Something shifts in his expression. The acknowledgment of what a closed door means — privacy, separation from the pride, a space where heartbeats aren't public information.
He steps inside. I close the door behind him and the room gets smaller. Not physically — Ezra just takes up space the way shifters do. Not with size but withpresence. The air gets warmer. The silence gets louder.
He sits on the end of the bed because there's nowhere else to sit. The desk chair is a hard plastic thing that belongs in a waiting room, not a conversation. So: the bed. Ezra on the end of my bed, leaning back on his hands, legs stretched out, looking up at me like this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing at midnight in a Pinewood Inn.
"You can sit down," he says. "I promise the bed is big enough for two people."
I sit. Not next to him, at the head, against the headboard, knees drawn up. A careful distance. The bed is a queen, which means there's about two feet of hotel comforter between us.
"So," Ezra says. "Dinner."
"Dinner."
"Your heart rate was really something. I could hear it from inside the house. Everyone could. Jason wanted to hug you. Robin wanted to feed you. Vaughn wanted to ignore it. Knox wanted to address it. Silas wanted to give you a book." He tilts his head. "Standard pride response to a stressed human."
"And you?"
"I wanted to clear an outlet."
I almost smile. "That's what you wanted? In that moment? To rearrange the electrical infrastructure?"
"I wanted to make space for you. The outlet was the only version of that I could say out loud in a room full of people who hear everything." He pauses. "You used the app."
"Yes."
"You have my number."
"I know."
"But you used the app."
"I know what I did, Ezra."
"Why?"
Because the app is where I found you. Because the app says something a text doesn't. Because I wanted you to know which door I was knocking on.
"Because a text saysI want to talk," I say. "The app says something else."
Ezra is quiet. His jaw works for a second, processing something that rearranged his expectations.
"Something else," he repeats.
"You know what else. You wrote a profile about the difference between efficient and lonely. I read it three times before the Troy date and I didn't message you because I didn't know what to say. I know now."
"What do you know now?"
"That I'm efficient. And that I've been lonely for a very long time. And that sitting in your bar for days didn't fix either of those things. It just made me aware of the difference."
The two feet of hotel comforter between us feels like a decision I'm going to have to make soon.
"At the bar this morning," I say. "Your lion decided something, and you stopped yourself from saying what."
Ezra goes still. Not the wall — something different. The focused stillness of a man who knew this question was coming and still isn't ready for it.
"It's later," I say.
"It's later," he agrees.
