Page 37 of Single Pucking Orc

CHAPTER 12

The letter was face down on the counter, and Nora had been not-looking at it for twenty minutes. He’d carried it with him when they finally left the nursery and placed it on the kitchen counter. He’d moved it aside to set down two mugs, with the care of a male handling something he’d decided not to explain. She’d carried a jar of the cow-udder balm over as her reason for coming—Charlie had gone through it faster than either of them expected—and she’d set it by the sink and never mentioned it, and neither had he.

Charlie was still asleep. The house had the settled hum it got after the last feed, the monitor a small green glow on the table between them. Rognar sat across from her with his hands around a mug he wasn’t drinking from, tired in a way she’d never once seen before.

“Can I ask you something,” she said, “or is that the wrong thing to do right now?”

“You can ask me something.”

“Why the jokes?” She focused on her mug, turning it slowly. “Not tonight. In general. You do it even when it costs you. At the rink Fen thought you were hungover this morning and you let him.”

He considered that with more seriousness than the question probably deserved.

“If you’re the one who laughs,” he said, “nobody checks on you. It’s a good deal. You get left alone and everybody likes you.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good deal.”

“It’s a great deal.” He turned his mug the way she’d turned hers, which she noticed. “Right up until you need something.”

She didn’t answer right away. The green glow of the monitor pulsed a fraction with Charlie’s breathing and steadied again.

“And they don’t take you seriously,” she said.

“That’s the price. A fair price, mostly. You don’t get worried about and you don’t get taken seriously, and for a long time those seemed like the same coin, heads and tails.” He glanced at the letter and then away from it. “Turns out they’re two coins.”

She winced, because she knew what she had to say, and she knew it wouldn’t feel good, but she said it anyway.

“I did that.”

“I know.”

She’d wanted him to argue. She only knew it in the second after he didn’t. She’d wanted no, not you, you’re different, the little absolution. He hadn’t said it, and it was so much better that he hadn’t that her throat went tight. He wasn’t finished. He said the rest of it without malice, because that wasn’t a tool he owned.

“You gave me three eggs last October,” he said, “and decided I was somebody who couldn’t keep eggs in the house.”

She stared at him.

“I’d run out,” she said, before she could stop herself, because it was true and it was the least important true answer available. “You knocked and asked if I had eggs and I gave you three and you⁠—”

“I put them in the fridge,” he said mildly. “And I saw you decide it. You did the whole thing across the fence. It was a short trial. I didn’t get a lawyer.”

The year unspooled backwards in front of her. The teammates’ cars, the late music, the occasional female she’d cataloged from her office window and filed under of course. The cool nods. The disapproval she’d worn like a good coat, because it was warm and it fit and it kept her separate. And every last comfortable inch of it had been visible from this kitchen. From this exact chair, probably. He’d watched her build the file on him in ten days and he’d let her because letting people was easier. She had never once considered that the person she was quietly judging had been standing at his window, doing nothing more sinister than making his breakfast.

“You knew,” she said. “The whole time.”

“I knew the whole time.”

“Why didn’t you⁠—”

“Say something?” A ghost of the grin, worn thin tonight. “And what, correct the record? Nora, I’ve spent thirty-four years not correcting the record. It’s a bad habit. I’ve had it for a long time.” He looked at the letter, face down between them, and for a second she could see what that meant to him. “I’m apparently only just finding out what it costs.”

She reached across the table and put her hand on his arm. She’d never done that. Not once, in a year of fences and doorways and porch steps. She’d handed him things and taken things back. Their hands had brushed over a diaper bag more times than she’d admit to a notebook. But she had never simply reached out and laid her hand against the warm green skin of his arm the way she did now.

He was so warm, like a stone that had been sitting in the sun all afternoon. Neither of them looked at her hand. They kept their eyes on each other, and neither of them said anything about it, because if he named it she’d have to take it back.

“You’re not the person in the file,” she said. “I’ve known that for a while. I filed you wrong.”

“I know.”