"You okay?"
He jumps like I tased him. "Fine! Great. Good. Why? I'm fine."
"You're being weird."
"I'm not being weird. This is me. Being normal. Normally."
"Robin, you haven't hit on anyone in an hour."
"Maybe I'm evolving." He takes a gulp of beer, won't meet my eyes. "I should go. Early morning. Gordon's got a thing."
"Toby drove you."
His eyes dart around the room. "Toby! Can you—"
But Toby's already vanished upstairs with Knox, and even Robin isn't dense enough to go bang on that door.
"I'll take you," I say.
"No, I can — I'll call an Uber."
"Robin." I touch his arm. Barely — just my fingertips against his forearm, the lightest contact I can manage. He shivers. Full-body, visible, like I pressed ice to the back of his neck. "Let me take you home."
He closes his eyes. Something crosses his face that looks like surrender. "Okay."
The bike ride is torture.
He climbs on behind me and wraps his arms around my waist and presses his entire body against my back, and his heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through his jacket and my jacket and every layer between us. His hands are laced tight against my stomach. His face is tucked against my shoulder. He's holding me like I'm the last solid thing in a world that's tipping sideways.
I drive carefully. Slowly. Taking the long way to Ash's house, not because I need to but because Robin is warm and pressed against me and I can smell him — vanilla and brown butter from the baking, and underneath that his real scent, the one my lion has been cataloguing for months.
We pull up to Ash's house. Porch light on. All the windows dark.
He climbs off the bike but doesn't step back. Just stands there, holding my helmet, staring at me.
"Thanks for the ride," he says, and his voice is doing something strange. Thin. Stripped.
"Robin, wait." I swing off the bike. "What's going on? Is this about Saturday?"
"No."
"Then what—"
He kisses me.
No warning. No preamble. No flirty setup, no playful escalation, none of the performance that Robin wraps around everything like armor. He just drops my helmet on the lawn and grabs my jacket with both fists and crashes his mouth into mine.
His lips are shaking. His whole body is shaking. He kisses me the way someone grabs a lifeline — desperate, graceless, terrified, like if he stops to think about what he's doing he'll lose his nerve.
I freeze for half a second. Not because I don't want this — I've wanted this for months, I've wanted this since the day he walked into the bar. I freeze because this is real. This is Robin without the mask, Robin choosing me, and I need one heartbeat to understand that before I ruin it by moving too fast.
One heartbeat. That's all I take.
Then my hands are on his face, tilting his head, and I'm kissing him back. Deep and slow and thorough, the opposite of his frantic pace. He whimpers against my mouth — this broken,startled sound, like he expected me to push him away and doesn't know what to do with the fact that I'm pulling him closer.
"Inside," he gasps when we break apart. His eyes are wide and dark and completely unguarded. "Bedroom. Please, Vaughn—"
"Are you sure?"
