"Against."
Toby looks at me over his sandwich. "You've been here over a week and just now figured that out?"
This man is a librarian. He reads people the way he reads books — thoroughly, with attention to subtext.
"The report has gaps," I say. "I'm being thorough."
"Uh-huh." Toby takes another bite. Chews. Swallows. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Why do you come here? Every day, I mean. The Wi-Fi's fine but it's notthatgood. The nachos are good but you could get nachos anywhere. You sit in that booth for hours every day and you barely talk to anyone and you drive back to a hotel. Why here?"
It's a simple question. It should have a simple answer —I'm finishing my assessment, this is where the property is, where else would I work.Professional, logical, complete.
"I don't know," I say instead.
Toby nods like this is perfectly reasonable. "When I first came here, I was lost. Literally lost — my phone was dead and there was a storm and I walked in because the door was unlocked and I was soaking wet." He smiles at the memory. Something soft and private. "I didn't know they were shifters. I didn't know anything. I just knew the building was warm and someone gave me a blanket and food and nobody asked me to leave."
"That doesn't bother you? Being here with—" I gesture vaguely at the bar, the garage, the building that contains multiple apex predators.
"Being here with lions?"
"Being here with people who could hurt you."
Toby sets down his sandwich. Considers this with the seriousness it deserves, which I appreciate — most people would deflect or minimize.
"Sometimes," he says. "Not the way you mean — I don't lie awake calculating escape routes."
"I calculate escape routes."
"I know. Ezra told me about the twelve-minute sweep." Toby says this without judgment. "But I get nervous sometimes. Not about safety — about fitting in. About taking up space in a world that's designed for people who are bigger and stronger and faster than me. About being the breakable one."
"How do you handle it?"
"I let them take care of me." He says it simply, like it's obvious. "Knox wraps me in blankets when it's cold. Jason makes me food. Silas recommends books. Vaughn once carried me to bed when I fell asleep on the couch and didn't wake me up. They take care of me because that's what they do — it's how the pride works. And I let them, because accepting care from people who love you isn't weakness. It's the whole point."
I don't know what to say to that. I've been taking care of myself since I was twelve — since Martin's house, since Yale, since Coldwell. The idea of letting someone carry me to bed without waking me up is so foreign that my brain rejects it like an incompatible file format.
"You don't have to figure it out all at once," Toby says, reading my face. "I didn't. I spent the first two weeks after I officially moved in here being anxious about everything — was I in the way, was I too loud, did they actually want me here or were they just being polite. Turns out they're not polite. They're lions. If they didn't want me here, I'd know."
"That's... oddly comforting."
"Right? The honesty is actually the easiest part. Nobody here pretends." He picks up his sandwich again. "Except Ezra,who's pretending really hard right now about something I'm not going to speculate about because it's not my business."
He says this casually, lightly, the way you mention the weather. Then he takes a bite and changes the subject to a book he's reading about deep-sea creatures, and I spend the next twenty minutes learning more about anglerfish than I ever expected to know, and the booth feels less like a workstation and more like a place where someone sat across from me and shared their lunch hour because they wanted to.
* * *
At two, Toby goes back to the library. "Same time tomorrow, if you want," he says, casual, no pressure. Like it's a standing invitation that I can take or leave.
"Yeah," I say. "That would be good."
He kisses Knox on his way out, who appeared in the office doorway at some point during our conversation, watches Toby leave with the expression of a man who tracks his person's movements as naturally as breathing. Then he looks at me. Brief. Not the loaded look — something lighter. Acknowledgment.You had lunch with Toby and Toby liked you. That's a data point.
The afternoon settles. I try to work. I manage about forty-five minutes of actual productivity — cleaning up the report, refining the financial analysis, making it airtight even though I'm not sending it. The work is soothing. Familiar. The click of keys and the logic of numbers and the satisfaction of a clean spreadsheet.
At three, something lands on my booth.
