Lion shifter. Yes, really. No, I won't show you.
I do spreadsheets and feed stray cats. Sometimes at the same time.
Looking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely. If that doesn't make sense to you, we're probably not a match.
I read it again.
Then a third time.
Looking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely.
My throat tightens. Not unpleasant — just unexpected. Like walking into a warm room after being outside too long.
He wrote that. Ezra — the spreadsheet lion, the one who does inventory and feeds stray cats and looks at me like I'm a variable he hasn't solved yet — sat somewhere and wrote a dating profile that sayslooking for someone who knows the difference between efficient and lonely,and I'm lying in a Pinewood Inn reading it at eleven PM because I said those exact words to him three days ago.
Efficient. Lonely. He remembered. He'd already been thinking about it. Maybe it was already in his profile before I said it, and when I said it in his bar he heard his own words coming back at him from a stranger in a suit.
Or maybe he wrote it after. Maybe he went upstairs that night and opened the app and changed his bio because a manat the bar saidit's efficientin a voice that meantI know it's not enough.
I don't know which possibility is worse.
I look at his profile for a long time. The photo — that half-smile, the low light, the ease of someone who isn't performing. The bio — three lines, specific, honest, a little funny. Lion shifter, confirmed. I'd guessed right. The group structure, the deference to Knox, the way they went still. Lions.
My thumb hovers over the screen. I could tap. Send a message. Something clever, something that references the bar or the nachos or the difference between efficient and lonely. He'd know it was me immediately. There's no version of this where he doesn't.
I don't tap.
I close the app. Set my phone on the nightstand. Plug in the charger.
The HVAC hums. The ice machine cycles. The laugh track murmurs through the ceiling.
Tomorrow I'll walk into the bar and sit in my booth and order my IPA and my nachos, and Ezra will be on his stool with his tea and his spreadsheet, and neither of us will mention this. He doesn't know I found his profile. He doesn't know I read it three times. He doesn't know that the line betweenefficientandlonelyhas been living in my head since the moment he said it, and now I know it's been living in his too.
Tomorrow I'll bring a date to his bar. A guy who calls me sexy and wants to come to my hotel room to show me a "real good time."
And Ezra will be right there. On his stool. With his half-smile that's more smirk than smile. Doing spreadsheets and feeding stray cats.
I turn off the light.
It takes a long time to fall asleep.
Chapter 7
Ezra
Nicholas is late.
Not late by normal-person standards — it's twelve-thirty, and he doesn't punch a clock. But he's been arriving earlier every day. Yesterday was noon. The day before, twelve-fifteen. My brain has built a trendline on him, and today's data point is an outlier.
I'm not concerned. I'm noting an anomaly. There's a difference.
The morning goes the way mornings go. Tea, receipts. Vaughn's in the garage with Jason, working on a Triumph that came in yesterday — actual paying customer, not one of ours. Knox is in the office. Silas is reading. The bar hums along in its usual rhythm, except the booth by the window is empty and I keep not looking at it.
He walks in at one-fifteen.
Something's different. He's wearing the same chinos-and-sweater uniform he's settled into, same laptop bag, same posture. But there's something behind his eyes that wasn't there yesterday. Not stress exactly — more like a decision made. A file reorganized.
"Afternoon," he says. To me, directly, which is also different. Usually he orders from whoever's behind the bar and goes to his booth. Today he's looking at me.
