Chapter 18
Nico
I can't sleep.
This is becoming a pattern. The Pinewood Inn ceiling, the HVAC hum, the ice machine cycle — I know these sounds the way I know my own breathing. They should be soothing by now. White noise. The auditory wallpaper of a man who sleeps in hotels most of the year.
But tonight my body won't settle. My skin feels electric.
My brain is running a loop that isn't about spreadsheets or Coldwell or Langford for the first time in days.
It's running a loop about a dining room table with mismatched plates and a man who said I'll clear the outlet next to the booth like he was rearranging the architecture of his life to make room for mine.
It's eleven-forty. I've been lying here for an hour and a half.
I showered. I brushed my teeth. I hung up the navy sweater. I did all the nighttime routines that are supposed to signal to my body that the day is over and it's time to shut down. My body is ignoring every signal.
I pick up my phone.
I have Ezra's number. He gave it to me this afternoon. EZRA, no last name, in my contacts. I could text him. That's the normal thing, the logical thing. Hey, can't sleep, want to talk. Simple. Direct. The way adults communicate.
I don't text him.
I open the app.
I haven't opened it since the night I found his profile.
The night I read looking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely three times and didn't tap.
That was almost two weeks ago. I was a different person.
I was a man who ate nachos and filed assessments and thought the difference between efficient and lonely was a theoretical question.
It's not theoretical anymore. I know the difference now. Days of efficiency in a hotel room, days of something else entirely in a bar that doesn't make commercial sense and never will.
I choose the app over the text because the app is where I found him. Because messaging him through the dating app says something that a text doesn't. A text says I want to talk. The app says I want you.
I type: Hey. Are you awake?
I stare at it. This is either a reasonable thing to do or the worst idea I've had since agreeing to a date with a man whose opening line was about my swim trunks.
Send.
The read receipt appears instantly. He was already on his phone. He has my number now. He could have texted me. He didn't. He was on the app. Waiting? Or just awake, the same way I'm awake, running the same loop?
Three dots, then:
Yeah. Can't sleep either?
No. Dinner was... a lot.
Good a lot or bad a lot?
Both. Mostly good.
I watch the three dots appear and disappear twice. Then:
Did you want to talk?
I type: Yes. Delete it. Type: If you're not busy. Delete it. Type: Want me to come there?
Send before I can delete it again.
The response takes ten seconds. I count.
No, it's crowded here. Knox and Toby are down the hall. Silas is in his room. I'll come to you.
Something hot and complicated moves through my chest. Ezra, here. In this room. The beige walls and the mass-produced art and the desk I've never used. The bed I've been sleeping in alone, with sheets that smell like hotel detergent and nothing else.
The room is depressing, I type. Because it is, and because honesty has been working better than performance lately.
Yeah, but at least we can stretch out.
I stare at the message. Read it again. Process the implication — stretch out, which could mean sit comfortably, which could mean something else, which could mean anything, and my brain is doing the thing it does where it runs every possible interpretation simultaneously and arrives at the most destabilizing one.
Okay, I type. Room 214.
20 minutes.
I put the phone down. Pick it up. Put it down again.
A lion shifter is coming to my hotel room at midnight because I messaged him on a dating app. Not texted. Messaged through the app. Because I wanted him to know which door I was knocking on.
I get up. Put on jeans. I'm not answering the door in boxers, that's a decision point I'm not ready for.
The gray t-shirt I sleep in. Look at the room.
The bed is made because I make the bed every morning even in hotels because structure is how I survive.
The laptop is on the desk. The nightstand has Silas's book, my phone charger, and a glass of water.
I should straighten up. There's nothing to straighten. The room is immaculate because I live like a man who's ready to check out at any moment, because I am.
I hear the motorcycle before I see headlights. The low rumble of it in the parking lot, the engine cutting. Footsteps on the exterior stairs. Pinewood Inn, second floor, outdoor access. A knock on the door.
I open it.
Ezra is wearing jeans and a jacket over a t-shirt, hair slightly wind-wrecked from the bike ride. He smells like night air and bar soap and underneath that, something warm that I've been tracking at a distance for twelve days and is now standing two feet away.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"Nice room."
"It's terrible."
"Yeah, it is." He looks past me at the beige walls, the mass-produced art, the HVAC unit under the window. "This is where you've been spending your time?"
"At night. During the day I've been in your bar."
"My bar is better."
"Your bar is significantly better. But your bar doesn't have a door I can close."
Something shifts in his expression. The acknowledgment of what a closed door means — privacy, separation from the pride, a space where heartbeats aren't public information.
He steps inside. I close the door behind him and the room gets smaller. Not physically — Ezra just takes up space the way shifters do. Not with size but with presence. The air gets warmer. The silence gets louder.
He sits on the end of the bed because there's nowhere else to sit.
The desk chair is a hard plastic thing that belongs in a waiting room, not a conversation.
So: the bed. Ezra on the end of my bed, leaning back on his hands, legs stretched out, looking up at me like this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing at midnight in a Pinewood Inn.
"You can sit down," he says. "I promise the bed is big enough for two people."
I sit. Not next to him, at the head, against the headboard, knees drawn up. A careful distance. The bed is a queen, which means there's about two feet of hotel comforter between us.
"So," Ezra says. "Dinner."
"Dinner."
"Your heart rate was really something. I could hear it from inside the house. Everyone could. Jason wanted to hug you. Robin wanted to feed you. Vaughn wanted to ignore it. Knox wanted to address it. Silas wanted to give you a book." He tilts his head. "Standard pride response to a stressed human."
"And you?"
"I wanted to clear an outlet."
I almost smile. "That's what you wanted? In that moment? To rearrange the electrical infrastructure?"
"I wanted to make space for you. The outlet was the only version of that I could say out loud in a room full of people who hear everything." He pauses. "You used the app."
"Yes."
"You have my number."
"I know."
"But you used the app."
"I know what I did, Ezra."
"Why?"
Because the app is where I found you. Because the app says something a text doesn't. Because I wanted you to know which door I was knocking on.
"Because a text says I want to talk," I say. "The app says something else."
Ezra is quiet. His jaw works for a second, processing something that rearranged his expectations.
"Something else," he repeats.
"You know what else. You wrote a profile about the difference between efficient and lonely. I read it three times before the Troy date and I didn't message you because I didn't know what to say. I know now."
"What do you know now?"
"That I'm efficient. And that I've been lonely for a very long time. And that sitting in your bar for days didn't fix either of those things. It just made me aware of the difference."
The two feet of hotel comforter between us feels like a decision I'm going to have to make soon.
"At the bar this morning," I say. "Your lion decided something, and you stopped yourself from saying what."
Ezra goes still. Not the wall — something different. The focused stillness of a man who knew this question was coming and still isn't ready for it.
"It's later," I say.
"It's later," he agrees.
"So. What did your lion decide?"
He looks at me. Those eyes — brown, steady, the gold edge barely visible in the dim light of the nightstand lamp. The gold that means the lion is close to the surface. The gold that I've been learning to read for almost two weeks.
"My lion decided about you," he says. "The night you ended the date with Troy. The moment you told him to leave, not because he was rude to you, but because he was ugly about shifters. My lion heard that and decided."
"Decided what?"
"That you're mine." He says it plainly, without drama.
The way he says everything, factual, clear, this is the data.
"It's not a claim. I haven't claimed you.
It's just what my lion wants. What it's been wanting since that night.
It's why I shut you out for four days, because wanting you when you worked for Coldwell was stupid and dangerous, and the lion didn't care, and I couldn't fight both the lion and the wanting at the same time. "
"And now?"
"Now you drove to my bar at dawn with evidence that your company is hurting people like me.
Now you sat at a table with five lions and told them the truth with your heart going a hundred and twelve beats per minute.
Now you messaged me on a dating app instead of texting me because you wanted me to know which door you were knocking on.
" His voice is low, steady, but the gold is brighter.
"Now I'm not fighting the lion anymore."
The two feet of comforter is suddenly not enough distance for the magnitude of what he just said and simultaneously far too much distance for what I want to do about it.
"What do you want?" I ask. "Not the lion. You."