Page 41 of Single Pucking Orc

She reached for her water like it was the punchline of the joke.

“Nine,” she said. “I had to stand on the phone book to reach. I remember being annoyed there was a phone book in the booth because it meant I had to explain to the man why I sounded like a child.”

She’d told it like an anecdote, as if she’d told it a million times before. Except he suddenly thought, watching her, that she hadn’t. That this was the first time she’d ever said it out loud.

He didn’t laugh.

She noticed that too. She looked at him over the water, and her shoulders came down a half-inch that had probably been up for twenty years.

“You’re supposed to laugh there,” she said.

“I know where I’m supposed to laugh.”

Grimshaw sent over a dessert nobody had ordered. Some enormous chocolate thing with two forks, set down by a waitress who said it came from the kitchen and left before he could argue. Grimshaw stood behind the bar, wiping a glass that was already dry, and very carefully not looking in their direction.

“We didn’t order that,” Nora said.

“No.”

“Is this going to happen the whole time we’re—” She stopped, hearing where that sentence was going. “The whole meal.”

“The whole meal. The whole everything, probably. You do understand what my team is like.” He picked up a fork. “They’re not subtle and they don’t stop. I’d apologize but they’d only take it as encouragement.”

They split the huge chocolate thing nobody ordered, and he told her the part he’d promised.

“My reputation.” He said it flatly, like reading an item off a menu. “I’ve been to a lot of parties. I left most of them early.”

She didn’t say anything, so he kept going.

“I let people think whatever’s easiest. It’s a bad habit and I’ve had it a long time.” He set the fork down. “You’d have heard the colorful version. The colorful version is mostly a guy leaving a party early to go home and sleep, and a lot of people filling in the blanks in a direction that’s more interesting.”

“I may have noticed.”

He looked up. “When?”

“The eggs.” The tiniest hesitation. “No. Before the eggs.”

He drove them home, pulled into his driveway, and cut the engine. The engine ticked as it cooled. Through the windshield he could see her lit front window, and his dark kitchen window, and the eight feet of wet grass between the two houses that they had spent a year not crossing except on business.

He knew where this was going. So did she. Neither of them said so. Saying so would have made it a decision, and it had stopped being a decision somewhere around the payphone. Somewhere she’d been standing on a phone book at nine years old, trying to sound like a grown-up so a stranger would turn the lights back on.

The engine went quiet.

Nobody reached for a door.

CHAPTER 14

There were four rules. Nora checked them off on her fingers on the walk from the truck to the door. That was who she was, and the walk was short, and a person had to do something with her hands.

Rule one: don’t sleep with a neighbor. She could not un-see a neighbor. He was going to be eight feet away every single morning for the foreseeable future. If this went badly she would spend the rest of her tenure in this house conducting elaborate surveillance to make sure the driveway was empty before she took out the recycling.

Rule two: don’t sleep with a client-adjacent party. She did the books for the bar half his team drank in. That was a professional entanglement, and professional entanglements on top of personal ones made the kind of mess she’d spent her adult life avoiding.

Rule three: property values. That one was a joke she was making entirely to herself. Breaking rules one and two had put her in a strange, giddy, light-headed frame of mind. The only way she knew to handle the strange giddiness was to file it. Consideration three: cohabitation, or the appearance thereof, may affect resale. She almost laughed. He heard the almost, and looked at her, and she shook her head.

Rule four: don’t decide a person is safe just because they’re standing close to you in the dark. And they smell like cedar and spice. And they didn’t laugh when you told them about the phone book.

She unlocked her front door and let him into her house.