All This Time

40 ⦿ in which i listen

Two days later, I feel like I've reached the end of my emotional tether as much as Levi has reached the end of his self-imposed timeline.

"Are you sure?" I ask once again as I sit cross-legged on his bed, watching him fold clothes with the same meticulous neatness I've come to expect from Levi. "Really sure?"

He removes a half dozen hangers and doesn't answer me. He folds them like every press of the fabric and smoothening of a wrinkle is truth, like he's talking to me without saying a word. Tears spring to my eyes. The bruised glow of the sun streams through his windows, brimming the room with orange light. In a few short hours, we'll be at the gallery. And after that, I'll be at Brett's, clinging to a couch cushion and sobbing, while Levi will be in a taxi, going wherever it is he thinks he'll find what he's looking for.

Without thinking about it, I snatch the shirt he's folding. Some childish, inane part of my brain thinks that if I don't let him pack it, he'll stay. He loves this shirt, right? He would never leave without it. My mind translates: He loves me, right? He'd never leave me.

"Charlotte." Levi's voice is full of fond exasperation. He stretches his hand out for it, but my fingers only dig into the fabric harder.

"No." My stubborn grasp refuses to let him tug the shirt away.

"Charlotte," he says again, and this time he sounds almost angry. It's a new look on Levi, and I'm so startled, I forget to dig my fingers in when he makes a grab for the shirt. It slips from my fingers as easily as everything else in my life seems to have evaded me.

He's staring at me like he wants to say more, but then he spins around, giving me his back. He refolds the shirt in silence and I want to apologize, but the word sticks between my teeth like taffy. I watch as he ignores me, wondering if his moving away means he's cutting the cord on our friendship as much as he's cutting the cord on New York.

"You don't even get it, do you?"

Levi doesn't look at me as he speaks. For a moment, I'm terrified he's going to admit something friendship-altering, but he puts my mind at ease with his next words.

He turns, puts the shirt on the top of his bulging suitcase, and zips it up. "Have you ever been fishing, Charlotte?"

The about-turn confuses me. "Um, no?"

"One of my mom's boyfriends taught me."

I nod, still not sure of the relevance.

"You put some bait on the hook and you wait for the fish to start biting." Levi shoves the suitcase onto the floor so he can sit next to me. "It requires a lot of patience."

Unable to restrain myself, I blurt out, "Are you telling me to have patience? With Wolf? Like you told me in the Netherlands?"

He frowns at me. "Let me finish," he reproaches. "Anyway, you need to have patience in order to catch a fish. Fishing isn't about being smarter than the fish, it's about being able to wait it out. And fish are pretty stupid. I mean, they nudge the bait over and over and at some point, they probably realize it's not food—"

"Fishermen use live bait sometimes," I interject. "Like worms and stuff."

"Just listen to the story!"

I huff, flopping down onto the bed so my head lands on his pillow. "Fine. Sorry."

"So they keep coming to the bait even though it's not like it'll magically turn into food. They think that doing the same thing over and over again will yield different results. But the fisherman has all the time in the world to wait—remember what I said about patience?—because to them, that fish is their meal ticket. They need that fish. They're depending on that fish."