Georgie, All Along (67)
He looks so pleased as he turns me around, backs me toward the couch. But when he gets close his brow furrows, a frown at the corners of his mouth.
“What’s wrong?”
“I still don’t know about those pillows. I got them right before I had the repairs started. Wrong color, maybe.”
My mouth drops open, and Levi looks down at me again.
“What’s that face?”
I close my mouth. “What face?”
“You’re looking surprised. Men can pick throw pillows. I got one of those sites, where I get ideas.”
“Oh my God, Levi! Do you mean a Pinterest?”
He picks me up and dumps me on the couch. “So what if I do?”
His eyes widen when he sees I’ve got nothing on under this hoodie, and I tug it down again, giving him a scolding look. I’m not done with the Pinterest. I probably won’t be done until I see it, and also until I make sure Bel knows about it. Maybe until I write a letter about it to the local newspaper.
“Cookbooks and home decorating! You’re a domestic god. I’ve never picked out a throw pillow for myself.”
He drops next to me, pulling my bare legs across his lap, smoothing his wood-roughened palms over my shins. “Is that right?”
“I lived in Nadia’s guest house for the last few years. It was all furnished, with really nice stuff.”
“What’d you do with all your things?”
“What things?”
Levi frowns. “Your furniture. Your . . .” He waves a hand toward the shelves, where the landscapes and tiny canoes and nature paperweights sit.
“Oh,” I shrug. “I didn’t really have any. Before I got hired by Nadia I’d been working on a set for three months, so I was living in a hotel. Before that I rented a room in an apartment with two other assistants, but it was just a way station. We all traveled all the time with location shoots.”
“Huh.”
“Nomadic, I know.”
I’m suddenly shy, no doubt intimidated by Levi’s grown-up decorating prowess when I’ve never even owned a set of plates. I swing my legs off of him, standing again to continue my shelves inspection. Behind me, he makes a strangled noise and I tug at the hoodie again.
“Behave,” I say, but I put a gentle sway in my step.
The thing about Levi’s books is, they’re pretty lovingly arranged—some standing upright, some stacked on their sides to serve as tidy bookends. It’s almost all nonfiction, almost all about the bay or about climate change: Chesapeake Bay Explorer’s Guide, Chesapeake Requiem, The Weathermakers, All We Can Save. On his lower shelves the books are thicker, heavier, and I cock my head to read their spines.
Principles of Management. Introduction to Accounting. Basics of Computing. Fundamentals of Biology.
“Textbooks?”
“Mm?”
I’m pretty sure he is very distracted by my legs in this hoodie, which is nice. But I want the story behind these. “What are these from?”
He clears his throat. “I got an associates’ degree a few years back.”
I spin to face him. “Really?”
He nods.
I walk back toward him, intending to sit beside him again. But he pulls me over him so I’m straddling his thighs, and I have to hold the hoodie down over my lap.
He makes a noise of disapproval, and I give him a quelling look.
“Tell me about it,” I say.
He looks down at where I’m covering myself, his eyes half-glazed. “Now?”
“Yes, now.” I wriggle against him. “I want to know.”
I’m desperate to know. Levi going back to school seems important for me to know. Isn’t that one of the things I’m supposed to be considering, after all? One of the things I might want?
He stills me with firm hands on my hips. “You’re gonna have to stop moving if you want me to be able to talk.”
I freeze dramatically. “Tell me,” I say again, barely moving my lips.
He smiles. Levi has kind of a silly streak. I wonder if anyone else knows about it.
I hope it’s only me.
“After I worked for Carlos for a couple years, he suggested I take some classes at a community college so I could help out with the books.” He shrugs. “I did, and then I took a few more. They were pretty easy.”
“Biology was easy?” That’s hard for me to imagine. I barely passed biology in tenth grade. Plus, my parents wrote a letter of protest to my teacher about the required animal dissection.
He lowers his eyes, rubs his palms up my legs. “Biology was something separate.”
“Separate how?”
He shrugs again. “Those classes I took for Carlos, they were fine, but they were boring as fuck. Or at least they were for me.”
“Accounting,” I say, squinting my eyes and nodding, as though I’m committing this information to memory. “Not riveting, got it.”
He smiles. “So one semester I was in a class with this guy who was getting a transfer credit taken care of for his minor; the rest of the time he was doing a Bio major over at William & Mary. He was almost always studying for those classes, and sometimes I’d look over his shoulder and read. Or look, it’s more fair to say. His books always had tons of pictures.”