Chapter 6
Nicholas
The Pinewood Inn has a specific quality of silence at eleven PM.
Not quiet — silence. The HVAC hums. The ice machine down the hall cycles every forty minutes.
Someone in the room above me has a television on low, the murmur of a laugh track bleeding through the ceiling.
But none of it adds up to sound. It's just the white noise of temporary living, the ambient proof that you're somewhere but not anywhere.
I'm lying on the bed in boxers and a t-shirt, phone balanced on my stomach, doing the thing I told myself I wouldn't do tonight.
The app loads with its usual cheerful optimism.
Thirteen notifications since this morning — most of them the automated kind, the algorithm trying to convince me that my soulmate is a twenty-minute drive away.
He's not. My soulmate, if such a thing exists, is not a guy named Brad whose profile picture is a gym mirror selfie with a motivational quote about hustle.
I scroll. Slim pickings, which I expected.
This isn't Portland or DC, where I can open the app and have thirty viable options within a mile.
Out here it's a scattering of profiles spread across a huge radius.
A few college-aged guys who are clearly just looking.
A couple of older men with profiles that read like job applications.
Someone whose entire bio is a fish emoji.
A message blinks. New, from twenty minutes ago.
TroyH_29: damn those trunks look good on you. bet they look even better on my floor
The Miami photo. I knew I should have taken that one down.
It's from a work trip last year — the one good afternoon I had between property assessments, when I went to the beach for two hours and Cass made me take a picture because "you never look relaxed and I need proof it's possible.
" I'm in swim trunks, squinting at the camera, almost smiling.
It's the most human photo I have, which is why I keep it and why it attracts exactly this kind of message.
I tap the profile. Troy, 29, works in construction, lives about forty minutes away. Three photos — truck, bar, shirtless in what appears to be someone else's bathroom. Bio: Good times and good vibes. No drama. DM me if you can keep up.
He's not what I'm looking for. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for, but I know it doesn't describe itself as "good vibes."
Still. The alternative is another night in this hotel room with my spreadsheets and the laugh track through the ceiling and the loneliness of a man who's been in the same town for six days and hasn't had a real conversation with anyone except his sister and a shifter who told him his life sounds lonely.
I type back: Thanks. You free tomorrow evening?
The response is almost instant. TroyH_29: hell yeah. your place? I can come over tonight if you want show you a real good time
I stare at the message. The "real good time." The assumption that I'm going to give a stranger my hotel room number because he complimented my swim trunks.
Tomorrow works better. There's a bar I've been going to — I'll send you the address.
TroyH_29: a bar? lol I was thinking something more private
The bar first. Drinks. Then we'll see.
A pause. Longer than his previous responses. He's recalculating — I can practically see him weighing whether I'm worth the effort of actual pants and a public location. Then:
TroyH_29: alright cool. what time?
Seven. I'll send the address in the morning.
TroyH_29: bet. see you then sexy
I close the conversation and let my phone rest on my chest. The ceiling stares back at me. I just agreed to bring a date to a bar full of shifters who can hear heartbeats and smell arousal and have been watching me eat nachos for a week.
This is either a reasonable attempt at a social life or an act of profound self-sabotage. The line between those two things is, as previously established, thin.
I should put the phone down. Charge it, go to sleep, get up tomorrow and do the same thing I've been doing all week — IPA, nachos, booth, spreadsheets. The date is tomorrow evening. I'll deal with it then.
Instead, I open the app again. Not the messages — the grid. The browse function, sorted by distance.
I'm not looking for anything. I'm just looking.
The profiles load in a mosaic of thumbnail photos. I scroll past Troy's shirtless bathroom selfie, past Brad and his hustle quotes, past the fish emoji guy. The radius is set to fifty miles, which out here covers a lot of empty ground and not a lot of people.
I almost scroll past it. The photo is dark — taken in low light, maybe a bar, maybe a garage.
Someone leaning against a counter with a half-smile that's more smirk than smile, one eyebrow slightly raised.
The lighting catches the edge of his jaw, the line of his throat.
He's not posing. He's not trying. He just looks like that.
I know that half-smile. I've been watching it from across a room for five days.
E. | 29
Lion shifter. Yes, really. No, I won't show you.
I do spreadsheets and feed stray cats. Sometimes at the same time.
Looking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely. If that doesn't make sense to you, we're probably not a match.
I read it again.
Then a third time.
Looking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely.
My throat tightens. Not unpleasant — just unexpected. Like walking into a warm room after being outside too long.
He wrote that. Ezra — the spreadsheet lion, the one who does inventory and feeds stray cats and looks at me like I'm a variable he hasn't solved yet — sat somewhere and wrote a dating profile that says looking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely, and I'm lying in a Pinewood Inn reading it at eleven PM because I said those exact words to him three days ago.
Efficient. Lonely. He remembered. He'd already been thinking about it. Maybe it was already in his profile before I said it, and when I said it in his bar he heard his own words coming back at him from a stranger in a suit.
Or maybe he wrote it after. Maybe he went upstairs that night and opened the app and changed his bio because a man at the bar said it's efficient in a voice that meant I know it's not enough.
I don't know which possibility is worse.
I look at his profile for a long time. The photo — that half-smile, the low light, the ease of someone who isn't performing.
The bio — three lines, specific, honest, a little funny.
Lion shifter, confirmed. I'd guessed right.
The group structure, the deference to Knox, the way they went still. Lions.
My thumb hovers over the screen. I could tap. Send a message. Something clever, something that references the bar or the nachos or the difference between efficient and lonely. He'd know it was me immediately. There's no version of this where he doesn't.
I don't tap.
I close the app. Set my phone on the nightstand. Plug in the charger.
The HVAC hums. The ice machine cycles. The laugh track murmurs through the ceiling.
Tomorrow I'll walk into the bar and sit in my booth and order my IPA and my nachos, and Ezra will be on his stool with his tea and his spreadsheet, and neither of us will mention this.
He doesn't know I found his profile. He doesn't know I read it three times.
He doesn't know that the line between efficient and lonely has been living in my head since the moment he said it, and now I know it's been living in his too.
Tomorrow I'll bring a date to his bar. A guy who calls me sexy and wants to come to my hotel room to show me a "real good time."
And Ezra will be right there. On his stool. With his half-smile that's more smirk than smile. Doing spreadsheets and feeding stray cats.
I turn off the light.
It takes a long time to fall asleep.