Page 44 of Single Pucking Orc

She fell asleep before she could file it.

She woke to noise in her kitchen. For one disoriented second she was alarmed. Nobody made noise in her kitchen. Her adult life had been specifically arranged so that the only sounds in the house in the morning were the ones she made herself. A cupboard. Running water. The soft clatter of a pan set on the range.

Then a small, delighted, gummy shriek floated down the hallway, and she remembered the night before in a single warm flood. She got up, and found her robe, and went down the hallway.

He was in her kitchen. He’d been next door, showered and changed, and come back with Charlie and a diaper bag. Charlie was strapped to his chest in the sling, facing out, chewing her fist with grim six-month determination and kicking her chubby green legs at the general concept of morning. He had one arm around the baby and the other working the pan, cracking an egg one-handed against the rim, and she stopped in the doorway.

She had watched him do this through the glass—cooking with his daughter tucked against him. It had done unfortunate things to her then, and she had pretended it hadn’t. Except now she wasn’t looking through the glass and it was even worse. She was standing in the room. It was her range and her pan and her one good spatula, and he was using all of them like he’d used them a hundred times before.

He held out her green mug without turning around.

“You’re up,” he said.

She took it. She didn’t have to look to know that it would be the right color and the right amount of oat milk—coffee made by a male who had never once been told and had simply watched and remembered. He hadn’t looked up from the eggs to do it. He hadn’t made a fuss of it, and her chest went tight and warm all at once. She’d have coped better if he’d made a production of it.

On the counter, her mother’s ancient cream-colored 1997 Panasonic rang, the shrill electronic warble it had produced for as long as Nora could remember. Charlie’s whole body lit up. She flung one starfish hand towards it, opening and closing, roaring a demand.

Nobody answered it. Rognar slid the eggs onto a plate. Charlie abandoned the phone in favor of her fist again. The Panasonic gave up after four rings and fell silent.

She stood in the doorway of her kitchen and looked at it. The male, the baby, the eggs, the two mugs, the bag on the chair, the morning light coming in over the arrangement. All of it fitted into a room she had built precisely so that nothing could ever fit into it unexpectedly.

She waited for the alarm. She genuinely waited, standing there with the perfectly made coffee warming her hands. She waited for the old reliable clang of it, the one that went off whenever her careful, expensive quiet got breached. The alarm that had run her life and kept it safe. She gave it every opportunity. It didn’t go off.

And that was so much worse than if it had.

CHAPTER 15

Afew days later there was a baby and a bookkeeper in his kitchen, with coffee going and the radio playing something with a horn section. Rognar Stonebreaker was, at seven o’clock in the morning, so pleased with himself he could barely stand it.

He danced. Not well, but Charlie approved of it with the fierce approval of the very young, drumming her heels against his stomach and shrieking her one-syllable opinion of the horn section. He spun her in a slow half-turn past the toaster and she lost her mind with joy. Nora, at the table with her laptop, did not look up.

“You’re dancing,” she said.

“I’m a male in a good mood. It expresses itself.”

“It’s seven a.m.”

“It’s seven a.m. and I’ve already been to two houses this morning. Mine and yours. Some of us are productive.” He set her coffee down at her elbow, the right color, and she took it without comment, which he’d decided to treat as gratitude. “I’ve made eggs. I want that noted.”

“You always make eggs.”

“I always make you eggs. I’d like that added to your file.”

She set down the coffee, reached into the leather bag beside her laptop, and produced a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it and laid it carefully on the table.

“You wrote them down,” he said, delighted.

“I did.”

“You made a document.”

“There are four rules.”

“Of course there are four.” He pulled the chair around and sat with Charlie facing him, so the baby could gnaw contemplatively on his knuckle while the terms were read. “Go on. Read me my rights.”

Nora put on her glasses. This was for effect and they both knew it, and he loved it anyway.

“One. Nobody stays over on a game night. You need your sleep, I need mine, and I am not being blamed to a locker room full of orcs for a bad third period.”