Page 27 of Single Pucking Orc

She came down off her step. She crossed the strip of lawn between their houses in her sock feet, mug in both hands, then stopped a respectable distance away, and he watched her decide to say something and then say it.

“I had a picture of you.”

“I know.”

“You’ve spent four days taking it apart and I want you to know it’s extremely inconvenient.” She said it flatly, but her eyes weren’t flat. “I had it all filed in a neat little folder. Rognar Stonebreaker, comma, hazard. And I never once, not one single time, pictured you leaving a bar early. I couldn’t have. It wasn’t in the file.”

“You made the file in about a week.”

“Ten days.”

“You made the file in ten days.” He set the monitor on the hood of the truck, screen up, so he could keep an eye on it and give her the rest of his attention. “And in fairness to you, I let you. I let everybody make the same assumptions. It’s easier, being the fun one. You get invited to everything and nobody expects anything back and nobody ever—” He stopped, and it came out more quietly than he’d planned, more truthfully than he’d planned. “Nobody checks on the fun one. That’s the deal. Nobody ever asks the fun one if he’s all right, because the fun one is always all right, that’s his job.”

The night was quiet around them. Someone’s TV flickered blue through a window. A car purred softly several streets away. And he stood in the silence with the monitor glowing on the hood of his truck. The woman he’d flirted with over a fence for a year was looking at him like she’d never actually seen him before tonight. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe he’d made sure of it.

“We didn’t finish that conversation,” she said.

“No. The pot boiled over.”

“It did.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot since Tuesday,” he said. “Which I want on the record as well.”

She couldn’t quite hide the smile, but she was still holding the mug in both hands like a shield. She wasn’t going to put it down. If this happened at all he was going to have to be the one who moved. And then she was going to have to be the one who stayed or stepped back. So he moved.

He closed the distance between them slowly, out of some instinct he trusted more than thought. He was aware of how big he was next to her, and how easy it would be to get this wrong. He stopped, closer than the banter had ever let them get before, close enough to smell the tea she was drinking and the faint clean scent of her hair. He left enough room between them for her to make the choice. Then he raised his hand, tucked a piece of dark hair back off her face, and let it linger against her jaw.

“Tell me to go inside,” he said, but she didn’t say anything.

He waited. He waited long enough that his heart got louder. Long enough that he believed she wasn’t going to respond. Long enough that the gentleman in him, the one nobody thought existed, drew his hand back to step away. To let her keep her mug and her files and her ordered life intact⁠—

“No,” she said, and set the mug down on the hood of the truck next to the monitor.

He kissed her, and it was a problem immediately, in the good way and the complicated way at once because his mouth was not built like hers. For one graceless half-second it was almost a disaster, but then she made a small frustrated sound against him and tilted her head enough for her mouth to find its way between his tusks.

And then her lips were against his and her hands were fisted in his shirt. He knew he had to be careful so he held himself back behind a locked door and kissed her like she was something that could break. One enormous hand curved around the small of her back, the other still resting lightly at her jaw, guiding her.

He knew she felt him doing it because she pulled back half an inch, her breath gone ragged. She looked at his mouth like she’d caught him being careful, and then she came back in harder, up on her toes, done being careful. She bit his lower lip, and he opened his mouth to say Jesus, and she licked the word right out of it.

The first time he’d kissed a girl he’d been thirteen and there had been a number of females since then, but he’d never been on the receiving end of a kiss like this. She put a hand on his chest and pushed him back a step, her mouth on his, her tongue exploring. He was shockingly aware of her body, of the rise of her breasts against him and the soft swell of her hips. She had found a way to kiss him that made his tusks irrelevant, and he discovered that being kissed back was a hundred times more powerful than doing the kissing.

It got away from both of them fast. Faster than he’d planned, and he was sure faster than she’d planned. But here she was with her hands fisted in his shirt on his front lawn, her mouth open and hot against his, and a sound coming out of her that she’d clearly have taken back if she could. He had somehow walked her back against the side of the truck and his hand was under her cardigan. Neither of them was being remotely sensible, and it had taken about eleven seconds to get there from no⁠—

The monitor woke up.

A crackle, a snuffle, and then the small rising complaint of a six-month-old surfacing from sleep, tinny and unmistakable through the little speaker on the hood.

“No,” he said, against her mouth.

“You’d better go,” she said, not moving, her hands still in his shirt. “That was definitely not in the file.”

“I’m going. Sorry about the file.”

“No, you’re not. And you’re not going.”

“I’m not going,” he agreed, and kissed her again, once, hard. The monitor escalated from complaint towards genuine grievance. He pulled back with the physical difficulty of a male detaching himself from the best thing that had happened to him in a year, and grabbed the handset off the hood.

Charlie’s face filled the little screen, dark and furious and awake, both fists waving.