Page 47 of Single Pucking Orc

“Exactly,” Nora said. “So what I’m going to do is send them a very polite email. And in the very polite email I am going to use the word reconcile, which is a threat, and they’ll know it’s a threat, and everyone will keep pretending it isn’t. That’s business. Are you following?”

Charlie shrieked.

“Good,” said Nora. “You’ve got a better head for it than half my clients.”

He stood in his hallway with his gear bag on his shoulder and did not go in, because going in would end it, and he wanted it to last. She was explaining accrual accounting to a seven-month-old in complete grammatical sentences, in his living room, in the middle of a Friday. She had no idea he was listening. She just did that, apparently, when she thought no one could hear. She talked to his daughter like she was a person, and told her the truth about invoices.

Something moved in his chest that had nothing to do with sex. Something that kept ambushing him lately. He liked the sex enormously—but he’d have stood in that hallway for an hour to keep hearing this. He liked finding her at his breakfast table with her hair still wet. He liked the sound of her voice through a wall. He liked wandering next door for no reason he could name except that she was in the building, and he’d started doing it so often that he’d stopped bothering to invent errands.

He set the bag down quietly.

“—and that,” Nora was saying, “is why we don’t pay the plumber up front.”

He made eggs the next morning. He always made eggs. Nora was at the table, laptop open, glasses on. He put a plate on the table, adjusted it automatically, and stopped.

He’d moved it to the side of the table nearest her. Nudged it two inches without deciding to, so the good side faced her, the side with the yolk unbroken and the toast underneath. He stood there with his hand still on the rim of the plate.

A cold small feeling went up the back of his neck.

Because he’d seen this happen before. Last season. In a restaurant, to Tarmek, of all the humorless males on the earth. Tarmek had pushed food across the table to Edie without appearing to notice he was doing it. Rognar had been delighted, leaning across to whisper to Korvash. He’s feeding her off his plate, man. You know that’s a thing, right? My mother told me that’s a thing. That’s a whole⁠—

“No,” he said, out loud, to his kitchen.

She looked up. “No what?”

“Nothing. Talking to the eggs.”

She went back to the laptop.

Orc instincts, he told himself, taking his plate to the far chair with tremendous casualness. That’s all it is. A male cooks for one adult and a baby and overshoots, so he ends up with more eggs than three people need. So he distributes them sensibly, and sensible distribution means the good yolk goes to—no. That was simply portion control.

He was not going to think about the restaurant, or the word his mother had used, or the way Tarmek had stopped chewing and gone rigid and not-quite-met anybody’s eye for the rest of the meal. He was especially not going to look it up. There was nothing to look up. It was eggs.

He ate his eggs.

He did not look at his plate. He did not look at hers. He looked, with grim resolve, at the middle distance. He was not curious. He was the least curious male alive. Charlie flung a fist of scrambled egg onto the floor, and he was grateful to her for it, because it gave him a reason to get up.

The phone rang while she was still in his kitchen, her mobile, buzzing on the table between them. Nora glanced at it and her whole posture changed. She went from working-Nora to bracing-Nora, and she answered with the flatness of a woman who already knows.

“Mom.”

Rognar could hear both sides. Everyone in the county could hear both sides. Summer Bennett came down the phone like a hurricane.

“—so I said to her, I said, Deirdre, the whole point of the retreat is that you don’t book anything after it, that’s what makes it a retreat. Anyway it’s finished a day early because Marco had a thing with his back, don’t ask. So I’m already on the road… Darling, are you eating? You sound thin, I can hear thin. I’m coming straight to you, I’m not even stopping at the house, because I haven’t laid eyes on my only child since the Sunday you didn’t come, which if you think about it is really⁠—”

“When?” Nora asked.

“—which is really an indictment of both of us, I’m not putting it all on you. What, sweetheart?”

“When? When are you coming?”

“Today! I told you. I’m on the road now. I’m somewhere with a very large cow statue, does that mean anything to you? I’ll be there for supper. Don’t fuss. And I’m not driving the last twenty minutes in the dark, so I’ll stay on the couch. I love your couch, is it still that grey one⁠—”

Nora closed her eyes.

“—anyway I can’t hear a thing, I’m going through a canyon. I love you, put the kettle on⁠—”

The line went dead.