Now he looks at me. Those hazel eyes do a quick sweep—professional, thorough, sizing me up the same way he sized up the parking lot. His gaze catches on my bare chest, drops lower to my abs, lower still to where my jeans hang low on my hips, comes back up. The whole thing takes maybe two seconds.
I feel like I've been stripped naked and evaluated. Measured against some internal standard and found... something. I can't tell if I passed or failed.
Then he smirks.
"Cute."
And walks toward the bar like he owns it.
Cute. He thinks my bike is cute. Two years of custom work, hand-tooled leather, a bored-out engine that I did myself in this very garage with Vaughn swearing at me every time I dropped a bolt, and some asshole with a quarter-million-dollar machine calls it cute.
Dismissive. Condescending. Like I'm a kid with a tricycle who doesn't know real machinery when I see it.
I should be pissed. I am pissed. But I'm also watching him walk away, watching the way his shoulders move under thattight black shirt, watching his ass in those tactical pants that cling to thighs thick as tree trunks, and my lion is making sounds that have nothing to do with anger.
He doesn't knock. Just pushes through the front door like he has every right to be here, like he's walked through that door a hundred times before.
I follow, because apparently I'm a masochist with no self-preservation instincts.
Inside, the bar is quiet for a Sunday afternoon. The usual smell hits me—beer and leather and the faint undertone of motor oil that never quite washes out of anything around here. Robin's on one of the couches scrolling through his phone, still in the catering blacks he wore to last night's gig. There's a stain on his sleeve that looks like balsamic reduction, which means the event didn't go as smoothly as he'd hoped. Vaughn's behind the bar doing a crossword, reading glasses perched on his nose in a way he'd kill me for mentioning. Ezra's in the back doing inventory, his voice occasionally drifting out as he counts bottles. Silas is in his usual corner with a book—something thick with a dragon on the cover—barely visible in the dim light, exactly how he likes it.
Robin looks up when the door opens.
And goes completely still.
I've never seen Robin freeze like that. He's always in motion—talking, gesturing, bouncing from one thing to another like a hummingbird on espresso. But right now he's not moving at all. Not even breathing, as far as I can tell.
Shock. Disbelief. Hope. And then his expression breaks open into pure, radiant joy. His phone slips from his fingers and lands on the couch cushion, forgotten. His mouth opens, closes, opens again.
Then his expression breaks open into pure, radiant joy.
"ASH!"
Robin launches himself off the couch so fast he nearly trips over the coffee table. His knee catches the edge and he stumbles, but he doesn't slow down, doesn't stop—just crosses the room in three steps and throws himself at the stranger with the full force of his body.
The guy—Ash—catches him easily. No hesitation, no stumble backward, just arms coming up and wrapping around Robin like they've done this a thousand times before. He lifts Robin right off his feet, holding him close, and Robin's arms are locked around his neck, face buried in his shoulder, holding on like he's afraid to let go.
"Missed you," Ash says, and his voice has gone soft in a way I wouldn't have thought possible from the man who called my bike cute thirty seconds ago. "Five years is too long."
"Whose fault is that?" Robin's voice is muffled against his shoulder, thick with something that might be tears. "You could have come home sooner."
"I'm here now. Retired. For good."
My stomach drops.
Robin hasn't mentioned anyone. No boyfriend, no situationship, no friends-with-benefits arrangement, nothing. I've known him for over a year and in all that time, he's never mentioned a single person he was involved with. Just casual hookups he never talks about, one-night stands that don't mean anything.
But this—the way he ran to this guy, the way he's clinging like his life depends on it, the way Ash is holding him like something precious and fragile and infinitely valuable—this doesn't look casual. This looks like someone Robin loves coming back after a long time away.
This looks like the kind of reunion you see in movies, at airports, in commercials designed to make you cry.
Ash sets Robin down but keeps an arm around him, like he can't quite bear to let go completely. Robin's face is wet—definitely tears—but he's smiling so wide it looks like it hurts.
"You been taking care of my car?" Ash asks.
"Oil changes every three thousand miles, just like you said. Rotated the tires in July. Got the brakes checked last month even though they were fine."
"Good." His voice goes flat, shifting from tender to something harder in an instant. "So what's that dent on the driver's side?"
