Immediately, I yank my hand from his and stand up, walking back from the ledge. I'm disgusted by what he's implying. I'm transported back to when I was standing outside our film class, crying and yelling at him for saying that I'm wasting my life by dancing.

"You're unbelievable," I spit. "You take me up here just to shove your little speech in my face again? Why are you so fixated on the way that I choose to live my life?"

I head back toward the ladder to climb down, but Levi takes my wrist to stop me. "Scarlett, wait. Will you just listen to me for a second?" He asks. His touch feels like it's burning me, and the anger in my chest is already growing.

"I've already listened to you and your opinion on my life," I point out, removing myself from his grasp again. "Remember? How you humiliated me in front of our entire class? I swear, it's like you try to upset me every time I'm with you. Just back the fuck off."

"I'm not trying to make you upset. I'm trying to get you to really look at what you're doing to yourself," Levi says. I turn back to him with fury written on my features. He puts his hands up, telling me that he won't make any more moves toward me. "I care about you, and I want you to be happy."

"You don't know what the hell makes me happy."

"I know it's not what you're doing with your life right now."

"How? How the hell could you possibly know that? What gives you the right to dictate whether or not I need to change the way I live my life? Hm?" I ask, a cruel sarcasm to my voice. "How would you feel if I kept forcing you to tell me about Zeke? What if I lectured you about how to deal with your own brother?"

His expression falls to something resembling defeat, and I shake my head, exasperated by the fact that we're even having this conversation again. I turn back around and grip the railings of the ladder, prepared to leave without him.

His voice follows me. "Do you really want to know about my past?"

I keep descending the ladder, ignoring his attempts to pull me back into the conversation. He knows the answer to that question.

"Fine. Ask me whatever you want," he says. "But only if you promise to listen—actually listen—to my answers." I stop halfway down the ladder, wondering if he's just saying things to get me to listen to him. "If you promise to not run away from me like you did last time."

"Don't joke with me," I say, climbing up a few rungs and looking over the ledge to look at him.

"I'm not joking. I'm being serious for once in my life," he says. "Test me."

I want to leave, to show him that he can't pull these kinds of things and get away with it. But I also have countless questions that have been eating at me since I've met him. Questions only he can answer.

I step back onto the roof, keeping a significant distance between us. I start off with the most obvious one. "Tennis," I say quickly. "Why the fuck do you get so mad when I bring up tennis?"

"I've already told you. I used to play."

"We both know there's more to it. I'm not going to stay if you're just gonna give me these vague answers."

He turns, looking up toward the sky. "I played tennis from the time I had the strength to pick up a racket until I graduated high school. Fourteen years, five days a week, a couple of hours a day. On my days off, I either had conditioning or tournaments. Next question."

"No, not next question," I say, stunned by his lightning-fast answer and the nonchalant way he described it. I think about his insane schedule. "Were you good?" I ask pathetically, not knowing how else to communicate my confusion with this information.

Levi laughs. "For everything I sacrificed, not good enough." He turns back to me. "In those fourteen years, the value of my life could pretty much be simplified down to my national ranking."

National ranking. Holy shit.

"Why'd you quit?"

He looks at me like I've grown a third head. "The same reason a animal will chew off its own leg when it's stuck in a trap. To escape something it knows will eventually kill it."

The pieces start to fall in place. "You hated it."

"Hate is too weak of a word to describe how I felt toward it," Levi says. "My parents wanted a son they could be proud of, so they made sure that it consumed every second of my life. They wanted to homeschool me so I'd have more time to practice. Even after I convinced them to let me to go school, they didn't let me do anything beyond that. I didn't have any friends, any hobbies, anything besides this—this thing that I resented."

I begin to see where he's going with this. "I'm sorry you went through that. But you can't—you can't assume that I feel the same way," I insist. "Your parents forced you to play tennis. I'm dancing because I want to."

"No, you aren't."

"Yes, I am. I can stop any time that I want, but I don't," I say, raising my voice. "See? I haven't danced since before Thanksgiving Break."

"That's only because your doctor hasn't cleared your injury."

I scoff. "Stop trying to make it seem like we're the same. Because we aren't."

"You really think that my parents were the reason I threw away fourteen years of my life? Crimson, think. Think back to the answer you gave me during the interview: why do you dance? Be as honest with yourself as you were with me."

I dance for my sister.

"You're not making sense," I say, feeling a stress-induced headache coming on. "You want me to believe that you played tennis for your brother?"

I scoff and start pacing.

"Now you're asking the real questions. Up until two years ago, everything I did was for Zeke," he says. Now there's no smile on his face, only anguish as he finally talks about his brother. "Everything."

I stare at him, still at a loss but rendered silent by the emotion in his voice. His impenetrable facade is breaking, and I stay silent, waiting for his truth to come out.

Levi looks back at me for a few seconds, and I see his eyes take on a far-away look. "It was around the time I began to hate tennis that I realized my brother's secret. We'd always been close, so I found out he was gay not long after he figured it out himself. My parents wanted two perfect sons. But if they knew the truth about Zeke, they'd never see him as perfect. And they'd punish him for that in ways I wouldn't be able to save him from."

He stops talking to walk back to the ledge of the roof. For a second, I'm afraid his emotions might push him to do something irrational, but he just sits down again. I see his hands gripping the concrete edge, even though I know it's not the height that he's afraid of.

"So I decided to be the perfect son for them. The only one they'd need. I thought that maybe if I worked hard enough and did everything they asked of me, that they'd take the pressure off Zeke. That they would never look close enough to see that side of him."

I take a few steps closer to him, stopping just before I reach the ledge. "It didn't work," I say. Levi's here now somehow, and there's no way he would've just quit on his brother. Something must've gone wrong.

He turns around and gives me a faint smile. "It worked for a while. I knew how much I loved my brother, and I was content with throwing my life away to protect him. Everything I missed out on—relationships, friends, free will, being a kid—I told myself it was all worth it."

It terrifies me how hard his words impact me. "You were protecting him. So in a way, it was worth it."

I sit down next to him again, using his shoulder to keep from losing my balance. "Sometimes we have to go to great lengths for the people we care about," I add. "There's nothing wrong with that."

He turns to me, and the sun is reflecting in his eyes in the same beautiful way it was just a few minutes earlier. But now, it highlights the sadness in his gaze. "Do you know what I learned in those fourteen years? The most critical time for a person's mental development?"

"What did you learn?"

"I learned how to give a good handshake," he says. I'm confused.

Levi elaborates, "In the time that I was supposed to be learning about myself—about my likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests—I learned absolutely nothing of value aside from how to give a good handshake. Fourteen years dedicated to a single sport, and the handshakes I gave to my opponents right before my matches ended up being the most valuable part of it. I came into college not knowing a fucking thing about myself. All because I'd spent my entire life living for someone else."

We both look out toward the horizon. "Do you regret it?" I ask, hoping I'm not being insensitive. "Quitting tennis and leaving home?"

"Not at all," he says without missing a beat.

"How?"

I see his jaw clench. "I lied," he says. "I learned one other thing besides how to give a good handshake."

"And what was that?"

"I learned that" —he reaches over to hold my hand— "no matter how much you love someone, no matter how much you want to keep them safe, you can only go so long living for them. When you spend years sacrificing pieces of yourself for another person, you'll eventually lose yourself completely."

"You didn't," I say quietly. "You're here right now. You're in a band, you have a lot of friends. You're happy. You didn't lose yourself at all."

"Scarlett, you don't understand," he says, removing his hand from mine and leaning back on his hands. "If you saw the Levi from two years ago, you wouldn't recognize him. I'm not a shell of a person right now because I eventually realized what I was doing to myself and I walked away. From tennis, from my parents—"

"—from your brother," I finish for him. I chew on my lip, looking down at my lap just so I don't have to look at him.

"Yes, from my brother," he affirms. "When I graduated, I had to make the decision: stay and forget more of myself with every passing day or come here. I loved my brother, but I had to do this for myself."

"How?" I whisper, repeating my earlier question and feeling my eyes grow misty. I think about Dani and the prospect of ever breaking away from her. Leaving her behind to chase what I want. "How could you have made that decision? And not feel an ounce of regret?"

"How could you not?"

"Because of the guilt," I finally say, letting my voice crack in a thousand different places. "You don't—you don't know what I did to her. If you knew, you would understand . . ." I pause to take a breath. "Dance is the only way I can make up for what I did. I have to dance, Levi."

"Scarlett, I know what guilt feels like," Levi says, taking my hand again. "My decision to leave didn't come without consequences that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Don't tell me that I don't understand you, because I'm probably the one person that does."

Pieces of our conversation on the way to my house float back to me. It hits me: his brother isn't at home.

What happened to him?

Levi doesn't elaborate. Before I can ask, he clasps his hand on the back of my neck and forces me to look at him, teary-eyed and all. "I've been exactly where you are right now. Your conscience—your inability to see that there are some things that are out of your control and some things that you have to be selfish about—is crushing you in the exact same way that mine was crushing me. And it fucking kills me to see you like this."

My chin quivers as I try my best to hold in my tears. It feels like a dam has broken inside me, releasing a tsunami of pent-up emotions. I don't want him to see me like this, but at the same time, I feel like he understands exactly where my tears are coming from. I feel seen.

"Whatever you're carrying with you that's forcing you to dance, you need to let go," he tells me. "I'm not trying to make you cry or confuse you. I want to make you see the person hidden under all your guilt."

I let a sob out. "I can't."

I'm overwhelmed. My thoughts feel fragmented and spiraling, and if it weren't for Levi right next to me, I'd be scared of falling.

"Yes, you can," Levi says. "I'm telling you this because I did, and it was the best damn thing I've ever done."

I sniff and place my hands over his, feeling the way his fingers cradle my face. I look into his brown eyes and see my own reflection in the irises. His thumbs gently wipe the tears from under my eyes.

He smiles as he holds me. "And I'd make the exact same decision a million times again if I had to. Because it led me to a rooftop with the most stunning girl I've met in my life, and I've never felt freer."

Levi leans his head closer to mine, examining my face. "Tell me why you're crying."

"Because I don't know what to think. My head feels like it might explode."

He smiles, and I have to look now to see the smile lingering a mere few inches from me. "Well, that's the problem. I'm trying to get you to stop overthinking. Crimson, just let go for once."

My tears slow. It's funny how easy Levi makes this all sound. If only this was all as easy as just breaking free or letting go. "How?"

"Like this."

Then he closes the space between us and kisses me, still holding my face between his hands. I'm sure he tastes the saltiness of my tears, but neither of us cares. With his kiss, the tsunami that was growing in my mind crashes and soothes, leaving nothing but the serene acknowledgment of his lips on mine.

The kiss is so intoxicating—a breath of fresh air after being plunged underwater by his words—that the thirty stories below us feel like nothing but wind beneath our feet.

♔

voting

jack

levi

thought corner

1. How do you feel about Levi's mysterious past?

2. How will this talk affect Scarlet moving forward?

3. Who's connection is stronger? Levlett or Jackett?

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