-old banging on pots and pans, wild and arhythmic.
“They’re specifically designed to match the dirt, Silas,” I manage to pant. “No I didn’t see it, they’re practically invisible —”
“We’ve got another hundred yards before the parking lot,” he says.
“—they look like sticks or logs and then it turns out they’re alive—”
Silas pats my arm mock-comfortingly.
“C’mon,” he says, then turns around and starts running again.
I follow him, because I’ve got no real choice.
“—they move wrong,” I call. “Things shouldn’t move that way. It’s not right.”
“Sorry,” he calls back, clearly not sorry.
I continue cataloging what’s wrong with snakes — poison teeth, swallow things whole, too smooth — but for once Silas wasn’t lying to me, and after about thirty seconds we’re back at the parking lot.
“—and they strangle their prey,” I’m saying as we step out of the forest and into the small gravel parking area at the Raccoon Hollow trailhead, where I suppress the urge to hug my car. “That’s fucked up, Silas. Any self-respecting animal would just bite their prey to death, but no. Snakes had to get weird about it.”
Silas is resting both his hands on top of his head, taking long, deep breaths.
“Not most snakes,” he says. “Most snakes just swallow their prey whole.”
“Which is also horrible,” I point out.
“Did you see that news article about a snake that swallowed —”
“No,” I say, holding out both hands and waving them. “No no no, no, no. I do not want to hear about this and you know that.”
Silas gives me his best what, innocent old me? grin, which means that he knows he’s getting to me and he’s pleased with himself about it.
“I forgot how much you hated snakes,” he says, semi-apologetically as we walk to our cars. “I didn’t realize that seeing a few inches of one as it departed would bother you so much.”
“I almost stepped on it,” I say, leaning against my bumper. “And plenty of people hate snakes. You know who hates snakes? Indiana Jones, and he punched a whole bunch of Nazis, so I’m in perfectly good company here.”
Silas opens his car, ignoring my snake rant, and pulls two big water bottles out, tossing me one. I catch it. It’s still ice-cold.
We chug water, both leaning against our cars, facing each other in silence, a nice breeze sifting through the trees, the sun on its way down, this side of the mountain in shadow.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes for a moment, and feel the cool air against my sweaty, sweaty skin.
It’s actually pretty nice. See? I love nature.
“I think it’s gonna storm,” Silas says, and I open my eyes again.
Just barely peeking over the leafy green ridge of the mountains behind us is a line of dark gray storm clouds, looking ominous.
“Looks like it,” I agree.
It’s late summer in the South, and that means thunderstorms. This week it’s been pretty much every day: it’ll be sunny until late afternoon, then storm like hell, then clear up right before nightfall. I kind of like it, to be honest, though I’m also glad that I’ll be safely in my car before it starts raining.
“You heading back to town?” he asks.
“Eventually,” I say, pulling my phone out the running armband I had it in and turning it on. It’s close to six p.m., and I have no service.
I sigh.
“Does the ranger station down there still have wifi you can access from the parking lot?” I ask, opening my phone and hoping that while we were running, we ran through a patch of reception long enough to get email.
We didn’t.
“The ranger station has wifi?” Silas asks.
“Useless,” I tease him.
“I saved you from a snake. You’re welcome.”
“You’re the reason I nearly got killed by one in the first place,” I counter, shutting my phone off and drinking more water.
“I don’t think a king snake has ever killed a person before,” he says, grinning his I’m-bugging-my-little-sister-and-I-know-it grin. “They’re totally harmless.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” I point out.
“You need wifi for a gig?” he asks, pulling his keys out of his pocket and tossing them in the air
“Yeah, I just want to make sure my editor doesn’t need anything before she leaves for the day, and it’s forty-five minutes back home,” I say, and Silas just nods.
I don’t mention that “my editor” is actually just Madison, a twenty-two-year-old who’s in charge of the OMG section of hypefeed.com, and my gig is actually a list titled Ten Celebrity Dogs So Cute You’ll Hurl.
It paid. It was something to do, and frankly, at this point in my unemployment I’ll take just about any journalism-adjacent freelance work I can find, hurling or no.
“Cool,” he says, and opens his car door again, tossing the now-empty water bottle onto his passenger seat. “Same time again tomorrow?”
I don’t respond immediately.
“Call it aversion therapy,” he says.
“I’m not averse to nature,” I protest, still leaning against my car. “I’m just not used to it.”
“We’ll have you going on week-long backpacking trips in no time,” he says. “You’re gonna poop in the woods like a champ. Face down a black bear with nothing but a pocket knife and your wits.”
“Well, now I’m averse to it,” I say, and Silas just laughs.
Then he rubs his hand on my head, pulling my baseball cap askew.
“Dammit,” I mutter.
“See you tomorrow, Bug,” he says, and gets into his car. I pull my car key out of the tiny pocket I stashed it in and follow suit, dropping into my driver’s seat like a ton of bricks.
“I should’ve gotten really into wine or something,” I say out loud to myself, leaning my head back against the driver’s seat. “Next reinvention, wine. And cheese.”
Five minutes later, I’m driving the wrong direction along the Appalachian Parkway, listening to an episode of This American Life about [something extremely public radio-y], because I’m going to the ranger station in the hopes that their parking lot still gets enough wifi signal from inside the building for me to check my email.
I don’t think Madison, the twenty-two-year-old who runs the “OMG” section of hypefeed.com, needs me to check in with her. I’m pretty sure that if she wants changes made to Ten Celebrity Dogs So Cute You’ll Hurl, she’ll just make them.
But I need to check in. I can’t help it. I like doing things correctly, so if something needs tweaking in my celebrity dogs article, I want to know.
I pull into the parking lot of the ranger station. The station is closed, because it’s a little past six in the evening, but when I was visting my family a couple years ago and they took me hiking way out here, the wifi worked all night long. That time I was also checking for emails from my editor, only then it actually mattered because I’d just turned in a piece about vandalism and police brutality in Raleigh.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Anyway, there’s still free wifi in the parking lot.
It’s not fast, but it’s fast enough to check my email, and sure enough, there’s one from Madison.
It says: Cool, thanks.
I guess she doesn’t have any notes for me, then, and I should probably leave this parking lot and make the drive back to my parents’ house, where I’m living while unemployed, but instead I go through some emails, learning that several positions I’ve applied for have been filled.
Cool. Great. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m closing in on a hundred rejections. I don’t even know how many I’ve just never gotten a response from. It’s not the best feeling.
I check Twitter to distract myself from my problems. I check Instagram. Facebook. Reddit.
Suddenly, rain smacks against my windshield in big, fat drops, and I look up. I’ve somehow been looking at nonsense on my phone for almost twenty minutes, and the sky’s so dark it looks like twilight.
Oops.
I twist the key, turn the radio back on, and pull out of the ranger station parking lot, heading back the way I came on the parkway, toward town, hoping that I can beat the storm and get home before it gets really bad.
Ten minutes later, it’s clear that I miscalculated and am driving directly into the storm, something I probably should have checked first.
It’s raining so hard that I feel like I’m under a waterfall, my wipers completely ineffective against the onslaught.
Every thirty seconds the sky strobes with lightning, the thunder instant and deafening, so loud and close it vibrates my car. The thick forest on either side of the road is waving and dancing in the wind, enormous trees bending and swaying so much they look like they might break.
“Shit,” I whisper to myself, the steering wheel in a death grip, both palms sweating. Every muscle in my body is rigid, and I’m driving so slowly that it doesn’t even register on my speedometer. I’d stop, but there’s nowhere to pull over, and if I keep going maybe there will be soon.
I have to be almost back to the trailhead, right?
Lightning strikes again, so close I swear I can feel the crackle in the air, and I tense even harder, sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat. Thunder shakes the earth, the road, my car, or maybe that’s me shaking.
“What Juan didn’t expect,” Ira Glass is saying, “was that the girl he’d spent all those months—”
I smack the radio button, and his voice shuts off because I can’t deal with it right now. I take deep breath after deep breath, wishing that I’d stayed in the parking lot or just gone home after the run, because Cool, thanks is incredibly not worth getting struck by lightning over.
You won’t get struck by lightning, I remind myself. All these trees are ways taller than you, and hardly anyone—
There’s another flash and the world goes pink-white, buzzing, pulsing, and for a split second I think I got hit but as the thunder rattles through everything, chattering my teeth, I slam on the brakes and realize that I can do that, and at the exact same time I realize that it was the enormous tree twenty feet away, the crack so loud that it sounds like it’s rending the heavens.
I watch, motionless, as it falls.
“No,” I whisper out loud, powerless. “No, please, come on…”
The tree falls right across the road, ten feet in front of my car..
As it falls the slow-motion scene is illuminated by another crack of lightning, capturing the whole scene mid-action, so bright that I’m temporarily blind when I hear the cracking thump of the tree hitting the ground, something long and black draping itself over my windshield.
It’s the snake, I think wildly, shaking, suddenly freezing. It’s the snake I nearly stepped on, it’s found me and now it’s going to—
It’s the power lines. The tree must have fallen into them, and now they’re draped across my car, probably still live.
As if to confirm it, something sparks in the twilight in front of me, the pinprick of light barely visible through the driving rain. Lightning flashes. Thunder booms. I take a deep breath. I try to make my hands stop shaking. I turn the car off.
And then I stare out the windshield at the downed power lines and the fallen tree and try to remember what, exactly, you’re supposed to do in this situation.
I almost got struck by lightning and then that tree nearly fell on me oh my God if I’d been ten feet further down the road I’d be a pancake —
I take another deep breath, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, and make myself stop thinking about things that almost happened so I can focus on the situation at hand.
There’s no service. I can’t Google it. All I can do is try to remember the electrical safety talk we got in school when I was in third grade.
Another lightning crack, the sky pink-white, thunder that sounds like the world being torn apart. Everything vibrates. In the darkness after, the only thing I can see is the sparking power lines on the road ahead of me.
I let out a shaky breath and think: there’s nothing I can do. More specifically, I don’t think I’m supposed to do anything.
I don’t think I’m supposed to get out of the car. I don’t think I’m supposed to drive anywhere, and even if I can, the hell with driving right now.
I can’t call 911, so I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to wait until someone else comes along, and then eventually I’m going to be rescued and I’m going to go home and shower and put on my pajamas and I’m going to make hot chocolate and hell yes I’m going to doctor it with rum.
So I sit. And I wait. I shut my eyes against the lightning and breathe through the thunder and after a little while, I stop shaking.
After a little while longer, the storm starts to moves off. The lightning and thunder grow further apart, the flashes more and more infrequent, the trees on the road not swaying as violently. It could be minutes. It could be hours. I lose track completely.
And yet, no one comes down the road. Not a single solitary soul, and the wires are still right there on my car, sparking away, soaking wet exactly like powerlines shouldn’t be.
I wonder if I could just drive away. I wonder if I should somehow leap from the car, since I’m wearing rubber-soled tennis shoes. I wonder if maybe I can put my car into neutral and just sort of roll back down this hill, but as I’m wondering that last thing, a truck pulls up behind me.
“Thank you,” I whisper out loud to no one. I take a deep breath and look at it in my rear view mirror, a green truck with something written across the front.
US FOREST SERVICE.
My heart beats a little bit faster, even as I remind myself that I’m literally in the middle of a national forest, that forest rangers are thick on the ground out here, that there’s a billion of them and the chances of this being one particular ranger are very, very slim.
The truck door opens.
A bearded man gets out.
Not this, I silently beg the universe. Not today. Please?
I unbuckle and turn around in the driver’s seat, leaning through the gap between the front two seats so I can see him better, but before I can be really, truly, 100% sure, he opens the rear door of the truck and leans in.
This lasts for several minutes, me practically in the back seat of my car, the bearded forest ranger rummaging through his back seat, stomping around and doing something that I can’t quite see.
Finally, he closes the door. He’s now wearing thigh-high rubber boots over his work pants and shoulder-length thick rubber gloves over a white undershirt, his unruly hair knotted at the back of his head.
It’s him.
It’s definitely, one hundred percent, not-a-smidge-of-doubt-in-my-mind him.
The shirt is soaked through from the rain, clinging to every muscle and ripple on his tall, broad frame. My mouth goes dry and adrenaline shoots through my veins, because he looks very good right now and I look very not-good, oh, and also, I’m trapped inside a car during a rainstorm and it’s not my favorite way to spend an afternoon.
Levi Loveless, Silas’s best friend and my nearly-lifelong crush, has come to rescue me.
I know I shouldn’t complain about being rescued, but I’d much rather run into him while, I don’t know, effortlessly doing an impressive yoga pose while reciting Ralph Waldo Emerson and being presented with a Pulitzer prize, my hair shiny and bouncy and my face not streaked with sunscreen and sweat.
Levi stops about six feet from my window. He stands there, assessing the situation. It’s still raining. He’s still getting wet. I’m still half goggling at the free wet t-shirt show I’m getting and half trying not to perv on this nice man who is, presumably, about to get me out of this car.
So I wave.
He waves back.
Cool, I think to myself. What a super cool situation I’m in right now.
Levi walks around the back of my car. I swivel my head as I watch him, because what else am I going to do?
“Can you hear me?” he calls from the other side of the car.
“Yes!” I call out, scrambling over the center console and into the passenger seat.
“Open the door.”
I glance down at the door handle, nervous again. It’s plastic, which should be fine, right?
I grit my teeth and pull it, pushing the door open as fast and hard as I can. Instantly I get a face full of rain, but I don’t die of electrocution.
“Hi,” I tell Levi, pointlessly wiping water out of my face.
“Hello,” he says, still standing about five feet away, looking incredibly unperturbed by all the weather happening around him.
Still in the wet t-shirt, which is still clinging to his shoulders and biceps and the dark line of chest hair and happy trail and okay, okay, that’s enough.
“How are you?” I ask, because he makes me nervous and I need to say something.
“I’m well,” he says, raising one eyebrow. “And yourself?”
I wipe water from my face again and look quickly around my car.
“I’ve been better,” I tell him honestly.
Levi just nods.
“The wires are live and touching the metal frame of your car,” he says, getting back to the point, nodding at the thick black lines draped across the hood of my car. “Which makes you getting out a little bit tricky.”
“I jump, right?” I ask, because I’m pretty sure I remember that from third grade, and I’m eager to be part of the solution, not just part of the problem.
I can accept that everyone needs to be rescued sometimes, but I’m not terribly excited to play the part of the hapless princess.
“I think it’s better if I lift you,” he says, taking a step closer. “More control.”
Oh, come on, I think, but I take a deep breath, suck up my pride, and nod.
“Okay,” I say.
“Kneel on the seat and face me,” he says. “I’ll pick you up in a fireman’s carry.”
My stomach knots, but I nod.
“Be sure to maintain control of your limbs,” he goes on, taking another step closer. “Don’t touch the frame.”
I get into position and Levi steps in, towering above me, his boots squeaking quietly even through the din of the rain, and I’m eye-level with his belly button and doing my absolute best not to notice that his shirt is clinging to the happy trail extending downwards.
He bends until we’re eye-to-eye, his serious, thoughtful face inches from mine, his deep, golden-brown eyes searching my face like there’s some sort of answer there.
Thank God for the rain so he can’t hear the way my pulse is drumming against my skin.
“All right,” he says, then crouches. He puts his shoulder to my midsection, pulls me from the car, and lifts while I maintain strict control of my limbs.
We clear the car. His boots squeak as he steps away, into the grass at the side of the road, and for several seconds I’m ass-up and slung over Levi’s shoulder like I’m a sack of dirt or concrete or grain or whatever it is that sexy lumberjack types like to lift.
Then he puts me down, one thickly-gloved hand on my shoulder, rain still pouring down, and he looks at me. He looks at me for a long moment, checks me over like he’s inspecting me for cracks.
“You okay?” he finally says.
I swallow, then nod. My heart’s still tapdancing but I clench my fingers and toes and look down at myself.
I’m soaking wet and I’m pretty embarrassed and I’m definitely wearing too-short running shorts and a bright purple sports bra that’s mostly visible through my now-soaked light blue tank top, and I could really, really use a shower, but I’m fine.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay.”
“Good,” he says quietly, and takes my elbow in his gloved hand. “Wait in the truck while I put out the flares. It’s at least dry in there.”
Chapter Two
June
He refuses my offer to help put out the flares. He refuses it firmly but gently, guiding me into the cab of his truck while I go on about how I could help, spreading an old-but-clean towel on the seat and then offering me a hand as I climb into the cab.
I admit that I don’t mind being dry and safe.
I also admit that I don’t hate the continuation of the Levi Loveless Wet T-Shirt Extravaganza, even though I feel guilty that he’s all alone in the rain while I could be helping.
I grab another dry towel from the back of the cab, where there are plenty, and watch Levi circle my car with the roadside flares. He does it the way he seems to do everything: methodically, purposefully, as though this is all part of some plan.
He does it this way despite the driving rain, despite the lightning and thunder that are still all around us. I still jump every time the sky lights up and boom sounds like it’ll split the earth in half, but Levi is completely unperturbed.
There are worse things to watch. He’s still got the gloves and boots on, which aren’t exactly what Chippendales fantasies are made of, but the rest?
Yes. Hi. Hello, wet t-shirt and big muscles and broad shoulders.
My younger, hopelessly-and-secretly-crushing-on-Levi-Loveless self is feeling very vindicated right now. She gets even more vindication as he walks to the edge of the forest, ducks inside, then comes out holding up a huge, long tree branch.
His body tenses. His muscles knot. I use a towel to wipe the steam from the inside of the windshield. He reaches out with the branch and nudges the passenger door of my car closed, then drops it back on the ground.
I don’t know when, exactly, I first started crushing on Levi Loveless. He was always hanging around with Silas, so it’s hard to pinpoint.
I just know that one day, my attitude toward Levi was he’s pretty cool and sometime later it was I think I want Levi to kiss me.
I was far from alone in my Loveless crush. If you were a lady of a certain age in Sprucevale, it was pretty much a rite of passage to have a crush on a Loveless brother.
There were five of them, and even as teenagers Lord in heaven were they good looking.
The girls my age were split between Eli, the second oldest, and Daniel, the middle of five. Eli was competitive, smart, and a total wiseass, but mostly nice. Daniel — who was my year — was the hell raiser, always in trouble, down at the Sherriff’s station with some regularity.
He’s got a daughter and a fiancée now. Apparently he’s straightened his act out, because last time I saw him, he gave me the stinkeye for saying damn in front of his kid.
Seth and Caleb were a few years younger, but everyone’s little sister had a crush on one of them. Seth was the second-youngest, good at baseball and so charming he should have had a warning sign. Caleb was three years younger than me, and despite his rugged, free-spirit vibe, he was already taking college-level math classes and the senior girls were lining up for homework help.
Levi was the oldest. The same age as Silas, three years ahead of me, a senior when I was a freshman.
He was the odd one out, because no one but me had a crush on Levi.
To this day, I don’t understand why. In a batch of five abnormally good-looking brothers, he’s the hottest — in my opinion, anyway, an opinion which clearly has not changed.
Levi was nice to little sisters. He rescued baby birds who fell from nests. He chopped wood for grandmothers, a moment that may or may not have contributed to my very first (and, in retrospect, very tame) sexual fantasy.
But then again, Levi was… weird.
In a school that emptied out the first day of deer hunting season every year, he was a vegetarian. He carried a book everywhere he went, and it wasn’t unusual to see him reading a paperback as he walked through the hallways from class to class. There was a solid six months where he wore a corduroy blazer over a t-shirt to school every single day, and I never did find out why.
I have no clue what he and my brother Silas — football star, middling student, obnoxious Big Man On Campus type — saw in each other, but they’ve been thicker than thieves since they were kids, and adulthood hasn’t changed that.
Outside the truck, Levi surveys his work, standing perfectly still in the driving rain, his shirt sticking to him like a second skin. I’m tempted to take a picture, but I know that would be straight-up creepy so I commit it to memory instead.
Then he nods to himself and walks around to the back of the truck, takes off the gloves and boots, flops them into the bed, and opens the driver’s side door.
The water’s just dripping from him: his nose, his beard, his eyebrows, even his hair, knotted behind his head. I have ten thousand dirty thoughts.
“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 guess?” 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” any more, 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.
Unsurprisingly, he refused to take no for an answer. I ended up calling Silas, whose no is quite a bit more emphatic than mine.
Brett wasn’t an outlier.
Brett was part of a shitty pattern, and I had very, very bad taste in men. Enter reinvention, and trying new things, and being open to new experiences, and generally being different from the girl who’d gotten dumped and fired and who fell for men who “didn’t believe” in expiration dates.
Long story short, now I love the outdoors.
“I didn’t know Silas enjoyed trail running,” Levi admits. “Last time he went on about his fitness regimen I believe it was CrossFit.”
“Oh, God, the CrossFit,” I say, laughing. “He once swore up and down that he could bench me and then got mad when I wouldn’t let him try.”
“I can’t imagine why not,” Levi says.
We round a curve in the gravel road, and I catch a glimpse of a building through the trees.
“This is your house?” I ask as the truck navigates one final curve of the long gravel driveway.
“It is,” Levi confirms.
I lean forward, craning my neck for a better view, the building still partly obscured by trees. I’ve never been to Levi’s house, but I know two things about it: one, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and two, he built it himself.
Now we’re in the middle of nowhere, at least a mile down a long gravel driveway, and we’re coming up on what might be the most charming cabin I’ve ever seen in person.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
“Oh,” I say.
Levi just glances over at me.
“You built this yourself?” I ask, just as the cabin comes fully into view.
“Not entirely,” he says, the truck slowing as Levi reaches up, hits the button on his garage door opener. “I hired someone to do the plumbing and electrical work. Silas helped me hang drywall. Charlie helped with the kitchen cabinets. Caleb and I spent a weekend laying the floors.”
“Oh, so only mostly,” I say, still staring at the cabin.
It is, for lack of a better word, lovely. It’s made of wood so rich it practically glows, even in the near-dark. It’s got a wraparound porch and a small flowerbed in the front. There’s a walkway with slate paving stones leading to the front steps. It’s not big, but it’s also not small.
It’s an honest-to-God mountain man cabin, only instead of being ramshackle, crooked, and drafty-looking, it’s beautiful. It looks like it should be on the cover of Lumberjack Real Estate or Fancy Backwoods Vacation Homes or some other magazine I’ve just made up.
“Looks like the power’s out,” he says, shutting off the truck. “Not precisely a surprise, but I think we can make do.”
“Mhm,” I agree. “You built this? Mostly?”
“C’mon,” he says, climbing out of the cab.
I follow, shutting the truck door heavily behind me, eyes still on Levi’s house as I follow him in, a rucksack slung over his shoulder.
Something about this feels like learning a secret about Levi. It feels like he’s invited me to his secret hideout, deep in the woods, his fortress of solitude. I know that’s probably ridiculous, but it’s not like Levi’s known for throwing dinner parties.
I follow him onto the porch, still silent, and he puts his key into the lock, then turns to look at me.
“Watch out,” he says, and pushes the door open.
“For wha—”
I don’t finish my sentence, because I’m hit by a missile.
A furry missile, with a wet nose and a wetter tongue, who nearly knocks me off my feet and then prances in a circle around me as I kneel on the porch, too excited to hold still.
“The attack dog,” Levi says.
“Hey girl!” I say.
She licks my face, tail thumping, and I laugh.
“You remember me? Yes you do. Yes you DO.”
The dog makes a funny little growf noise, like she does when she gets excited.
“Traitor,” Levi says mildly, still standing next to the door as he leans inside and checks something. “Yup. Power’s out.”
I’m now sitting on the floor of his porch — it’s covered, so at least it’s pretty dry — and the dog is still circling me, snuffing and growf-ing and licking me, her paws prancing with glee.
“I may have given her some treats while Silas was dog sitting a few weeks ago,” I admit to Levi, dodging around the dog’s face to talk to him.
“Some?” he says, leaning against his doorjamb, one hand in a pocket. His shirt is now just damp, not soaking wet, though I’m somewhat consternated to report that the change hasn’t made him less distracting.
“It might have been more like several,” I admit.
It was not several. It was a lot. She’s a very good dog.
“No wonder she picked you,” he says. “All I do is feed her, give her a dry place to live, and supply her with toys.”
I glance quickly at Levi, ninety-five percent sure he’s joking. He can be hard to read, and even though I’ve known him for a long time, I can’t say I know him well.
But then the dog is right in front of my face again, paws on my knee, doggy smile filling my vision. I realize there’s a tag hanging from her collar.
“Oh good, you named her,” I say, taking it between my fingers.
LEVI LOVELESS
(276) 555-1212
“You named the dog Levi?” I ask, deadpan, as she licks my hand.
Human Levi sighs.
“I put my contact information on her in case she runs off again,” he explains. “Come on, girl.”
The dog looks at him, and he points her into the house. I stand and follow her.
“What’s her name?” I ask as I go through the door.
“I don’t know,” he says, the door shutting behind us.
It’s dim, but not dark. The pale gray of an afternoon thunderstorm, light coming in through the house’s many windows. It’s deeply quiet: nothing hums, nothing ticks, nothing creaks, no sounds except for our breathing and the quiet padding of the dog, walking across the room.
Near-total stillness.
“You should name her,” I say, breaking the silence. “You can’t just call her dog forever.”
Levi takes his boots off and puts them in a [rubber boot thing, it’s probably got a name], so I follow suit with my sneakers.
“I put more flyers up in Eli’s neighborhood last weekend,” he says.
“Did anyone answer them?”
“Not yet.”
The dog gives the back of my thigh one more lick — okay, thanks — then trots off through the living room and up a flight of stairs, disappearing into a room off a landing.
“They’re not going to,” I tell him. “Someone dumped her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t,” Levi says, walking into his living room and pulling his shirt off, over his head, and tossing it onto the back of a chair.
I avert my eyes, heart suddenly thumping.
“She’s house trained,” he says, opening a closet. “Aside from her paw, she was well-cared-for. She’s friendly. She’s clearly got owners, June, and I’ve got no right to take their dog and re-name her.”
He pulls a drying rack from the closet, opens it on the floor, and neatly arranges his shirt over it.
When he looks back at me, I pretend I was averting my eyes the whole time.
“She’ll remember her old name if they ever come back, which they won’t,” I say. “Just give her a name. You can’t call her dog forever.”
As if summoned by this, the dog comes barreling back down the stairs, a toy held in her mouth, and she trots over and presents it to me so I grab both ends of it and tug, grateful for something to do besides pretend I’m not ogling the shirtless man whose house I’m in.
She tugs back, tail wagging like mad. Levi went camping with some of his brothers a few weeks ago and Silas dog sat, so I got to hang out with her. Turns out she loves doggy tug-of-war.
He sighs, then pulls his hair back with his hands, ties it into a knot again.
“If I name her, I’ll just get attached, only for her rightful owners to return and take her away from me,” he says, walking away from me, across the living room. “Better to just call her dog until that happens. I’ll be right back.”
With that he heads up the stairs, across the landing, and into a room, leaving me and the dog alone in his quiet gray living room, still tugging on opposite ends of this toy.
“Maybe I should name you myself,” I tell her after a minute. She growfs and wags her tail. “Princess. Cupcake. Muffin. Fluffy. Tell me if any of these appeal to you.”
She just wags her tail and tugs on the toy. I tug back, trying to think of more names.
“Bella. Angel. Pumpkin. Queenie. Anything?”
Growf.
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re a Pumpkin,” I say, now sitting on the floor, still pulling back. “Maybe something more dignified, like Peaches, or Buttercup —”
“You cannot name my dog Buttercup,” Levi’s voice says from the loft above me.
“So she’s your dog when I’m trying to give her the dignity of a name to call her own,” I call back.
He pads down the stairs barefoot, wearing navy blue sweatpants and dark green t-shirt with a small Forest Service logo on one side of the chest.
Update: still hot.
“I’d hardly call Buttercup a dignified name.”
“She’s a dog.”
“Even beasts need dignity,” he says, padding off the stairs and through the living room.
“It was good enough for The Princess Bride,” I point out.
Levi stops in front of me. He’s got a small stack of clothes in one hand, and he’s holding them out toward me.
“That’s a movie?” he asks, eyes narrowed.
I narrow my eyes back at him in jest, though I have no idea whether Levi realizes it’s a joke or not.
He can be… inscrutable.
“Technically, it’s also a book,” I say. “About a woman. Who’s a princess. And also a bride, thus the catchy name.”
“Girl, are you a princess?” he asks the dog.
The dog sits, looking up at Levi, wagging her tail and grinning a doggy grin.
“No? What about a bride?”
Same reaction from the dog, and Levi looks back at me. I’m about sixty percent sure he’s smiling, but I can’t quite tell.
Levi makes me feel off-balance and helter skelter, like everything I say is either too much or not enough, like I’m an object of some scientific interest. I am, generally speaking, good with people. I’m good at gauging their reactions to me, good at understanding how to speak and act to make others comfortable, good at saying the appropriate thing for a situation.
It’s why I’m a good journalist. Or at least, it’s why I was a good journalist. I’m good at getting people to talk to me.
Not Levi.
Levi is a mystery wrapped in an enigma stuffed into a crate labeled puzzle, and I don’t think he likes me.
Let me clarify. I don’t think he dislikes me. I just get the feeling that, to Levi, the vast majority of people fall into the neutral feelings category, and he feels as strongly about us as he does rocks or dirt or the sky above.
“These are the smallest things I could find,” he says, and even though he’s holding out a stack of clothes it still takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about, because he throws me so off-balance.
“Thanks,” I say, pushing myself off the floor.
He offers me his other hand. I take it. It’s big and rough and strong, none of which give me any feelings whatsoever.
“I’d offer you use of my shower but I’m afraid the well pump runs on electricity,” he says, pushing his hands back into his pockets. “But I’ve got several buckets of emergency water outside, and if you’d like I can bring some in for your use.”
His eyes.
I’d almost forgotten about his eyes: light brown, the color of deep amber. I’d forgotten the way they always seem lit from within, like candles behind a stained glass window.
“That’s okay,” I hear myself saying. “I’m fine, really, as long as you don’t mind these clothes getting a little gross —”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Carrying buckets of water inside is trouble.”
“Certainly not more trouble than I’m used to.”
“How much trouble are you used to?” I ask, raising one eyebrow.
Levi half-frowns, half-smiles, like he’s amused and consternated all at once.
“More than you might think,” he says, and turns away from me, heads for his back door. “I’ll be right back with the water and there’s nothing you can do about it, June.”
Chapter Three
Levi
June is now nude in my bathroom.
Presumably. It’s a reasonable assumption to make, that several minutes after carrying in two large buckets of water, setting them in the shower despite her protests, and pointing out the soap and shampoo, she has disrobed and is currently bathing.
Silas’s little sister. Naked. Right now. On the other side of that wall.
It’s a thought I shouldn’t be thinking at all, but it’s impossibly distracting. I turn away, toward the dim interior of the house, averting my eyes as if that will help.
It doesn’t help.
June makes me feel like I suddenly no longer understand the world I thought I inhabited. She makes me feel as though I’m walking through brand-new territory without a map or a compass.
She makes me feel as though, without warning, the solid wall that I built with my own two hands might suddenly turn into panes of clear glass. That the world is topsy-turvy and unpredictable and that there are entire dimensions to reality that I’d never even considered before, waiting for me to discover them.
And yet every time I talk to her, there’s that iron fist in my gut, the squeezing heaviness that whispers you traitor, he trusts you. Even though I’ve done nothing.
Besides bring her home. Besides invite her to get naked in your bathroom while you think about the way water would run over her —
“Don’t,” I growl out loud to myself, standing in my kitchen, facing away from the bathroom door.
The dog gives me a look.
“Not you,” I say, and she yawns.
Finally, in the absence of June, she comes over and presents the sock monkey to me. After a few minutes of wrestling, she lets me check her paw, which is almost completely healed, nothing more than a pink line in a patch of shaved fur.
A few weeks ago, my younger brother Eli was hosting a barbecue at his house when the dog wandered up. She was dirty, skinny, and limping, but she was friendly and I’ve got a soft spot for animals.
June was there, along with her brother Silas, who’s become something of an honorary Loveless brother. She helped me bandage up the ugly gash in the dog’s paw, and next thing I knew, I was taking her home — the dog, not June — and letting her sleep at the foot of my bed.
I took her to the vet, got her paw properly looked at. No microchip. I hung flyers all over Sprucevale, posted on all the relevant internet forums. No one was missing a black and white medium-sized female mutt who might be part lab, part shepherd, and part something else.
The fact remains, however, that she was indisputably once someone’s dog. Even though she was dirty and hungry, she had clearly been well-cared-for at one point. She’s friendly, familiar with people.
Most telling of all, she’s housebroken. She sits patiently by the back door when she’d like to be let outside. She doesn’t go on the couch or the bed. She’s never chewed anything that wasn’t a dog toy.
She’s a good dog. Possibly the best dog.
And it’s painfully clear that she is not my dog.
I put her paw back down and scratch her behind the ears, glancing one more time at the bathroom door before I go to the closet and get out the emergency candles and lanterns, set them out on the coffee table and the countertop in case the power doesn’t come back on before it’s full dark.
There’s a splashing sound from the bathroom. I take a deep breath and concentrate on the wood grain of the wall on the far side of the living room, the dark lines graceful and flowing like water —
“Let’s have hot chocolate,” I tell the dog, cutting off my own train of thought and standing.
She stands as well, tongue lolling out of her mouth in pleasant agreement, and I raise my eyebrows.
“Not you,” I tell her, walking into my kitchen. “You’re a dog. If I gave you chocolate I’d have to take you back to the vet, and you haven’t enjoyed your visits thus far.”
Her enthusiasm does not wane. I quickly gather the necessary items for hot cocoa: ultra-pasteurized shelf stable milk, sugar, cocoa, salt, a saucepan, my propane camping stove, and the dog and I head onto the front porch.
It’s nearly stopped raining by now, though the air is still so damp it feels like you could wring it out. I quickly set everything up on a small wooden table between two Adirondack chairs, then settle into one and wait for it to reach the right temperature.
And I do not think about June’s current state of dress or undress. I don’t imagine the look that would be on Silas’s face if he knew what I was thinking. I don’t remember the brief weight of her on my shoulder, I don’t remember the way her running shorts rode up her thighs when she sat in my truck car, and I certainly don’t contemplate the fact that every time I lay eyes on her, my mind goes blank.
I get out of the chair and start pacing back and forth on the front porch instead. I watch two squirrels chase each other around a white pine. I watch some small birds flutter around an oak tree. My mom is always after me to set up some bird feeders whenever she visits, but so far I’ve resisted. They’re wild animals. If I feed them, they’ll come to need it.
“Oh good, there you are,” June’s voice suddenly says, and I turn.
She’s standing in the doorway, her dark hair knotted on top of her head, wearing dark green sweatpants that say GO COLONIALS in green down one leg, and a blue sweatshirt that’s got two crossed billiard cues on it and says Cumberland Billiard League in yellow. Everything is too large for her.
“Thanks for the outfit,” she says.
“Sorry I didn’t have anything smaller.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says, shrugging, walking out onto the porch in bare feet. She stands atop the steps, looks out at the forest. I watch her, lost for words, even though I understand the rules of human communication and know that now it’s my turn.
I should say something witty, charming, something that would make her eyes light up with a smile, maybe even a laugh.
My mind goes utterly, completely blank.
“Who’s Joe?” she asks suddenly.
“Joe?” I echo dumbly, trying to think of a Joe. Not a single one comes to mind.
“Joe,” June says again, and points at her breasts.
Impossibly, I maintain eye contact. I do not breathe.
I have the insane, wild thought that I’m being tested. Maybe June’s last breakup sent Silas, always an overprotective older brother, completely around the bend and now they’re somehow working together to test my loyalty to our friendship.
It is not the thought of a rational man, but it’s the thought I have.
“I don’t believe I know a Joe,” I tell her, staring straight into her sapphire eyes.
June is now looking at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.
“Were you in the billiard league?” she asks.
It’s the sweatshirt.
Of course it’s the sweatshirt.
I am an idiot.
“Only briefly,” I tell her, relieved. I maintain eye contact, but I don’t need to look at my ancient Cumberland Billiards sweatshirt to know that, under the logo, it says Knock ‘em in good, Joe. “Back when I had just started with the forest service a few older rangers were in, so I joined. They mostly wanted to smoke and drink beer together, so I didn’t last long.”
For the briefest of moments, I let my eyes flick down to the logo and text on the sweatshirt.
“Also I’m terrible at it. And I never did find out who Joe was, or whether he knocked ‘em in,” I say, stepping across the porch to stir the hot cocoa.
“He probably did,” June says, leaning against the porch railing, her hands by her sides. “Even I can eventually knock ‘em all in, if you give me long enough.”
I taste the cocoa. It still needs a few minutes. Camp stoves don’t tend to be fast.
“Is that hot chocolate?” June asks.
“It is,” I confirm, settling back into the Adirondack chair, crossing an ankle over a knee. “It’s a power outage tradition. My father used to break out the camp stove any time the power was out for a while when we were kids, so I started doing it too.”
June gets into the other Adirondack chair and sits cross- legged, pushing up the sleeves of the sweatshirt as she does.
“Did you ever do it when Silas was there?” she asks, eyes narrowed like she’s calculating something.
“I’m sure,” I say.
“Well, that explains that,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows, wait.
“He tried this once when he was twelve or thirteen,” she goes on, sighing, leaning her head back against the wooden back of the chair. “Only he was an idiot and did it in his unventilated bedroom, where he somehow managed to catch some homework on fire.”
I start laughing, despite myself.
“The smoke alarm and the carbon monoxide detector went off at the exact same time, which is honestly kind of impressive in the worst possible way. My parents grounded him for like two weeks and made him write them a five-page essay on the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning,” she says.
“Can Silas write five pages?” I ask, still laughing.
“You should’ve seen the font size and margins on that thing,” June says, turning to face me and grinning.
“He told me he was grounded for doing flips off the roof,” I say.
“Oh, he did that too,” June says. “He once rode his bicycle off the roof. I don’t know how no one noticed him getting it there in the first place. That one’s on my parents, really. It’s amazing that he survived to adulthood.”
We’re both quiet for a moment. It’s true that Silas could be monumentally stupid when we were younger. So could I, though never quite like that.
The heavy knot in my stomach tightens.
How long have you been friends? Twenty years?
More?
“Remember the time he drove my dad’s truck into the creek because a football fell off the seat next to him?” June says, staring off into the forest. “How the hell did he become a lawyer?”
I lean over, take another spoonful of hot cocoa to test the temperature, glancing at June as I do.
She still doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what really caused that crash.
It wasn’t a stray football. It was a passenger.
Jake Echols, to be exact. June’s then-boyfriend, to be even more exact. He was eighteen and had just graduated. She was fifteen, about to start her sophomore year.
I don’t know the inner workings of the relationship, but I know he gave her a promise ring and swore to make a long-distance relationship work after he left the next fall for West Virginia University. I heard about the promise ring constantly from Silas.
And I also know that he bragged to his friends about getting a blowjob from some college chick.
Silas gave him a ride somewhere. They fought in the car. It got physical. Silas crashed into the creek by accident, and Jake, unhurt, hopped out of the car and ran, leaving Silas to concoct a story about a football.
A week later, Jake up and joined the Air Force, and I don’t think June ever learned why.
There are reasons besides loyalty and friendship that June is a bad idea for me. Reasons like Silas has extensive combat training and Silas is not a reasonable human being when it comes to his little sister.
“It’s ready,” I say, turning off the stove. “Mugs are inside. Shall we?”
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