Page 15 of Second to None

For just a moment, his expression slipped into something raw and open. He swallowed, mouth firming into a thin line as he looked up. “The Lyra constellation?”

Pressure pooled behind my sternum. “Yeah.”

Four stars connected in a rhombus shape and a fifth extending out at one end. The lyre of Orpheus, its music so beautiful it could move even the gods. Passion, longing, and creativity. A constant anchor in the nighttime sky.

We’d talked about it, back then—matching tattoos, hidden away so only we would know. Funny how that hadn’t scared me while love did. Anyway, we’d splintered apart before we could follow through. When I’d eventually had mine done, I wondered whether Levi would catch a glimpse of it, maybe flicking through some magazine, pausing at a shirtless vacation picture of me, and he’d see the tattoo and just… know. His face, though, showed surprise and confusion, a flicker of something else before he masked it all.

“You went ahead and got it on your own?” His words were neutral. “When?”

I almost missed it, time whittling away at the contours of how well I'd learned to read him—his shoulders drawing in just a fraction, a minute inward tilt as though he was bracing himself for a hit. It was how he’d sat through the regular meetings to review and tweak our individual images, through award shows when we presented the easy butt of a joke, hugely popular and kind of cute but somehow justnot serious musicians, ya know?

BecauseLevi had cared what people thought, too. He’d just refused to let it rule his life.

“About a year ago,” I said, my voice so low it barely rose above the hum of the boat. I held his gaze, waiting for more—some clue as to why this bothered him. Did it make him uncomfortable, the idea that I might still be holding on?

“Closure?” he asked, still so damnneutral. I needed a moment before it made sense.

“No.” Too urgent. I paused to center myself, oddly soothed by the subtle dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. “No. More… a reminder.”

Levi’s eyes narrowed very slightly, sunlight catching darker spots in his irises. “A reminder,” he repeated, no inflection whatsoever.

I resisted the impulse to cross my arms. “Of what it cost me—being too afraid to be true to myself.”

“What it costyou?” Finally, a flicker of emotion. Even though it was meant to cut, I’d take it.

“I could only speak for myself. Maybe, in hindsight, you were glad things had worked out this way?”

He snorted, bitterness twitching around his mouth. “Oh, for fuck’ssake, Cass.”

Do you still care?

I didn’t have the guts to ask. Instead, I motioned at a beige lounge island off to one side of the deck, the glass railing offering uninterrupted views of the ocean’s shimmering expanse. “Can we sit down?”

He squinted at me, then gave a tiny shake of his head that seemed to be more at himself. “All right, I guess. But put a shirt on, will you?”

I bit back a joke about how, hey, does my chiseled chest make it hard to think? Not the moment, and Levi had a tendency to unleash his tongue when he felt backed into a corner. So I grabbed a shirt knotted around a chair, never mind that it was Jace’s, and slipped it on before I sank onto the bench. Levi slid in next to me, a careful distance between us that felt like an abyss. I blamed the gentle rocking of the boat for the unease that pooled in my stomach.

Silence. My gaze drifted to the coastline, softened by the midday glare and blurred into hazy shapes of land. A scattering of other boats dotted the water, their white hulls like dashes of punctuation on the vast blue page of the ocean.

When I turned back, Levi was studying me, his eyes sharp and face unreadable. The breeze caught the edge of his hair, ruffling it across his forehead. Backlit by the sun, he seemed ripped out of a dream. Here, up high and open to the elements, it felt like the world couldn’t touch us when of course it could, it had.

But he’d come.

“Thank you,” was how I reopened this impossible conversation.

“For…?”

“Being here. Willing to see me.”

“I’m not here for you, Cass.” Sharp as the crack of a whip, and yeah, ouch. I inhaled around the fluttering ache in my chest. He had every right.

“I know. That’s not how I meant it.”

“How did you mean it, then?”

Fitting that it hurt to look at him, the sun’s glare painting white spots across my vision. I didn’t reach for my sunglasses, though. “I know I’m not why you’re here, but I could have been your reason to stay away. It’d hardly be surprising.”

He considered me for a heavy, heart-wrenching beat. “What makes you think you still hold that kind of power over me?”

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