Then his eyes flutter closed and he moans against my palm and his whole body melts.
Oh.
I keep my hand there. Thrust into him with a steady, building rhythm. Feel the sounds he's making vibrate against my palm — desperate, wordless, the raw unfiltered version of Nico that exists underneath the suits and the spreadsheets and the professional composure. Every sound goes into my hand instead of the room and it's the most intimate thing I've ever experienced.
His hands find my back. His nails drag down my spine — not gently, not carefully, the sharp scrape of a man who has abandoned strategy and is just holding on. I'll have marks tomorrow. I want marks tomorrow.
"Close," he breathes against my palm. "Ezra, I'm close—"
I angle my hips. Hit the spot and stay there, steady, relentless. His body tightens around me — legs, arms, every muscle clenching at once. He comes with a sound that my hand barely catches, his whole body arching off the garage-sale mattress, and the clench of him around me pulls me over the edge seconds later.
I come with my face buried in his neck, my hand still on his mouth, his heartbeat slamming against my chest. My lion roars — silent, internal, a sound that no one hears but me and maybe, maybe, the man underneath me whose heart is keeping time with mine.
We breathe. The radiator clanks and hisses, the nighttime sounds of a building that's held people for sixty years and doesn't judge what they do behind closed doors. The moonlight hasn't moved. The world outside is quiet.
I take my hand off his mouth. He takes a ragged breath.
"Well," he says. His voice is destroyed. "That was."
"Yeah."
"Your hand."
"Too much?"
"Do it again next time."
Next time.I file that away in the category of things Nico says that rearrange my entire internal architecture.
I pull out carefully. Deal with the condom. Find the t-shirt that ended up on the floor and use it to clean us up, his, not mine, which he'll complain about tomorrow. He watches me do it with the heavy-lidded attention of a man who's been thoroughly fucked and is cataloging the aftercare for future reference.
"Come here," he says. Pulls me down next to him. The bed is a double, which means we're pressed together from shoulder to ankle, and Nico hooks his leg over mine and puts his head on my chest like this is something we've done a hundred times instead of twice.
His heartbeat is slowing. Settling. The measured rhythm returning, except it's not the controlled version. It's the genuine resting pulse of a man who's exactly where he wants to be.
"Ezra."
"Mm."
"I stopped counting."
I open my eyes. "What?"
"The exits. The room sweeps. The twelve-minute inventory." His voice is quiet, half into my chest. Sleepy, unguarded, the way he says things when he's stopped running them through the filter first. "I stopped counting when I satdown at dinner. Not because I decided to. Because I forgot. My body forgot to be afraid."
I let that settle. Two weeks ago, he walked into the bar and counted exits every twelve minutes. Silas tracked it. I watched it stop on day three and start again when I built the wall. At Ash's dinner, his heart rate was one-twelve and he mapped the bathroom window.
And now he's lying in a room above the bar, in a bed with a lion shifter, and his body forgot to count.
"That's not nothing," I say.
"That's not nothing," he agrees. His fingers trace patterns on my chest — not words, not shapes, just movement. The habit of a hand that needs to be doing something. "I don't know who I am without the counting. Without the assessments and the exits and the calculations. That's been my operating system since I was a kid."
"You're the guy who packed lube in his suitcase side pocket on a business trip."
He laughs. Quiet, muffled against my chest, but real. "Optimistic preparation is not the same as personality."
"Nico."
