Page 60 of Levi

“Honest to God.” I do a sign of the cross over my chest.

“I wish I had Beckett Christensen’s voice, but I don’t. It would take me years to train my voice to sing, and even then, there’s no way I’d sound anything like Beckett. His voice is a gift. I’ve learned to control mine to rap. I have no desire to switch careers, but I can hold my own with word play and rhyme... especially when it comes the old school rap music.”

“You have many talents, Levi Aldridge.”

This enigmatic man who is now my most formidable lover is a lot more complex than I imagined.

Throwing yourself headfirst into a no strings arrangement with a virtual stranger means he remains a stranger even after the second hookup.

“Many, many talents,” he winks.

I roll my eyes.

“I meant talentsoutsideof the bedroom,” I tell him.

He smiles and pulls me closer to his body.

My eyes drop to his chest and I reach out to trace his eye-catching tattoo. Black ink adorns his chest. Not that I know much about tattoos, but the juxtaposition of skulls—one on each pectoral muscle—and butterflies is interesting. The addition of long hair clues me in on the feminine gender of the skulls. LA is the land of tattoos—both men and women. Levi’s ink is strictly contained to his chest—nothing on his arms, stomach or legs. Three words are tattooed along his collarbone—Fortunes Always Hiding. He also has a fairly elaborate tattoo on his back of a woman, her face has similarities to the skulls on his chest. Also, this tattoo has vibrant touches of red on the woman’s lips and the roses pinned in her hair. It’s almost as if the ink is telling a story. I could study these tattoos all night long and not fully appreciate all the beauty of the artist’s work, or the meaning.

“You never told me if this is just random art or if it has any significance,” I remind him.

He grabs my hand, pulling it away from his chest.

The movement is so swift, you’d think his skin was on fire.

He just stares down at me.

I grow nervous by the second.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked...” I flail for the right words to cover up my faux pas.

He closes his eyes for a beat, his nostrils flaring.

When he opens his eyes again, they’re not the sparkly aqua blue I’m used to. They’re stormy blue.

“Levi––”

“When you told me about losing your mom, I alluded to losing mine,” he says.

“Yes, I remember.”

“My mom was a nurse.” He pauses. “One day, during one of her shifts, she ended up on the receiving end of a rusted knife.”

I gasp, my hands flying to cover my mouth.

The energy in the room shifts to a morose melancholy I’m sadly used to.

“An addict, high on God knows what, weaseled his way inside the hospital Mom was working at, in search of drugs––”

“There were no security guards?”

“There were, but they weren’t posted at every entrance.”

“Of course,” I say.

“From what the police told us, Mom was the first person that druggie encountered. From the video footage, the guy was threatening from the get-go, and then just like that, he plunged the rusted knife into her heart.”

“Couldn’t they save her?” I ask.After all, she was in a hospital.