Chapter 9
Ezra
I'm avoiding him.
I know I'm avoiding him. My lion knows I'm avoiding him.
Knox probably knows I'm avoiding him, because Knox knows everything that happens in this bar the way the bar knows everything that happens in this building — through the walls, through the floor, through the frequency of silence that means something has changed.
What changed is: my lion decided. And I'm not letting it.
Three days ago, Nicholas sat in his booth and told Troy to leave.
Not dramatically, not with a speech. Just I don't think this is going to work out.
You should go. And my lion heard that — heard the quiet certainty of it, the baseline standard that didn't need to be defended because it was foundational — and decided.
Mine.
I've been fighting it since.
Lions don't get to choose for us. That's the whole point — that's what separates shifters who live in the world from the animals.
The animal has instincts. The human has judgment.
When they align, you get something beautiful.
When they don't, you get a man on a barstool pretending he can't feel the gravitational pull of a human in a window booth who eats nachos edges-first and tips exactly thirty percent and keeps his phone facedown like he's hiding from someone.
My lion wants Nicholas. My brain says Nicholas works for the company that's trying to buy our home.
My brain wins. My brain has to win. Because if my lion wins, I'm the idiot who fell for the corporate agent, and Delgado's warning will be justified.
So I don't look at him. I don't comment on his nachos or his work habits or the way his left hand holds a pen differently than his right. I don't think about the dating profile I wrote six months ago that describes, with uncomfortable precision, exactly the kind of person he seems to be.
I do the books. I stock the bar. I exist in the same room as him and maintain the professional distance of a bartender to a customer and absolutely nothing more.
It's the hardest thing I've done in years.
* * *
"You're brooding," Jason says.
It's mid-morning. Nicholas isn't here yet — his pattern is noon, give or take fifteen minutes — and I'm using the pre-Nicholas hours to get work done without the distraction of his presence in my peripheral vision.
"I'm doing inventory."
"You're doing inventory and brooding. The inventory doesn't require that face." Jason leans on the counter, dish towel over his shoulder. "Is this about the booth guy?"
"Don't call him the booth guy."
"Robin calls him the booth guy. Vaughn calls him 'the human.' Knox doesn't call him anything, which is its own statement." Jason tilts his head. "You were warming up to him all week and now you've gone cold. What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Something happened at the date. The night with Troy.
" Jason's eyes are sharper than people give him credit for.
He's the soft one — the one who brings water and makes food and hums while he works — but he's also the one who watches.
"You were different after that. Not better-different. Worse-different."
I set down the clipboard. "My lion decided."
Jason's expression shifts. He understands — they all understand. When a lion decides, it's not a preference. It's not a crush. It's the animal identifying a mate with the kind of certainty that doesn't have a return policy.
"Oh," Jason says. "Oh, Ezra."
"Yeah."
"And you're fighting it."
"He works for Coldwell. He was sent here to buy our home. Whatever I — whatever the lion — it doesn't matter. He's not someone I can—"
"You don't know that."
"I know that he showed up with a property file and a corporate card and a directive to make Knox an offer. That's not ambiguous."
Jason is quiet for a moment. He picks up a glass, starts polishing it — the nervous tic of a man who needs his hands busy when his brain is working.
"Knox's lion decided about Toby in about four seconds," Jason says. "You were there. We all were. Toby walked in soaking wet in a cat cardigan and Knox went—" He makes a sound that's a fair approximation of a lion's brain short-circuiting.
"Knox and Toby are different."
"How?"
"Toby wasn't sent here by a company that wants to buy us."
"No, Toby stumbled in from a storm. Which is arguably worse, as far as first impressions go." Jason sets the glass down. "I'm just saying — fighting your lion is your call. But make sure you're fighting it for the right reason. 'He works for Coldwell' is a reason. 'I'm scared' isn't."
"I'm not scared."
Jason gives me a look that says exactly how much he believes that. Then he goes back to the kitchen, because Jason always knows when to push and when to leave.
I'm not scared.
I'm terrified.
Not of Nicholas — of what wanting him would mean. Of building something on a foundation that could be a lie. Of my lion being right and my brain being wrong, or my brain being right and my lion being wrong, and not knowing which scenario is worse.
* * *
Nicholas arrives at noon. He sits in his booth. Orders the IPA. Opens his laptop.
I don't look.
I feel him, though. That's the thing about a lion's decision — it's not just emotional, it's sensory.
My hearing sharpens when he's in the room.
I can track his heartbeat from the bar, steady and controlled, the pulse of a man who manages everything including his own circulatory system.
I can smell him — the hotel soap, the leather of his bag, the coffee he had this morning, and underneath all of it the warm, specific scent that my lion has filed under important in a folder I can't delete.
The afternoon is its own kind of torture that I'm sure someone has written about in a book Silas has read.
Two people in a room, aware of each other, pretending not to be.
Every sound he makes is specific and cataloged — the shift of his weight, the tap of his keyboard, the scratch of his pen in the leather notebook.
Every twelve minutes he does a room sweep, and I know this because I've been counting, and every twelve minutes his eyes pass over me without stopping and it's the absence of contact that I feel, not the presence.
***
Night. The bar is closed. Knox is in his room with Toby. Silas is reading. I'm on the back porch, sitting on the steps, not feeding Mango, who is sitting next to me eating tuna from a can I didn't open.
The night is cold. Mountain cold — the kind that settles into your bones and makes the stars sharper. The garage is dark, the bikes lined up like sleeping animals, the gravel lot empty except for the ghosts of customers who don't come.
My phone is in my hand. The app is open.
Nicholas's profile. The one he doesn't know I know about.
The photos — the swim trunks one, and another, Nicholas at what looks like a rooftop bar, sunset behind him, smiling in a way I've never seen him smile in person.
Open. Unguarded. The smile of a man at a party with people he trusts, and even in a photo you can see that it's rare.
Looking for: something that doesn't require an NDA.
Interests: Data analysis, bad hotel Wi-Fi, nachos (recently).
He updated his profile. Recently, based on the nachos reference. He's sitting in a hotel room updating his dating profile and he put nachos in his interests.
Mango butts her head against my hand. I scratch behind her ears.
"I'm in trouble," I tell her.
She purrs. It's not sympathy. It's the general contentment of a cat who has tuna and a warm hand and no opinion about the romantic entanglements of the person providing both.
I close the app. I don't message him. I don't look at his profile again.
I go upstairs and lie in my narrow bed and listen to the building and fight with a lion that has already decided and won't take no for an answer.
Tomorrow I'll be better. Tomorrow I'll find the middle ground between cold distance and the terrifying warmth that my lion wants me to wrap around a man I barely know who works for a company that wants to erase us.
Tomorrow.
Mango jumps on my windowsill. Settles into the moonlight. Purrs.
My lion purrs back.
Neither of them listens to me.