Chapter 22 #2
"That's what I said! Toby says it's about impermanence and the passage of time, which okay, but it's a bunny saying goodnight to furniture, Toby."
I laugh. It comes out easy, unforced, the kind of laugh that happens when you're not performing and someone says something genuinely funny.
Robin looks pleased. Not smugly, not like he's collecting a reaction.
Just pleased, the way you are when someone laughs at your observation and it feels like a connection.
Vaughn comes through at one. Doesn't speak to me, which I've learned is not hostility but simply Vaughn.
He gets water, drinks it, looks at me on the stool, looks at Ezra's hand near mine on the bar, and goes back to the garage.
That's Vaughn's whole deal. Presence without commentary.
I respect it enormously. And I also envy how easy he and Robin are together as Robin hugs him and Vaughn keeps him close.
At two, Cass calls.
I answer at the bar, because where else am I going to answer? The spare room is upstairs and my phone is in my hand and Cass doesn't wait for convenient timing.
"Nico! Did you quit? Uncle Martin said you quit. He called me, Nico. He called me. On the phone. Not a text, a phone call. On his lunch break. He asked if I was alright and I almost fainted."
"Martin called you."
"He asked about university. About my plans.
He asked if I needed anything. I've lived in his house for six years and he's never asked if I needed anything.
" Her voice goes soft. Something I rarely hear from Cass — the softness of a girl who's been performing loudness to fill the space where a parent should be. "What did you say to him?"
"I asked him for legal advice."
"You asked him for legal advice and he turned into a person?"
"Something like that." Martin's wire transfer is still sitting in my banking app.
Fifteen thousand dollars and a one-word memo.
Contingency. The language of a man who learned to say I love you in transaction codes, and a nephew who's finally learning to read them.
"I think he was always a person, Cass. I think we were both too far gone in our own heads to notice. "
She's quiet for a beat."What are you doing right now?"
"I'm being."
"Being what?"
"Just being. Ezra said—"
"Who is Ezra?"
"He's—" I look at Ezra on his stool. He's pretending not to listen, which is pointless because he's a lion shifter and the phone is two feet from his ear and he heard every word of last night's activities through a wall. "He's someone I met here."
"The spreadsheet bartender."
"Don't call him that."
"Is he your boyfriend? Oh my God, Nico, do you have a boyfriend? I'm coming to visit. When can I come? I have two weeks before university starts, I can fly over—"
"Cass—"
"I'm serious. You quit your job. You have a boyfriend. This is the most interesting you've been in years and I want to see it in person."
I look at Ezra. He's looking back at me now, not pretending anymore. His expression is open, warm, the half-smile that I've cataloged and counted and am now adding to my list of things I want to see every morning in a bar that smells like coffee and oak.
"Let me get settled first," I say. "Then... yeah. Come visit. I was going to see you anyway before you left for uni. This works too."
"Really?"
"Really."
"NICO." She's shrieking. Actual shrieking.
Ezra winces. Shifter hearing plus eighteen-year-old vocal range is apparently a physiological event.
"I'm booking the flight tonight. I'll send you the details.
Tell Ezra I said hi. Tell the nachos people I'm coming.
I'll tell Uncle Martin I need his card for the ticket. "
"You are not putting a transatlantic flight on Martin's credit card."
"He said to call if I needed anything! I need to see my brother! That's a need!"
She hangs up before I can argue. My phone screen shows the call lasted four minutes and twelve seconds. Maximum Cass efficiency.
Ezra is looking at me with an expression that I can only describe as delighted. Not the half-smile. The full thing. The one that changes his whole face and makes my chest do the thing that I've stopped pretending is about anything other than what it obviously is.
"She's coming," I say.
"I heard."
"She's a lot."
"I heard that too."
"She's going to interrogate you. She will ask about your intentions. She will judge your shoes. She will decide within thirty seconds whether she approves and her approval is non-negotiable."
"I look forward to it."
I put the phone down. Facedown, habit. Then I pick it back up and set it face-up on the bar, because I don't have anything to hide and I'm not expecting a call from anyone who scares me and the screen is just a screen.
Small thing. Probably no one notices. But Ezra's eyes track the gesture — the flip, the decision, the phone sitting open on the oak — and his mouth does the private thing again. The one that's not for anyone. Except it's for me.
* * *
The afternoon stretches out. I don't fill it.
I sit on my stool and drink coffee and read Silas's book, which is, as I suspected, devastatingly relevant in ways I'm not ready to fully process.
The butler is reflecting on dignity. On service.
On the moments he chose duty over feeling and the accumulating weight of those choices.
Silas chose this book for me the way he chooses everything.
Precisely, with full awareness of subtext, and with the quiet devastation of a man who communicates in literary recommendations because words are what he trusts most.
I listen to the bar exist around me.
Ezra does the books. Mango appears on the windowsill of my booth — my booth, empty today for the first time since I arrived. The laptop bag is upstairs. The charger is unplugged. The outlet Ezra cleared is waiting for a purpose I'll figure out later. Mango settles into the sun spot and sleeps.
At five, Ezra closes his laptop.
"Dinner?" he asks.
"Where?"
"Here. Jason's making something. Or we could go to Ash's — there's usually food. Or we can always go out too."
"Here is good."
I've been in this bar for twelve hours. I haven't produced anything. I haven't assessed anything. I haven't written a report or closed a deal or justified my presence in a room with a deliverable.
I've eaten two muffins, a sandwich, and a pickle.
I've read forty pages of a novel about a butler who wasted his life being useful.
I've talked to my sister and a pastry chef who debates the emotional content of Goodnight Moon and a mechanic who communicates exclusively in water glasses.
I've sat next to a man who does books and feeds cats and told me to shut up and be.
I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month.
But I know where I'm going to be when I figure it out.