Page 79 of Bearly Out Loud

She obliged. The ending was not quiet.

After.Tangled in sheets that lived up to their obscene thread count. Her head on his chest—the broad, warm plane of it, rising and falling with breaths that were still evening out. His hand traced slow circles on her hip. The city lights painted the ceiling in amber and blue.

The vibration was steady now. Constant. The deep, rolling hum of a bear who had everything he needed within arm’s reach.

“You’re purring.”

“Bears don’t purr.”

“That is objectively a purr. I work in audio. I know what a purr sounds like. You are producing a sustained vibration consistent with contentment in large mammals. That is a purr.”

“It’s a resonance—” He stopped. Reconsidered. “It’s a physiological response to?—”

“To getting laid?”

“To contentment.”

She laughed into his skin. The sound vibrated against his ribs and the hum—whatever he wanted to call it—doubled in intensity. He pulled her closer. She pressed her ear to the broad plane of his chest and listened with her whole body, absorbing the layers, letting the sound settle into a place deeper than hearing.

“Dojin?”

“Hmm.”

“Your sheets are unreasonable.”

“Swedish linen. Maman’s requirement for every bed in the family.”

“I’m never going back to my own bed.”

“Good.”

She tilted her face up. His eyes were warm brown, fully present. The man, not the bear. The man who had cooked seven courses alongside his mother and waited while her father assessed him and watched her pocket a carved cherry figure and explained the difference between biology and choice on a rooftop. The man who had taken her to bed and asked her to be louder.

She kissed the underside of his jaw. Slow. Deliberate. A thank-you and a promise and a choice, placed against warm skin, because Nari Wixx did nothing by accident and the man beneath her mouth understood that.

His arm tightened around her. The hum didn’t stop. Neither of them corrected the terminology.

FORTY

DOJIN

He was making eggs when the counterattack took shape.

Six in the morning. The den kitchen, quiet except for the hiss of butter in the pan and Reo’s boots on the tile. Two plates out. Three mugs of coffee—one for the night-shift operative who would pass through in twenty minutes, because Dojin tracked his people like he tracked his bees: with attention, consistency, and food available at every turn.

Nari had left his bed at five-thirty, kissing the hinge of his jaw before sliding out of the sheets with practiced stealth—she valued her early-morning voice warm-ups and would not be derailed by a man whose body temperature ran at a hundred and two degrees.

She kissed me goodbye in her sleep. Half-asleep. Mouth on my jaw, hand on my chest, mumbled an instruction about saving her coffee. Then she was gone and the sheets smelled like her, and I laid there for four minutes like an idiot.

The four minutes were embarrassing. The eggs were productive.

Reo sat across the counter, laptop open, dark eyes scanning a screen of corporate filings while eating toast with a focus that suggested the toast had personally offended him. His henley wasfresh, but his knuckles were bruised from a late session at the gym—he’d been working out harder since the parking garage. Processing. Bears processed through their bodies: Dojin cooked, Reo hit things.

“Crane.” Reo turned the laptop. The screen showed a small liberal arts college. Faculty page. Art History department. A photograph of a thin man with wire-rimmed glasses and a corduroy jacket, standing in front of a chalkboard with a slide of Edo-period woodblock prints projected behind him. “Tomas Crane. Associate professor. Teaching survey courses on Asian art history to undergrads who think anime started with Naruto.”

Dojin studied the photograph. Mild face. Narrow shoulders. The man who had sat in Hideo Saito’s library for six years, handling masterworks with archival gloves, indexing genius with the devotion of a disciple—and photographing every page for a man who would sell the soul out of it.

“He looks like a librarian.”