He hasn't asked anyone's name except Toby, who offered his. He calls Robin "the pastry guy" when he references him at all. He calls me nothing, because we haven't technically been introduced. We've exchanged maybe fifteen words total. Same booth. Good Wi-Fi. That's the extent of it.
"What do we do about him?" Jason asks.
We're eating lunch at the bar — leftover pasta from whatever Jason made last night, which is better than anything a bar should be serving. Nicholas is in his booth with his nachos. There's a careful distance between his world and ours, maybe fifteen feet of floor and something wider than that.
"Nothing," Knox says. "He's a customer."
"He's a developer," Robin says. "Who's here to take our home."
"He's a customer who was told no and is spending money in my bar. Last I checked, that's how a business works."
Robin opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. "He's counting cars, Knox. Through the window. He's writing things down."
"Let him count." Knox takes a bite of pasta. "We own the property outright. No mortgage, no liens, no partners. There's nothing Coldwell can do except make offers, and I've already declined."
"What if they escalate?" I ask. Not because I'm worried — Knox is right about the ownership — but because I like understanding the whole board.
"Escalate how?"
"I don't know yet. That's why I'm asking."
Knox looks at me. Considers. "Look into it when you have time. Nothing urgent. Just... know what we're dealing with."
That's Knox for "I'm more concerned than I'm showing but I trust you to handle the thinking part." I nod and go back to my pasta.
Across the room, Nicholas closes his laptop. Checks his phone for the first time — quick, efficient, three taps and it's facedown again. He makes a note in his leather notebook. Left-handed, small precise handwriting that I absolutely cannot read from here but am still trying to.
Stop it.
* * *
The afternoon settles into something that shouldn't be comfortable but is.
Lunch breaks up the way it always does — Knox back to the office, Vaughn to the garage, Jason washing dishes with more focus than dishes require before he goes and joins Vaughn in the garage. Robin stays at the counter working on a supply list for the café, occasionally muttering numbers under his breath. Silas hasn't moved from his corner. The book is different from yesterday. He reads fast.
But nobody really leaves. That's the thing. On a normal afternoon, the bar would empty out. Vaughn would be under a bike for hours. Knox would close his office door. Jason would find something to do in the back. Today, they cycle through. Vaughn comes in for a water, leans against the bar for five minutes, eyes drifting to the window booth before he heads back out. Knox appears in the office doorway twice in twenty minutes, not saying anything, just standing there. Jason reorganizes the clean glasses, which don't need reorganizing.
They're not subtle. Shifters are a lot of things, but subtle has never been on the list.
Nicholas notices. Of course he does — the man counts cars through a window for a living. He doesn't react, doesn't stiffen or look uncomfortable. But I catch him watching. Not the nervous room-sweeps from day one, the every-twelve-minutes security check. This is different. He's watching the way they move around each other. The way Jason automatically pours Knox's coffee when he appears in the doorway. The way Vaughn takes a tart from Robin's tray and Robin just slides the tray closer. The way Silas turns a page and Knox glances at him — one look, barely a second — and whatever he reads there satisfies him enough to go back to his office.
Nicholas's eyes track all of it. Not hostile. Not even wary, not right now. Curious. Like he's watching a nature documentary about a species he's studied on paper but never seen in the wild.
I wonder what it looks like from the outside. This thing we are — not a pack, not exactly a family, not a business. Something that doesn't have a word because the word would need to hold too many things at once. I've never thought about how it reads to someone who walked in from the cold.
Robin catches me watching Nicholas watch us. He raises an eyebrow. I ignore him.
Around two, Jason drops off a fresh glass of water at Nicholas's booth. Unprompted. Nicholas looks up from his laptop, startled — not by the water, by the gesture. He stares at the glass for a second like it might be a trick.
"Thanks," he says.
"You looked thirsty," Jason says, already walking away.
Nicholas watches him go. Then he picks up the water and drinks half of it, and his shoulders loosen by about two degrees. Small thing. I shouldn't be tracking his shoulder tension from across a room.
I'm tracking his shoulder tension from across a room.
The bar goes quiet for a while after that. Real quiet — the good kind, where everyone's doing their own thing and the silence is just the sound of people being comfortable in a shared space. Robin's pencil scratching on his supply list. The clink of Silas turning a page. The distant grind of Vaughn's wrench from the garage. My keyboard. Nicholas's keyboard. Two people typing on opposite sides of the same room, working on completely different things, and somehow it feels like parallelplay. Like toddlers in a sandbox who haven't been introduced yet but are building in the same direction.
