Page 78 of Protective Pucking Orc

The fire was visible from space, probably—a roaring tower of orange in the middle of our backyard that Bardon and Kardok had spent two full hours constructing while each telling the other they were doing it wrong. There’d been an argument about airflow. There’d been a diagram, at one point, drawn in the dirt with a stick.

Now half of Bramblewood milled around the finished product with drinks and paper plates, faces gold on one side and freezing on the other, while Rosa and the other kids dared each other closer to the heat until some adult hauled them back by their collars—an endless tide of children going in and out like the world’s most flammable surf.

A year ago I would have been freaking out about this, trust me.

But now? Surrounded by a community I’d come to love almost as much as I loved the life I’d built with Dakvaar, I didn’t feel the need to be as vigilant. I kept an eye on Rosa the same way I kept an eye on all the kitlings—human and orc—who were here tonight, content in the knowledge that their parents were doing the same.

The picnic tables groaned under a spread that would’ve made my grandmother cheer: green bean casserole and pumpkin pie sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a whole roasted bkarn haunch and a jug of something fermented that Torrk swore was traditional and nobody else would touch.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Legare had brought her ambrosia salad. It sat, untouched by human and orc alike, a bridge too far for both species. Some things unite us all.

My contribution lived between the two worlds, half-demolished before sundown—three dozen cinnamon rolls, Sunrise Café recipe, scaled up for orc appetites. Dak had eaten four before the party even started, standing at my counter licking icing off his thumb and looking zero percent sorry about any of it.

“You’re going to ruin your festival dinner,” I’d told him.

“I am three hundred pounds, dkaar. Nothing ruins my dinner.”

“Uh-huh. Save some for your daughter.”

“Our daughter,” he’d said—mild, automatic, the way I knew he would—and I’d had to turn back to the oven so he wouldn’t see my face do the thing it still did whenever he said it.

Some things don’t change, is what I’m saying, and thank every god on both worlds for that.

Every morning he still drops Rosa at kindergarten—which she loves so ferociously she’s begun assigning homework to the rest of us; I got graded on my letter Q’s last week and did not do well—and then he follows me down the mountain to the café and takes his same booth, and I bring him his eggs, and Maggie pretends that the sight of an enormous orc mooning over his waitress wife is a great trial to her personally. My favorite customer. My best tipper.

He still leaves too much, and I’ve stopped fighting it; I put the tip right back in his wallet each evening, because I know I’m never going to want for anything for the rest of my life.

Although waitress isn’t the whole truth anymore. Maggie offered me the assistant manager job again in September, and this time I said yes—mornings only, so I’m off in time to meet the kindergarten bus at the bottom of our road. Turns out that during the years of carrying plates I had been quietly filing away opinions about scheduling and vendor orders and which distributors were cheating us on produce. This meant I was just the person Maggie could hand a clipboard to. I still wait my old tables, though.

Some regulars you don’t give up.

Look at you, said the voice in my head—the one that used to only ever count exits. A job with a title. A town that knows your name.

A husband, added the newest voice, the one that still did a little spin every time it got to say the word.

I turned the ring on my finger. Plain gold, human-style, because he’d insisted on doing that part “the way of your people, so no one can mistake it.”

He’d worn a tux to our tiny courthouse wedding in June, custom-cut for shoulders that don’t come standard, and when I’d walked in wearing a knee-length white dress from a shop in Denver, my enormous unshakeable Wall of a Mate had made a sound like someone had checked him into the boards.

Torrk cried. Loudly. Through the whole thing.

There’s video, and in the video you can hear him honking into a handkerchief while the judge tries to keep a straight face, and I wouldn’t trade that video for anything I own.

I drifted away from the fire with my warm cider, past the ring of light and laughter, out to the dark edge of the yard.

To the pond.

Don’t, said the old voice.

It’s fine, said the new one. Look. It’s just water.

It was just water—dark and glassy, not frozen enough for skating yet, patient under the cold sky. Rosa asked almost daily when the ice would be ready. Dakvaar tested it every weekend, and I knew—because I know him now, down to the marrow, the way you know your own heartbeat—that he’d tested it twice today before letting a single festival guest set foot in our yard.

And I could stand here and look at it. That was the new part. For months I couldn’t face the back windows after dark; I’d catch the black shine of it from the corner of my eye and my whole body would go cold from the inside.

Now it was mostly just our pond again—except on the nights it wasn’t, and on those nights Dakvaar wrapped himself around me in the dark without asking a single question, one hand splayed over my sternum like he could hold my heartbeat steady from the outside.

Sometimes he can.