Page 90 of The Lion's Tempest
"There's space in the office. Knox already mentioned it."
"Knox mentioned it?"
"Knox said:If he's going to fix the NSRC's pattern recognition, he needs a real desk. The booth has a bad outlet." Ezra pauses. "The outlet you said was fine."
"It was fine for a laptop. It's not fine for a dual-monitor setup."
"You're getting a dual-monitor setup."
"I'm thinking about getting a dual-monitor setup."
"Nico. You've already priced them. I saw the browser tabs."
"I was doing preliminary research."
"You had three tabs open comparing response times."
"I'm thorough."
He laughs. The real one — the full sound that changes his face and makes my chest do the thing. I've been hearing it more often lately. The ratio of half-smiles to real laughs is shifting, slowly, toward something warmer.
We walk. The road is quiet. The trees are turning — October settling in, the leaves going amber and red, the air sharpening. In three weeks Cass will be here, with the greendress and the spray bottle and the questions prepared. In a month, Diana will send the first formal case file. In a year — who knows. A year ago I was in a Hyundai Sonata with a thin file and a mandate to assess a bar that doesn't make commercial sense.
The bar still doesn't make commercial sense. The depreciation schedule is finally updated. The formula errors are fixed. And the bar still runs at a loss, the way it has for sixty years, because the point was never the money.
The point was the address. Having a place where people know where to find you.
"Ezra."
"Yeah."
"I'm happy."
He looks at me. Those brown eyes with the gold edge, the ones that go full amber when the lion is close, the ones that were entirely gold above me the night he claimed me and saidI love youbefore he planned to.
"I know," he says.
"You know because you're observant."
"I know because you just told me. That's not observation, that's listening."
"I want to make sure you heard it. I'm happy. Here, with you, in this town, in this bar that loses money, on this road, right now. I spent years being efficient instead of being alive. I'm done."
"The butler."
"The butler. Silas's book. The man who wasted his life being useful." I stop walking. Turn to face him. The light is gold on his face, the evening sun doing what it does out here — making everything look like it was painted specifically to bebeautiful. "I'm not going to be the butler. I'm going to be the man who sat in a booth for two weeks and ate nachos and fell in love with a bartender who does spreadsheets and feeds stray cats and has terrible taste in mattresses."
"The mattress has been fine since the claiming."
"The mattress has a spring. The spring is in my kidney."
"Your kidney is on the wrong side of the bed."
"My kidney is in the standard human location. The spring is in the wrong location."
"We could get a new mattress."
"We could get a new mattress."
We stand in the road. His hand in mine, the mark on my neck, the trees turning. The bar behind us — small, impractical, running at a loss, full of people who chose each other.
"Let's go home," I say.
And we do.
The End
