Page 5 of Requiem Of Him (Of Solace And Sin #1)
CORTLAND
‘Different Man’ Kane Brown, Blake Shelton
S omehow, I am supposed to reconcile with the idea that the person who is standing in front of me is the same person that I’d been trying to get back to for longer than I’d care to admit.
When Levi disappeared after announcing to his father he’s a man, it was like he no longer existed.
No one talked about him, and if anyone did and his father heard about it, the world stopped.
It took me a few years to find him, but I chose not to interfere and as many times as I told myself I never would, it was a lie.
His exile was devastating, the pain of losing him without so much as a goodbye or even a note haunted me but I couldn’t bring myself to disturb the peace I thought he found.
I kept tabs on him after meeting Alessio while I was in Vegas for Pbr.
How Levi was connected to Alessio didn’t make any sense to me at the time, but when Alessio introduced me to Jameson, his stepbrother and Levi’s best friend, the pieces slowly started to fall into place.
Finding him behind the bar of Jameson’s club threw me for a loop and it took every ounce of restraint I had to remain a stranger to him.
As many times as I sat across from Levi while at Fallout, I was still shocked.
The man standing only feet away from me is anything but what I expected to find.
Levi is no longer the gangly kid who hid beneath clothes that were three sizes too big for him, or stole his brothers beaten to death jeans held up by a belt and a prayer.
He is striking, and anything but what I expected to find after a decade apart.
Tattoos crawl up his neck, encasing the column of his throat like a collar with a stark negative space in center.
A metal bar flashes between his teeth with each word he speaks while the moonlight gleans from the one through his eyebrow and the stud in his nostril.
He traded his cowboy boots for combat boots and his flannel-lined jean jacket for a leather jacket that was painted on his skin, hugging the muscle he’d put on.
He isn’t my Levi anymore. He is something else entirely.
“Are you just going to stare at me like I’m a circus freak, or are you going to say what you have to say, Cortland?” His voice slices through the pregnant silence that has fallen between us, snapping me out of the daze I find myself in the longer I stay in his orbit.
I force myself to rein in the impulse to grab him the way I want to when he continues to lash out like the brat he is.
He absolutely isn’t mine to punish, but that doesn’t mean I would stand here and listen to him spout off at the mouth without correcting him.
I hate every minute of this. I hate that he wasn’t mine.
But more than anything, I hated the glaring distance between us that I have no way of repairing.
“What did I tell you about that attitude of yours? If you want to keep speakin’ freely, I suggest you fix it, boy.” I grind out through gritted teeth, barely holding onto the shred of control I have left.
“And if I don’t?” He lifts a brow in my direction, challenging me.
His head tilts to the side, his unruly onyx curls falling across his forehead as he studies me, dissecting me until my skin crawls.
It’s unnerving how detached he’s become, so cold and lifeless.
He gives nothing away while he pulls a cigarette out with his teeth and flicks his lighter, the flame dancing in front of his face.
When I don’t give him an answer as fast as he would like, his agitation makes him reckless enough to get close to me again, blowing the smoke in my face as he continues to taunt me.
“This is getting tiresome. Will you, won’t you…
” He sighs dramatically, “Really, Cortland? Not going to threaten me?” He pouts again, before a predatory grin disfigures his beautiful face.
“You’re more than welcome to test that theory, but before you do, because we both know you can’t help yourself…
” I take the few steps needed to back him into the door of the SUV again, ignoring the burning cherry searing into my skin as his cigarette swipes across my jaw, and whisper in his ear, “Remember that I was the one who taught your skin to sing.”
With those parting words, I walk back into the house and past Jameson, who is still making Alessio feel like the red-headed stepchild he is.
Pain in the ass that he is, Alessio wasn’t the worst that I’d dealt with but a necessary evil when it came time to get out from underneath Marcus’ control over my family and the ranch.
It had been a process, a fucking long one, but I needed to protect every bit of what I’d built without the slightest margin for error.
Nothing could slip through the cracks. But these trips back and forth left me wide open.
It left my family unprotected. A business could be rebuilt, but the family I’d created couldn’t be.
Diana knew something was going on. She’d been on board from day one when I came to her telling her that I wanted out, out of the arena, out of our sham of a marriage.
We did what we both had to, to survive living in a state so deeply indoctrinated in intolerance.
We may have love for each other, but that didn’t happen overnight nor did what we built together.
My phone begins to ring, pulling me from my thoughts, and when I check my caller ID, a grin spreads across my face. Nightly FaceTime calls with Elliott made leaving for a week at a time worth every bit of the turmoil it could cause.
His little face fills the screen, although it was mainly a shot of his messy, wet blonde hair because even though we’d done this countless times, he still doesn’t understand that he needs to back up from the camera.
“Bubba, he can’t see your face when you have the screen that close to you.” Diana tries to explain for what feels like the thousandth time. She lets out a sigh that ended in a breathy laugh as he starts to lower the tablet from over his head.
“You givin’ your Momma trouble, son?” I ask in the sternest voice he rarely hears from me.
He turns to look at me with owlish eyes, the same way he had when he got caught in the stallion barn alone when we first started having him in lessons.
It was a scare that neither Diana nor myself had been prepared for.
Even though our stallions were well behaved, all it would take for one of them to send Elliott running was them smelling one of our broodmares in flaming heat, which at the time was happening regularly during breeding season, but Elliott hadn’t understood that quite yet.
After that, he steered clear of the stallion barn unless it was out of season or one of us was with him to tack up.
As much as people love to say their horses are bomb proof, having a stallion near a mare in heat was always a risk, and keeping Elliott safe was our top priority, one that wasn’t afforded to either of us as kids.
His head bobs up and down in a choppy nod before he answers my question and makes my heart soften.“Of course not, Daddy. I’m holdin’ down the fort just like you made me promise. We shook on it, remember?”
“Yeah, and what else did we promise? Do you remember what we said?”
With all the seriousness he could muster, he stiffened his upper lip and straightened up before reciting exactly what I had said.
“Mhm. You said that while you were gone that I was the man of the house, and that Momma would need me to be on my very best behavior because she’d be worryin’ herself sick until you came home, and that if anythin’ happened to you, Momma needs to call Mr. Reigns and tell him that ‘moonshine in the bayou made every eight worth it.’ And that no matter what you love me.
” His eyes brighten, and he gives me a gummy smile when he finishes.
It’s the same thing I tell him every time I leave.
A throat clears, pulling my attention from my son only to see the last person I want to be bothered with—Jameson.
He fills the doorway of the kitchen and remains motionless until I return my focus to Elliot.
He slinks past me while my son rambles on about wanting to spend more time with his colt that we’d recently started under saddle before I’d left.
Diana wasn’t too pleased about Elliott starting on a colt that hadn’t been gelded because of the potential bad outcome even if he was good minded, but Ares was his.
“That’s right, Elliott. Never forget it.
” He beams at me like he’d won a contest at the county fair and was about to get the biggest stuffed animal he could manage to carry.
I regret shattering our little bubble, but the words are out before I can stop them, not having a choice in the matter.
“Listen, Daddy has to go, but I love you no matter what, and I’ll be home soon.
If you listen to your Momma, we’ll take Ares out for some miles under saddle. ”
“Cortland, I will be damned if you put my son on that damn stallion. Don’t you da—” I hang up before she can get the rest of her sentence out.
She hates the notion that Elliott wants to be a rider, even though it was bred into him from both of us.
We couldn’t keep him away from the horses if we wanted to. She would just have to get over it.
“What is it, Jamie?” I snap at him without bothering to turn around.
“Oh, nothing.” He huffs dramatically. He continues to buff his nails on the fabric of his too expensive shirt before checking them again.
The sound of a hangnail snagging on the fabric is too much like nails on a chalkboard, and it takes everything in me to ignore his presence.
“Cute kid. Shame his daddy prefers the company of whores rather than his own wife.”