Chapter 18 #2
"I want to kiss you," he says. "I've wanted to since you sat at my bar on day one and ordered an IPA and tipped three dollars on a six-dollar beer.
I wanted to when you asked about the oak and when you wrote that note about Robin's lemon bars and when you told Troy to leave.
I wanted to at dawn when we were one inch apart and Knox's footsteps stopped it. "
He's moved. Or I've moved. The two feet is less than one now. I can see the gold in his eyes without squinting. I can smell the bar soap and the night air and the warmth underneath.
"I want to kiss you," he says again. "Can I?"
"Yes."
He kisses me.
It's not careful. That's the first thing I register.
It's not the tentative, testing-the-waters first kiss of two people who aren't sure.
Ezra kisses me like he's been holding his breath for days and just decided to stop.
His hand comes up to the side of my neck, warm, certain, the callused grip of a man who works with engines and spreadsheets and his hands know both, and his mouth is on mine and my brain, which has been running calculations and worst-case scenarios and room sweeps for days, goes quiet.
Just quiet. The only time it's been quiet since I got here.
I kiss him back. My hands find his shoulders, his arms, the solid weight of him.
He's warm the way shifters are warm — not just body heat, something deeper, something that runs hotter than human.
His t-shirt is soft under my fingers and the muscle underneath is not soft at all and I pull him closer because the distance between us has been a decision for twelve days and I'm done deciding.
He makes a sound. Low, from the chest, not quite a growl but close.
It vibrates through his body and into mine and my own body responds in a way that is entirely unhelpful for rational thought.
His hand slides from my neck to the back of my head, fingers in my hair, tilting me to change the angle, and the kiss deepens into something that is definitely not a first-kiss-appropriate level of intensity but I don't care because his mouth tastes like tea and his hands are in my hair and the HVAC is humming and I'm alive in a way I haven't been in years.
We end up horizontal. I'm not sure who decided that.
I think it was gravity, or possibly my back against the headboard giving way, or possibly Ezra's weight shifting forward in a way that had exactly one logical conclusion.
He's over me, forearms braced on either side of my head, and his eyes are fully gold now and that should scare me.
I'm pinned under a lion shifter whose eyes have gone predator-bright.
But it doesn't. It doesn't scare me at all.
"Hi," I say. Because my brain has apparently abandoned all higher function and that's what came out.
"Hi." He's breathing hard. His arms are steady but his pulse isn't. I can feel it in his wrists, bracketing my head, fast and urgent. "Your heart is doing the thing again."
"Different reason this time."
"Yeah." He dips his head. Kisses the corner of my mouth. My jaw. The spot below my ear that makes my breath catch in a way I can't control and don't try to. "Very different reason."
His mouth moves down my neck. Not gentle.
There's teeth in it, the scrape of canines that are sharper than human and the knowledge of what those teeth could do mixed with the absolute certainty that they won't. He bites down on the muscle where my neck meets my shoulder.
Not hard enough to break skin, just hard enough to make my hips jerk off the bed and a sound come out of me that I didn't authorize.
"Good?" His mouth against my skin, the word more vibration than voice.
"Do that again."
He does it again. Harder. His hand slides under my t-shirt, palm flat against my stomach, and the contact of his skin on mine is a line crossed.
The shift from kissing to touching, from testing to taking.
His hand is hot. Hotter than it should be.
The shifter heat pouring off him like a furnace, and everywhere he touches feels branded.
I pull at his shirt. He gets the message.
He sits back on his heels, strips it off in one motion, and the sight of him.
I lose the sentence. Broad shoulders, lean muscle, the body of a man who works on motorcycles and carries kegs and does everything physical with the easy efficiency of someone whose body has never been a problem to solve.
A scar on his left side, old, silvered. Chest hair that trails down past his navel.
Gold eyes looking down at me with an intensity that makes my mouth go dry.
"Your turn," he says.
I pull my shirt off. His eyes track down my chest, my stomach, the line of my hips above my jeans, and his expression does something that isn't the composure or the half-smile or anything I've cataloged.
It's hunger. Naked, unperforming, the look of a man, of a lion, seeing something it wants and deciding to have it.
He lowers himself back down. Chest to chest, skin to skin, and the full-body contact drags a groan out of both of us.
He's hard against my thigh. I can feel it through the denim, the thick line of him, and my body responds with a surge of heat that makes me rock up against him before I can think about it.
His hips shift. The friction is specific. Direct. Through two layers of denim, unmistakable, and the pressure of him against me hits exactly right and drags a sound out of my throat that I will deny making in any future context.
"Okay?" Ezra asks. His voice is rough. Wrecked. The composure that I thought was unbreakable has broken and what's underneath is raw and wanting and asking permission.
"Yes. Okay. Very okay."
He does it again. Not accidental this time — deliberate.
A slow roll of his hips that grinds us together through our jeans, and I feel every inch of him, the length and the heat and the weight of his body holding me exactly where he wants me.
My hands clench in the back of his waistband, pulling him tighter, and the friction builds into something rhythmic and desperate.
"Ezra — the jeans —"
"Yeah." He reaches between us. Unbuttons mine first, quick, efficient, his knuckles brushing against me and making my spine arch.
Then his own. We strip the rest off without grace or patience, denim and cotton shoved down and kicked away, and when he presses back against me with nothing between us the difference is staggering.
I can feel him. The heat and his cock and the way he throbs against me when I shift the angle.
Skin on skin, the full length of him against the full length of me, and I understand now why he's been holding his breath for days.
"Better," he says. His voice has dropped into something barely human. "Much better."
He finds a rhythm. Slow at first, deliberate, controlled, the way he does everything. His hand grips my hip, adjusting the angle until we're lined up, and when he rolls forward the friction drags along the full length of me and my head drops back against the pillow and I stop thinking entirely.
It builds fast. Embarrassingly fast. I haven't been touched like this in months, maybe longer, and Ezra's body against mine is overwhelming in a way I wasn't prepared for.
The heat of him, the weight, the sounds he's making that are somewhere between human and not.
His mouth on my neck, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat where he can feel my pulse hammering.
My hands on his ass, pulling him into every thrust. His skin burning under my palms.
"Nico." My name in his mouth. Low and broken and reverent. "Nico, I —"
I come first. It hits me like a wave cresting, my whole body locking up, hips stuttering against his, the orgasm pulled out of me by the weight and the heat and his voice saying my name like it belongs to him.
I bury the sound in his shoulder because the walls are thin and this is a Pinewood Inn and I have some remaining shred of dignity.
He follows seconds later — two more hard thrusts, his hand clenched in the pillow beside my head, a sound against my throat that's more growl than moan.
His whole body shudders, and I feel the wet heat of it between us, soaking me, and I don't care.
I hold him through it, my hands in his hair, his face pressed into my neck, both of us breathing like we ran something.
The HVAC hums. The ice machine cycles. Ezra's weight settles onto me. He's heavy, warm, his face in my neck, his breathing ragged against my skin.
We lie there. The ceiling is still popcorn textured. The art is still mass-produced. The room is still beige.
But it's not depressing anymore.
"Well," I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. Someone less put-together. Someone better. "That happened."
"That happened," he agrees.
"In a Pinewood Inn."
"In a Pinewood Inn." He lifts his head. Looks down at himself. At me. At the situation. "We're a mess."
"We are."
"I tore my pants getting them off. Please tell me you have some spare in this room."
"I'm a man who packs for every contingency. I have spare everything." I gesture vaguely toward my suitcase. "Bottom compartment. The gray sweats."
He rolls off the bed, graceful, because apparently lion shifters don't do the awkward post-hookup shuffle the way humans do, and finds the suitcase.
Pulls out the gray sweats. Cleans up with a hand towel from the bathroom and pulls on my pants.
They're slightly too short on him and too loose in the waist and he looks better in them than I've ever looked in anything.
I change and clean up while he's in the bathroom. Boxers and a clean t-shirt. When he comes back, he looks at me standing by the bed in my underwear.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your eyes said something."
"My eyes are not something I can control." He sits on the bed. "No regrets?"
"None."
"Your heart rate?"
I take stock. My heart is beating fast — but not the survival sprint from the dinner. Not the fight-or-flight of a man in a room full of predators. This is exertion, endorphins, the hummingbird pace of a body that just experienced something it wants to experience again immediately.
"Elevated," I say. "For the right reasons."
He kisses me. Slow this time. Gentle. The opposite of everything that just happened — careful and deliberate and tasting like a promise I didn't know I was looking for.
"Stay," I say. The word comes out before I can stop it. Before I can weigh it and analyze it and decide if it's strategically sound.
Ezra looks at me. "In the Pinewood Inn."
"In the Pinewood Inn."
"The depressing room with the terrible art."
"The art isn't that bad."
"Nico. It's a painting of a barn. The barn has no doors."
"Maybe it's a philosophical barn. Open concept."
He laughs. The real one — not the half-smile, not the smirk. A full laugh, muffled against my shoulder, his body shaking with it. I feel it everywhere.
He settles next to me, pulling me against his chest, his arm heavy across my ribs. The bed is a queen, which I previously thought was adequate for one person. With Ezra in it, it's barely enough, and I've never been more comfortable in my life.
"I'll stay," he says into my hair. "But I'm leaving before sunrise. Knox will know if I don't come home, and I'm not ready for that conversation."
"Knox already knows."
"Knox suspects. There's a difference. Suspecting means he gets to pretend he doesn't know, which is a courtesy I'd like to maintain for at least twenty-four more hours."
"He said the outlet thing was smooth to you on the way out. I have very good hearing for a human."
"You weren't supposed to hear that."
"And yet."
Ezra tightens his arm around me. "Go to sleep, Nico."
"I don't fall asleep easily. It takes me—"
"Go to sleep."
I close my eyes. His heartbeat is slow and steady against my back — the resting pulse of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.
A lion who found something worth keeping and is holding onto it with the same patience he brings to everything.
Spreadsheets and stray cats and a man who was efficient and lonely and didn't know the difference until someone wrote it on a dating profile.
Mine, his lion said. And Ezra stopped fighting it.
I fall asleep in eleven seconds. A new record.