Page 31 of Single Pucking Orc

Brogan crossed the room.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask. He put out both hands, and Korvash handed her over like a live grenade to the one male in the room who knew what to do with it. Brogan settled her against his forearm and put his thumb to her mouth—not on the little tusk, the way Rognar always did, but above it, against the swollen gum where the next tooth was coming.

Charlie stopped fussing. She stopped cold, mid-wail, and clamped down on his thumb and made a sound of pure animal relief, and the room noticed. Nobody said anything, because it was Brogan.

“How did you know that?” he asked.

“It’s the gum.” Brogan didn’t look up. “It’s always the gum.”

Charlie had stopped chewing to stare at him. She got a fist into that big silver-shot, and she studied his face with the total scientific absorption of a scholar who has finally located the primary source.

Fen leaned in, pulled a face, waggled his fingers, did his whole act. Charlie didn’t even look at him. Fen tried the clicky sound that always worked. Nothing. He escalated to the one Charlie usually laughed at. She kept her eyes on Brogan, unblinking, like Fen was weather happening on some other continent.

“She’s not even—” Fen straightened, wounded. “I’m fun. I’m the fun one. Rognar, tell her I’m fun.”

“You’ve been demoted,” Korvash said. “There’s a new fun one now. He hates fun.”

Brogan didn’t move. He held her correctly and he did not soften and he wore the expression of a male waiting out a fire alarm, patient and grim, as if being adored were something done to him.

“She’s leaking,” he said.

“That’s spit.”

“I’m aware of what it is.”

He held her a beat longer, and Charlie kept a fist in his beard and gazed up at him like he’d hung the moon, and for half a second something moved behind that terrifying scowl. Then he handed her back. He transferred her smoothly, not looking at Rognar.

“Cold helps too,” Brogan said quietly.

“How do you know that?”

Brogan simply turned and went to get his pads.

Rognar took the ice with the rest of them and did the optional skate, which meant nobody worked and everyone chirped. Charlie held court from her carrier in a folding chair in the tunnel with Nora standing over her. Half the roster took turns getting waved off the ice by Coach for coming to look.

He kept finding her at the boards. Nora. He’d cut a lap and there she’d be through the glass, her arms crossed, watching the ridiculous circus of it. She had that flat unimpressed face he’d learned meant she was having a better time than she’d ever admit under oath.

Somebody skated up beside him. Tarmek, breathing easily, watching the tunnel too.

“Somebody got her a coffee,” Tarmek said. “Jensen’s telling her the seats behind the bench are where the mates sit. If she wants out of the tunnel.”

And it wasn’t a chirp. That was what got him. Nobody was nudging anybody. There was no ooh. Jensen had handed her a coffee and pointed at the bench seats and told her where the partners sat during games, like somebody telling a new signing where the good parking was. Just a fact about the building.

He looked at the tunnel. She had the coffee in her hand and her mouth was open and nothing was coming out. The silence opened up between them.

One.

Two.

He should have said something at one. A clean she’s my neighbor, light and easy, the line the old Rognar would have fired off before the sentence finished. He didn’t. She didn’t. They let two full seconds fall into the space between them like dropped gloves. Two seconds is nothing and it is a very long time, and then⁠—

“Oh, I’m not—” she started.

“She’s just—” he started.

At the exact same instant. Over each other. Which was worse, so much worse, than either of them saying nothing. Jensen just nodded, unbothered, already skating off, his mission completed, and left the two of them tangled in a correction neither of them had finished.

Nora looked at him through the glass. He looked at Nora. Charlie, between them in the chair, sneezed, and broke the look, and that was a mercy.