He looks at me for a long moment. Then he takes off his jacket, folds it behind his head, and lies down in the grass next to me. Not touching. Close enough that I can feel his warmth.
We lie there. The stars are thick and bright and the grass smells like autumn and somewhere below us the city hums. It's the quietest I've been in weeks. Maybe months. Maybe ever.
"I'm tired," I say, and I don't mean sleepy.
Vaughn doesn't respond. Just waits.
"Every guy is the same. Not the grabbing — that's not all of them. But the wanting something from me. The guys on apps want sex. Gordon wants productivity. The dates want a performance — someone funny and flirty and available who makes their evening interesting. And I give it to them. Every time. Because it's what I'm good at." I press my palms over my eyes. "I'm so good at pretending to be what people want that sometimes I forget what I actually am underneath all of it."
"And what's that?"
"That's the problem. I don't know. I've been performing for so long that I'm not sure there's anything underneath. Maybe the performance IS me. Maybe there's no real Robin, just a bunch of scripts I run depending on who I'm with."
The grass rustles. Vaughn shifts beside me. "That's bullshit."
I drop my hands. "Excuse me?"
"You're not a performance. You're a person who performs because it's safer than being seen." He says it flatly, like a diagnosis. Like reading a code off an engine scanner. "There's a difference."
"How would you know?"
"Because I see you." He doesn't look at me. Stares straight up at the stars, voice steady and low. "I see you when you think no one's watching. At story hour, when you're with the kids and you forget to be charming. In the kitchen at Ash's house, when you're cooking for people you actually love and your face goes soft and focused and completely different from the face you wear at the bar."
I can't breathe.
The silence stretches. The stars wheel slowly overhead, indifferent and beautiful. My chest hurts in a way that has nothing to do with Brett or the restaurant or the marks on my wrist.
"I'm cold," I say, because I am, because my thin V-neck is nothing against the autumn air, and because if I don't change the subject I'm going to say something I can't take back.
Vaughn sits up. Starts pulling off his shirt.
"Not that I don't appreciate the view," I say, because the performance reflex kicks in even now, "but I'm really not up for sex right now."
He huffs — actually huffs at me, like an annoyed cat — and shifts.
The lion is enormous. Tawny and gold and radiating heat like a furnace. He lies down next to me, and I curl into him without thinking — my whole body pressing against warm fur, my face buried in his mane, my fingers gripping the thick ruff of his neck.
He smells like Vaughn — motor oil and soap and something underneath that's just him, warm and clean and steady — and he curls around me until I'm completely enclosed. His heartbeat is slow against my ribs. His breath ruffles my hair.
"This okay?" I whisper.
A low rumble. Yes.
I close my eyes. The shaking is gone. The performance is gone. I'm just a man lying in the grass wrapped around a lion who came for me in eight minutes and told me I'm not a performance.
I think I'm falling asleep when headlights sweep over us.
"Sir? Are you alright?" A cop, flashlight in hand, standing over a scene that probably looks alarming from any angle. "Is the shifter bothering you?"
"Are you serious?" I sit up, indignant. "My evening was perfect until you showed up."
The cop blinks. Looks at Vaughn, who yawns — a full, unhurried, massive yawn displaying every tooth in his head — and settles back down like this is his personal savanna.
"We patrol this area. A lot of kids come up here to—"
"Stargaze," I say firmly. "We were stargazing."
"Right." He clearly doesn't believe me. "Well. It's getting late."