I open the door.
The spare room is small. Bed, dresser, window that faces the back lot. The moon is coming through the curtains and Nico is sitting against the headboard in a t-shirt and boxers, Silas's book open facedown on his chest. He wasn't reading. He was holding it like a prop.
"Can't sleep?" I ask.
"I slept in this room for zero previous nights. My body doesn't have a pattern for it yet."
"Your body needs a pattern to sleep?"
"My body needs a pattern for everything." He looks at me. I'm in sweats and a t-shirt, barefoot, standing in his doorway like I belong there. "Are you coming in or are you going to stand in the hallway?"
I come in. Close the door behind me. The click of the latch is loud in the quiet — and I know Knox heard it. I know Silas heard it. And I know that tomorrow morning there will be a very specific silence at breakfast that communicates everything without a single word being spoken.
That's tomorrow's problem.
Nico moves over. Not a lot, the bed is a double, smaller than the hotel queen. He makes room without making a production of it, the way he does everything. I sit on the edge. The mattress dips under my weight and his body tilts toward mine by physics alone.
He sets Silas's book on the nightstand. His eyes are dark in the moonlight, steady, watching me with the directness that has been making my chest do things since day one. "You lasted almost an hour before coming to see me. I lasted about twelve minutes before I started hoping you'd knock."
"Twelve?"
"I unpacked for ten. Sat down. Immediately wanted you here." He says it the way he says everything; plainly, without performance. Data. "I don't know what to do with that. I've never wanted someone in a room I've been in for an hour."
"It's the mattress. Very inviting."
"It's a terrible mattress."
"I know. Knox got it at a garage sale."
"That explains a lot." He's almost smiling. The real one. "Ezra."
"Yeah."
"We have to be quiet."
"I know."
"Knox and Toby are—"
"Twelve feet down the hall. Silas is eight feet the other direction. And every single one of them can hear a whisper through these walls."
"And you still knocked on my door."
"I still knocked on your door."
The air shifts. The same charge as the hotel room, the same gravitational pull, except this time we're not in a beige box between the highway and nowhere. We're in my territory. The bar, the building, the space where I live and work and exist. Nico is in my world now, in a bed that belongs to this pride, and my lion knows it.
My lion is extremely calm about this, which is more alarming than the growling. The growling I understand. This, the deep, patient stillness, the focused attention of a predator who knows exactly where his prey is, this is something else.
I reach for him. My hand finds his jaw. The line of it, sharp, precise, the architecture of a face I've been mapping from across a bar for two weeks.He turns into the touch. Not a flinch, not a calculation. Just the simple, animal response of a body that wants to be closer to the thing touching it.
I kiss him. Slower than the hotel room — deliberate, intentional, the way you do something when you know you're going to do a lot more and you want the first part to matter. His mouth opens under mine and his hand comes up to my wrist, holding on, fingers circling the bone.
"Quiet," I murmur against his lips.
"I'll try."
"You'll do more than try. Knox is—"
